The Thousand Dollar Escape Read online

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  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

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  THE THOUSAND DOLLAR ESCAPE

  J.T. Brannan

  © J.T. Brannan 2016

  The right of J.T. Brannan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First Edition

  For Justyna, Jakub and Mia;

  and my parents, for their help and support

  “The abuse of women and girls is the most pervasive and unaddressed human rights violation on earth”

  - Jimmy Carter

  “Let’s start a movement – a movement of men who aren’t afraid to stop violence against women”

  - Carlos Andrés Gómez

  Prologue

  I woke up with a hangover, which was unpleasant. But the hangover was the result of a night on the town with a blonde bombshell called Ricci, who was now lying next to me in bed, and that made it somewhat easier to deal with.

  Ricci was a dancer from Secret’s, a strip club on the western borders of Tulsa just before you reach the small town of Sand Springs. After escaping from a group of psychotic killers in Badrock Park a few weeks ago, I’d felt I was due a little R&R time, and so I’d partied my way up from New Mexico into Oklahoma. Secret’s – rough and ready as it was – had been my favorite place so far, and Ricci had been my favorite girl.

  It wasn’t just her pretty face or her fantastic body either – she’d actually been interesting to talk to, and after a few nights of hanging around the club, she’d agreed to go out for a drink with me. That had been last night, when I’d been fully inducted into the nightlife of Tulsa by a true professional. It had been great fun, but nowhere near as good as when we’d got back to her apartment in Sand Springs. Now that had been fun.

  It looked like my boy Kane had had a pretty good night too – he was currently curled up at the foot of the bed with Ricci’s purebred, perfectly groomed Saluki. We’d left them alone in the apartment with each other when we’d gone out the night before, and it looked like they’d used the time well. With Kane – part Mastiff, part Alsatian – outweighing the Saluki by about sixty pounds, I wasn’t sure about the mechanics of their partnership, but it seemed to be working out.

  Ricci, one smooth tanned leg draped over me, was still snoozing, and I started to move my head around gently, trying to work the kinks out of my neck. I’d had a hard life, and I wasn’t getting any younger; morning aches and pains were just part of the routine now.

  Was that one of the reasons I was lying here with a younger woman, I wondered briefly? Was I somehow trying to prolong my youth, convince myself that I wasn’t past it? Did I go from one town to the next – and one woman to the next – simply in a vain effort to avoid getting old?

  I shook my head, at the same time letting my entire body stretch out, and I could literally hear the creaks and groans as my joints popped.

  Who was I trying to kid? My youth was gone, along with my innocence. It was gone, and it wasn’t coming back.

  And why was I questioning myself now? I was lying here in bed with Ricci because I wanted to, and that was enough reason for anything. I liked women, I liked drifting from one town to another and – Heaven help me – I liked fighting.

  It was simply who I was, so why try and justify it?

  My head snapped up at almost exactly the same moment as Kane’s; the Saluki’s followed moments later, and Ricci’s didn’t move at all. But there had been sound nearby, and a sound I recognized – the sound of men in boots running up a set of stairs.

  Something was going on outside.

  It was none of my business of course, but I’ve always been a curious sonofabitch. Kane had already left his girlfriend and shot out the bedroom, heading for the living room and the apartment’s front door, and I didn’t want to be too far behind him.

  I gently removed Ricci’s leg from me, paused as she stirred. ‘Mmm . . .’ she purred, half asleep, ‘you wanna go again?’

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ I whispered as I kissed her forehead, before sliding smoothly out of bed.

  I pulled on a pair of boxers as I crept out of the bedroom toward the front door of the lounge, trying to pick up the sounds again as I went. But they’d gone now, which could mean one of two things – either I’d imagined it in the first place, or the people who had been bouncing up the stairs had stopped moving.

  And if they’d stopped moving, it meant they were waiting for something.

  I edged toward the door, where Kane was still waiting, ears pricked – an indication that we were looking at the second option, and there were people outside.

  As my head bent toward the peephole, I wondered what I would do if those people were waiting outside for me. Had law enforcement finally tracked me down? Some pretty powerful and influential people had been left dead and buried down at Badrock Park – including the governor of New Mexico – and while the press had recorded the deaths to be the result of a gas mains explosion, I didn’t know what sort of comeback I could expect. Nothing had happened yet, and I’d been running all the counter-surveillance drills I could think of, but had my luck finally run out?

  And if it had – and right now a police SWAT team was waiting outside to take me down – what chance would I have, dressed only in boxer shorts and plagued with a doozy of a hangover?

  But I was at the door now, and curiosity once again took hold and forced me to take a look through the peephole.

  My first reaction was one of relief – there was nobody outside the apartment door, which put me in the clear.

  But the relief was gone moments later, as I saw that the landing wasn’t clear at all – there were four men further along the hallway, waiting outside another apartment door.

