Title:
The Potheads Got to Go (Formerly "On the Fly")
By:
Lee Eide
Oliver (housekeeper) discovers from his co-worker Dillon (maintenance) that Richie Stone, the filthy rich GM of the grand and historic Rivertown Hotel, has been making sex tapes from the secretly-recorded bedroom activities of hotel guests for the past forty years. Dillon and one of his maintenance colleagues were repairing a heating duct above Stone's office when they saw him watching amateur porn on his desktop computer. After Dillon recognizes the couple as guests of the Rivertown Hotel, he realizes the video is from a secret camera planted in their room. With Stone retiring in a few days, now is the time to hit him with a blackmail ultimatum: pay us $3,000,000 in cash or we'll tell the world that you're a sex fiend who's been illegally videotaping sexual activities for forty years.
Oliver initially balks. He's been minding all his P's and Q's ever since he and his sister Martha got away with killing their abusive, alcoholic father and making it appear like it was a home invasion turned deadly. After the trial ends, Oliver's guilt drives him to abuse alcohol, heroine and turns into a gambling addict. He starts off winning big at Blackjack and Texas Hold 'Em but he's so drunk and high that he loses all of the $1.5M. After inpatient rehab and much soul searching, Oliver sobers up. He's been clean for almost twenty years.
But Dillon, who's overwhelmed with debt from alimony and child-support payments for eleven illegitimate children, convinces Oliver to take a line from "Risky Business" and say, "What the fuck?" Afraid he'll start using again if their scheme is successful but also fearing his life will bore him to death, Oliver goes all in on the blackmail scheme. And it works!
Well until the hitman hired by Richie Stone tries to shoot them dead. But after he fails to kill the targets in the parking ramp where the blackmail cash was left, Oliver and Dillon escape with the two duffel bags full of cash. And the chase is on.
The two blackmailers, in way over their heads but with no choice, go on the run. A frantic car chase on a Wisconsin back road; meeting at the NYC Hard Rock Cafe to get fake visas and ID's; a near-death-experience compliments of the assassin in a gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice; escaping a small Slovakian hotel in London by creating a fire diversion but losing Dillon to the hitman's gunshot; flying to Bogotá where Oliver uses the dark web, a YouTube video and Zoom to set up a lethal trap for the assassin; and final showdown with the slimy Stone, "On the Fly" is an action-packed suspense tale with a hero who breaks free of the shackles of his quiet, conforming life to grow into a killer of a killer and a thriving survivor who lives life on his terms, not the world's.