THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN: Introducing Colt Ryder - One Man, One Mission, No Rules

by J. T. Brannan

  Santiago was a low-level dealer for a small gang that worked for Los Zetas, the number one cartel in the area after a series of battles with the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels. He was twenty-one, handsome, and – as far as Elena and Noemi could see – rich.

  Although Noemi had been with him first, Elena had also fallen for him hard, and when Noemi found out they’d argued furiously. Elena claimed to have already slept with him, but Noemi hadn’t believed it at the time.

  But then one evening, when Mateo hadn’t come for her, Noemi discovered that he’d already picked up Elena and taken her across to meet Santiago.

  After that, nobody had ever seen Elena again; and it was also clear that Noemi was no longer welcome down there. With no family of her own in Mexico, border crossings would have been more problematic anyway, and so her weekend visits came to an end.

  ‘Mateo never said anything to the police?’ I asked Noemi, and she shook her head.

  ‘Not that I know of, no. Nobody says anything to the police in Mexico, don’ you know that?’

  ‘And Elena’s parents didn’t know about what Mateo had been doing?’

  ‘I don’ know,’ Noemi said, ‘but I guess not, otherwise they would have told you, huh?’

  It was true, I guess; they would have. ‘And why didn’t you say anything? If you’d fingered Santiago, you could have got your own back.’

  ‘And been killed for it,’ Noemi said matter-of-factly. ‘They got no problems sending their sicarios north of the border, you know? Santiago was a small-time dealer, but he was connected, and you don’ go messing with that. It wouldn’t have been just me either – they would have killed my entire family.’

  ‘So why tell me?’

  ‘I don’ know . . . I guess a part of it is that I do trust you, crazy as it sounds. You might be . . . more subtle than the police, I don’ think you’ll be involving the law or taking anything to court, am I right?’

  I nodded my head. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Although maybe not so much about the ‘subtle’ part.’

  ‘Ha,’ she said, ‘that’s fair enough, mano. But either way, I don’ think you’ll be telling anyone about me. And I guess I do feel bad about what happened to her. At the time I wished she was dead, you know? Or maybe worse, maybe one of their whores or somethin’, I don’ know. I guess you must think I’m a real bitch, but I was young, and she’d hurt me, and I guess I dealt with it like a kid. And then time passed, and she wasn’t found, and . . . I don’ know . . . I guess I thought it was over. But if she’s still alive . . . and you find her . . . I’d like to tell her I’m sorry.’

  I put my hand on hers across the table and held her gaze. ‘I promise you,’ I said earnestly, ‘I will do everything in my power to give you that opportunity.’

  So phase one was over; I had two names, Mateo and Santiago, and I just knew they would have some of the answers I was looking for.

  It was time to move on to Mexico.

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  I crossed the border with one of the fake IDs I carry with me. I was wanted in a number of states, so I used a variety of different identities when travelling. This was the first time I was moving outside the United States though, and I was pleased that I was let through with no more than a cursory glance at the fake passport.

  I would have needed all sorts of paperwork to take Kane with me though and so – reluctantly – I had to leave him in the hands of Emilio and Camila. But they seemed like good people, and I was sure he’d be fine until I got back.

  I was carrying a day sack with me, put together from the side pouches of my main rucksack, a jacket, and a walking stick. I’d left a lot of my gear behind, including my weapons; it just wasn’t worth getting stopped at the border.

  That being said, the walking stick wasn’t exactly as harmless as it looked. It was basically a four-foot long hardwood pole with a leather strap at the top; perfect as a weapon in itself, it could also separate in the middle to give me two perfectly sized Escrima sticks.

