THE THOUSAND DOLLAR TREASURE: A Colt Ryder Thriller, page 1
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR TREASURE
A Colt Ryder Thriller
J.T. Brannan
Grey Arrow Publishing
Copyright © 2024 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
“There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.”
James Russell Lowell
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
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
Prologue
“So I heard you had a good day on the water?”
“Oh, you could say that,” I replied with a smile, and not just because Emily, the barmaid who’d asked me the question, was a bona fide knock-out. I was actually pretty pleased with myself, having managed to catch a six foot, hundred-pound tarpon while sea fishing in the channels around Boca Grande Key. I’d been staying down in Key West for a couple of weeks now – long enough for me to have developed exactly the right kind of relationship with Emily – and this had been my most successful catch by far. Sure, I’d heard of the eight foot, three-hundred-and-fifty-pound monster hauled in by commercial fishermen over at Hillsboro Inlet more than a hundred years before, but I was still more than happy with my own little result. I’d done quite a bit of fishing down in Florida over the years, and this was probably the biggest fish I’d landed yet.
“So modest,” Emily said with a smile of her own.
“Well, a place like this,” I said, gesturing around, “I wouldn’t start shouting until I landed Moby Dick himself.”
We were in a place called the Schooner Wharf Bar, advertised as “a last little piece of Old Key West”, and it lived up to the hyperbole. Opened in 1984 on the site of the old Singleton Shrimp factory, it was an open-air bar with live music and fresh seafood, with a glorious view of the marina beyond. It was the ice-cold beer I was there for though. Well, that and Emily’s company, anyway.
The place was crowded, as always, and Kane – a huge Alsatian-Mastiff cross who also just happened to be my best buddy in the world – was off making friends with an Old English Sheepdog a couple of tables over. For a moment, I wondered what the puppies would look like from such a mix, but couldn’t quite picture it.
“How did you hear about it anyway?” I asked. “Keeping tabs on me?”
“Somebody ought to, I guess.”
“Yeah? I need looking after, huh?”
“Maybe,” she said, the smile back.
“Well, you’re doing a pretty good job of it so far,” I said, and toasted her with my beer. I wasn’t joking either; Emily had been looking after me very well for the past few nights, after she’d finished her shifts here.
“Anyway, it was Joe who told me. He dropped by earlier. Said your little face had lit up like a kid’s on Christmas Day when you pulled in that tarpon.”
Joe was the chief of the boat I’d been going out on, a crusty old sea dog who knew these waters better than anyone else around – or so he claimed anyway. But he’d done alright by me, and so I was inclined to believe his bombast.
“He still around?” I asked.
“No, he took off a little while ago. Has a hot date, believe it or not.”
I believed it; to hear Joe talk, womanizing came a very close third to sailing and fishing on his list of favored activities. He was knocking on the door of seventy, but that didn’t seem to stop him trying.
“And he’s not bringing the lucky lady here?” I asked, and Emily laughed.
“Not this time. Maybe because he spotted Gloria over there,” she said, pointing to a lady sitting at a table with some friends, “who he used to be seeing. Or maybe still is.”
“Yeah, probably best he stays away then,” I agreed.
I looked around the bar, taking in the clientele. I recognized a few of the faces, some of them regulars that had apparently been coming here for years, others tourists like me who’d grown fond of the place during their stay.
“What’s his story anyway?” I asked, gesturing with my eyes at a man sitting alone at a table, staring out at the waters of the wharf as he drank from a glass of rum; he’d bought a bottle of the stuff, and was steadily working his way through it. He’d been doing the same thing every time I’d visited the place, and I’d started to wonder what made the guy tick. He was in a wheelchair, which I guessed probably had something to do with it.
I’d been confined to a chair myself, after a gunfight gone wrong, back in my army days. I’d been serving with the elite US Army Ranger Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment, and what should have been a surgical strike on a small village outside Mosul in Iraq had turned into a bloodbath of epic proportions. I’d lost my best friend that day, among many others, and had myself been shot, stabbed, and taken a fall out of a four-story window, locked in a death embrace with a crazed terrorist. It had taken me some months to learn to walk again, and so – to some extent at least – I knew a little of what the guy might be going through.
“I don’t know, to be honest with you. Turned up here just about the same time you did. Keeps himself to himself, gets through a bottle a night, pays his bill, and goes off to wherever he calls home. That’s it.”
“Maybe I’ll go and say hello,” I said, slipping off my barstool and grabbing my beer.
“Colt, some people just want to be left alone, you know?”
