The Blue Door

Gordy Miller is sixty-seven years old, slightly deaf in his left ear, and six months away from selling his shop and moving to a cabin in Flagstaff. He bends neon. Not LED. Not digital displays. Real neon — glass tubes, argon gas, high-voltage transformers, the kind of signs that hum when you stand close enough.

One October night, sixty feet up on a lift above Boulder Highway, his hand finds something inside a 1963 motel sign that shouldn't be there. A metal box. Military green. No markings. Inside: six microcassette tapes, a list of names, and a playing card with a phone number written in blue ink.

One of the names on the list belongs to the frontrunner in the Clark County Commission race.

Gordy doesn't want to be involved. He just wants to finish the job, log the invoice, and get back to his schedule. But forty years of fixing things has made it nearly impossible for him to leave a problem unexamined. And whoever put the box inside that sign was counting on exactly that.

Dead Letters is a crime novella in the tradition of Elmore Leonard — unhurried, drily funny, and more interested in the people carrying secrets than in the secrets themselves. It is a story about old Las Vegas, disappearing crafts, and what careful people leave behind for other careful people to find.