The year was 1940, and the unforgiving sun beat down on the dusty streets of East Los Angeles, turning the asphalt into a shimmering mirage. Inside his cramped office, Moe "Snake-Eyes" Juarez mopped his brow with a sweat-stained handkerchief. The air hung heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes and desperation. Three years had passed since he'd traded the smoky haze of underground gambling dens for the uncertainty of private investigation, and business, to put it mildly, was slow.

Snake-Eyes hadn't exactly been a choirboy in his younger days. His arrest at a crooked casino in El Monte at the tender age of 25 was a badge of dishonor he wore with a rueful smile. But that life, a life filled with the adrenaline rush of marked cards and shady characters, had eventually soured. He craved something more, something legitimate. So, with a past that reeked of backroom deals and whispered secrets, Snake-Eyes decided to go straight – or at least as straight as a man with his connections could manage.

His tiny office, nestled above a noisy bakery on Whittier Boulevard, was a testament to his newfound (and somewhat precarious) path. The walls were adorned with cheap detective novels and faded wanted posters, the only real decoration a framed photograph of a woman with a smile as bright as the California sun. Her name was Amelia, his wife, gone too soon from a bout of the Spanish Flu. The picture served as a constant reminder of the life he was trying to build, a life where justice, not chance, determined the outcome.