For the last six years, Tim Scarberry has called Portland, Oregon home. Placed there by the Witness Protection Program, he has assimilated into the existence set up for him, trying to gain some level of enjoyment from the life he never asked for and even less wanted.

An existence that is completely destroyed by a single phone call, nothing more than a message telling him that his last remaining tether to his old life has been severed in a most tragic and unexpected way.

Having no choice but to abandon his adopted life and return to his roots, Scarberry finds himself dropped into a situation far more harrowing than he ever could have imagined. Allied with a single sheriff's deputy-a young woman he knew only briefly in his youth that is fighting battles of her own-the two face a network of illegal gun runners, apathetic bureaucracy, and federal agency, ultimately squaring off with the very thing Scarberry's been trying to avoid for so long . . .