THE THOUSAND DOLLAR HEIST, page 1
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN
A Coly Ryder Thriller
J.T. Brannan
Grey Arrow Publishing
Copyright © 2021 J.T. Brannan
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
For Jakub and Mia; and my parents, for their help and support
"Sometimes that light at the end of the tunnel is a train."
Charles Barkley
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
Books In This Series
Prologue
“Hey, I think you might have something there,” the grizzled old guy at the front of the boat said.
I opened my eyes, and could see that my dog Kane was poised by the rod, hackles raised, his body shivering in anticipation. Yeah, we had something, alright.
I must have dozed off for a while, but that was no surprise really. I’d had a few beers and that, combined with the rocking of the boat and the beautifully warming Florida sun, was more than enough to send me off to Dreamsville.
Kane and I were saltwater fishing off the Florida coast, on a private charter from a little town called Destin, the self-proclaimed “world’s luckiest fishing village”. Located on the Emerald Coast between Pensacola and Panama City, it was on a peninsula separating the Gulf of Mexico from Choctawhatchee Bay, and supposedly had the state’s largest fishing vessel fleet. I believed it, too – the problem was, there was too much choice. But on my first day in town, I’d spotted this old guy giving some potential clients a hard time about not respecting the sea, and knew I’d found the captain for me. Dave Phillips was his name, and he’d been with the Merchant Marine since the Vietnam War, before retiring to the big-game fishing business a few years earlier. A serious guy like that, he’d know where the best fishing was, even if his bedside manner meant he probably wouldn’t ever earn much money from it.
I was all the way down on the Emerald Coast because after my last job, I’d wanted to get as far away from Pittsburgh as I could get. It wasn’t just the horrible weather up there I’d wanted to avoid – it was the memories. I’d been seeing the bodies of dead children in my sleep, and I figured a complete change of scenery might help.
It had only been when I’d got down there that I’d remembered that my last visit to the state had hardly been a barrel of laughs either – a couple years back, I’d taken down a gang that had been into making real-life snuff movies, and lost one of my best friends in the process. But that had been all the way down in the Everglades, and later on, in Miami. The way I figured it, up in Destin I was closer to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia than I was to those memories of Miami.
It looked like the plan was working, anyway – I’d just been asleep, and had dreamed of nothing, just the way I liked it.
I rocked forward off the deckchair and checked the rod; sure enough, something was pulling on it, and hard.
“It’s a marlin,” the old guy called, “a blue marlin!”
No wonder it was pulling hard – these things were big, bad sons of bitches. There was one on record weighing in at over eighteen-hundred pounds, and they could grow bigger than sixteen feet.
The rod was a big old industrial-strength beast, but I still wasn’t sure it was capable of reeling in something of that size.
“Must be a male,” Phillips called out as he looked out over the side of the boat, “not much more than a six-footer, maybe three hundred pounds. Now come on, reel the little bastard in!”
The entire boat was moving now as the big fish struggled on the line, and I climbed into the rack attached to the rod, braced myself against the backrest, slipped on the heavy welders’ gloves, and started to work the reel.
Kane started to bark in excitement, and Phillips barked right along with him. “Go on, son!” he called. “Big lad like you, what’s wrong with you? Pull harder, reel it in, what the hell are you waiting for, Christmas?”
“Give me a break,” I gasped as my forearms burned with the effort, “this fish is huge.”
Damn, it was like being back in bootcamp again with this guy. And I was voluntarily paying him for this abuse? Still, I’d been right about him – he definitely knew where the big fish hung out.
“Ah,” he said, along with a dismissive wave of the hand, “three hundred pounds? He’s just a baby, my mother could reel her in one-handed, and she’s been dead twenty years.”
I thought about firing back a wisecrack of my own about his mother, but thought better of it; a guy like that, he might have laughed, or he might just have shot me with a speargun.
“What the –”
I saw Phillips’ head come up as he looked to the right – or starboard, as he demanded I call it – and immediately saw what had grabbed his attention.
“Slow down!” he called, as he waved his arms. “Slow down, damn you! You’re going too fast, you’re going to –”
The speedboat was big, and I couldn’t believe that none of us had heard it roaring up to us earlier; it must have been the adrenaline of the big catch, I figured. By the time we noticed it, the thirty-foot craft was almost on us, its sharp-edged prow on a direct line with the side of our own vessel. I let go of the rod and braced myself for the inevitable impact, images of the resulting destruction flying through my mind in the final seconds. I could see the speedboat hit, smashing a path through our boat, wood and metal flying everywhere, along with the huge geysers of seawater that would surge up around us on all sides.
