Thaddeus "Thumper" Palano is dying. As he looks back over his seventy-one years-including thirty years as an enforcer for the syndicate in Chicago-he realizes that he has never done anything that could be considered "good" in his whole life.
And now, for the first time, he feels guilty.
Desperate to leave at least one positive memory behind, he decides to contact the son he abandoned years before. That reunion is quickly marred by the horrifying discovery that his granddaughter has just been kidnapped-and is about to be sold into the flesh market in Mexico. The old enforcer straps on the weapons from his past and heads for Texas to rescue a girl he has never met. The odds are stacked against him: he knows nothing about the area he will be fighting in or the adversaries he will be facing-but that doesn't matter.
Before he is through with them, the men who stole his granddaughter will know the name Thumper-and they will know fear.