Tom Wells was born in Douglas, Arizona, across the border from Agua Prieta, Mexico. When he was eight, Tom's father took him across the line. In Mexico, he saw boys with dirty faces and hands, begging for coins, food, cigarettes, and wondered why he wasn't among them. What trick of fate allowed him to eat good food and sleep in a warm bed while these boys mooched for scraps on dusty streets? The next morning, he opened his eyes in his childhood bedroom and witnessed atoms slamming together and yanking apart, as if his vision had pierced the solidity of the nightstand, the dresser, the chair. The concrete world had come unglued and revealed its internal vibrations. It was his secret, how things broke apart and came back together. He believed he was developing x-ray vision and would someday have super powers. Two years later, the visitors came. They were companions at first, buddies who taught him things and kept him company. They made him feel different and special. When the visitors refused to leave him alone, there was no going back, no unraveling the secret he had harbored. By then, Tom was old enough to know the visitors weren't real, old enough to know he had to keep them secret, and old enough to know that drugs, alcohol, would shut them up. After high school, Tom moved to San Francisco hoping to flee the ruined expectations and sleepless nights. He outran neither. He attended Hayward Community College and started working for a private investigation firm. Tom started like most P.I.'s, insurance fraud cases, cheating husbands, cheating wives, and missing persons. He found he had a knack for finding missing persons. Some missing persons were hiding. Those cases involved a secret to be exposed. But most missing persons were dead and keeping an altogether different kind of secret. The visitors are always there, lurking on the edges, waiting for an idle moment to take hold. Sometimes they help Tom, mostly they torment him and he will do anything to escape them. Lately, Bacardi 151 Rum straight from the bottle does the trick. In The Sick & The Dead, two connected murders, a corpse found floating in San Francisco Bay and a woman gunned down on a street south of Market, lead Tom Wells into a clandestine world of government intelligence agencies where no one can be trusted and no one is accountable.