“I know,” I said, but started making my way over to the man nevertheless. Emily was right – sometimes people needed their space – but then again, sometimes they needed someone to talk to.
After Iraq, I’d not done a lot of talking. Not about what had happened – to me, to my friends – and not about what my future held either. In the end, I’d been invalided out of military service – healed physically perhaps, but certainly not psychologically – and, unable to adjust to civilian life, I’d bounced from one dead-end job to another. Since taking on this second vocation – as a vigilante-for-hire dubbed the “Thousand Dollar Man” by the press – I had the nightmares less now, but I’d never truly got over that day, and probably never would. Might it have helped if I’d opened up a little, let other people in, talked through my problems? Maybe it would have. I’d never know, at any rate; it was too late for me now. But this guy in the chair, looking out to sea with the bottle of rum in front of him, maybe it wasn’t too late for him.
It was worth a shot, in any case.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked, sidling up next to the guy.
He didn’t answer, didn’t even turn his head to me; but he gave a slight shrug, which I took to be some form of acquiescence, and I pulled out a chair and sat down, gazing out at the boats tied up at the wharf.
We sat in silence for a time, before I figured I’d try my luck again. But before I could say anything, the man surprised me and spoke first.
“You know, most people, they can’t keep their mouths shut,” he said, still not looking my way, his gaze still directed out to sea. “Ask me a load of questions. Why do I drink so much? What am I staring at? How did I end up in the chair?” He paused as he sipped some run, and I stayed silent, drank more of my beer. “You though, you sit down and look at the water, just like me.”
“I figured you could use the company,” I said. “That doesn’t always mean talking though.”
He nodded his head, and finally turned my way. “I appreciate that,” he said. “And you know what? Maybe I could use the company, after all.” He extended a hand in my direction and I took it. The grip was firm, his hand rough, like that of a man who’d spent his life at sea. “My name’s John.”
“Colt,” I said. “Good to meet you.”
“Yeah, you too.”
He turned back to the water then, our little chat over as soon as it had begun. But I didn’t mind. It was a beautiful evening, and the table at which we were sat gave us a fantastic view of the sun as it started its lazy descent toward the horizon, bathing the marina in a spectacular shade of crimson that took the breath away.
And so we sat there in silence, watching the sun go down on this little slice of paradise, each of us wrapped up in our own thoughts.
“Colt.”
It wasn’t John’s voice now, but that of Emily, hand on my shoulder, mouth close to my ear.
“Hey,” I said, “I thought you might have brought me another beer, if you were coming my way.”
“It’s not that,” she said, and I looked at her and saw a nervous look in her eye that I didn’t like.
“What’s wrong?”
“We just had a call from Sunset Tiki around the corner, they said they’ve just had their place busted up by some guys. They were drunk, off some kind of party boat, you know? Bar girls refused to serve them, they went crazy.”
I nodded, responding to the fear in her eyes. “And they’re on their way here now, is that it?”
“I think so,” she said. “So I think you better get out of here, I don’t want you to get hurt.”
That was cute, I thought; she was worried about me. Still, she had absolutely no idea what I did for a living, the kind of man I was.
“Anyone called the cops?”
“Yeah, but they’re busy, there was a big crash earlier on the highway going over Stock Island, they can’t send any units.”
Tuned in now, I was sure I could hear the sound of drunken men somewhere on the streets outside, even over the noise of the calypso music that played on the speakers, warming up the crowd before the live band started to play later in the evening.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “Now what I want you to do is to go back behind the bar, and stay right there, out of the way. Tell everyone else who works here the same. Understand?”
“But why –”
“Just do it,” I said, my voice firm, and she must have seen something in my eyes as she backed away slightly, nervous now not just because of the coming trouble, but perhaps because she’d just caught a glimpse inside of me, seen what really made me tick, and decided it wasn’t pretty.
“O . . . Okay,” she said, and moved off back to the bar, as I stood and followed her.
“I’ll be back in five,” I told John.
“What are you going to do?” he asked, obviously having overheard the conversation.
“Just going to welcome those guys to the bar,” I said. “See just how much they want those drinks.”
I left John behind, probably wondering what kind of crazy bastard he’d been sat next to, and wound my way through the scattered tables and chairs to the entrance on Lazy Way. It was a narrow street that ran from Elizabeth Street to William Street, paralleling the harbor as it snaked between the Marker Key West hotel on one side and the Schooner Wharfe Bar on the other. If the people Emily was worried about were headed here from the Sunset Tiki, this was the route they’d follow.
