THE THOUSAND DOLLAR HUNT: Colt Ryder is Back in Action!

by J. T. Brannan

  There was another way up from the rear, but a gully had opened up near the bottom on that side of the mesa which some buffalo had drowned in and was now festooned with feasting, twenty-foot long Nile crocodiles. Besides which, I’d also set a variety of booby-traps across the flat top of the mesa just in case anyone was crazy enough to make the climb up that way.

  Talia was conscious now, but terrified and something of a nervous wreck. It was hardly without reason, but I was afraid that her sobbing would give her away and considered knocking her unconscious once again, purely for her own safety. But then Kane had returned, and his presence seemed to reassure her, so I placed him with her back within the bushes while I waited to make my two last kills of the night.

  Miles Hatfield.

  Roman Badrock.

  They were coming for me now, I could feel it in my bones; the general was right, he wasn’t a coward, he wasn’t the type of man to back down from a fight. I might have singlehandedly taken out an entire contingent of professional ex-military mercenaries and a handful of blood-crazed amateur manhunters, but Badrock probably just saw this as a glorious challenge; when he put my head on that trophy wall, it would be the finest prize of his long career.

  Only it wasn’t my head that was going to end up on that wall.

  I don’t know how long passed before I heard the near-silent sounds of someone coming slowly up the cliff path ahead of me – I hadn’t dared looked at my watch for fear of missing something – but the sunrise was nearly here, the blackness of night giving way to the dull grey of a pre-dawn twilight.

  Whoever it was, they were moving slowly, cautiously, and I couldn’t blame them for a second; they were moving toward what could be their death.

  A few more moments passed, and I went through my regular breathing routine, taking my heart rate way down, ready to make the kill shot the moment I saw my target appear.

  A few moments more, and then something rose up into my rifle sight.

  Miles Hatfield, ex-Delta commando and right-hand man of General Badrock, a comped-up old-school AR15 assault rifle in his hands, up and ready in the aim.

  My finger started to squeeze, then stopped as my body was wracked by a hideous, paralyzing pain that was so brutal, so sudden, I thought my heart would stop right then.

  I’d been shot, I knew that much as my wounded body sank into the mulch below me, pain localizing now in the back of my shoulder.

  But how?

  By who?

  Despite the pain, I turned on my ass, back to the rock to cover myself from Hatfield – for now at least – and opened fire across the mesa toward the figure of Roman Badrock, ignoring the pain to make my fingers work the trigger, pumping shot after shot toward him until the twenty round box was almost empty.

  I saw the figure run and jump for cover, and as he ran, I knew he must have braved the crocs, come up the hard way to surprise me from behind while his loyal servant took the obvious – and much more dangerous – route to the front.

  I felt stone chips spark off the big rock next, as Hatfield opened fire with the AR15, keeping me pinned down on Badrock’s side, open for another shot when he the general could reestablish a fire position.

  My brain was racing as I considered my options, and then I could see a low, powerful four-legged figure sprinting across the mesa top toward me, past me; Kane, moving faster than I’d ever seen him, leaping over the rock with teeth bared.

  I heard shots next, screams, violent yells and the savage ripping and tearing of flesh and sinew.

  With Hatfield occupied, I rolled painfully around to his side of the big rock, putting the hard cover now between me and the general.

  To my surprise, Kane was struggling with Hatfield; the man was still alive, able to fend off Kane’s normally unnatural strength, keeping his teeth and claws at bay. I soon saw why – my boy had been shot by the Delta man, taken a 5.56 round through the body, and his fur was matted with his own blood.

  Hatfield had dropped the rifle, but I watched as he withdrew a knife and thrust it toward Kane’s heavy-breathing chest.

  The bullet that I fired without conscious thought caught Hatfield just above the right eyebrow, the bullet driving through the ex-soldier’s skull and blasting the back of his head off in an horrific yet perversely satisfying fountain of blood, bone and brain tissue.

