Renegade — David C. Edney

Jesse Redfeather's day is about to get even worse. His bipolar girlfriend has gone off the deep end, grabbed her .357, jumped into her truck and headed for the Gila Wilderness, leaving her ten year old son behind. Knowing Angie and her demons, this is never a good thing. Coming to work at 6am, Jesse hopes to relax by planting flowers and grooming greens at Albuquerque Country Club. Instead, he encounters an oblivious twit yakking on his cell phone while his three large dogs relieve themselves prodigiously on the fairways. Nearby is a freshly cut hole in the chainlink, and a pearlescent SUV, license plate GENIUS, parked on the bike trail outside. Unable to contain himself, and a bit jangled by events at home, Jesse snaps, violating his self-imposed rule of never confronting rich white idiots, and never dreaming of the shit-storm he's about to unleash. GENIUS, it happens, is Dr. Richard I. Davis, Professor of Physics at UNM, and perhaps the world's most inept scientist. Sometimes, Jesse thinks, upon learning this, the spirits have got to be messing with me! Meanwhile, across town, someone at Sandia National Labs has a big problem, and she senses, a great opportunity. Almost immediately, a pork-peddling US Senator, three honchos from DOE and the Jicarilla Nation, sensing a potential windfall, become involved. Crooked police, casino gambling, strip joints, narcotics, nuclear waste and a process that seems too good to be true: how is a lowly groundskeeper to keep it all straight? And what is his involvement in it to begin with? Renegade does for New Mexico and Albuquerque what Carl Hiaasen has done for south Florida: nasty, bad-natured fun that's just close enough to reality to keep you wondering: could this really be true?