I wondered whether to throw myself clear, and turned to Kane, who was poised to do exactly the same thing; but then my thoughts turned to Phillips, and I knew I couldn’t leave him. Was there time to get him out of the way safely?
But no, there was no time left, no time at all, I could only hold on and hope –
The speedboat suddenly veered to the left, a sharp maneuver that turned the craft broadside-on to us and sprayed the entire boat with a huge wave of water that was like being hit by a tsunami. For several seconds I couldn’t see a thing; the impact of that water hitting us had, for a moment, convinced me that the speedboat itself had actually collided with us. But I knew that it had managed to avoid us at the last second, that it was just a wall of water that had hit us, that we’d been spared the utter destruction that would have resulted from a true crash.
I looked around, saw that Phillips and Kane were drenched, absolutely soaked from head to toe – or head to tail, in Kane’s case – but were otherwise unharmed.
I looked back to the speedboat, which had now pulled about fifty yards away from our own boat, and saw for the first time the people onboard. Seven kids, all early twenties, bare-chested, beers in their hands. Laughing. Pointing at us, and laughing.
Shit.
Sons of bitches had meant to do it.
Then I heard the whoops and catcalls, the cheers and shouts of joy at their little victory. One of the kids even pulled down his shorts and mooned us, to the merriment of his idiot friends.
I felt the anger building in me, tried to get a grip on it but knew it was a losing battle; then I looked down at the rod, saw that the line was slack, the marlin had seized its opportunity and escaped, and suddenly all I could see was boarding the other ship like an old-school pirate and giving those kids an ass-kicking they wouldn’t soon forget.
“Hey,” I said, turning to Phillips, knowing before I even asked that there was no chance we could catch a vessel that fast, “you think there’s any way this thing could catch up with those –”
But I saw that Phillips was one step ahead of me – hell, one step more crazy than me – and had already come up with a plan of his own. In his hand, he held a flare gun, and it was immediately apparent that he wasn’t going to use it to signal for help; he was aiming it directly across the water, right at the speedboat.
“Damn sons of bitches,” he muttered, eyes black like coals, burning with hatred as he stared across the water at the boat full of taunting, jeering and yelling youngsters, “I’ll teach you bastards a lesson you won’t forget, you don’t come out on my waters and do that, you damn little peckerwoods, you better believe it.”
Even as he carried on talking, he pulled the trigger, and the thought of stopping him had only flashed through my mind momentarily before I decided he had exactly the right idea. Their mummies and daddies obviously had
“Take that, you fucking little bastards!” he yelled at the top of his voice, and together we watched as the burning red flare shot fifty yards across the Gulf of Mexico in a stream of billowing smoke.
I watched as the kids’ faces went from beaming and joyful to concerned, then terrified, the laugher and the jeering turning to shouts and screams.
The flare was on a collision course with the speedboat, and nobody thought fast enough to move the craft out of the way; all seven of them were just stood there, open-mouthed, like rabbits caught in the headlights.
“Good shot,” I said, as the red-hot flare neared the boat. I knew the intensely bright light would be searing their retinas if they looked at it directly from that distance; I also knew that Captain Phillips was going to land a direct hit, right onto the deck.
The kids knew it too, and within an instant, they all snapped out of their dream-like state of disbelief and did the only thing they could – throw their beer bottles to the side, and jump off the damn boat into the sea.
I watched with guilty satisfaction as the young men hurled themselves from the speedboat, shouting and screaming, barely getting clear before the flare hit.
They thrashed around desperately, and for a few moments nothing else happened; there was just the dull red glow of the flare burning away on the deck. But then the inevitable occurred, and I saw the flicker of a real fire starting onboard, where the burning flare had set fire to the luxury teak paneling. Pretty soon, the whole thing would be a write-off.
“Ah, shit,” the old man said in wonder, “I guess I didn’t think I’d actually hit the damn thing. Only wanted to scare ’em a little, was all.”
“Well, I think you did that, at least,” I said. “But I guess we better go and pick them up before the sharks start taking bites out of them.”
“I guess you’re right,” Phillips said. “Unlikely they’ll make the ten miles back to shore by themselves, ain’t it?”
“It is that,” I agreed, and saw Phillips was already moving to the wheel, firing up our engine and getting the boat heading over to the splashing, panicked, and half-drowning men, even as their speedboat was consumed by flames.
“Get away from the boat!” I called out to them. “In case it blows!”
If the fire hit the fuel tanks, the explosion wouldn’t do any of them any good. Probably wouldn’t kill them, but the further away they could get, the safer they would be.
I guess I was even starting to feel a little sorry for them. Destroying their boat and sending them swimming with the sharks was possibly just a little excessive; but as Phillips had said, he hadn’t meant to hit the boat, so as far as I was concerned, it was just an unfortunate accident. Their own little stunt could have killed us, so the captain was just repaying the favor. If you wanted to play games with the big boys, you had to accept the risks.