  They wore boots, as I’d heard, but they weren’t SWAT – they were dressed in a casual combination of jeans, checked shirts, utility pants and bomber jackets, and carried no visible weapons.

  They were definitely up to something though, gathered outside the door and whispering to one another, checking and rechecking whatever plan it was that they were about to put into operation.

  Who were they? Were they there to rob the place? But something about them didn’t fit that picture; I didn’t know what it was, just a gut feeling I had. But gut feelings had served me well before, and I was happy trusting my instincts.

  One of the men had his ear to the door, obviously checking to see if anyone was inside; seconds later he turned to his friends and nodded his head. There was a change in the men then, and the listener moved out of the way as the largest man in the group – six three and a good two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and solid, hard fat – launched a kick at the door, his massive boot smashing straight through it with a resounding crash.

  Kane jerked, and I felt my own body stiffen in response; the Saluki trotted into the lounge, and even Ricci had woken up. ‘What the hell was that?’ her voice called from the bedroom.

  She appeared in the bedroom
doorway moments later, naked except for a blanket clutched across her body, and I held up a finger to my lips to quieten her, before turning my attention back to the peephole.

  There was only one guy left outside now, three of them inside the apartment. I could hear men shouting, a woman screaming.

  What the hell was going on?

  ‘Who lives in the apartment across the hall?’ I whispered to Ricci as she came up alongside me.

  ‘I thought it was empty,’ she whispered back, ‘there was an old guy there, but he died a few months ago.’

  There were bangs and crashes coming from across the hall now, and I was moving without giving it any conscious thought.

  ‘Stay here,’ I warned Ricci as I opened her apartment door, still wearing nothing but my boxers. Kane was right with me though, and I’d have him by my side over a pair of pants and a shirt any day of the week.

  By the time I was out the door, there were once again four big guys in the hallway, a dark-haired woman of about thirty held, kicking and screaming, between two of them. As they dragged her out of the apartment, I could hear her cries of protest loud and clear, even though one of the men tried in vain to cover her mouth with one bear-like hand.

  ‘Let me go, you sonsofbitches! Help me! Help! Leave me alone, let me go!’

  And then, all of a sudden, we were all there in the middle of the hallway, just ten feet of cheap carpet separating us. Kane emitted a low growl of warning, but stayed close to me, waiting for my command.

  I sensed movement behind me, but Kane had reacted already, twisting around and baring his teeth at the new threat – two more guys, guarding the stairwell at the far end of the hall.

  Six men in total – it was a big ask, especially without weapons, but this was what I did; it would be hard, but doable.

  The way I saw it, there were people who could long jump nearly thirty feet, or run a marathon in just over two hours - a mind-blowing twenty-six miles at sub-five minute per mile pace, and others who could pitch a baseball at over a hundred miles an hour. These are things that are simply above the capabilities of most people, but the athletes concerned are not only gifted and highly motivated, they have also channeled this into thousands of hours of hard practice to bring them to a level that – to the layman – might seem somewhat superhuman.

  The field of physical violence is no different, and I was one of the top ‘athletes’ in the profession – I was well-suited to the work, had one hell of a motivation to do it, and had trained my ass off for years to be good at it. Experience could never be overrated, either.

  And so while – for most nice, average, law-abiding folk – getting into a brawl with six hard-jawed thugs would be a surefire way of getting a free ride in an ambulance, for me it was just another day at the office.

  And I was pretty sure Kane would help narrow those odds pretty soon, too.

  ‘Why don’t you let the lady go,’ I said, my voice even.

  The men across from me looked at me like I was an alien from Mars; not surprising given my near-naked appearance, I supposed.

  The big guy who’d kicked down the door looked at me with a quizzical smile. ‘What the fuck are you supposed to be?’ he asked. ‘Trust me, mind your own fucking business.’

  ‘I’m making this my business,’ I replied calmly, even as I calculated angles and vectors, who was stood where, any little signals the men gave off, anything that would help my cause if things got physical.

  The woman looked at me with pleading eyes, and I knew that it wasn’t if things got physical; it was when.

  ‘If you make it your business, you’re gonna get fucked up,’ a second guy said, smaller than the first but tough-looking, a bushy eighties-style moustache pasted over a hard mouth and a granite jaw.

  A third, eyeing Kane nervously, spoke next, voice high and shrill. ‘And you best keep that fuckin’ dog away from us too.’

  The men were edging toward me slowly, so slowly that I might not even have noticed had I not been watching for it; but they were closing the gap, and the ten feet between us had been reduced to six.

  A quick glance over my shoulder showed that the other two guys had also moved slightly closer, but not by much; they were away from the stairwell now, but Kane’s ferocious gaze had obviously stopped them coming any further.

