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

by J. T. Brannan

  The other women stood there in shock, unable to compute the situation, to reconcile the fact that the young girl they were trying to help was now holding a knife to the throat of their friend.

  The police would be here any minute and – while it wouldn’t be so bad if they arrested Elena Rosales – I sure as hell didn’t want to be taken into custody. Too many questions, too many unsavory answers.

  And on second thoughts, I didn’t really want Elena to be arrested, at least not yet, not before I’d verified that there was an Elena still in there somewhere. I wanted to bring Emilio’s daughter back, not the empty shell that was Z13.

  ‘Back the fuck up, mano!’ the girl screamed, her voice high, the intention behind it violent. ‘Back up or I split this bitch’s throat right open!’

  Her eyes were wide, and I had no doubt whatsoever that she would carry out the threat, then go onto someone else.

  I knew I was running out of time, the cops would descend on the place any second.

  Z13 started to back away, past the other women, heading through the rear yard of the house for the open street on the other side of the property.

  ‘Get me a fucking car,’ she shouted to the small crowd, ‘right fucking now!’

  The knife pressed deeper into the soft skin of her hostage’s neck, and the women started to move, pulling out keys or rushing back to their houses.

  ‘I’m leavin’ here, mano,’ she told me. ‘I’m fuckin’ leavin’.’

  ‘In that?’ I asked, my eyes roaming to the left, and the sound of a car being started up.

  It was the oldest trick in the book, but her desperation for transport out of there made her fall for it, her eyes roaming for a moment – just a moment – to the source of the noise, to confirm that a vehicle was on its way as she’d demanded.

  That moment was all I needed.

  In the blink of an eye, I whipped out a heavy, wooden-handled Bowie knife and hurled it through the hot morning air.

  It was thrown quickly, fluidly, but – in the time distortion of adrenaline – it seemed to turn over and over itself in slow motion, each rotation reflecting sunlight off the gleaming blade.

  But then it reached the target and made impact, just before her eyes snapped forward again.

  The heavy hilt of the knife, butt-capped in solid brass, hit the girl square in the center of the forehead, causing shock and a momentary loss of ability to do anything except stand there, open mouthed.

  I used that opportunity to rush forward, covering the last few yards between us in a frantic dash; and as I reached her, I snatched her knife away from her victim’s throat, pushed the woman away from danger, and unleashed a heavy, open handed slap with my callused palm that struck the girl across the face and knocked her unconscious, the pain receptors in the large surface area of skin unable to process so much information and shutting her brain down, the whole system malfunctioning.

  She dropped to the floor, but I was already next to her, catching her and scooping her into my arms as I raced past the house, heading for the street and the vehicle that I’d seen, one of the women having done as the girl had demanded and bringing her a car.

  It was a little Mercedes two-seat sports car – fast, agile, and absolutely perfect. There was something to be said for money after all.

  ‘Get out,’ I said to the driver inside, slinging Elena onto the passenger seat and sliding behind the wheel as the woman exited the car. Engine already on, I gunned the accelerator and raced off down the street, sirens sounding so close now that I knew the cops must be right on top of us.

  But where there was a will, there was a way; and I sure as hell wasn’t going to get caught now.

  Chapter Six

  The little neighborhood was planted right smack in the middle of the country club grounds, and we were in a cul-de-sac with only one way out – straight ahead.

  I accelerated that way, hurtling round the bends and heading east – if the golf course surrounded the oasis on the other three sides, as it appeared, then the link to the main roads would have to be east, and I made the decision and stuck to it.

  Ignoring a turn-off to my right, I swept around the road, narrowly avoiding a couple of cars just setting off for work; and then I could see it up ahead – a junction to a main road, and my exit out of there.

  But I could also see police cruisers heading down my way, and I instinctively eased off the accelerator, slowing the car to pretend I was just another white-collar worker on my way to the office.

