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

by J. T. Brannan

  The card itself was half-covered by an advert for a pet-sitting service, all animals catered for and best rates guaranteed; but the part I could see had instantly grabbed my attention.

  The top right hand side read ‘-LLAR MAN’ in thick red felt-tip, and I casually moved toward the noticeboard, picking up the sugar pourer and ‘accidentally’ pushing to one side the pet-sitting advert to reveal the card beneath.

  My eyes took it all in within a couple of seconds, then I let the advert re-cover it and poured some sugar into my coffee; I didn’t want it, but felt I had to continue with the charade.

  ‘Well,’ I said softly to Kane as I sipped my sweet coffee and patted him on the head, ‘it looks like we’re not going to be heading out of town just yet.’

  Because according to the words on that little green card, there was work to be done.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  We met on the benches of a kids’ playground, right on the edge of an old baseball field at Tingley Park, not too far away from the Albuquerque Homeless Mission where she currently resided.

  The girl was apparently homeless, and had no telephone; the advert had said to contact her at the mission, and so that’s what I’d done, taken a brisk walk over there with Kane.

  The sun had still been up when I’d got there, asked at the counter for the girl and been given an envelope in return.

  Inside, a handwritten note gave me the meeting place; I read it, and told the guy who’d given it to me to tell the girl to be there in an hour.

  I’d done a quick recon of the site – a lovely little park right next to the Rio Grande Zoo, itself part of the larger ABQ BioPark – and had then returned to watch the mission, observing as a woman left alone just twenty minutes later.

  It reassured me that she was alone – sometimes these adverts are just put there to lure me into a trap, either laid by the police or instead by someone I’d upset, looking to get their own back.

  I watched from a distance with Kane as she entered the park, the sun now almost gone over the horizon, and continued to observe as she sat down on a swing to wait for me.

  As she waited, I doubled back and checked her route for followers; finding none, I then checked the perimeter of the park, closely observing the other people strolling the grounds.

  None of them set off my radar and so – eventually – I approached the girl as promised, Kane still by my side to offer an extra level of protection.

  After the introductions – which included a quick search of her person to check if she was armed – we settled down to business.

  She’d called herself Kayden, although I had no way of knowing if that was her real name or not. It was hard to place her age, too – she looked like she should be young, and yet her hair, her skin, her clothes, her manner, all spoke of her being much older. But life on the streets did that to you, and a combination of drink, drugs and abuse could make a girl age an extra twenty years in six months.

  She must have been aware of how she looked, for the first thing that she did was press the thousand dollars into my hands, perhaps worried that I’d think she wasn’t good for the money.

  The relief on her face as she handed it over was obvious, and I knew why – if she’d been carrying this on her for any length of time, living where she did, she must have become paranoid about it getting stolen. People in her shoes were often killed for a lot less than this, and the fact that she’d gone to the trouble of getting the money – and then keeping it safe, both from others and from herself – made me more than a little interested in her case.

  ‘I can’t tell you how good it feels to get rid of that,’ Kayden said with a sigh, looking around as if she still wasn’t at ease, was still worried that at any moment somebody might try and get it. ‘And you don’t even want to know how I got it in the first place.’

  I smiled at her as she petted Kane on the head. ‘I’ll take your word for that,’ I said, and meant it – I really had no wish to know how she’d raised the cash.

  She smiled back, and I could see her crooked and uneven teeth showing, blackened like the worst crack addict’s. But I wasn’t there to judge.

  ‘Nice dog,’ she said. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Kane,’ I told her. ‘He follows me around.’

  ‘I like him,’ she said, continuing to stroke his head, Kane continuing to let her. ‘Reminds me of home. Before my step-dad, anyway.’ She looked back up at me. ‘But you don’t want to hear about that,’ she said, ‘do you?’

  I shrugged. ‘Not unless it has something to do with the job,’ I replied. The fact was, it might do – her current situation could well stem from run-ins with her step-father, and the thousand dollars might be for me to teach him a lesson in return. Maybe even kill him?

  There were so many people staying in places like the Albuquerque Homeless Mission because of things that had happened at home, so many parents and step-parents that had abused their children, forcing them into leaving home too early, onto the streets where the abuse just continued.

  But I didn’t kill people for money, no matter how deserved it was. I didn’t have many rules, but that was one of them.

  I waited for her answer.

  Finally she shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no it doesn’t. I’ve not even seen the bastard for five years, and I’m past caring about that sack of shit.’ She rolled up a cigarette and lit it with unsteady hands, trying to steady her nerves. ‘No,’ she repeated, ‘it’s about my boyfriend. He’s missing.’

  ‘How long?’

  She paused as she thought, puffing on her cheap roll-up. ‘A month or more now, I guess,’ Kayden answered.

  I sighed, wondering what to tell her. The fact was that people went missing all the time, especially homeless people. They were often itinerant by nature, drifting from place to place. Oftentimes they would upset the wrong set of people and have to flee one area for another; or else they’d be picked up for petty crime and be encouraged to move on. It might be that he’d been arrested, or even killed; it was rare to get positive IDs on homeless corpses. Her boyfriend might have been murdered, or he might have been knocked over by a car, and she would never find out about it.