  Escrima, also called Arnis or Kali, is a Philippine martial art which emphasizes combat with sticks, knives and other blades weapons. If the US has a ‘gun culture’, then the Philippines definitely has a ‘knife culture’; whereas most western blade arts have become extinct, those of the Philippines are alive and thriving. Filipinos are even referred to as chad ra oles by the nearby Palau islanders – ‘the people of the knife’. Legend has it that the famous Colt M1911 with its man-stopping .45 ACP round was developed after a Moro tribesman decapitated a US serviceman during the Philippine-American War at the turn of the nineteenth century – even after the soldier had emptied his .38 revolver into him.

  Sticks are also very important to the art, and experts practice continually with either the single stick, or double sticks – typically twenty-six inch lengths of rattan.

  I’d been involved in the art for many years myself – hence my love of the collapsible baton as a concealable weapon. Before my selection for the Regimental Recon Detachment, I’d been my unit’s unarmed combat instructor, and – in addition to the main curriculum of US Army Combatives, which was heavily based on Gracie Jiujitsu – we’d mixed in a lot of other things, including Muay Thai, freestyle wrestling, boxing and various other arts. Knife work had been important too, but it was only when I was posted to the RRD that I became exposed to the Filipino arts, which changed my entire outlook.

  One of my close friends was Manuel Lapada, the son of Filipino immigrants and a master of Escrima, in all its aspects – sticks, knives, kicking, punching, locking, throwing and grappling. He introduced me to it, and I trained with him intensively, even accompanying him on trips home to the Philippines where I met his family; the older guys were all grandmasters, and had a wealth of scars from past duels, where they’d perfected their technique in the most realistic conditions there were – actual fights. The fact that they were all still alive told me a lot.

  Our operational experience also tainted what I had learnt – and taught – as a combatives instructor; and so Manuel and I had started up a program of brutally efficient armed and unarmed combatives training which combined the different aspects of Escrima with the deadly, back-to-basics tactics of World War II commando fighting methods, which I’d also been researching. It wasn’t regulated or authorized, but it was damned effective.

  The bottom line, of course, was that the walking stick I carried was more dangerous in my hands than a machine pistol in the hands of most people. That being said though, I hoped I wouldn’t have to prove it; I believed in the easy life if at all possible, and antagonizing the local cartels was something I would try and avoid at all costs.

  I’d not asked Emilio to call ahead for me to arrange a meeting with Mateo – I didn’t want the cousin to be alerted to my visit, to maybe panic and run. I’d asked Emilio about his family members south of the border though, and taken careful note when he came on to Mateo; the guy was still alive it seemed, and still living in Nuevo Laredo. It wasn’t too much of a surprise; unless they joined the military, most people from neighborhoods like that tended to stay there. I took note of all the addresses he had for them, and told him not to let anyone know I was coming.

  As I cleared International Bridge Number 1, stepping foot onto Mexican soil for the first time in years, I breathed in deeply, trying to acclimatize myself to the new setting. There might be just a river separating them, but Nuevo Laredo was going to be a whole other world to its northern twin, I could sense that straight away.

  And I could only hope that somewhere, in that world, I would be able to find a young woman called Elena Rosales.

  Chapter Two

  Nuevo Laredo was hot, dusty and dirty; the air was thick and powerful, you could feel the atmosphere all around you, working its way into your bones.

  Most of the people here were Latino and Hispanic, but I didn’t feel particularly out of place – there was such a streaming mass of humanity coming across the border in both directions that I was just one m
ore, hidden in the onslaught of busy human flesh. Nobody paid me any attention at all.

  That changed before long however, when I steered away from the main tourist traps and places of work and headed toward the more residential districts, my walking stick click-clacking along with me as I went.

  Most of Emilio’s family lived west of the Avenue César López de Lara, the main road south through the city. Apparently Mateo still lived there too, though further north than his parents, up on Calle Indepencia – which was where I was now headed.