  The cruisers zipped past me, three of them; but a cop in the last car had looked across at me and made a connection in his trained mind. Perhaps it was the combat jacket, or the fact I was soaking wet; but something didn’t gel with him, and he pulled up on the handbrake and made a perfect turn. My foot was stomping down on the accelerator before he could get back on his own, and I shot forward along the tree-lined avenue, heading for the main road ahead, at least one cop car right behind me.

  The T-junction up ahead led either north or south; but I knew that more of the country club lay north and so wrenched the wheel to the right, spilling out of the avenue onto Bermuda Drive, accelerating even as I whipped the car around the other early-morning traffic.

  I saw a sign for East Del Mar Boulevard, and piloted the vehicle in that direction, cop car right behind me. And I knew his friends wouldn’t be far behind him; he’d also almost certainly been on the radio by now, called in the make and model of my vehicle and requested back-up to my location.

  I took a left, sweeping down the last section of Bermuda Drive toward the intersection with Del Mar; and then we were there, the car ploughing out across the wide lanes, other vehicles swerving around us, and I had to fight with the wheel to correct it, pull us straight; but then the car stabilized, the tires gripped, and we were off.

  The sportster accelerated hard, the engine free-revving and potent, and we were up to eighty in no time at all, swerving in and out of the morning traffic and heading northwest, following signs for Loop 20, a four-lane highway that passed both Texas A&M University, and Laredo International Airport.

  I was just sailing around a big camper van when I felt the hands raking out at my face, heard the feral screams.

  D13 was awake and angry.

  Feeling terrible about it – but not wanting to crash the car and have us both killed – I reached over, gripping the wheel with one hand as we sped at eighty down the wide boulevard, grabbed hold of her hair, and ran her face straight into the dashboard.

  The impact was hard, and the effect immediate – the girl was knocked out cold once more, hopefully for the duration.

  It pained me to hit a woman – but being involved in a high-speed automobile crash would certainly have pained me a lot more. And I didn’t much fancy having my eyes raked out either.

  As we raced past JB Alexander High School on the right, I counted four sets of flashing sirens in my rear-view. But the Mercedes sports was faster – and certainly more agile – and if I played my cards right, there was still a chance I could get out of there.

  Not a good chance perhaps, but it was still a chance – and that was a whole lot better than nothing at all.

  I could see the intersection coming up now, traffic busy on the Bob Bullock Loop, streaming past at fifty in both directions, four lanes apiece. Traffic lights, stop signs, and not a hell of a lot else over the other side of the highway, just desert scrubland.

  I didn’t slow down at all, just kept on accelerating into traffic exactly as I’d done onto Del Mar a few short minutes before; with no obstructions in the way I could see the road clearly, identify the vehicles, their positions, their speeds, calculate my speed and angle of approach so that I could meet the traffic seamlessly.

  It worked, the little Mercedes bursting out right in front of a Ford minivan and immediately sprinting away from it, around two other slow-moving cars and out into a clear fast-lane, gunning the engine until we were running at over a hundred.

  I knew the cop cars wou
ld be far behind us; but with radio comms and the possibility of helicopters, I knew we weren’t out of the woods yet.

  But luckily, I had a plan.

  Chapter Seven

  For the next mile I really pushed the little sportster, opening up as much distance between me and the cops as possible.

  By the time I’d reached the turn-off for the university, I couldn’t even see their flashing lights; and so I swung off, reducing my speed now so as not to get noticed by anyone that happened to be around. Not that university campuses at seven in the morning were normally hives of activity – most students probably wouldn’t be anywhere near awake yet.

  I drove through the pretty campus, full of modern white-walled and red-roofed buildings set between manicured lawns and gardens, until I came to a parking lot.

  I parked the Mercedes up in a shadowy corner, then took the opportunity to secure Elena’s wrists and ankles with the duct tape I’d brought with me. I left her in the car while I approached the nearest vehicle, a small Ford hatchback, and quickly broke into it. Acting as casually as I could – as if both vehicles were mine and I was simply transferring some luggage between the two – I went back to the Mercedes, lifted Elena from the passenger seat, and placed her in the trunk of the hatchback. She was starting to come round, but not enough to cause any problems.