  Alternatively, he might just have had enough of Kayden and decided to move on.

  But, I supposed, it was too early to second-guess, and I owed it to the girl to hear her out.

  ‘How long have you been together?’ I asked.

  ‘Over a year. Thirteen months, maybe.’

  ‘So you know him well.’

  ‘As well as anyone I’ve ever known.’

  ‘Was he in any sort of trouble? Owe anybody money?’

  ‘No,’ she said adamantly, puffing hard on the cigarette. ‘No way, man. He wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Did he live at the shelter with you?’

  ‘He did,’ she said with what sounded like the beginnings of pride in her voice. ‘But a little while ago, he got himself a job.’ Her eyes sparkled, and I could see the pride now. And the love.

  ‘What sort of a job?’ I asked.

  ‘With animals,’ she said, stopping to roll herself another cigarette. When this was lit and the first few puffs had been had, she gestured over a fence toward the zoo. ‘His favorite place in the world,’ she continued. ‘He’d sneak in all the time. Couldn’t afford tickets, you know. Snuck in mostly at night, but sometimes during the day too, he’s real clever.’ I nodded, waited for her to continue. ‘Sometimes took me with him too.’ Her eyes misted over and I could see she was being drawn back into her memories. ‘He knew all about the animals, I mean everything – what they eat, where they live, even what they were called in Latin, you know?’

  ‘He sounds well educated.’

  She nodded her head vigorously in agreement. ‘Yeah, he’s got smarts coming out of his ears. Even graduated high school, grades good enough for college.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Drugs, I guess. Same old story, right? Got in with the wrong
crowd, got hooked, lost what little money he had, stole some, got arrested. Life fucked, right? I met him right back over there at the mission.’ She gestured with her head back over the nearby rooftops. ‘I was into him straight away, you know? Smartest guy I’d met in a long time. Funny, too.’

  ‘He still into drugs?’ I asked, knowing it was indelicate but also wanting to get to the point.

  ‘No,’ she said with an unconvincing shake of her head. ‘No. . . Not really. Nothing hard anyway, not for a few months now. That’s why I’m so worried about him, see? We had plans. We weren’t going to stay at the mission forever, we were getting ourselves straightened out. Going to find a place of our own. That’s why I came to you, why I put the advert there, the police aren’t interested in people like TJ and me, they just put it down to drugs or some other shit, you know, they owed people money, had to make a run for it, or else got killed over something, body’ll never be identified.’ She sighed. ‘It’s good to talk to someone who’ll hear me out.’

  I felt guilty for a moment, knowing that I’d had exactly the same thoughts as the police. But there was no point beating myself up over it, so I moved swiftly on.

  ‘That’s his name?’ I asked. ‘TJ?’

  ‘Uh huh. Well, that’s what everyone calls him, his real name is Ben. His second name’s Hooker though, you know, like the old TV show?’

  ‘Right,’ I said with a smile. TJ Hooker – I used to love that show as a kid. ‘So this job TJ got, tell me about it.’

  She puffed on her roll-up nervously, then shrugged her thin, bony shoulders. ‘I don’t really know,’ she admitted, before pointing over my shoulder to the walled enclosure of the ABQ BioPark. ‘But I think it was in there.’

  ‘The zoo?’ I asked for confirmation.

  ‘Uh huh,’ she said. ‘I think so, anyway. That’s the thing, you see, he never told me what it was. But he’d been over to the zoo one day, stayed there forever, came back to the mission at night and said he might have a job, he was really excited about it. I asked him if it was at the zoo, but he wouldn’t really say, said it was something to do with animals so I guessed it was at the zoo, but he said he’d have to go away somewhere for some sort of assessment. So he left, really excited, and I’ve never heard from him since.’

  ‘And that was when?’

  ‘About a month ago now,’ she said as she took a long drag on her roll-up, blew the smoke out into the darkening sky. ‘Five weeks maybe.’

  I paused, considering the facts. Had he been offered a job at the zoo? It was possible, if he had qualifications and was knowledgeable about the subject. But then again, it was hard to arrange employment without an address. Would they have accepted the mission as his residence? And what about references?

  I came back again to thinking that maybe TJ had just wanted to get out of there, had come up with the line about the job to make things easier for himself, then just cut and run.

  ‘How was TJ going to contact you?’ I asked.

  ‘Via the mission,’ Kayden said. ‘But I’ve asked everyone who was manning the phones, and there’s been no word.’

  ‘Have you asked about him at the zoo?’

  She nodded. ‘I asked, but nobody wants to talk to me. And there was no sign of him there at all.’

  I sat back and looked at her. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So what do you think happened to him?’

  ‘I keep thinking and thinking about it, you know? I guess it’s possible that he went somewhere for an interview, an assessment or whatever, maybe stayed there with a job, maybe they had accommodation or something. Maybe an outreach center for the zoo, some research place or something?’ She shook her head. ‘But I know that TJ would have been in touch, would have told me what was going on, where he is.’

  Tears started to well up in her eyes, and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat; I wasn’t terribly good with emotional women, despite my years of dealing with some very upset people.