  If I’d still been in the military, I would have spent time doing a full-blown reconnaissance of the city, starting off with a complete intel dump on the place – crime stats, bad neighborhoods, street layout, police presence, no-go areas, drug hotspots, the whole shebang – before I’d even set foot there. Then there would static and mobile surveillance on my targets before I made a move, including weeks – and possibly even months – of groundwork. But I just didn’t have the patience for it anymore, nor the desire to operate that way. That phase of my life, full of meticulous planning and rehearsal, was over. Now I just liked to work off-the-cuff; rattle some cages and see what happened. It was definitely more me.

  As it turned out, I hadn’t even rattled any cages before something happened. I’d come off the bridge and continued south onto Leandro Valle, passing business after business on the busy street – garages, pharmacies, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, visa bureaus, everything a good border town needed. Some were run-down, others looked pretty new, but the overall impression was still that of a Wild West frontier town, with violence just around any corner.

  Turning right onto Belden, I kept to the broken sidewalk to avoid the rush of cars down the narrow street. I passed a hospital and some parking lots, and even though I’d only been walking for twenty minutes, the atmosphere was already changing and I was starting to see the real Nuevo Laredo. Concrete walls separated plots of land, plasterwork crumbling after years of neglect; colonial-era buildings which might have once been pretty were now living on borrowed time, façades worn and battered; seedy basement bars lay nestled underneath dilapidated grocery and tobacco stores, the sky above almost blocked out by fantastic patterns of interwoven electricity cables, stretching from one rooftop to the next in never-ending cobwebs. It all seemed destined for the developer’s wrecking ball; but everyone here knew that the developers were never coming.

  The people, too, were changing as I moved west; young boys acted as lookouts on street corners, young men wandered restlessly from stoop to stoop, bulges underneath their baggy denim work shirts hinting at concealed weapons that weren’t really concealed, young women wearing next to nothing already plying their trade on the adjacent streets, even at this hour of the day.

  I turned south again, trotted down the Avenue Riva Palacio, then crossed the Avenue César López de Lara along Calle de Mier, which ran underneath the main road with its thunderous traffic.

  There was a sidewalk on either side of Riva, with steps running beneath, and I took the left hand side so that I could see the traffic coming toward me. I’d already checked that there was nobody on foot, waiting in the shadows.

  By the time I was halfway along the underpass, however, things started to rapidly change. First of all there was a car coming up behind me on the opposite side of the road; then I sensed it swerve across, heard its brakes; and then it was right beside me, before I’d had time to run. Its windows were down, Ranchera music blasting out from the interior.

  I held my ground, a part of me curious to see what would happen; I was about to get an introduction to Mexico, and I didn’t want to be impolite.

  The driver kept looking ahead, keeping his eye out for the police. But behind him, out of the rear passenger window, I saw a man leaning toward me with a smile.

  ‘Norte Americano?’ he asked, and I nodded my head, which elicited a wider smile. I’d counted five men in the car, two up front and three in the rear; I didn’t smile back. ‘I can help you, maybe, yeah?’ the man said, golden teeth gleaming.

  ‘Help me how?’ I asked, already calculating angles of attack.

  ‘Your backpack looks heavy,’ he sniffed. ‘Hot day like this. Hand it over, we’ll take it. Make it easier to walk. Your wallet too gringo, eh?’

  This time I did smile. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said, and I could see my response had confused the man; I could see also that his partners were busily scouting the surrounding roads, nervous – it was already taking too long. ‘But I’m afraid my answer will have to be a big ‘fuck you’, okay?’

  There was a look of blank disbelief on the man’s face for a moment; but then he started reacting, shouting in Spanish to his cohorts, raising his hand out of the window toward me.

  But I was already reacting myself, forcing the tip of my walking stick through the open window and catching the man straight in the eyeball with a sharp thrust which made him scream out in pain, the gun dropped somewhere to the floor of the car.

  His friends were out now, racing around to me; with the driver still at the wheel, that left three of them – two with flick knives, one with a two-foot long machete.

