The Thousand Dollar Escape

by J. T. Brannan

  But she did make the change, so we were making forward progress.

  There were glasses too, standard frames with clear lenses, and we both darkened our skin with fake tan. Samantha used more makeup to mask her bruising and – with the glasses and the hair cut – she was a different person to the one I’d met that morning.

  The funny thing was, of course, that she’d probably already made changes to her appearance when she’d left her husband and gone to that apartment in Sand Springs; and now she was one more step removed again.

  I was pretty sure that there would be more changes to come, if she wanted to get out of this.

  It was only after we’d sorted ourselves out – as Samantha retreated into her own thoughts, curled up on the sofa – that I’d gone to put on the television.

  And sure enough, there we were.

  Top story on the evening news.

  Chapter Two

  ‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ Chief of Police Don Carson told the TV news reporter, nose and lips broken and mashed-up, blood staining his uniform shirt. ‘That man, whoever he is, is public enemy number one.’

  Medical technicians dabbed at the wounds on Carson’s face as countless blue lights flashed around the scene, and he was really selling it for the cameras.

  ‘So can you tell us exactly what happened?’ the reporter asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ Carson said angrily, waving the medics away, ‘we arrested that man earlier today when he and his vicious dog interfered in a police operation and severely injured six Sand Springs PD officers. And then later today he escaped from our jail, shooting two officers in the process and badly injuring several others. And –’

  The breath caught in his throat and he sagged with emotional pain as he struggled to get the next words out.

  Give the man an Oscar.

  ‘– And my wife, she was visiting me at the station, and – and – the sonofabitch took her hostage! He’s got her somewhere now, and – if he’s listening to this’ – his voice changed, became more direct – ‘if you’re listening to this, we’re gonna find you and nothing’s gonna stop us. Nothing.’

  I got the message loud and clear, but ignored the not-too-veiled threat as I continued watching the coverage.

  It wasn’t good – they had footage of the bleeding cops that I’d shot being wheeled out of the police station on stretchers, other injured cops being helped out, supported on colleagues’ shoulders, close-up shots of blood-smeared walls from inside the station, interviews with panicked office staff and shocked bystanders.

  And then we had close-ups of the injuries to the firefighters, and you could see the outrage on the faces of the reporters.

  To be fair, the guys didn’t look good, and I felt a pang of guilt when I saw them. But they were alive at least, and their injuries – while no doubt abhorrent to the audience of the evening news – were no more than superficial, what you might expect after a few rounds of hard boxing. Still, firefighters with broken jaws, black eyes and broken noses weren’t going to put me on anyone’s Christmas card list.

  ‘He was crazy,’ said the one I’d kicked out of the driver’s seat. ‘Plain crazy, he just went insane in the cab, beat us up, threw me out onto the road, you know? It was a miracle more people weren’t seriously hurt.’

  That comment segued nicely into some footage of the vehicular carnage that we’d left in our wake – the upside-down police cruiser, its roof half caved in; civilian and law enforcement vehicles strewn across the streets; all the cars and vans that had been damaged when I’d taken the fire truck in the wrong direction, exiting off the on-ramp.

  Then we switched to shots of the abandoned fire truck, half of one side scraped off and the rest riddled by bullet holes; and then to footage of the house I’d burglarized, and interviews with the shaken owners.

  Because I’d not been photographed or fingerprinted, my identity could only be guessed at; but those guesses weren’t very good, and so they presented a few fuzzy CCTV images, and a composite picture of my likeness that was mercifully very different from how I looked now. I knew the differences were superficial, but that was all that was normally needed to fool people.

  Ricci Evans – my friend from last night, who also rated an interview – expressed surprise about what happened, but not much else.

  ‘I don’t really know him,’ she said sheepishly. ‘He’s just a guy I met in a bar, you know? He seemed okay, but I guess you never really know about people, you know what I mean? Normal family guys that turn out to be serial killers, that sort of thing.’

  Thanks Ricci.

  There was also a description of Kane, and an account of how he had ‘savaged’ the officers back in Ricci’s apartment block; total bullshit, as all he’d done was pin the guys down, he didn’t even break the skin. He also rated a composite sketch, and when I pointed it out to him on the TV, he let out a low, deep growl from the back of his throat; I couldn’t tell if he was being friendly or threatening, and I almost laughed as I wondered if he was scared of himself.

  He looked across at me, his head cocked to one side. ‘I didn’t mean it, big guy,’ I told him, not quite sure if he’d read my mind.

  There were good quality photos of Samantha Carson of course, as her identity was known; but she looked sufficiently different now to avoid immediate suspicion if we were to venture out onto the streets of Tulsa.

  Not that I had any intentions of going anywhere, at least for a while.

  I switched between channels for a good couple of hours, but there wasn’t much else to report; my backpack hadn’t been found at least, and nor had the stolen car, despite its description being all over the news.

  We were underground to all intents and purposes, with no leads as to our location; but after the bad publicity – much of it warranted, I was willing to admit – the whole world would be looking for us.