  Kane fell with him to the ground, weak and breathing hard; I wanted to run to his side to check on him, but dared not move from my position. Badrock was still out there somewhere, waiting for just a little glimpse of me.

  It would be all he would need.

  ‘Colt!’ I heard him call out through the storm, and I fingered my rain-slicked rifle, trying my best to ignore the pain that raced from my shoulder and through my entire body, the pain that told me to surrender, to give up, to lie in the muddy pool below me and wait for death.

  Another part of me though – a stronger part, a better part – told me to hang on, to not give up, told me that there was still a chance, there was still a chance.

  ‘Colt!’ the voice came again. ‘I’ve got your woman!’

  Talia.

  Dammit, she’d probably run out of cover after Kane; and without him protecting her, she’d have been easy pickings for her father.

  I staggered to my feet and swung around into the clearing beyond, free now from cover, my rifle up and aimed as best as I could in my condition, barrel pointed true toward the two people ahead of me.

  Badrock had one arm around Talia’s slim neck, a .357 Magnum revolver in his other hand pressed hard against her temple. I noted the rifle slung from his shoulder, and wondered – through the mind-numbing pain – what exactly he had planned.

  ‘So here we stand,’ he shouted across the soaking table-topped mesa, ‘face to face and man to man at last. Just the two of us left, just as it should be. It’s perfect!’ he shrieked, and I could see that the sonofabitch was actually enjoying this.

  I was trying to find a target through my scope, but Badrock was too much of a pro for this and continually changed the angle of both his body and hers, so that I was never presented with a clear shot. In my state, weakened by the gunshot, I would be just as likely to hit Talia as the general.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,’ he shouted. ‘You’re going to put that rifle down, and I’m going to release my daughter. Then I’m going to try and shoot you with this Smith and Wesson. It’s long range, the conditions are bad, and I only have six shots. You can move too, however you want. You do have a chance. When I run out of bullets, I’m going to go for my rifle; and with that, I’ll hit you no problem. Your only chance will be to try and get near to me while I’m firing the revolver, rush me when the six shots are gone, before I can get my rifle, and kill me with your bare hands.’

  Well, what did you know? Maybe he was a sportsman after all, I joked grimly.

  Badrock smiled. ‘Think you can do it?’

  But there was no thinking; I was already moving, rifle in the dirt as my legs pumped hard, eyes keen on the man ahead of me.

  He did as he promised, threw Talia down to the ground, took a double handed grip on the revolver, and fired.

  But as he’d said, hitting a moving target in these conditions was hard; not impossible, but hard, and it gave me a chance. I was also very aware of where the general was standing, and that gave me a plan.

  The first four shots went well wide of the mark, the fifth grazing my shoulder and making me momentarily lose focus; but then it was back, and I sprinted the last few yards to my final destination, right at the edge of the mesa cliffside, where Badrock must have climbed up earlier.

  ‘You’re no closer,’ he shouted happily, adjusting his aim for the final Magnum shot.

  ‘No,’ I shouted back, ‘but you are!’

  He smiled widely. ‘If you’re talking about that same trick with the sapling you used on my men,’ he said as he stepped wide around the trip wire that would have set off my trap, ‘then you’re wasting your time.’ His new
position set, he fired off his last .357 round. I moved reflexively, but he didn’t really intend it to hit; it was just to cover him as he dropped the revolver and transitioned to the far more accurate hunting rifle that was slung over his shoulder.

  I had less than a couple of seconds until Badrock had cleared the rifle and taken aim, but it was all I needed.

  My hands reached out for the wooden lever that I’d earlier jammed between the earth and the bottom of a quarter-ton boulder perched on the cliff edge.

  It was a superhuman effort but – by sinking all my bodyweight into it – the wooden lever did its job, and upended the giant rock, sending it tipping over the cliff edge.

  Badrock’s eyes, halfway up to his rifle sight, went wide as realization dawned. ‘No,’ he said, before screaming the word, ‘No!’