  The two from the rear got to me first, but as they rounded the car I was already swinging the wooden pole toward them; I caught the first man on the side of the neck as he cleared the trunk, stunning him. I immediately pulled the stick back then fired it out in a forward thrust to the next man, catching him high in the chest. He fell back into the street, dropping his knife and then screaming as he saw the van traveling toward him, unable to stop in time. It caught him on the hip and spun him wildly out into the street behind until he fell, broken, to the ground. The van never even stopped.

  The man I’d caught in the neck was recovering, maybe thinking of coming for me again; I discouraged him by smashing the hardwood staff right over his head, dropping him unconscious to the floor.

  The man in the car was still screaming over his popped eyeball, frantically searching the car floor, half-blind, for his pistol.

  And then the third man was finally there on the sidewalk beside me, chopping down heavily toward my head with the machete. I moved in to the attack, dropping my staff as I blocked his arm with my own, following through with my other hand to trap his arm completely, held in a figure-four around his wrist; with a sudden jerk I wrenched downwards, breaking the arm at the shoulder and driving him to the concrete sidewalk. The machete left his hand as the shoulder broke, and I followed him down with a knee to the exposed floating ribs, my weight crushing him and breaking a few of them. I kicked the machete underneath the car, then noticed that the man in the car had finally found his gun, was once more pushing it out of the window toward me.

  I moved instantly, deflecting the gun to the side; it went off, the round hitting the underpass wall, the noise tremendously loud in the confined space. At the same time I lashed out with my hand, tip of my thumb braced against my bunched knuckles. It hit the target squarely, right in the man’s other eye, and he cried out in pain once again; and once again, he dropped the gun, this time outside the car; and then he was screaming at the driver in Spanish, and the car pulled away from the curb and hightailed it out of there, motor gunning at dangerously high revs.

  I looked around at the three men left behind; all were still out of it, especially the one who’d been hit by the van.

  I simply loosened my shoulders, rolled my neck, and bent down to pick up my walking stick. I picked up the gun too, and pocketed it.

  With a welcome to Mexico like this, I was sure it wouldn’t be long before I’d be needing it.

  Chapter Three

  I saw Mateo Ramirez for the first time at just after four o’clock that afternoon.

  He was coming out of his dilapidated single-story home, dressed in baggy pants which barely contained a heaving gut, along with the ubiquitous oversized basketball shirt. He looked older than his twenty-three years; Emilio had shown me a picture of him as a normal-looking seventeen year old kid, and the years had
n’t been kind to him. His rough face was hidden behind several days of stubble and his greasy hair was slicked back in a ponytail; all in all, I could well imagine him as someone willing to pass around his thirteen-year-old Norte Americano cousin to his buddies.

  He lit up a joint as he stood on the sidewalk, obviously waiting for his ride to come and pick him up.

  There was a convenience store directly opposite, large broken signs advertising Coca Cola and Tecate beer. I’d sauntered over and was reading the assorted signs which decorated the exterior, pretending to decipher them as I watched Mateo across the street.

  Far from being a regular gangbanger’s car, what pulled up instead was a purple Citroen 2C; I could still hear the ranchero music playing inside though. It was driven by a heavy-set guy right around the same age as Mateo, who threw the passenger side door open and began shouting at his friend to get in, they were going to be late.

  Mateo got in, and I set off from the stoop of the convenience store, ambling across the road casually. I didn’t have a car of my own with which to follow him, and so I decided to take the bull by the horns and act while he was already in sight.

  As the passenger door closed, I increased my speed, matching it just right so that I was pulling open the rear door and getting in just as the car pulled out into the street. There was a look of shock on the driver’s face as he turned in his seat, even more so when he saw the gun I had pointed at the back of Mateo’s head. It was the weapon I’d taken from the man who’d recently attacked me; another .38 revolver like the one Pablo’s friend had back on the other side of the river, except this one was a snub-nose.

  ‘Keep driving,’ I said, ‘or your friend here will be decorating your windshield with his brains.’