  I slammed the lid, took off my jacket and stuffed it down into the rear footwell. It wasn’t much, but it was one less thing to identify me by. I then slipped into the driver’s seat, hotwired the engine, and pulled slowly out of the lot.

  Above me I heard – and then saw – a helicopter, noted its Laredo PD markings, and wondered if they’d seen me switch cars.

  But as I re-entered Loop 20, there didn’t seem to be a rush of police cars toward me, and the chopper seemed to be just roaming in a random pattern.

  It paid to be certain though, and so a couple of miles further south I turned in again, this time into the parking lot of Laredo International Airport. I knew the chopper wouldn’t be able to fly over the area, and I would be able to change cars again relatively unmolested.

  The switch took just a few minutes, and then – the girl once more secured in the trunk – I was leaving the airport and rejoining the Loop, this time in an ancient, lime green GM sedan.

  The chopper was still overhead, and I could still hear sirens all around me – sometimes even saw a police cruiser shoot past, lights flashing, horns blaring – but nobody seemed in the least interested in me or my ugly green car.

  I’d done it; we were safe.

  Now I just had to get Z13 somewhere we could talk, so I could assess just how much of Elena Rosales there was left inside before I presented her to Mom and Dad.

  Chapter Eight

  The sixteen year old sicario known in the Los Zetas underworld as Z13 eyed me warily across the room.

  We were in a safe location, in Jeb Wilkins’ old room at the downtown hostel; some of his things had yet to be collected, and nobody else had taken it over since his death. Perhaps someone would soon, but not yet; and for now, the place was about as safe as I could find.

  I wasn’t worried about Kane – he was used to the streets, and he would have hightailed it out of there long before the cops could have called in the pound to take him away. He would have headed back to Emilio’s apartment, knowing that I would be likely to meet him there eventually.

  The girl was still bound, and tied to a chair; she had yet to give me any reason to trust her, and until she did, she would stay right where she was.

  She was a pretty girl, or perhaps had been, once upon a time. Her body was trim and athletic, hard and wiry like a fighter’s. She was tattooed, most noticeably on her face. There were teardrops on her cheeks, and – when her eyes were closed – I was surprised to see eyeballs tattooed onto her eyelids. The effect was disturbing, to say the least.

  Images of Santa Muerte, the ‘Saint of Death’ – who was dreaded and revered throughout Mexico, especially by the cartels and their followers – adorned both her arms, and there was a series of straight lines around her neck, every four lines crossed through by a fifth. It looked like a prisoner had been counting the days of incarceration and marking them off on a cell wall; or an assassin commemorating her victims, on her own flesh.

  I didn’t want to count them.

  I noticed things other than wariness in the girl’s eyes too – there was violence, anger, and also fear. There was the glazed, hopeless look of the addict as well, and I wondered if that wasn’t partially how Sanchez had molded and controlled her.

  ‘You want a fix?’ I asked her.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said, before spitting on the threadbare carpet – but at my words I had seen a flicker of hope in those cold eyes, of need, and I knew she was a junkie; the next few hours – perhaps days – were definitely not going to be fun for her.

  ‘Is that how it started?’ I asked. ‘They got you hooked on that shit? Made you do it?’

  She just looked at me, opening and closing those tattooed eyelids; the sight was unnerving.

  ‘Let me tell you why you’re here,’ I said. ‘Why I’m here. I was hired by your parents to find you.’ I paused to let that sink in. ‘I was hired to find Elena Maria Rosales, by a mom and dad who love that girl very much. So much so, that they’ve hardly slept in the past three years, lying awake at night and wondering what happened to their daughter, hoping and praying that she was okay.’

  I nodded my head. ‘Yeah, those parents have tried everything, the police, the media, even the damn FBI. But nobody could help them, and so they came to me. Their last chance.’

