Blood By Choice (Uncle Dust Book 3)

Blood By Choice

Dust returns to Berkeley after two women and a child are murdered—victims he unknowingly helped put in danger. With his old friend Karma at his side, he starts hunting for the men responsible and finds Vollmer, a ruthless hired gun tied to Dust’s former boss, Rico.

But Vollmer knows Dust is back, and the search for vengeance becomes a fight for survival. Brutal men wait in every corner, old debts come due, and violence spreads through Oakland and Berkeley with no easy way out.

Hardboiled, gritty, and unforgiving, Blood By Choice is the third book in Rob Pierce’s Uncle Dust series, a noir crime novel about revenge, loyalty, and the blood paid for every choice.

Start reading Blood By Choice today.

Excerpt from the book

Dust runs the first red, before anyone’s in pursuit. He slows in a couple blocks, takes off his shades. Tearing off the fake beard hurts like hell and he yells in the car but his windows are up and the yell’s part celebration. He shouldn’t be pulling jobs while he’s on the run but no one knows him in Missouri and if he doesn’t rob banks he might as well be dead. It was stupid but he’s done stupid before, that’s why there’s a hit on him.

Music loud, he drove into one of the million middles of nowhere around here, ditched the car for a stolen job with already swapped out plates and traded his thrift shop leisure suit for jeans and a t-shirt. He hadn’t used his pistol so all he had to drop in the river was the robbery costume. The money wasn’t much but it’d get him to a bar to wind down, another stupid move for a guy with a record who’d just pulled a job, but he knew a place where he’d blend in.

Brock & Gibson was the kind of joint a guy like him always managed to find, a great bar if you wanted to meet guys with mugshots. A great place to get in a fight too, just by looking the wrong guy in the eye. Dust wasn’t worried; he was one of those guys.

A beer and a shot, that was his drink, and he could afford plenty but he wasn’t dumb enough to show much cash. Bought a round then another, his adrenaline enjoying the buzz. Nothing like a bank job to make a man want another.

A couple more rounds and he was relaxed, watched the TV behind the bar, the crowd in here too loud for him to hear it much. He didn’t care, it was just something to look at. Until the news came on and it was about murder. He wasn’t local, it wouldn’t involve anyone he knew. Words at the bottom of the screen said three women were dead in what looked like a gangland slaying.

“Like that thing in Oakland,” a guy near him said.

He turned to the guy. “What thing in Oakland?”

“You didn’t hear? Two chicks and a kid found dead on a hill.”

Fuck. The bit about the kid. Christ if it was Jeremy. That motherfucker Tenny. The prick he ripped off.

He tried to sound casual. “When?”

“A couple months back maybe.” Why? would be the next question but this guy wasn’t dumb enough to ask.

Dust walked away, got his phone out, searched “Boy Murdered Oakland.” Too much came up; there was a child killer in Oakland County, Michigan. He changed the search to “Boy murdered Oakland CA” and saw the one he was looking for, the one he really didn’t want: “Boy and Two Women Found Shot in Oakland.”

The article told him what he dreaded. Jeremy, Theresa, and Olive were dead. Val wasn’t mentioned; maybe she was still alive somehow.