  I was a violent criminal with a savage, psychopathic dog, who had terrorized a small town, taken out half its police force, and kidnapped the chief’s wife.

  As Don Carson himself had said, I was public enemy number one.

  I found some coffee in a kitchen cupboard, some milk in the fridge – probably left by the realtor to share with prospective clients – and I turned to Samantha, who was still curled up, silent, on the sofa.

  ‘Want some coffee?’ I asked, but she didn’t say a word, and I could only imagine what could be going through her mind.

  I made her some anyway, and when I held the mug out for her, she took it. A step in the right direction, at least.

  I realized that she wouldn’t want me sitting next to her on the sofa, and so I pulled the armchair a little bit closer and sat down near her.

  I took a sip from my own mug and waited for her to do the same, a small physical movement that might indicate that she was becoming more relaxed.

  I waited for what seemed like a long time, but finally she put the mug to her lips and drank. I waited a few moments more, then began.

  ‘Samantha,’ I said softly. ‘Is it alright if I call you Samantha?’

  ‘Sam,’ she whispered back.

  ‘Sam,’ I confirmed. ‘Our situation may look pretty bleak, but I think I can get us out of it. But you’ll have to trust me.’

  She made a small sound that I supposed was a derisive snort. I couldn’t say I blamed her; trusting a man was a big ask in her situation.

  ‘I mean it,’ I said earnestly. ‘We can get out of this mess, but I need you to trust me. Can you do that?’

  Sam looked up at me for the first time since curling up on the couch, eyes filled with suspicion. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  It was a fair question; I knew who she was, and if I was asking for her trust, I should extend her the same courtesy.

  ‘My name’s Colt,’ I said eventually. ‘Colt Ryder. But I hardly ever use that name now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I sighed. ‘It’s a name from the past,’ I told her. ‘A past I’d rather forget. Most p
eople have heard of me by my nom de guerre.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘It’s French. It literally means ‘name of war’.’

  ‘So you’re at war?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘The bad guys,’ I answered with a half-smile.

  ‘And who are the bad guys?’

  ‘Oh, it could be anyone,’ I said. ‘I use my judgement.’

  ‘So you decide?’

  I nodded. ‘Me and my clients, anyway.’

  ‘Your clients?’ Sam asked, body starting to slightly uncurl as our conversation progressed. ‘So you do this sort of thing for a living?’

  ‘Yeah, you could say that.’

  ‘What sort of job is that?’

  ‘A rewarding one, for the most part.’

  ‘I bet. So what is your ‘war name’?

  ‘I didn’t come up with the name,’ I told her, ‘but people call me the Thousand Dollar Man.’

  Sam’s eyes widened noticeably. ‘The Thousand Dollar Man?’ she asked incredulously. ‘I’ve heard of you. Are you serious?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s the truth.’

  She paused, looking into her half-empty coffee mug as she thought. Finally, she looked up, locked eyes with mine for the first time since getting to the apartment. ‘I don’t have any money,’ she said. ‘Not a thousand dollars. Don never let me have any, I’d been trying to store some up for when I . . . when I ran . . . but it was all in that apartment, Don probably has it all now.’ She looked worried, upset. ‘I . . . I can’t pay you.’

  ‘Have I asked for any money?’

  ‘But . . . but I thought . . .’

  ‘The money’s irrelevant,’ I said. ‘I use it to identify people that really need help. Saving up the thousand dollars – for most of the people I work for – is hard work, it proves they’re serious about what it is they want me to do. In your case, you didn’t have to prove anything.’

  ‘So you’re a Good Samaritan?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Why a thousand dollars?’ Sam asked. ‘Why not five hundred? Ten thousand?’

  I sighed again. Sam’s wall was beginning to break down but – if I ever wanted to learn anything more about her – I realized I was going to have to set the example, and tell her my story first.

  ‘Let me make us another coffee,’ I said, ‘and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  ‘I’d saved the money,’ I told Sam over our next cup. ‘One thousand dollars. It doesn’t sound like a hell of a lot, but believe me, at the time – to me – it was everything in the world.

  ‘After Iraq, I was a mess. Fell out of a four story window in Mosul after getting shot and stabbed more times than I care to remember; the only thing that saved me was landing on the body of the guy I dragged out of the window with me.’ I shook my head. ‘Yeah, I was a mess. Mentally screwed too, watched some of my best friends die. Took months to get ahold of myself, but there was no way I was going back into active service, not with the injuries I had. So they invalided me out, I used the money they gave me to help out the wife and kid of my best friend, who’d been killed during the operation. I’d been best man at their wedding, little Kyle was my godson.

  ‘Turned out a while later that Kyle had leukemia, so I tried to help them out by sending more money. But it was hard to get work, nobody wanted to take me on. Finally landed a job in North Carolina at a big meat factory, started saving some money so I could go and visit my godson, the family lived up in Alaska.

  ‘The plant started hiring illegal immigrants from Mexico right about then. I kept my job, but some of my friends got canned and I had a word with one of the managers about it. I said some things, he said some things, I ended up breaking his jaw, and that was that – no more meat packing for Mr. Ryder.

