THE THOUSAND DOLLAR HUNT: Colt Ryder is Back in Action! (6 page)

Chapter Six

There
was
a chapel, just like Badrock had said. It was old and broken down, and stood a hundred yards away from a dilapidated single story home that had once been the primary ranch house, many moons ago.

The site was about a mile from Badrock’s new, colossal mansion house on the bluff, hidden down some tracks in a small ravine, sheltered from the winds that would otherwise come in across the plains. In the days before double glazing and insulation, the location made perfect sense.

I’d traveled there in the back of a hundred thousand dollar Range Rover, Badrock in the back with me while Hatfield rode up front with the driver.

I was amazed by the man’s confidence and composure – here he was sitting within arm’s reach of someone who had just demolished four of his men inside of ten seconds, and it was like he didn’t have a care in the world. I could have been there to kill him for all he knew, and yet he had not even allowed Hatfield to search me; I still had the knife that I’d used to threaten Groban, and I could have sliced Badrock’s neck wide open in a heartbeat.

But I got the impression that the general was so good at reading people that he knew absolutely that killing him wasn’t the reason I was there; and I also got the impression that he wanted to win my trust. And what better way than by letting me keep my weapon, while offering himself as a target?

It was working, too – despite myself, I felt that I was being drawn to Badrock like a moth to a flame, impressed by the man’s charisma, his easy confidence, and his sheer force of character.

‘The house hasn’t been used for years,’ Badrock said as we stepped out of the 4x4 and made our way into the grounds of the chapel. ‘The chapel’s seen better days too, I’m afraid.’

‘But I can see it’s getting some more use now,’ I observed, as in among the ancient graves there seemed to be several which were significantly newer. It suddenly became apparent that Benjamin Hooker might not have been the only worker to meet an untimely demise here.

I noticed, too, several open graves just waiting to be filled.

I then wondered – and I was amazed that it had taken me this long to do so – if that was the reason I’d been brought here.

To fill one of these new graves.

I instinctively jerked my head toward Hatfield, ready to move if he was reaching for a weapon.

‘No need to worry, son,’ Badrock said as if he could read my mind. ‘You’re in no danger here. I just want to clear this up, so that we can move on.’

Even as he said this, the driver struck the earth with a spade he’d brought from the car, forcing it into the soil of a new grave with his heel until it went in deep, before pulling it back out and hurling it to one side.

‘Move on to what?’ I asked Badrock as the driver continued to dig.

‘Let’s just wait out on that,’ he replied. ‘Put your mind at rest first.’

I nodded, my eyes roaming the cemetery – for years used to bury the bodies of family members and ranch hands.

‘You’ve had more than one accident, I see,’ I said as the hole the driver was digging got larger and larger. I gestured at the open graves. ‘And maybe expecting more?’

Badrock shrugged. ‘Like any enterprise, we’ve had some unfortunate situations,’ he admitted. ‘Some accidents during construction, others with the animals. We bury the homeless ones here, although on occasion we also bury folk from across the border, if their families can’t afford to do it back home. Sometimes sickness takes them too.’

‘Doesn’t sound like a good safety record,’ I said, but Badrock didn’t reply, merely shrugged as if to say
what can you do?

‘I’m done,’ the driver-digger shouted from the open grave, and Badrock and I moved over toward him.

I peered down into the hole, saw the man down there covered in dirt, a coffin next to him in the pit.

‘Open it,’ the general ordered, and the man did as he was told, unclasping the locks and heaving the lid up.

I knelt by the side, saw the body as the waning sunlight hit it.

The boy was in grim repair, decomposition starting to occur despite the airtight coffin; and even from this distance, I could see the damage that had been done to him.

The chest was half caved in, the face ruptured and semi-crushed; but despite the damage, I could still recognize him from the Polaroid.

So it was true – Benjamin Hooker was dead, and the state of the body seemed to corroborate Badrock’s tale of what happened to him.