  The vine attached to the big rock was pulled tight as the boulder fell fast to the creek below, and the loop that Badrock was standing within – that he’d stepped into when he thought he’d cleverly avoided the obvious, decoy, booby trap – cinched fast around his ankles, drawing taut and pulling him to the ground.

  But he was fast to react, and dropped the rifle and reached out to grab hold of his daughter’s hair, dragging her down with him as the boulder pulled him toward the edge of the mesa.

  Now it was my turn to shout, ‘No!’ as Talia was pulled inexorably toward her death.

  The weight of the boulder pulled the general fast, ripping him painfully across the mesa’s rocky surface, and by the time he reached me he was a bloody mess; and yet as the rock pulled him over the edge, his eyes still registered victory as he kept his grip on the girl, dragging her with him.

  But then I was there, my hands wrapped around Talia’s and pulling her back, and for a second the general was caught between the two forces, me and the rock; but my grip on her hands proved to be stronger than his hold on her hair, and the weight of the crashing boulder proved too great, and his eyes went wide in disbelief, in horror and fear as his hand let go, Talia fell into my arms, and he fell plummeting down the near-sheer cliff face of the mesa.

  I scurried forward to the edge, watching him bounce off the rocky walls all the way down, eyes still wide with disbelief as his bones shattered, his skin ripped, and his organs were crushed to jelly.

  The boulder hit first, crashing into the creek in a huge geyser of rainwater, and then Badrock’s body slammed hard onto the top of the boulder before sliding, broken and bloody, into the black waters of the creek beyond.

  I watched, exhausted and yet unable to take my eyes from the spectacle, as the twenty-foot crocs – evidently tired now of buffalo – swam swiftly toward the general’s twitching body, chomping down on him with their massive jaws and breaking him into chunks of bloody meat, turning and tumbling with his parts sticking out of their full mouths in their characteristic and savagely joyful death rolls, before swimming away with the pieces.

  I guess I was never going to get the chance to mount his head on that trophy wall of his.

  ‘Good riddance, you son of a bitch,’ I heard a ragged whisper sound next to me, and I turned to see that Talia Badrock had watched the whole thing, the horror of her father’s demise not turning her stomach, but rather providing a most satisfying form of closure.

  I looked at the girl’s beaten, bloody and bedraggled body, glad she was alive.

  At least I’d managed to do something right.

  But my own painful and exhausted body sagged as I looked down from the high mesa.

  ‘Shit,’ I said unhappily.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Talia asked. ‘We won, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said in resignation, ‘we won.’

  ‘So what is it then?’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked wearily. ‘It’s that now we’ve got to climb all the way back down this huge fucking mountain.’

  I smiled through the pain and listened to Talia’s laughter, the warm human sound a welcome salve on my war-ravaged heart.

  Epilogue

  I spoke to Kayden from a payphone in a coffee shop just off the Las Vegas Strip.

  I wouldn’t normally travel so far in one go, but I figured that killing the governor of New Mexico – among several notable others – would probably cross me off some people’s Christmas lists.

  I actually had no idea if any law enforcement agency was looking for me – the ‘incident at Badrock Park’, as the popular press referred to it, had been described as an horrific accident, all the people killed supposedly having been enjoying a party in the main house when a gas main blew and incinerated the property, along with everyone in it.

  It was obviously a cover-up, and if Badrock’s connections ran as deep as I suspected, then it shouldn’t have surprised me at all. He’d served some powerful people over the years, and none of them would want the truth to be revealed.

  Talia had wanted to go to the press with the computer files she’d found, but I advised against it – she wouldn’t know who to trust, and approaching the wrong people could easily get her killed.

  Back at the ranch, all those days ago, I’d got her to patch me up in the headquarters medical room as best she could; without painkillers to dull me, I’d guided her through the process of removing the bullet from my shoulder, then got her to clean the wound and sew me up.

