PLAYBY:  Anson Mount (Hell on Wheels)

Height: 6’2”  Weight: 195 lbs  Hair:  Dark Brown  Eyes:  Steely Blue Gray

DESCRIPTION: A tall man with a wolfish air about him. Strongly built but lean, with deft longfingered hands and hard grey eyes. There's a savage ease to his movements; he inhabits his skin, owns his balance, walks with a feral lowslung gait. He doesn't speak often but when he does his drawl places his origins somewhere in the Old South. Dark of hair and beard, and often in need of a barber, his unmanicured look adds to the wildness crackling about him like a lightning storm.

SKILLS: If you ask him, he's not good for much else other than spilling blood. Deadly with a gun in his hands. Clears leather quicker than a snake can strike. Pretty handy in a brawl too, and certainly not above dirty tactics. Other than that, he did grow up on a farm. Knows his crops, knows how to sow and when to reap. Hopes to use that knowledge someday, because he has little else. He can't read or write, and he's sure as hell no artisan or scholar.

WEAKNESSES: This is a man walking a thin line between good and evil. He wants freedom; he wants peace; he wants to start anew with his lady. His history is long and bloody, though, and is a deadly liability to him. There aren't many on the right side of the law who wouldn't put a bullet between his eyes if they thought they could get away with it. At the same time, the decency at his core is a weakness Bosch and his men could easily exploit -- and already do. More than anything, he dreads the day Bosch finds out about Suzy. God only knows what the man will try to extort from him then.

FACTION: Loy is a good but conflicted man at heart. However, he's at present actively working for evil -- doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

CHARACTER'S BRIEF BACKGROUND: Loy Mason grew up a poor boy in antebellum Louisiana. His father was a tenant farmer on the local cotton baron's bayou plantation; his mother died soon after the birth of his youngest brother. Growing up, he and his younger brothers -- Tom and Jacob -- labored alongside their father, scraping by, never saving up much. In his early 20s, he had a brief, clandestine and passionate affair with Annabelle Dumont, the plantation owner's daughter. They had wild dreams of saving up enough money to run away together. Going west, starting over. When the Civil War broke out, it seemed their chance had come. The plantation was in upheaval, and in the chaos they could've slipped away.

His brothers joined the Confederate Army, though. Only seventeen and nineteen, they'd be easy pickings without him. Loy couldn't leave them alone. He enlisted too. Annabelle never forgave him for it.

The remainder of his 20s were spent in the Confederate Army, where he learned to fight, learned to shoot, learned to be a man. Learned to hate the wars that poor men fought for rich men's interests, too. In 1865, that war ended in disaster for the South. He and his brothers, disillusioned with the whole affair, turned to banditry to stay alive. They weren't monsters, though, and had no wish to become monsters. They swore a pact to behave as gentlemen and to adhere to their own moral compasses. They didn't harm women and children. They didn't kill unarmed men. They tried to steer clear of the law, and they tried not to take from those that had less than them. Sometimes, they even tried to give to those who needed it.

Turns out they were pretty good at it, and he was the best of the bunch. They had a pretty good run, pulled in some pretty good hauls. There was even a little glory in it; felt a little like they were some sort of folk heroes sometimes. Like Robin Hoods, or knights of old, when he and his brothers rode three-abreast across those windswept plains. From '65 to '66 they swept across Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. When the law started closing in, the brothers shared one last drink in New Orleans, then split up and went their separate ways.

Tom went east. Jacob went north. And Loy? He went west, back home to the bayou. Few people know what he did with all that cash, but somehow he spent it all inside of three years. Truth is he found Annabelle again. She'd fallen far from her sheltered and privileged childhood. The plantation was unrecognizable, picked clean by carpetbaggers from the north. The manor had been seized and subdivided by the Union, turned into some sort of flophouse. Her father was dead, her relatives scattered. She was alone in New Orleans, scraping by, on the verge of selling her body to pay for her means.

Loy used half his heist money to pay her debts; most of the other half went to buying a little shack at the outskirts of town for the two of them. She was still furious with him, but having few options, followed him. They lived awkwardly, chastely together for three years. He was an honest man, those years. Worked with his hands, and having few skills to call his own, worked mostly in hard labor. Lifting, hauling, building, breaking, sawing, fixing.

Maybe his dedication and diligence impressed her. Or maybe she was just grateful for the safe harbor he gave her, and his honor toward her. They shared a home but never a bed; he never asked for more. Slowly, with time, Loy thought he detected a thawing toward him. Maybe she'd forgive him after all.

And then Annabelle caught consumption. In 1868, everyone knew that was a death sentence. Loy was desperate to save her -- and perhaps to atone. He squandered what little money was left on the best doctors, the latest treatments. More than once, he thought about taking up the gun again, but it seemed like a betrayal of everything he'd worked for these past three years. He borrowed instead, and soon enough he found himself deep in debt to unscrupulous sorts -- amongst them Bosch.

Annabelle Dumont died over the winter of '68-'69. Loy was left bereft and as good as owned by Bosch. There was no way he could pay back the malicious loans he'd taken out. Not if he worked his hands to the bone. Not if he labored for a hundred years. So Bosch, knowing talent when he saw it, offered him a lifeline. Loy could move out to Laredo, he suggested. Go west and start over, just as he used to dream when he was a boy. He could work for Bosch -- just as long as his debt was repaid. Just as long as he was back on his feet.

Loy knew what sort of work Bosch had in mind. He knew, clear as day, that there was no getting out of this debt. But he had no other prospects. He agreed.

Once he got to Laredo, the jaws of the trap closed around him immediately. Bosch made it clear he expected absolute loyalty, and for as long as he wanted. If Loy doesn't follow orders -- if he even thinks of rebellion, let alone turning on Bosch outright -- Bosch has made it very clear that Loy's loved ones will suffer.

And Bosch is no Mason. It's not like it was in the old days, his brothers riding at his side, the three of them keeping to their own code, sleeping sound at night. Bosch doesn't have a scrap of honor to him. Bosch's hired guns, by and large, were just as bad as their master. No one and nothing, no brutality, no atrocity, is off limits. Bosch's greed, violence and hatred corrupts everything, corrodes everyone. And every day, Bosch asks him to do more. Do worse. The things Loy has already done strains what remains of his moral fiber to breaking. The things Bosch'll surely ask him to do might just push him over the edge.

So here he is, in Bosch's town. Been here since the last August, riding in out of a late summer thunderstorm like death's own shadow. A hardened shell of a man, made taciturn and grim by tragedy, made cold and brutal by necessity. Trapped in his own personal hell, with Bosch as his own personal devil. He's pretty sure nothing short of death will get him out -- his own, or Bosch's. He just can't see any other way out.

What he couldn't have imagined, though, was meeting Suzy Lamour. He didn't think he'd find someone who could stir his cold heart again. And now, in spite of his cynicism, in spite of what hard experience has taught him, he finds himself dreaming again. Maybe they can run away. Maybe they can go west. Start over. He's saving up secretly, trying to squirrel away enough of a nest egg that they can afford to run. This time, he won't leave his love behind. He won't waste time. He won't let her slip away. This time, he was getting her out of this mess. One way or another, he'd find a way to save her, and with her, his own scarred soul.