And yet the crushing damage could have been inflicted post-mortem to cover up the real cause of death. I wasn’t a doctor, and I wouldn’t be carrying out an autopsy though; it was sufficient that the boy was dead.

At the same time, however, I knew that it
wasn’t
sufficient, that there was more to Badrock’s enterprise here than met the eye.

Why were there so many other bodies here? How had
they
died, really?

It just didn’t add up, and I knew my work here was far from done.

If I was going to go back to Kayden with answers, it would have to be with
all
the answers.

And maybe justice too, depending on what I found out.

‘Okay,’ I said to Badrock, ‘I’m satisfied.’

‘Good,’ he said with a smile, nodding at the driver who merely grunted, resealed the coffin and began to fill the grave back in. ‘So now we can move onto business.’

‘What sort of business?’

‘You’re an ex-military man of course,’ Badrock said by way of explanation. ‘Special operations, from your performance back there. Obviously engaged in private work now, hired by someone to find out what happened to old TJ there.’ He gestured to the grave as he spoke. ‘Well, you’ve found out, and now I guess you might be available for another job.’

‘A job here?’

‘Why not?’ Badrock said pleasantly. ‘The conditions are good, we pay well,
very
well in fact, and I’m now four good men down thanks to you. So you could say you owe me.’

‘They were about to attack me.’

‘Were they? I watched the incident live on CCTV – it’s recorded too, by the way – and all they were doing was walking across the room. You attacked
them
, drew a weapon too against men who were at the time unarmed.’

‘They had
guns
,’ I reminded him.

‘In holsters,’ Badrock countered. ‘And at that time, they had no intentions of using them. But I’m not here to argue with you, or threaten you. Like I said back in the office, I’m always on the lookout for a good man. And right now I need you. You do private security work for money already, so why not come work for me instead?’

‘What sort of work are we talking about?’

‘If I tell you and you turn me down,’ Badrock said, ‘you must promise never to reveal what I’ve said to another living soul.’

‘Okay,’ I said uneasily.

‘I mean it,’ Badrock said. ‘Think of this as a military order, top secret stuff from a spec ops mission you can’t speak of to anyone.’

‘Okay,’ I said again.

Badrock looked around the ravine, back out toward the rest of his estate. The air was warm, and the only sound that could be heard was the earth being thrown back on top of the coffin.

‘What is the main difference between a nature reserve and a game reserve?’ he asked me.

It took me only moments to answer, and in that time I began to understand a little of what else might be going on here.

‘Hunting,’ I said. ‘Game reserves allow hunting.’

‘Exactly,’ Badrock said with a wide smile. ‘Exactly. Now, you can go to Africa and get a hunting license and go and bag yourself some big game, right? And here in the United States, you can hunt elk, moose, deer, even mountain lion, yes? And so why not do the same thing here?’

‘You allow people to hunt the animals?’ I asked, although the answer was already obvious.

‘I do, and they pay me big bucks for doing it too. And they can hunt anything they want, if the price is right, from elephant to lion. We even mount the heads and provide secure transportation of the trophies to wherever the client wants.’

My blood had turned cold, my stomach turning with disgust as the reason behind Badrock Park became all too apparent to me.

‘This is the reason you started the park?’ I asked. ‘As a hunting ground?’

‘Yes,’ Badrock said with a proud smile. ‘And why not? I can charge fifty thousand dollars for a hippo, eighty for an elephant, up to a hundred thousand for a lion. But it’s not about the money, I have enough anyway; it’s about the thrill of the chase, the thrill of the hunt. Why shouldn’t we do it? It’s in our blood, in our nature; it would be insane to deny it.’

I wanted to argue with the man, tell him that some of those animals were endangered, what he was doing was sick; I wanted to grab the man by his hair and ram his face down onto my knee, again and again and again.

Instead, I forced myself to smile. ‘Good idea,’ I said through what I hoped weren’t gritted teeth. ‘I can see why you need the security.’