  She was a good student, but I took care of the other injuries myself. The knife wound to my stomach was painful but superficial, while the slash to my forearm cut deeper and needed quite a few stitches. The damage to my other shoulder where the bullet had grazed me wasn’t too bad, and everything else was just cuts and bruises that weren’t anything to get excited about; it was nothing that a bit of rest and relaxation wouldn’t sort out.

  I was more concerned about Kane though, my little buddy that had thrown himself on Hatfield to protect me and taken a shot in the belly for his trouble.

  Despite my own condition, I’d carried him off that mountain myself, doused him with painkillers and removed the bullet before I’d allowed Talia to touch me. And whereas I was reluctant to seek medical attention for myself, there was no way I was going to apply those same principles to Kane; and so I had Talia call an emergency vet even as I was patching myself up.

  The guy hadn’t asked too many questions, despite the seriously bedraggled state that Talia and I were in, and had commended me on doing a good job of removing the bullet. Apparently Hatfield’s shot had missed the major organs, and was unlikely to prove fatal. With a complete medical facility to use, he put Kane on a drip and dosed him up with a serious combination of high-powered drugs.

  With Kane alive and blissfully out of it, the vet had turned his tender ministrations on me; he could tell that I’d been shot, and assured me that humans were just another sort of animal to him. He’d tidied up Talia’s stitching and given me some of the animal meds from the cabinets that he assured me were fine for human consumption.

  Finally, the good doctor had left, and then – not long after – Talia, Kane and I had too, not wishing to be on-site when the rest of the Badrock team returned from their all-expenses paid night out in Vegas.

  We’d taken a jeep and driven west, burning out the branded vehicle in the desert and stealing an SUV from a long term parking lot in Flagstaff before continuing onto Las Vegas. It was the biggest city in the area and – with its constant stream of tourists – an easy place to get lost in.

  Talia and I hired a motel room that took dogs, and used the time to try and recover. Kane did a faster job than me, back on his feet and raring to go within forty-eight hours, all but ignoring the large hole in his body.

  Talia wanted to stay with me, but – despite my protective feelings for her – I advised her that it really wasn’t a good idea. With my lifestyle, I wasn’t a long-term relationship kind of guy. Hell, I wasn’t a short-term relationship kind of guy, and we parted as friends after the third day, Talia promising me that she would try and rebuild her life.

  I didn’t know what she was going to do. Return home and claim
her inheritance? Or disavow all connections with her father and move on completely?

  Either way, her life would be easier now without him.

  But I knew that my job wasn’t completely over.

  Not yet anyway.

  ‘The name of the man who killed your boyfriend is Manfred Yates,’ I told Kayden over the phone.

  It was part of the information that Talia had dug up on her father’s computer – a list of clients, and the ‘prey’ they had killed.

  Yates had paid a million dollars to put a bullet in Benjamin ‘T.J.’ Hooker, and I thought that Kayden ought to know about it.

  I wasn’t sure what else to do with the information – as I’ve already said, getting it to the wrong people could end up with terminal results.

  But I thought that this was a good start.

  Kayden had paid me a thousand dollars for the truth, and this was it.

  ‘What you choose to do with that information is up to you,’ I said, before putting the phone down and walking off down the hot sidewalk, Kane limping at my heel.

  I was feeling the pain from my own wounds less now, and I was certainly in better shape than I’d been in after Iraq. I stopped in the street for a moment, the thought giving me pause. In that village near Mosul, I’d killed twenty-seven men and been called a hero, awarded the Medal of Honor by congress. They had been enemies of the United States, but they had been honest men at least, fighting for their homes, their families, a cause they believed in.

  On that ranch in New Mexico I’d killed over thirty people, men and women both, and they had arguably deserved it far more than those poor saps in Iraq. They hadn’t been fighting for a cause, they’d wanted to kill purely for killing’s sake; and yet in this case there would be no medals for me, justifiable though my actions might have been. If caught, there would only be life in prison, plain and simple.

  But that, I figured, was the life I’d chosen for myself.

  There was no fighting it.

  I wondered, as I carried on down the street, what sort of life Kayden would choose for herself.