Deadly Journey

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Deadly Journey

by

Declan Conner

Scorpion eBooks

Thrillers with a
Sting in the tail

Copyright

Deadly Journey

Copyright © 2014 Declan Conner

This book is a work of fiction. Characters,
names, places, and incidents, either, are products of the author’s imagination,
or they are used fictitiously. Any reference to actual locales, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, to include, but not exclusive to
audio or visual recordings of any description without permission from the
copyright owner.

UK English - First Edition.

For information on subsidiary rights, email
in the first instance.

[email protected]

Introduction

—

A Gangland Hit

A DEA Agent Kidnapped

A Deadly Game of Life or Death

—

Someone wants
Rawlings dead. A cartel needs him alive
–
until
they've got what they want. Rawlings? He just wants to live.

D.E.A. Agent Kurt Rawlings
has never lost a moment's sleep over the criminals he has sent to prison, even
those who daily face the threat of death at the hands of others inside the
wire. Now he knows how they feel, because he is facing it himself.

Assailants who held a contract on his life took Rawlings from the
streets of El Paso. When a Mexican cartel bought out the contract, he was
transferred across the border. It soon became apparent this was not a simple
kidnap and ransom.

Rawlings is running out of time if he is to have any hope of
returning to his family alive. And it will be no easy task. Whoever wants him
dead has a long reach, and Rawlings' incarceration isn't going to stop them.

His enemies are on a killing spree
–
and he's the next in line.

Chapter 1

Expect the Unexpected

Without warning,
late on a Friday evening, it happened.

It was a simple business transaction for
them, I guess, but for me…? Funny how your body and mind shut down when you’re
faced with real danger. Sure, you can train for situations and anticipate the
odds, but when that wire trips you up in real life, everything can go straight
to hell in a laundry basket.

I was staking out a crack house in El Paso,
crouching behind low bushes. It wasn’t easy for a man of my size, at six foot
one with a two-hundred-pound frame, to hide in silence. At least not with me
having a bad case of the fidgets thanks to a day shift running seamlessly into
an evening shift. It didn’t help that I stunk to high heaven and needed to
scratch an itch in my day’s growth of chin stubble.

Maybe I should’ve accepted the regular
hours that came with that promotion the department had offered me. I could’ve
been at home with my family instead of freezing my butt off behind a row of
Chinese Juniper.

What I should have done was heed the advice
of our instructor at the DEA Training Academy.

‘Agent Rawlings, can you repeat what I just
said?’

Maybe he thought I wasn’t paying attention.

‘Expect the unexpected, sir.’

But my mind was wandering as I studied the
target house from my vantage point behind the shrubs. The single-storey home
was a blot on a once-proud neighbourhood. The yard was overgrown, strewn with
kitchen appliances and an upturned sofa. Boards hung from the façade. The only
new paintwork was graffiti from a spray can.

I thought about the neighbours; those who’d
hung onto their property were now prisoners, caught in a downward spiral of
housing prices. Their American dream had been shattered. I was thankful my
dreams were still intact.

Activity drew my attention back to the
task: a bed sheet used as a curtain moved aside at the window and light flooded
the porch. A silver-gray Ford with four occupants cruised along the road. The
vehicle slowed outside the house and then accelerated before I had a chance to
note the license-plate number. Its brake lights glowed and it turned onto a
cul-de-sac. I heard a car door slam and a figure with a male gait appeared
around the corner. He wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled low to mask his
features.

Cursing about the license number, my
attention darted from the figure to the bed sheet still twitching at the window
and then back. The hope was that these people were the second tier in the food
chain, arriving with fresh drugs. With clammy hands I grasped my camera, set up
on a tripod. The closer the figure got to the house, the faster my heart beat.
I concentrated on watching the guy with the hood, but my mind drifted. My
partner was late returning and I was starving. I’d sent him for coffee and a
Monterey Melt from Whataburger over on Eastside.

I heard footsteps behind me. Thinking it
was my partner, Rob, creeping back into position, I half turned my head. Too
late. An arm gripped my throat. My heart flipped. Spasms ran through my body as
if someone had tried to jump-start me with car-battery cables. Something solid
dug into my spine, and at the same time a voice growled, ‘Move and you’re dead,
motherfucker.’ Self-preservation and the laws of chance involved in beating a
bullet made fighting back a no-go.

That split-second of indecision had cost me
dearly.

It wasn’t for lack of training that I felt
helpless. Hell, coloured belts all the way to black hung in my closet. But a
flood of adrenaline had turned me into a two-ton jelly statue, then an ice
sculpture. So much for the
fight-or-flight
syndrome. I wasn’t able to do
anything of my own volition. If ever I needed my partner with me, it was now.

It’s weird how your mind can ignore what’s
happening, as if there’s a disconnect from reality. That’s not to say I wasn’t
looking to escape. Through a haze of fear, I was definitely aware of what was
happening.