‘Yes,’ Badrock said. ‘Security for the park itself – we need to be sure that nobody gets in after dark to see what it is we really do here – and security for the hunters too, to protect them from the other animals. Some important people come here for the hunt – politicians, military officers, law enforcement officials, even movie stars, you name it – and it wouldn’t do for them to end up like your friend Hooker there.’ He grinned, and for the first time I could sense the insanity which gently touched his face in the diminishing light of dusk.

‘The rate of pay for senior security personnel –and after watching you in action, you definitely come under that category – is a thousand dollars a day, and we provide food and accommodation too, which as you have seen already, is first rate. Vanguard offers all sorts of other benefits too, but my personnel officer will tell you all about that back at the ranch house if you’re interested.’ His eyes locked with mine as if in challenge. ‘
Are
you interested?’

I smiled at the general. A thousand dollars a day? The figure had to be a good omen for the thousand dollar man. I also still needed to find out more about his operations here, and what better way to do it than from the inside?

‘Okay,’ I told him. ‘I’m in.’

Part Two

Chapter One

I was seated once again at the dining table in Badrock’s personal ranch house, being served roasted quail by an extremely attractive young lady in a black uniform which was tight in all the right places, and I couldn’t help but wonder why I was being so honored.

What was it that Badrock wanted from me?

‘You saw my men in those hills,’ the general said with a smile as he tasted his Chateau Lafitte. ‘That was impressive.’

When I’d given Badrock my answer earlier that evening, agreeing to work for him, it hadn’t only been due to the fact that I wanted to learn more about his business here – it was also because I’d picked up a reflection on the side of the ravine, maybe six hundred yards out. I would have been an easy target for a sniper with a scope at that range, and – now knowing what to look for – I spotted two more snipers at angles to the first, perfect for triangulating fire on the cemetery.

I hadn’t realized that Badrock had seen me observing them.

‘Thank you,’ I said after finishing a mouthful of quail. ‘I guess my eyes haven’t succumbed to old age quite yet.’

‘You’re too modest,’ Badrock said. ‘Only a man of exceptional skill could have spotted those snipers.’ He paused. ‘How many did you see, by the way?’

‘Three,’ I said instantly, conditioned to answering senior officers when they asked questions.

‘And where were they?’

Again I answered instantly, reeling off a description of the men’s positions as if I was back in the Rangers giving a report on a recon mission.

‘Very good,’ Badrock said, then his eyebrows furrowed. ‘Which unit did you say you served with?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But you’ll tell me now.’

I knew it wasn’t a question. ‘Rangers,’ I said. ‘Regimental Recon Detachment.’

‘Ah,’ the general said, ‘of course. You had to be special ops of one kind or another. When did you get out?’

‘Ten years ago,’ I told him, before taking some more of the delicious wine. ‘Medical discharge after Iraq.’

Badrock’s raised eyebrow told me he wanted me to go on.

‘It was a mess,’ I said, ‘an Iraqi translator gave us some false information, dragged us into a walled village near Mosul. Told us there was going to be a big meeting of al-Qaeda leadership, the army sent in an entire company from the seventy-fifth Rangers. It was a trap.’

Badrock sipped more wine, eyes regarding me coolly. ‘New Year, two thousand four?’ he asked, and I nodded in reply. ‘The seventy-fifth Ranger regiment was one of the unit’s under my command then.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Damn,’ Badrock said after a moment’s thought. ‘That was a bad one. How many was it?’

‘Twelve,’ I said. ‘Twelve good men.’

‘Enemy casualties were much higher, if I recall.’

‘We got fifty-six of the bastards,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t make it any easier to swallow,’ the general said, ‘but at least there was some payback.’ His eyes looked up, as if he was remembering something. ‘One of the recon boys bagged half those bodies himself, if memory serves me correctly,’ he said. ‘He was awarded the Medal of Honor.’

I looked down at my plate, took some more wine, a gulp this time.

‘You?’ Badrock asked softly. ‘That was you?’