  But as for the men in front of me, the closing of distance was an obvious red flag, signaling their intent as clearly as if they’d shouted it across the room. They were going to attack, sooner or later.

  They had no real option, to be fair – there was only one set of stairs in this place, and it was down the hall behind me, by their two friends. If they wanted to get the woman out of here, they were going to have to get there, and that meant going through me.

  So why wait for them to move?

  The best form of defense, they say, is a good offense – words I generally lived my life by.

  As they got within four feet, I moved.

  Out of the four men in front of me, two were tied up with the woman, which meant that the guys on either side – the giant who’d kicked in the door to the right, and the guy with the mustache to the left – were the more dangerous.

  I went for the guy on the left first – guessing he’d probably be faster than the bigger man – and I heard cries of panic from behind me as Kane simultaneously sprinted down the hallway to take on the two guys from the stairwell.

  I barely heard the commotion as Kane went about his work, my mind focused on my own efforts – initially a quick double-step forward before landing my bare instep hard into Mustache’s groin.

  I heard him sigh in pain, and his body convulsed, pelvis pulling back, chest and face jutting forward; I was already primed for the offered target and sent a hard elbow into the man’s face, knocking him to his knees.

  The giant had used the second or so it had taken me to neutralize Mustache to push past his two buddies, hands reaching out toward me; I knew he might crush my skull if he got the chance, and so I moved faster.

  As he stretched out, plier-like fingers seeking my throat, or my face, or my head – anything they could grip and tear – I simply collapsed to the floor, letting all my bodyweight fall on the knee of the giant’s extended leg.

  It didn’t snap, but he yelled in pain and I used his momentary distraction to grab the leg and take him to the floor in a wrestler’s single-leg takedown. Keeping hold of the tree-trunk-like limb, I snaked my arm around his foot, locking his toes under my armpit and scooping his heel into the crease of my elbow in a fast heel-hook, wrenching it as hard as I could.

  The giant screamed in agony as the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments were ruptured violently – maybe even the medial collateral too – and I knew he was out of the fight for good.

  With two of the team out of action, and their two backups pinned down at the stairwell by Kane, the men in the middle – still holding the woman – were momentarily at a loss, confused and unable to react quickly enough to this change in how they expected things to go down.

  I was still on the floor though, a position which weakened my advantage and gave them the few moments they needed to adjust; by the time I’d jumped to my feet, the woman had been taken by one of the men, who dragged her forcefully across the corridor, while the other one aimed a hard leather boot at my rising face.

  I reacted quickly though, stopping the up-swinging leg with my arms and driving instinctively into him with my head, knocking the air out of him as my hard skull crashed into his solar plexus.

  I followed it up, hands reaching up for his neck, my head rearing back and smashing forward into the guy’s unprotected face; the nose shattered, blood spurted, and nobody seemed to notice that I was driving us closer toward the last man, and the woman he held.

  But then we were there, and I let the man’s body sag to the ground, barely conscious from the head-butt; and before he hit the carpet, I feinted to one side of the last man before moving back in on an angle, lashing out with a hardened shin that s
lammed solidly into the meat of his thigh.

  It was a vicious round kick that found its mark, hitting the nerve cluster and sending the leg to sleep; the guy sagged without the support and his grip on the terrified woman weakened.

  I rushed forward, pulling one arm away and allowing the lady to wrench herself free from the other; and as she moved, I unleashed a powerful hook that connected hard with the man’s jaw. I saw the spark go out of his eyes, and knew he’d be unconscious before he hit the floor.

  I turned to check on the woman, satisfied that I’d have a few moments to assess the situation; but when I saw her, there was still terror in her eyes, and I followed her gaze to the stairwell, where I saw Kane hurtling down the hallway towards us.

  Confused, I saw the two men he’d set upon cowering in a corner, and wondered what he was running from; but in the next moment, the stairwell door burst open and two uniformed cops sprinted into the hallway, handguns up and aimed.

  ‘Hold it right here!’ shouted one of them.

  ‘Hands in the air!’ shouted the other. ‘Hands in the fucking air!’

  I looked at the carnage around me, and wondered what sort of shit I was in.

  That was when the giant, whose athletic career I’d just severely derailed, stopped screaming in pain and drew a wallet out of his pocket, flipped it open, and showed it to me.

  Inside was a gold badge.

  Sergeant Greg Kleinberg.

  Sand Springs Police Department.

  ‘You sonofabitch,’ he gasped at me through the agony of torn ligaments. ‘You sonofabitch . . . you’re under arrest.’

  Well, at least now I knew the kind of shit I was in.

  It was called ‘deep’.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  The jail cell was not an unfamiliar place.

  It wasn’t that I’d ever been in Sand Springs Police Jail before – only that it was pretty much like all the other jails I had been in. Small room, whitewashed walls, one side composed almost entirely of close-packed steel bars.