I grabbed hold of him, turned him around, and put the gun to his head. “Sorry about this,” I whispered into his ear. “You know I’m not going to hurt you, right?”

  “The cops?” he asked.

  “Working for the mob,” I said, even as the people around us backed away in horror, screaming and crying and shouting for help.

  “Figures,” he whispered back. “Bet the arm hurts, holding me like this, huh?”

  “You got that right,” I said, what had been a dull throbbing in the outer biceps muscle when I’d woken up a short while ago now a razor-sharp pain. “You got a car?”

  “Down in the garage.”

  “Then let’s go.” Just then, two armed security guards burst through the double doors at the end of the room, pistols aimed toward us. “Don’t fucking do it!” I yelled at them. “I’ll blow his head clean off his shoulders!”

  The guards looked at the dead cops in the doorway to my room, believed what I said even though I didn’t mean a word of it, and backed away, hands in the air.

  “Get away from those doors!” I said. “Throw the guns, get on the floor, hands behind your back!”

  They did as I said, tossing the pistols away and scurrying to the side, sliding down first to their knees and then to their bellies, putting their hands behind them and keeping their heads down. I was relieved they hadn’t tried to play the hero.

  We moved through the doors, away from the hysterical masses, into a corridor.

  “Take a right,” Abrahams said. “There’s an elevator at the end, it’ll take us to the parking garage.”

  “You’re a good man, doc,” I told him as we headed for the elevator, and freedom.

  “Better than some,” he agreed, and I didn’t press him on who he meant.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Doctor Abrahams was quite a guy, there was no doubt about it. Not only did he give me his clothes and shoes, but he also gave me a thorough medical check over – even adjusting my bandages – along with some painkillers from a supply he kept in his trunk, before I let him go. I left him in the parking lot of the SouthSide Works shopping mall, before stealing another car and making my way out of there.

  It had also been Abrahams who’d spotted Kane, not long after we’d rolled out of the hospital parking lot.

  “Hey, that dog there,” he’d said, pointing toward a small hillock that bordered the lot, “he looks a little like the description of a dog that was supposed to have been at that house last night. You know him?”

  And it had indeed been Kane on that hillock, keeping a watch of the comings and goings from the hospital. He must have followed the ambulance the night before, and been waiting for me ever since. I’d stopped the car, opened the door, and he’d bounded into the vehicle, wagging his tail like a maniac.

  Looking at the dried blood that surrounded Kane’s muzzle, Doctor Abrahams had merely nodded his head. “Well,” he’d said, “I guess that explains some of the wounds I saw last night.” That guy had one dry sense of humor, I’d give him that.

  I’d almost been sorry to leave the guy behind, but he wouldn’t have wanted to go where I was headed.

  I knew I would be on everybody’s most-wanted list – from the Feds right on down to the mafia gangsters that I’d recently upset – and that after killing Bridges and his two followers, all the stops would be pulled out to try and track me down; knew also that my best course of action was to get the hell out of Pittsburgh altogether. But despite the qualified success of last night’s raids, my job wasn’t done yet. Not entirely.

  After leaving Abrahams at the mall, I’d headed west toward a luxury apartment complex on Elizabeth Drive in Ridgemont called City Vista. A “preferred apartment community”, they called it. I wondered what they’d say if they knew that one of their residents was Matthew Rubinstein, chief technical guru for the Pittsburgh crime family? De Luca had gone to the trouble of giving me his name and address, and it didn’t seem right to leave him out of this.

  Rubinstein wasn’t a hero either, and gave up everything he had, in double-quick time. Before long, I had access to protected computer files that told me everything I needed to know about the syndicate’s operations. It had the names of the cops and politicians being paid off by the mob, it had information on all of the houses that had been taken down the night before, it had details about all the other sides of the crime family’s business. It was a treasure trove of incriminating evidence, the smoking gun which would put these guys away for decades.

  I thought about killing Rubinstein, but decided against it; the Feds would need his testimony to help put away the rest of the gang. And so I’d let him live.

  I’d also sent a lot of the information from his computer files to Vardy at the Gazette-Post, along with a few other media outlets. If just one party had the intel, they might be convinced to sit on it; if there were multiple groups who had it, then everyone would publish, for fear of being scooped by the others.

  I’d also notified the FBI about Rubinstein, who I’d left hog-tied in his apartment, a gift to my comrades in federal law enforcement.

  But not before I’d asked him for one more thing.

  An address.

  A very special address, which was not on anyone’s system.

  Because there was one last thing to do before this was over.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The man looked up from his desk as I entered the room, surprised at the interruption.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked. “How the hell you get in here?”

  “You know how I got in here, Mr. Bazzano,” I told him as I moved further into the room. “By killing your men.”

  I moved my body slightly, so he could see the open doorway, the heavy oak door held in place by one of those dead men, blood pooling onto the parquet floor from where I’d sliced his neck open with my knife.

