Welcome to California. Weed is legal. Grow it. Sell it. Smoke it. Eat it. But the money you make off it—there's the rub. Bank it, and the Feds will ask questions. Keep it around, and you’ll get robbed. LaDon and Jessie—two hustlers who make selling primo weed a regular gig—hire a private security detail to move and hold their money. Ex-soldiers Glanson and Echo target the cash—they start a ripoff business. It’s the wild, wild west. Except this time, everybody’s high. With their guns and guts, Glanson and Echo don’t expect much trouble from a mean son-of-a-gun like LaDon Charles. But that’s exactly what they get. In this industry, no matter how much money there is for the taking—and no matter who gets it—there's always somebody counting backwards...to zero. From acclaimed pulp writer Matt Phillips, Countdown is a head-spinning hit of Southern California’s lucrative and not-quite-regulated marijuana industry. Praise for COUNTDOWN: “A slab of rare pulp, served nice and bloody. Countdown reads like an homage to Elmore Leonard from one of the hottest new voices on the crime fiction scene.” —Anthony Neil Smith, author of Yellow Medicine and All the Young Warriors Praise for the Books by Matt Phillips “Matt Phillips speaks fluently the language of the dispossessed... His whiskey-soaked prose can at times be as slick as a man slinging snake-oil, and other times as brutal as a baseball bat to the head.” —Eryk Pruitt, author of Hashtag and Dirtbags “Phillips’ writing is so multi-layered and deep... An author to watch out for.” —Regular Guy Reading Noir