I just hoped we managed to pick them all up before the sharks did start feasting on them; I didn’t fancy pulling up a body and discovering that the legs had been chewed off. How would we explain that to Mr. and Mrs. Jenson-Smyth – because these kids’ parents just had to have rich-mummy-and-daddy names like that – down at the country club?
We pulled alongside the guys, who were no longer so cocksure and arrogant but were coughing and spluttering and grasping up toward us, desperate for our help.
I threw a line down for the nearest man. “Come on,” I shouted down, “get the hell up here before that speedboat blows.”
The kid sputtered and turned his head to the boat, then back up to me. “Blow?” he said, in disbelief. “That’s a fuckin’ half a million dollar boat, it better not –”
“Just grab the fucking line, and get up here,” I shouted down to him, “and we can discuss your little toy later.”
He was about to say something else but wisely thought better of it, took hold of the line and started hauling himself up out of the water. When he was close enough, I reached down and grabbed hold of him and pulled him up onto the deck, where I left him sputtering like a landed fish.
“At least I caught something,” I said to Phillips, who laughed as he pulled up one of his own.
“Yeah,” he called back, “although they ain’t worth much to anyone.”
I laughed as I hauled up another one, dumping him onto the deck next to his friends. Although they didn’t look like trouble, Kane watched over them with a cautious eye, just in case they made a fast recovery and tried something stupid.
The burning on the speedboat was getting worse, and I could feel the heat radiating out across the water to us. It was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened, and the fuel tanks blew.
There were two more left, and both of them were close to me. “I’ve got these,” I called to Phillips. “Get yourself to the wheel, make sure you’re ready to get us the hell out of here as soon as I’ve got them onboard.”
“I’m on it,” the old captain replied, understanding the danger just as well as I did.
The two men below me in the water looked like they were struggling, like they could barely swim. Damn idiots, being out on a boat by themselves in the Gulf of Mexico when they had no idea what they were doing. What was it Phillips had said to his last clients, back in Destin? Something about respecting the sea, right? Well, the old guy had that right; the seas and oceans of this world weren’t the sort of places you wanted to make mistakes. Forgiveness just wasn’t in their nature.
One of the men was clearly starting to panic, refusing to grab hold of the line. Instead, he thrashed around like a wild thing; and if the sharks hadn’t been interested before, they soon would be. I just had to hope that the heat from the fire was putting them off.
His friend tried to help, grabbing hold of the guy and pushing him up toward me. “Grab him!” he shouted. “Reach down and grab him, he’s not gonna take the rope!”
I knew the kid was right, sighed, and levered myself over the side of the boat, reaching down as far as I could with one arm as I held on tightly with the other hand. I watched as the guy was pushed up toward me by his buddy, arms flailing.
I managed to grab his wrist, and that was when I realized something was wrong; the thrashing stopped immediately, he reached up with his other hand and clamped it over my wrist, and then the second guy pushed down on his friend’s shoulders to get higher, grabbed me around the back of my neck, and pulled down hard.
I tried to hold on, but my position wasn’t ideal; gravity was on their side, and I felt my grip go and my body slide over the side.
Sons of bitches had been play-acting on me, and now I was going to suffer for buying it.
I splashed down into the sea, and instantly felt fists pounding my head, hearing a shout of “– teach you to trash our boat, you stupid muthafu –” before two sets of hands dragged me under the water and held me down.
It was happening so fast, I hardly had time to think, to process the situation, to come up with some form of plan, a counterattack; I was under the surface now, saltwater in my eyes, blinding me for precious moments, time I didn’t have. I tried to open my eyes, straining to see anything, but all I could make out were vague and blurry shapes, shadowy bodies with their hands on me, kicking and punching and holding me under.
Basic human instinct in these situations normally made people push back up against restraining hands, but luckily my instincts had been moderated and altered by a lifetime of training and experience; and so instead of fighting against them, I went the opposite way, down, away from those hands, like turning an opponent with a judo throw, using their energy against them.
They lost their control over me immediately, and I swam down away from them, wondering just how long it was going to be before the speedboat exploded. The water would protect us from the heat and fire, but the concussive blast could well be magnified by the water and knock us unconscious, and then we’d just drown and sink to the bottom of the Gulf, never to be seen again. Well, until the tide washed us up onshore somewhere in a few days’ time, I supposed.
Whenever it was going to happen, I had to deal with these two assholes first; but then I realized that if these guys had just been playing possum in order to try and drown me, what about the five other men I’d left onboard the ship with Phillips? Kane was up there with him, but I was starting to worry; and with the worry came a plan.
