The Thousand Dollar Team by J T Brannan

Author:J T Brannan [Brannan, J T]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grey Arrow Publishing
Published: 2018-02-27T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

When I came to, the SUV was parked in a field, and I was no longer in the car. Instead, I was trussed and bound, lying in the long grass with a semi-circle of leather-jacketed hard-cases around me. I looked around for a metal barrel, was grateful when I didn’t see one.

But Philips was there, in the middle of the group, and then I noticed the other car parked near the first, realized he must have driven out here to meet us.

“So, you’re awake,” he said, and one of the guys took that as a signal to kick me hard in the ribs. I grunted, and Philips smiled. “Excellent.”

Another kick, another grunt. The grass was warm underneath me, after being heated all day by the summer sun, which was only now drifting down toward the horizon. A part of me wanted to just sink into that warmth, give into its comfort, forget about what was happening around me, what might be about to happen to me.

But I couldn’t give into it, no matter how appealing the thought; it wasn’t in me to give up, wasn’t in me to surrender. If I died today, I was going to go down fighting.

I just had to figure out how I was going to do it, with my wrists and ankles tied. On the bright side, whoever had tied my hands had done it so they were in front of me rather than behind, which would make things slightly easier. But how many were there? From my position, curled in the grass, I did a quick headcount and got nine of them. Philips’ car, I supposed, must have been crowded.

“You got made,” Philips said, by way of explaining my current predicament. “One of our guys comes in when we’re reviewing the tapes from earlier, starts looking and – hey, guess what? – he recognized you. You were walking your dog in the park, the mutt stopped to have a shit, and you electrocuted the guy, right?” Philips laughed. “Guy’s got a good brain for faces, and no matter what you do with your hair, he made you straight away. Life’s a bitch, right? And then we called the Rankins, they never heard of you, they’ve got nobody staying there. And then we had a call from Salt Lake City, Billy Brown’s been dead for the past two years. Heart attack while he was eating a burger in McDonald’s.” He shrugged. “So, your story’s got bullshit all over it. But we still don’t know who you really are. The Thousand Dollar Man maybe, huh?” He laughed. “Yeah, maybe. I never figured he was real, but Mrs. Harris goes and puts up those posters, and then you show up. Coincidence? Maybe.”

He pointed at his men, and I looked at them again. Two of them held shotguns, four of them had batons or baseball bats, one of them held a meat cleaver, and the other one just had fists the size of hams, with calluses on the knuckles that indicated he liked to use them.

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