THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN
J.T. Brannan
© J.T. Brannan 2015
For Justyna, Jakub and Mia;
and my parents, for their help and support
“The soldiers who didn’t come back were the heroes. It’s a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you’re a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you’re a survivor”
- Bob Feller
“Sometimes when I help people, other people die”
- Colt Ryder
Prologue
Nuevo Laredo was hell on earth.
It had been years since I’d been out of the States, and this little Mexican border town was doing nothing to reignite my love of foreign travel; I’d had nothing but trouble since arriving here just yesterday.
To be fair, though, I had come looking for it.
And I was in real trouble now – blindfolded and bound, I had no real idea where I was, even if I was still in Nuevo Laredo. All I knew was that I was in a building with corrugated metal walls and a smell that took me straight back to my last real job, working as a meatpacker in the world’s largest slaughterhouse. Over thirty thousand animal carcasses were processed every day in that terrible place, and the smells that came from the rotten meat that accumulated there had been enough to make a man sick. It had reminded me of Iraq. And now, thinking about it, Nuevo Laredo kind of reminded me of Baghdad; and trust me when I say that wasn’t a good thing.
As my nostrils reacted to the stench of the place, I wondered if I was in a slaughterhouse once more and silently cursed; after punching out my boss I’d promised to never set foot in such a place again. But what could I do? My hands were tied – literally.
If it was a slaughterhouse, it was clear that the owners didn’t believe in the benefits of refrigeration – the place was like a sauna, the heat melting my bones and making it hard to breathe. No wonder the meat was rancid.
The blow came suddenly, out of nowhere, and knocked my head back hard. My skull collided with the metal wall behind me; it felt like it maybe loosened a few teeth as well.
I shook my head to get some of my senses back, my body instinctively curling up in a vain effort to protect myself. I’d had worse over the years though. Much worse.
Besides, if they were going to kill me, I wouldn’t be wearing a blindfold. They wouldn’t care if I saw them.
As long as I was wearing the blindfold, I told myself, I’d be okay.
The situation was far from pleasant though, the beating starting now in earnest, fists and feet flying in from everywhere. At least if you can see the punches and kicks coming – even if your hands and legs are tied, as mine were – you can tense the right bit of your body in time, take some of the shock out of the blow. With your eyes covered, it makes things a whole lot worse. The punches and kicks come from all angles, hitting all over your body, and the only chance you have is to tense up everything, all the time it’s happening. But that’s almost impossible, so you tend to relax without meaning to – and then they hit you again.
It wasn’t all bad though – one of the punches had elicited a grunt of pain from one of my tormentors. He tried to cover it up, not wanting to show weakness, but I caught it loud and clear. I might have been blindfolded, but my ears were working just fine.
I knew the guy must have cut his knuckles on my teeth. More fool him for not wearing gloves; I always do when I’m on the other end of this routine. The fist isn’t exactly the best weapon in the world – the bones are tiny and easy to break, and the skin is too thinly spread over those bones to make it anything other than a poor choice as an impact tool. But it seems like a natural thing to do, and people are slaves to their instincts.
‘Tell us,’ said one of the men; not the one who’d just hurt himself, and I amused myself imagining the other guy in the corner, nursing his bleeding knuckles and trying not to cry. ‘Tell us who sent you, and we can stop all this,’ the voice said again, his English heavily accented with the singsong Mexican lilt that betrayed his local background.
I wondered briefly if he was being serious. If I told them, would they stop? It was possible; after all, I was a nobody, a hired hand. They weren’t interested in me, only in who was behind me.
At the end of the day though, their promises didn’t matter; there was no way in hell I’d talk, no matter what they said. It’s not that I’m immune to pain and suffering – although I’ve experienced so much over the years that I can probably handle it better than most – but that this interrogation was too crude to break me. It was just a bit of roughing up, maybe more of a warning than anything else. And I still had the blindfold on.
I didn’t answer, just spat out a mouthful of blood; I wasn’t sure if a crown came out with it as well.
‘Tough guy,’ the man’s voice said, very close to me now, so close that I could smell the pepper and nicotine stench of his breath. ‘Tough guy, you’re gonna tell us everything, sooner or later.’
He was wrong; dead wrong. I wasn’t going to tell him anything, and they weren’t going to do anything too bad to me in return.
But then I felt the man’s hand go to my face, grip the blindfold and rip it off.
I was momentarily blinded again, only this time by the light as it assaulted my rested retinas, its intensity magnified by the hours of darkness that had preceded it.
But the damage to my eyes wasn’t what worried me, as I took in the blurry shadows of the men stood around me.
No, the damage to my eyes might not even matter for much longer.
There were four men stood around me, plus one other off to the side nursing his damaged hand. They were tough-looking guys, the type who’ve seen a lifetime of violence and were completely inured to it.
Some people tell me I have the same look myself.
But it wasn’t the sight of the men which scared me; it was the nature of the building itself, its secrets now laid bare.
