A friend of Hammer's, Cozy Higgins, is shot when coming through an airport terminal. Hammer finds out that he is carrying a load of diamonds and in his dying breath he gives Hammer one half of a $10 000 bill. The diamonds were the intended as payment for a gambling debt but the mystery deepens when the diamonds turn out to be fake. When the Hammer kills Cozy's killer in a shootout, he just needs to find the man who hired him. It turns out that the treasury department is also interested in what is happening.
—jem