I raised my eyes to his. ‘That was a long time ago,’ I told him, and it was true; it was a lifetime ago.

But I still remembered it all too well, the blood of my friends over me, the feral thrill I felt as I fought my way up through the building full of terrorists; the pain as I was shot, stabbed, and went crashing out of a fourth floor window, a death grip around the last man, taking him with me and using his body to cushion my fall but only partially succeeding; the months of rehab on my broken body, my eventual discharge; more months of struggling to find work, nobody interested in my unique mix of abilities; my eventual release of everything tying me to a normal life, and my final transformation into the thousand dollar man.

I remembered it all.

Badrock stood solemnly, raising his glass. ‘A toast in your honor, sir,’ he said. ‘I had no idea the kind of man I was entertaining.’

I rose and we touched glasses, and we both drank deeply from them before sitting down again. ‘How lucky I am to have you here,’ Badrock said. ‘Who would have thought it? I said I had no idea of the kind of man I was entertaining, but that is not entirely true. I saw the way you moved in the office when you took out those boys there, saw how you observed everything that happened this evening, so aware, so switched on to what was happening around you.’

I ate more of the quail, unused to receiving so much praise; especially from a general, retired or not.

‘You are truly special,’ Badrock continued. ‘A man of your caliber, I can use you for so much around here. As word from my influential friends gets around, we’re only going to get busier on our nighttime hunts, and I need real professionals helping to make sure it all goes smoothly. The last thing we need is a Hollywood starlet getting gored by an elephant, or a Texas governor being ripped apart by a lion. Or a presidential candidate accidentally getting shot by an overexcited chief of police.’

‘I should think that wouldn’t be good for business,’ I agreed.

Badrock laughed. ‘It sure as hell wouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘But you know how easily those things can happen, especially after dark.’

‘They use night vision?’ I asked, interested in the specifics of how things were run.

‘Of course,’ Badrock replied as the beautiful girl came back in to the room, uncorking another bottle of wine and clearing our empty plates away. ‘We only use the very best equipment, military-grade stuff. We provide training too, but most of our hunters are hardly professional men like yourself. Accidents can and do happen, we just need to mitigate the chances as much as possible.’

‘And what sort of work do you see me doing here?’ I asked.

‘Working the hunts, of course. Keeping an eye out for any potential problems, keeping the animals away from our clients, making sure that friendly fire doesn’t catch anyone. And now I know your background, I might get you training them too, before they go out. Teaching them how to use the equipment, basic tactics. How does that sound?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘A little different from my normal work.’

‘And what sort of work is that, exactly?’ he asked with interest.

‘Private investigation,’ I said. It was near enough to the truth anyway.

‘I see,’ the general responded. ‘You work for a company?’

‘I work for myself.’

‘Good. No need to hand in your notice then. Have you got any jobs outstanding, anything you need to go back to your offices for?’

‘Only this one,’ I said. ‘I’ll need to contact my client regarding the fate of Mr. Hooker.’

‘And what are you going to tell this client?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘The truth,’ I said. ‘He went to the BioPark looking for a job and was turned down. Witnesses have him heading across the Mexican border soon after that. Unlikely we’ll ever see him again.’

Another smile appeared across Badrock’s face, this one the largest yet. ‘An excellent answer, Mr. . . .’

‘Ryder,’ I answered truthfully, knowing that my fingerprints were all over the place anyway, and that a man in Badrock’s position could have them checked within hours. ‘Colt Ryder.’

‘Well, Colt,’ Badrock said, ‘never let it be said that I am ungrateful to my friends.’ He clapped his hands, and the dark-haired beauty that had been serving us reappeared from a doorway. ‘Sweetheart,’ the general addressed her, ‘see Colt here to his quarters, and make sure he has
everything
he needs.’

‘Yes general,’ the girl said as she looked at me with a mischievous smile. ‘It will be my pleasure.’

I smiled back, sure that at least some of the pleasure was going to be mine.