  ‘The kid was getting worse, and I knew I had to get up there. I was out looking for work one day, was going to book a ticket just the day after that, but when I got home to my trailer, I found it had been broken into. Everything I owned was gone, including the thousand dollars I’d managed to save up for my trip.

  ‘Well, that broke my heart, you know? I went a little crazy after that. The cops weren’t interested, they didn’t care about ‘trailer trash’ like me. So I decided to deal with it myself, tracked down the guys who’d stolen my money. Beat the shit out of them when I finally found them a week later, put them in hospital and took their money, and it was a hell of a lot more than a thousand dollars.

  ‘Went and booked a ticket for Alaska right away, but I was too late, Kyle died just before I got there.’ I shook my head, a single tear appearing in my eye. I wiped it away and looked at Sam. ‘So that was it. What else did I have?’ I shook my head again. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I had nothing. Nobody wanted to give me a job, I had no family, there was nothing to live for.’

  I took another sip of the coffee. ‘Well, actually that’s not strictly true. I did have something – I had a rage inside me, a huge anger against people who take advantage of others, criminals and bullies who think might is right, who take what they want and say ‘fuck everyone else’. I had that, you know? And I decided to use it, to channel it, to help the people who couldn’t find help anywhere else.

  ‘I became the Thousand Dollar Man, the money a symbol really, a reminder of why I do this, it represents the money those guys stole from me, the money that meant I couldn’t see Kyle before he died. It keeps me straight if I ever have doubts, it brings back that day when I saw his poor little dead body in the coffin.’

  I wiped away another tear and finished my coffee, then looked up at Sam. ‘So that’s why I don’t ask for five hundred dollars or ten thousand, or anything else. It’s not the money. It’s the idea.’

  Sam looked back at me with something new in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, before placing a hand on my arm.

  And then I realized that the look in her eyes was sympathy.

  I’d not recognized it, simply because I had never received it.

  Chapter Three

  ‘We met when I was just sixteen,’ Sam said, no longer curled up defensively on the sofa but sitting up and ruffling Kane’s fur, rubbing behind his ears as he murmured appreciatively.

  ‘I was still at high school,’ she continued, ‘young and naïve, you know how it is, how kids are at that age, and when I met Don, it was like something else. He was older than me, I guess he must have been twenty-seven then, and it was such a thrill. He was a man, not a boy like the others I’d been out with, and he was interested in me. Can you imagine how that made me feel?’

  She was silent for a few moments as she stroked Kane’s head, deep in thought. ‘Of course, I see now how wrong it all was. I was just a kid and he was a full-grown man, but I didn’t see it at the time. He was so nice, looked after me, bought me gifts, made me feel like a real princess. I never could have guessed what kind of a man he really was.’

  ‘What did your family think?’

  Sam shrugged her shoulders. ‘My Dad left home when I was just three years old, and my Mom had me when she was just sixteen so she was hardly in a position to say anything. And anybody else who might have had a problem with it – at school, in the community, wherever – never said anything about it after Don went to see them. He was very . . . persuasive like that. Again, I had no idea what he was really like, how he was intimidating those people. I thought people just respected him, loved him even. He was in the police already of course, had quite a reputation. Nobody questioned him.

  ‘It was a whirlwind romance, we got married when I was seventeen. We needed my Mom’s permission, but she didn’t mind – as I said, he had a good reputation, he was going places, she believed I wouldn’t do any better than Don. So she signed the papers, we got married in my final year of high school. I never graduated in the end, Don convinced me not to, he said he’d look after me, what did I need a high school diploma for?’

  She went quiet again, and I let her have the time to herself. There was
no need to rush anything; this might well be the first time she’d told anyone her story.

  ‘Again,’ she said after a few minutes, ‘I can see now why he didn’t want me to graduate, it was to limit my opportunities, make me more dependent on him. Classic, textbook behavior for abusers if you believe the research. And believe me, I’ve done plenty of research in the last few months. But back at the start, I didn’t really understand what was going on.’

  ‘When did it start?’ I asked softly.

  ‘When?’ She sighed sadly. ‘Right after getting married. Our first time together – oh, he’d been a real gentleman, I was a virgin until our wedding night – he was . . . rough. Unpleasant. Violent. I wanted to make him happy, but it hurt – it was my first time, you know – and he got more and more angry with me. That’s when he slapped me for the first time.’

  Her eyes welled up as she told me her story, and I couldn’t say I blamed her.

  ‘It was the first time,’ she continued, ‘but it sure as hell wasn’t the last. After that first night, I spoke to my Mom, told her what he’d done. You know what she said to me? She said “you’re just going to have to deal with it”, and that was that. It was my lot in life, all I could expect. Don was a well-respected lawman, everyone knew he’d make chief of police one day, he was a pillar of the community.’ She let out a bitter laugh. ‘Still is, I guess. But me? Poor little white trash girl, no education, no prospects. I should have been grateful for what I had, that was what everyone thought.