  ‘So,’ she continued through the tears, ‘something bad must have happened to him, I know it.’ She wiped her eyes on a dirty sleeve, looked back at me. ‘I know it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, tapping the envelope with her hard-earned money inside. ‘Okay. You’ve paid the price, so I’m your man. I’ll find out what’s happened to TJ. I can’t promise I’ll bring him back to you, but I promise I’ll put your mind to rest at least.’

  She smiled then, a weak smile but a smile nonetheless, and placed a hand on my arm. ‘That’s all I ask,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s all I ask.’

  Chapter Two

  The next day broke bright and sunny, and I found myself part of a small queue waiting to enter the Rio Grande Zoo.

  It was right over the road from Tingley Park, and I could see the playground where I’d sat with Kayden the night before. I knew she was counting on me, and the thought was sobering.

  I’d gone back to the mission with her after our meeting, where I’d used my charms – and a hundred dollars – to get TJ’s file from the desk clerk.

  The information was thin – residents didn’t have to give any details, and any that they did give didn’t necessarily have to be true – but it confirmed what Kayden had told me, at least. The paperwork – filled out in his own hand, which was neat and precise – had the name Benjamin Timothy Hooker across the top, date of birth September fourth 1992, place of birth San Diego. Parents not listed, which wasn’t a surprise. I wondered if he really was from San Diego; maybe he just liked its famous zoo, and put it down for that reason alone? People at missions more often than not didn’t want to be traced, and it would be unusual if TJ had been honest on the form.

  The next sheet consisted of the scrawled notes of the mission’s resident medical officer, who examined all new arrivals. Again, it tied in with what Kayden had told me – signs of hard drug use including needle marks, damaged nasal passages, slight glaucoma and seriously depleted bodyweight. But it also said that he had indeed been clean for a while, and also made a point of him being bright, communicative and intelligent – a potential success story.

  But as I handed over my cash and strolled through into the Rio Grande Zoo, I realized that I still didn’t know a hell of a lot about the young man I’d pledged to find – one of the reasons that the police weren’t really interested in cases like this.

  The only really useful thing was a Polaroid head shot of the man that had been attached to the file. It had cost me another fifty, but it was now securely in my pocket.

  My backpack was in storage back at the ATT, only a few blocks northeast from the park, and Kayden was looking after Kane. He would have been happy to wait for me outside but – with no collar or leash – I didn’t want him getting picked up by an overzealous warden and impounded. I kept hold of a Benchmade everyday carry knife and an extendable metal baton though; my empty hand skills were good, but you never knew when you might need an equalizer. I wasn’t expecting trouble at a public zoo, but you know the old saying – it’s better to be safe than sorry. And in my line of work, such controlled paranoia had saved my bacon more than once.

  As soon as I was inside, I looked at the map I’d been given with my ticket and made my way to the information center, which happened to be part of the administration block right next door to the entrance.

  I wandered into the light and airy room and waited in line behind a young family with twin pushchairs as they asked a twenty-something male something about the restrooms. Minutes later they were gone – apparently satisfied – and I approached the desk with what I hoped was a friendly smile.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I was wondering who I should speak to about a job?’

  ‘A job here?’ the young man – whose name badge read Soren – asked, somewhat redundantly. I resisted the urge to say no, at the White House, and merely nodded and smiled once more.

  He looked me up and down rather doubtfully, and I knew why; unshaven and with worn utility pants and t-shirt, I hardly looked like an ideal employee. It made me wonder how different TJ wo
uld have looked. Given his situation, I guessed he wouldn’t have made any better impression, and it made we think again how unlikely it was that he’d found some sort of work here. But he was bright, I supposed, and maybe that still counted for something.

  ‘That would be Mr. Ortiz,’ Soren said at last. ‘Is he expecting you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve not got an appointment, no,’ I said. ‘Might I be able to speak with him? I’ll only be a few minutes.’

  Soren continued to look at me for a few moments, before picking up the phone and pressing a single digit, an internal number. A second or two went by, then I heard a muffled voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Mr. Ortiz?’ Soren said. ‘Sorry to bother you sir, I’ve got somebody down here asking about a job, could you come over and speak to him?’ A pause, then ‘No.’ Another pause, some muffled talk on the other end of the line, then ‘No sir, I’m sorry, I don’t know that either.’ Soren listened some more, nodded his head as if Mr. Ortiz could see him, said his thank yous and goodbyes and put the phone down, looking back across the desk at me.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Mr. Ortiz will be over to see you in just a few minutes.’

  I nodded my thanks, and sat down to wait.

  With nothing else to go on, Mr. Ortiz was as good a place to start as any.

  Less than five minutes later I was shaking the hand of a short, bespectacled man in his fifties, neat grey hair slicked back over a tanned forehead.

  ‘Mr. Ortiz?’ I asked with another one of my friendly smiles.

  ‘Yes,’ he said pleasantly, with only a cursory glance at the way I was dressed, ‘and you are?’

  ‘My name’s Hudson,’ I said, ‘Tom Hudson. Do you deal with employment at the zoo here?’