  I looked at her, searching for what lay beneath those hard eyes, what lay inside. ‘What am I going to tell them?’ I asked. ‘Is their little girl already dead? Or is Elena Rosales still alive, still capable to returning to her family, to her normal life?’

  ‘And who the fuck are you?’ she asked – but although her words were fierce, a little of the fire, a little of the hardness, had gone out of those eyes; perhaps a little bit of Elena shining through the darkness.

  ‘My name doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘All that matters is that your parents paid me a thousand dollars to find you.’

  She smirked. ‘The thousand dollar man, eh? I heard about you, mano. Didn’t think you was real, esse. But you fight like Santa Muerte man, hah! You a real tough motherfucker. What’s your story?’

  She was talking, and that was important; she wasn’t giving me the evil eye any more. She might not exactly be opening up herself, but it was progress. I wanted her to trust me, so that we could get a real dialogue going. If I told her something, perhaps she would tell me something in return.

  ‘My story?’ I said. ‘It’s a long one.’

  ‘We going somewhere, mano?’

  ‘I guess not,’ I conceded, and stretched out my arms, rested back in my own chair. ‘It all started when I was injured, I suppose.’

  ‘Iraq?’ she asked, and I nodded my head.

  ‘Yeah, a battle just outside Mosul. Got shot to shit, most major bones broken, you know the score – not a great day at the office. Anyway, when I was finally discharged they gave me a payout but I gave it all away to the family of a friend of mine who was killed during that same battle. I promised him I’d look after his family, and that’s just what I did.

  ‘Still, it left me with nothing except an empty bank account and no real job prospects. Things are better now than they were after Vietnam, but who’s really gonna hire an injured infantry veteran? I mean, what’s my skill set? I can kill people, that’s what I’m trained for. Tried running some martial arts classes for a while, but I guess I was still wound a bit tight from the war, took things a bit too seriously. Got a lot of students, but not many wanted to stick it out. Relax, they said, there’s no war going on here, they said. But there was for me, the war was still going on inside and I couldn’t stop it if I tried.

  ‘Anyway, after a while I decided to roam around, look for work, taking anything I coul
d get. I worked in bars and clubs as a bouncer, on construction sites as a bricklayer, I valeted cars for showrooms, grilled the meat at fast food joints. You name it, I did it. Kept applying for overseas security jobs, but always got turned down on medical grounds. Didn’t matter a shit what I’d done over my career, only that in the end I’d gone out on a medical discharge. Nobody wanted to touch me, couldn’t get insurance for me, they said. Couldn’t take the risk.

  ‘But then I was in North Carolina, heard they were doing a big recruitment drive at a slaughterhouse out at a place called Tar Heel. A real hole, but that processing plant was just about the biggest in the world, did over thirty thousand pig carcasses a day. Anyway, bottom line is that they hired me and I pulled twelve hour shifts cutting and hauling hundred pound slabs of meat for the next year and a half.

  ‘I was still helping out my dead buddy’s family, sending back some of my pay every month to them. Did a few extras on the side too, got involved in some pit fights to raise a bit of extra cash. You know, bare knuckle fights on the slaughterhouse floor, whole crews of guys watching and betting. They probably made more money out of it than I ever did.

  ‘Found out that my friend’s son – my godson – had leukemia right about then, I started fighting more, pulling extra shifts, sending even more money their way. Saved a bit too, wanted to go and visit them up in Alaska. Hell of a long way, and a good chunk of dough to get there, you know? But things weren’t looking good, and I wanted to see him. Poor kid was only about six years old.’ I shook my head. ‘No justice in the world.’

  I noticed that Z13 – Elena? – was sitting there quietly, listening to my every word. Had there even been a flicker of sympathy in her eyes when I’d mentioned the boy?

  I wasn’t making it up for her benefit though; it was a true story, and one which still threatened to bring a tear to my eye.