  “You son of a –”

  He reached for his desk drawer, no doubt going for a gun; but I pulled out my own weapon before he could get anywhere near, and pointed the pistol – Detective Bridges’ Smith & Wesson M&P .40 – right at the head of Saul Bazzano, boss of the Pittsburgh crime family.

  “You should hire better help,” I told him.

  “Fuck you,” he said, but he put his hands on the desk where I could see them, realizing he wasn’t fast enough to get the gun from the drawer before I could shoot him dead.

  We were in one of the penthouse suites at the Omni William Penn Hotel on William Penn Place, an old world kind of place that looked as if it would have been fit for Al Capone.

  Bazzano was a hard man to track down – one of the reasons he was still alive and at large after so many years at the top – and one of the reasons was that he moved around a lot. He owned several residences around Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, and often rented hotel suites at random intervals. Sometimes he would rent one place, and stay in another. It was one of the reasons why there hadn’t been more men guarding the place, I supposed. He thought nobody would know where he was, why waste the manpower? But Rubinstein had known. Tech guys, they always knew. That was how it was in the modern world.

  There had been six people guarding the place in all, from the elevator in the hallway all the way to the door to this temporary office; I’d taken them all out silently, one by one, with batons and knives.

  And now I was there, in front of the big man himself.

  Bazzano was old, perhaps in his mid to late seventies, but wore the years well. He was a little overweight perhaps, but nothing excessive. It just looked as if he enjoyed the good life a little too much.

  But that was about to come to an end.

  “What do you want?” he asked. “Are you the guy? The guy who’s been fucking up my business?”

  “I’m the guy,” I confirmed.

  “Want a job?” he asked, and I almost laughed at the old guy’s audacity.

  “I prefer working for myself,” I told him.

  “Ah, an independent man. Yes, I can respect that. So, what do you want? You want money? How much?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t want money. You know what I want.”

  “Then do it,” he spat. “Just fucking do it.”

  “Just tell me one thing first,” I said. “Was one of the men outside called Benny?”

  “Yeah, the guy at the fucking door with his tongue hanging out of his neck, so what?”

  “Last night,” I said, “what orders did you give him? What did you tell him to tell the others, the ones running the houses?”

  “Why are you asking me this? You must know what I said, or you wouldn’t be asking, right? I mean, you were there, weren’t you? I told Benny to give the order to clean up.”

  “Clean up.”

  “Yeah. No witnesses. You know what I mean? Why?”

  “I just wanted to be sure,” I said, and then I squeezed the trigger and pumped two rounds into Bazzano’s chest.

  He’d ordered the murder of children; like De Luca before him, they weren’t human to Bazzano, they were mere product. But somebody was speaking for them now. Yes, someone sure as hell was speaking for them now.

  Stepping closer, I saw the man gasping, eyes wide as he looked at me; even though he’d known what was coming, he still couldn’t quite believe it.

  And then I squeezed the trigger again, and put a .40 caliber slug right between his eyes, blood and bone blasted out over the expensive landscape artwork framed on the wall behind him, forever silencing those voices crying out from the grave for justice.

  For vengeance.

  And just like that, it was done.

  The mission was finally over.

  Epilogue

  I sipped my coffee as I read the newspaper coverage of the past few days’ events. I was in a roadside diner just off I-70 outside of West Friendship, on my way to Baltimore, a nice big city where I figured I could lose myself in the crowds, lay low for a while.

  I’d changed my appearance slightly – the old standby of dyed hair, glasses and a change of clothes always doing the trick – and Kane and I had left Pittsburgh a couple of days ago. I’d called my buddy down in Texas, told Ayla Miller what had happened, that she was free to come home any time she wanted. Anyone who had been involved in the death of her boyfriend was either in the ground themselves, or on their way to prison.

  Every paper had major stories on what had happened, and it was no surprise; one of the biggest federal cases in years was being opened up in the city. The Pittsburgh crime family was being dismantled piece by piece, and some major public figures had been indicted, up to and including the mayor himself. There had been a lot of people either on the take, or actually using the services of these people, and the press was having a field day; except for the fact that several reporters had been caught up in the corruption too, which tarnished the victory somehow. I would never know for sure, but it was a safe bet that the leak at the Post-Gazette would be doing some serious jailtime, and the thought was a pleasing one. A lot of people in the Gang Task Force were also under investigation, and the city was going to be seriously readdressing its entire police structure as a result of this thing. I only hoped they came up with something better, and didn’t make things even worse.

  Rubinstein and his computer files were letting the Feds make some real connections between the Pittsburgh crime family and the other gangs which ran human trafficking operations through the city and the state. It was allowing them to make major inroads into the nationwide issues of human smuggling, exploitation and sexual slavery, and the FBI and associated agencies were expecting to make hundreds of more arrests over the coming weeks. Then there was the online stuff, which would undoubtedly lead to even more arrests and – hopefully – convictions. And with luck, more innocent victims might be rescued, set free from their own private hell. I could only hope.