The entrance was a simple wooden arch, just large enough for one person at a time to pass through into the garden beyond. Of course, the rest of the place was only separated from the narrow street by some low-lying plant pots, so it wasn’t as if the place was hard to get into; I just had to hope that I would act as a suitable deterrent.
The manager was there, peering anxiously to the right, down the narrow street to where the noise was coming from. The crowd would be there before long, there was no doubt.
I wondered what kind of people they’d be. Drunk for sure, but they’d hired a party boat which meant it might be some sort of bachelor party, or else a visiting sports team, maybe even a corporate blow-out of some kind, a gang of office workers who went wild the first opportunity they had? But I thought that if these guys had trashed a bar, then a sports team was the most likely – competitive people often became aggressive people when too much alcohol had been consumed.
But we’d see soon enough, I was sure.
Kane had appeared by my side, clearly responding to my body language as I’d moved through the open air bar. His ears were pricked up, hearing the incoming crowd, and sure enough we saw them a moment later, appearing on the street to our right.
“Oh shit,” the manager said.
“You go back inside,” I said to him. “Let me handle it.”
He looked me up and down, clearly not convinced I was up to the job. “Look buddy, I don’t want any trouble here, alright? I’m just gonna let ’em in, treat ’em right, and hope they’re happy.”
“Trust me,” I told him. “Go back inside, I’ll have a quiet word with them, alright? Make sure there’s no trouble.”
He looked me up and down again, wondering what he should do, before finally nodding his head. “Okay,” he said, “but be careful, alright? Don’t make ’em any angrier than they already are.”
“You got it. Just have a cold beer lined up for me when I get finished, alright?”
“Hey, if nothing bad happens to the place, you can drink for free all night.”
“Deal,” I said, before turning back to the street.
Shit, I thought as I saw the men approach, how many are there?
It was a good job the manager had gone, otherwise he might have had a heart attack. They were bunched together so that it was hard to get an accurate headcount, but there seemed to be over twenty of them heading our way. Loud and boisterous, it was a mixed age group – there looked to be some kids in their late teens, alongside guys up into their sixties – and I figured it was a bachelor’s party, friends and family members of the groom. Last night of freedom might not work out so well if he ended up in a jail cell. Or, more likely, a hospital bed.
The numbers would be a problem though; now I figured there could be two dozen of the bastards headed to the bar. Anything up to half a dozen wasn’t normally a problem; with the element of surprise, four could be put down in the blink of an eye, leaving only two with any time to react. With twenty-four guys though, that element of surprise would only last so long, and some of them would be sure to get their licks in.
Could they be armed? It was definitely possible, and at least a few of them were carrying bottles, which could easily be used to bludgeon or slash or stab me. Would they be willing to do it though? Under normal conditions, maybe not; fueled by alcohol and testosterone, however, anything was possible.
But on the other hand, the numbers weren’t insurmountable, if this thing was handled right. After all, how many people could attack me at any one time? It wasn’t as if two dozen people could all hit me at the same time. No, they’d get in each other’s way, make life hard for themselves. They’d be tripping over each other, trying to get to me.
The narrowness of the street would help with that too. I’d considered moving toward the group as they approached, taking them away from the bar. But it was a little more open down there, a grassy area further down by the hotel that would give the gang the space they needed to get around me, and I decided to stay where I was, use the environment to my advantage.
It was also doubtful that all of the men there would want to fight in any case. What was it that Heraclitus had once written? Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.
If the same held true here, that meant there might be a quarter of a warrior somewhere in this group. But realistically, I figured that there would be one or two hard cases in the mix, maybe another half dozen who could fight a little, and the rest would simply be cannon fodder. Unless this was actually not a bachelor party, but a reunion of some kind of elite military unit, or a day out for an MMA gym.
But from the way they moved down the narrow street, I didn’t see them as the athletic type; no, these were just average Joes, drunk and offensively confident due to their numbers.
I would just have to see how quickly I could narrow those numbers down.
“Evening guys,” I said as they arrived outside. “We’re full this evening I’m afraid though. Maybe another night?”
“Don’t look too fuckin’ full to me son,” said the guy at the front of the group, his accent unmistakably Irish. That wasn’t a good sign – those guys liked to fight. He was a barrel-chested man in his middle years, a large ’80s-style mustache going gray along with the close-cropped hair that covered his bulldog-like skull.
He pointed over the low makeshift walls at the tables and chairs beyond. He was right of course – although the bar was busy, it wasn’t exactly full, and this man probably took the sight of the empty seats as a direct challenge.