It turned out that I was in a slaughterhouse, just not the meat-packing kind; all around me, through the dusty heat-haze, I could see bloody, broken human bodies, the life beaten and tortured right out of them.
Some of the corpses were incomplete, hands or even entire limbs missing. Some bodies were missing their heads.
And to make matters worse, no effort had been made to clean up the mess; blood lay in congealed pools everywhere through the concrete-floored, metal-walled charnel house, and some of the dead bodies must have been there for some time, insects devouring the flesh. Eggs had been laid in the rotting human meat, larvae born inside the body, maggots emerging to consume what was left.
At least the source of the rancid stench was no longer a mystery.
One of the men walked away then, to a nearby table littered with tools of the trade, all far more effective than the fist.
My stomach turned as he strolled back towards me, a small chainsaw now in his hands. The others started shouting at me in Spanish, spitting obscenities in my face, encouraging the other man to get started.
The man nodded at them and grinned through a mouthful of gold and empty spaces, one hand pulling the cord, the other steadying the chainsaw as it roared to life.
So this was it – captured and imprisoned in a drug cartel’s secret little torture palace, about to be carved up and left for the critters.
I shook my head as I thought again of the young girl I’d been sent south of the border to find, saddened and angry that it was all over, her parents never to find the closure they so badly needed.
My blindfold was off.
I was going to die.
Part One
Chapter One
The Day Before
‘So you’re the thousand dollar man,’ the woman said, her eyes playing over me, taking in every detail like a vulture. Only this vulture was about five two and a little over a hundred pounds, with curves in all the right places; a pleasant surprise in a town like Laredo, Texas.
Laredo was the seat of Webb County, a city of nearly a quarter of a million people just a stone’s throw away from Mexico, over the polluted waters of the Rio Grande which separated them.
I’d made the journey with just my backpack and my dog, Kane; the same way I’d moved around the country for years. I’d discovered Kane early on in my curious second career, when I’d taken down a ring of dog-fighting organizers and breeders. They’d been arranging fights to the death for years in the steel towns surrounding Detroit, and – after I’d broken them – one of the puppies had latched onto me. He looked like a German Shepherd, only bigger. I knew there had been a fair mix in his ancestry, and he definitely had some Mastiff blood in him. His back end was higher than a normal Shepherd’s, more able to work. And as he’d grown over the years, he’d added plenty of muscle to his frame.
He hadn’t wanted to leave me alone, and I’d taken him with me; and since then, I’d never regretted the decision for an instant. I was a loner, but it was nice to have company. He was also immensely trainable, and reminded me of the dogs I’d worked with in Iraq and Afghanistan; amazing animals who sniffed out IEDs and drug caches. In fact, military working dogs had been used as sentries, scouts, messengers and searchers; and as far back as Roman times, as dogs of war, trained to attack the enemy.
As he grew into adolescence and adulthood, Kane had performed all these tasks over the years, and was as much a part of me as my arm or leg; I didn’t know what I would do without him, and didn’t look forward to finding out.
We’d walked the length and breadth of North America since our first meeting, and Kane was my constant companion; my partner, through thick and thin.
We’d only travelled so far south this time – a long way from our normal stomping grounds – to attend a funeral.
Even though I’d been invalided out of the military years before, I still kept my ear to the grapevine, still kept tabs on my old war buddies. Like Jeb Wilkins, a fellow Ranger I’d served with in both Iraq and Afghanistan as members of the Regimental Recon Detachment. He got it before I did, stepped on an IED just outside Mosul back in 2003. Took both his legs clean off; plenty of pelvis too. I’d been with him at the time, had tried desperately to hold bits of him together until the real medics could get there and do their thing.
Between us we must have done something right – Jeb survived and returned stateside soon after, although he’d been reduced to a life of wheelchairs and pissing through tubes ever since.
When he was further north – and when my life had been somewhat closer to ‘normal’ – I used to visit him as much as I could; but since his move to Laredo, I’d not managed to see him at all, never seen the low-rent hostel in the city’s poverty-stricken downtown area where he’d spent his final years alone and – it was now all-too apparent – suicidally depressed. He’d been bitter and resentful since the ‘accident’ and I could well understand where he was coming from; I had some of the same issues myself.
But I got there in the end – too late to help perhaps, but with time enough to pay my last respects, joined for the small service by the few people who still knew or cared about him; a few guys from the hostel, and a couple of other buddies from the 75th Ranger Regiment. It was good to see them, even given the circumstances; they were some of the only people left who still knew me as Colt Ryder.
To everyone else – including this stunning Latina woman sitting in front of me – I was the Thousand Dollar Man; not a real person at all, but a mythical character, an urban legend. Many people didn’t think I existed at all, despite the exposé a few years back in the Washington Post – a piece that was surprisingly accurate, and did a lot to increase my levels of business.