  I’d tried to find out what had happened to Emma – or Marcie – but had come up with a blank. It wasn’t surprising, given that I didn’t even know her second name, but it would have been nice to know she was okay. I’d called the club, but it had been a cop who’d answered the phone and I hadn’t thought it a good idea to pursue the issue through him. And so I’d resigned myself to the fact that I’d probably never know. Like so much else, I would just have to hope for the best.

  My arm and leg weren’t so bad, but the burns on my back hurt like a son of a bitch. I knew the dressing needed changing, but it was hard to do by myself, and I was reluctant to go to a doctor; a description of my injuries had probably been distributed to hospitals and doctors’ surgeries all over the state, if not the country. I was in Maryland now though, and the pain was only getting worse, so I supposed it was time to bite the bullet and get it seen to.

  But a part of me welcomed the pain. I had helped a lot of people over the past few days, there was no doubt in my mind about that. A lot of people had died too; and although most of them had deserved it, some of them had not. Sometimes I thought of that child, blown apart by that shotgun blast; other times, my imagination conjured up images of the other dead children, the ones I hadn’t seen – a neck broken in the snow, two bodies burned beyond recognition – and I wept, knowing that it was my fault. I deserved the searing pain of the burns, I knew that.

  I tried to focus on the good – those people who were no longer being abused, no longer slaves – but it was hard.

  And so I read my newspaper, drank my coffee, and tried to forget.

  Sooner or later, I would.

  I always did.

  The End

  . . . but Colt Ryder will return in The Thousand Dollar Heist, out in April 2021!

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  THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN

  J.T. BRANNAN

  "The soldiers who didn’t come back were the heroes. It’s a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you’re a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you’re a survivor”

  - Bob Feller

  “Sometimes when I help people, other people die”

  - Colt Ryder

  Nuevo Laredo was hell on earth.

  It had been years since I’d been out of the States, and this little Mexican border town was doing nothing to reignite my love of foreign travel; I’d had nothing but trouble since arriving here just four short days before.

  To be fair, though, I had come looking for it.

  And I was in real trouble now – blindfolded and bound, I had no real idea where I was, even if I was still in Nuevo Laredo. All I knew was that I was in a building with corrugated metal walls and a smell that took me straight back to my last real job, working as a meatpacker in the largest slaughterhouse in the Midwest. Over twenty thousand bovine carcasses were processed every day in that terrible place, and the smells that came from the rotten meat that accumulated there had been enough to make a man sick. It had reminded me of Iraq. And now, thinking about it, Nuevo Laredo kind of reminded me of Baghdad; and trust me when I say that wasn’t a good thing.

  As my nostrils reacted to the stench of the place, I wondered if I was in a slaughterhouse once more and silently cursed; after punching out my boss I’d promised to never set foot in such a place again. But what could I do? My hands were tied – literally.

  If it was a slaughterhouse, it was clear that the owners didn’t believe in the benefits of refrigeration – the place was like a sauna, the heat melting my bones and making it hard to breathe. No wonder the meat was rancid.

  The blow came suddenly, out of nowhere, and knocked my head back hard. My skull collided with the metal wall behind me; it felt like it maybe loosened a few teeth as well.

  I shook my head to get some of my senses back, my body instinctively curling up in a vain effort to protect myself. I’d had worse over the years though. Much worse.

  Besides, if they were going to kill me, I wouldn’t be wearing a blindfold. They wouldn’t care if I saw them.

  As long as I was wearing the blindfold, I told myself, I’d be okay.

  The situation was far from pleasant though, the beating starting now in earnest, fists and feet flying in from everywhere. At least if you can see the punches and kicks coming – even if your hands and legs are tied, as mine were – you can tense the right bit of your body in time, take some of the shock out of the blow. With your eyes covered, it makes things a whole lot worse. The punches and kicks come from all angles, hitting all over your body, and the only chance you have is to tense up everything, all the time it’s happening. But that’s almost impossible, so you tend to relax without meaning to – and then they hit you again.

  It wasn’t all bad though – one of the punches had elicited a grunt of pain from one of my tormentors. He tried to cover it up, not wanting to show weakness, but I caught it loud and clear. I might have been blindfolded, but my ears were working just fine.

  I knew the guy must have cut his knuckles on my teeth. More fool him for not wearing gloves; I always do when I’m on the other end of this routine. The fist isn’t exactly the best weapon in the world – the bones are tiny and easy to break, and the skin is too thinly spread over those bones to make it anything other than a poor choice as an impact tool. But it seems like a natural thing to do, and people are slaves to their instincts.

  ‘Tell us,’ said one of the men, not the one who’d just hurt himself; and I amused myself imagining the other guy in the corner, nursing his bleeding knuckles and trying not to cry. ‘Tell us who sent you, and we can stop all this,’ the voice said again, his English heavily accented with the singsong Mexican lilt that betrayed his local background.

 

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