And speaking of business, that’s what I was there for, sitting in the beat-up living room of a girl called Gabriela Torres. A living room like dozens I’d seen before, a neighborhood like hundreds; and yet another story of heart-ache and desperation.
I’d seen the sign in the window of a local mom-and-pop grocery store as I’d been strolling the streets of Laredo that morning. I’d been walking off the hangover from the previous night’s drinking session with my old Ranger buddies; I’d regretted the pounding in my head that resulted, but it had been the best way to see Jeb off, and we were all sure he’d have had it no other way.
The sign had been simple and direct, as they so often were; there was nothing subtle about it in the slightest. I couldn’t blame people though; subtle could often be missed, and they wanted so badly to be heard. I was the last resort, the person others relied upon when they’d tried everything else.
THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN! the sign had screamed at me in red magic marker, I need your help! It had then given a phone number, and I wondered how many fake calls the person behind the sign had received; kids playing games, curious neighbors, even the police. Probably the number was for a pre-paid cellphone, bought for cash; my clients didn’t normally want to advertise who they were by listing their real phone numbers.
Over the years, my clients had told me about all sorts of people who had contacted them, pretending to be me; but what could I do? I didn’t invent the system, but had had it thrust upon me both by the public, and by that article in the Washington Post.
I’d been wandering across the States for months, helping out whenever I found people who needed helping, when I’d first seen a sign for my services, posted in the window of a truck-stop diner. When I’d spoken to the man who’d placed it, he said he’d heard rumors about me and had decided to take his chances; if I came across it and responded, then fate had decided to be kind to him.
The story must have spread quickly, for a few days later, in a town hundreds of miles away, the same thing happened; another window, another advert for the ‘thousand dollar man’. And then people started taking out ads in the local papers, and I found myself checking the classifieds in every small town I rolled into. And more often than not, there was something for me.
The national press had finally gotten wind of me, and the Post article had subsequently described the various ways of contacting me; and now there was always something for me, no matter where I ended up. But that was alright by me; I have a habit of getting bored easily, and in this game, every day threw something different my way.
Some of the people leaving me messages were cranks and crazies, but I soon dealt with them; more dangerous were people setting me up for revenge attacks stemming from the results of earlier jobs. As such, I was very wary of who I met, when, and where. And it wasn’t just gangland thugs or angry husbands either; the police were always on my tail for one thing or another too, and were constantly trying to entrap me.
I’d called the number I’d found at the grocery store from a pay phone just minutes after I’d spotted it. I don’t carry a cell phone, as it’s just one more way for someone to track you, and I try not to use the internet for the same reasons. Somebody asked me once why I don’t set up an online message board instead of people leaving notes in the classifieds, or posters on barroom walls. But I don’t like to be ‘connected’ to any more people than I have to be, even if I knew how. I’m kind of old fashioned, I guess. If people want to contact me, they can. They know what to do.
A woman – from her voice in her late twenties, maybe early thirties – had picked up, and I’d arranged to meet her at a local café. Gabriela Torres was her name, but I took no more details over the phone. Before the meeting I consulted local records and found her home address, then went into surveillance and observation mode.
I’d had no intention of meeting her at the café; it was just a ruse to flush out anyone who wanted to do me
harm. I watched her from a distance, Kane at my side; I noted only her beauty at first, then her look of nervous harassment. But nobody else met her there, and there didn’t seem to be anybody else watching her either.
I watched until she got bored waiting, then followed her as she paced back to her car – a bust-up nineties Toyota Corolla – and then as she cranked the old beast up and scooted off, presumably back to work. I’d seen the badge on her blouse, glad that it confirmed both her name – Gabriela Torres, she’d not been lying – and where she worked, which was somewhere called the Falcon International Bank.
Satisfied it wasn’t a set-up, I’d set off to find where she lived, Kane bouncing along happily by my heels. He’d enjoyed a beer or two last night as well – one of the guys hadn’t been able to resist filling his dog bowl with chilled Budweiser – but he seemed none the worse for it now. I put it down to his age – Kane was in the prime of his life, while I was moving steadily past mine.
The girl’s apartment was in a four-level building on Salinas Avenue, her unit placed right above a low-cost sports store whose customers didn’t appear to do much sport. Must be a fashion thing, I decided.
Like most of the city, Salinas Avenue was predominantly Latino and my features could well be noted as being out of place; my everyday dress of work pants, army boots and t-shirt didn’t exactly mix in with the baggy shorts and basketball shirts that seemed to be the norm here either. But at least I didn’t have my fifty-pound backpack – basically my home, all wrapped up in one easy-to-carry package – on me, having left it in a locker at the train station. It might have made me stand out even more if I’d been hefting that thing about the neighborhood.
There were balconies looking out onto Salinas, but the back was a lot more private and – leaving Kane on lookout duties – I managed to gain access to Gabriela Torres’ apartment with practiced ease.
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN: Introducing Colt Ryder - One Man, One Mission, No Rules Page 1