The hooded guy appeared. He prodded the
barrel of his revolver in my direction, Gangsta style.

‘Kneel,’ he said.

The punk danced from foot-to-foot,
agitated. I braced for a muzzle flash. A hand pressed down on my shoulder from
behind. I knelt. He forced my arms behind my back and applied cuffs to my
wrists. Focus turned to my family as one of the punks relieved me of my gun and
cell phone. All I could think of was the last time I had told my wife and
children that I loved them. Then I noted the hooded punk’s appearance. He wore
Nike Zoom sneakers. He was white. Young; he was maybe in his early twenties. A
jumble of concerns circled.
Will Mary be able to pay the mortgage loan?
sprang
to mind. Then the “if onlys” surfaced. A sense of outrage at my own stupidity
followed, tempered by the certainty that that kid’s trigger finger could have
beaten some textbook self-defence move.

The guy behind me slipped a cloth bag over
my head and pulled a drawstring tight around my throat. My shoe slipped off my
foot as they pulled me to my feet. With their arms locked through mine, they
dragged and bundled me into what must have been the trunk of a car. It felt as
though someone pressed the barrel of a gun to my forehead.

‘We’ve disabled the trunk release. Try
kicking your way out and we’ll shoot you through the back seat,’ one of them
growled.

The trunk closed with a clunk. I heard
footsteps. Car doors slammed. The vehicle set off with a lurch. Working out the
direction we were headed was futile. It didn’t help my concentration that the
bag over my head was impregnated with the stench of cannabis, so I concentrated
on breathing through my mouth. Although, which was the more repugnant, the
smell, or the taste
–
it’s hard to recall, but it was a
close call.

A solution for the mortgage payments came
in the flip of an eyelid. My only hope was that these were professionals and
not some crackheads doing a favour for a fix. If they were seasoned hit men,
they’d probably already have a grave dug somewhere in the desert. Without a
body, Mary could drag things out for years. The agency would still have to pay
her my salary. That thought stopped giving me comfort when it drifted to a
judge pronouncing me dead.

Dead…

If they wanted to kill me, a bullet to the
back of the head would have done it back at the stakeout. Maybe I had something
they wanted; either that, or they were going to ransom me, which was a faint
hope at best. It was at that point I realized we hadn’t made a turn for some
time and we were probably on a highway. They couldn’t have been speeding,
because the car swayed each time a big vehicle passed.

Doing nothing wasn’t an option. With my
arms pinned behind my back and a bag over my head, my only hope was that a cop
would pull them over for some traffic violation.

I guess thinking about it, you could say
that it was a mixture of the notion about the traffic cops and one of those “Eureka”
moments of inspiration that handed me a plan. There was the faint-red glimmer
of one of the taillights shimmering through the cloth... I mean, there it
was... the answer, right there in front of my nose. All I needed was to contort
my body, grab the wires, and pull the connection. The idea was easier drum
rolled than accomplished in the confines of a trunk. The endless contortions
failed miserably when my calf muscle cramped.

Over the rumble of tyres on asphalt, I
heard a clicking. The orange blinker light flashed through the weft of the
burlap bag. It told me that the car was heading left. Where, was beyond a
guess. I had half a hope they were headed for Austin, which would buy me more
time to think of a way out.

It was difficult to work out how long we
had been driving. Maybe an hour. All I knew was it was sufficient for me to
have run through my entire life many times over in my mind. Regrets! Yeah,
there were quite a few. But the good times outnumbered them. My daughter Claire
wobbling off down the road on her bicycle for the first time. The beam of
delight on Craig’s face when we hauled in his first fish. Above all, the
iridescent smile radiating from Mary’s very essence when she turned to me at
the altar. I slipped the ring on her finger, knowing I had made the right
decision. The preacher had asked me, ‘Do you, Kurt Rawlings...’ ‘I do’ had
never sounded so sweet and it brought tears to my already moist eyes.

The image of Mary faded as the car turned
and the vehicle’s suspension rumbled. Vibrations turned to rocking and bumping
as if we were off-road.
Desert track
sprung to mind, which raised a
thought that my initial notion was correct and these were professionals.

When I tried to turn, the cramps returned,
so I remained in position. All I could think of was to rub my head against the
wheel-well, in the hope some of my hair would drop out of the sack and leave
DNA evidence. The vehicle stopped with a lurch. My heartbeat went off the
scale, like a drum beating out a warning. The toes of my left foot pried off my
remaining shoe to relieve a cramp.

The trunk popped. Grasping hands hauled me
out and dumped me on the ground.

‘Get up,’ someone called out in a strong
Texas accent.

It was an idiotic request. The entire right
side of my body was stiff. Landing awkwardly had given me dead-leg. I wish I
could have complied, because, just as I imagined the pain couldn’t get any
worse, my ribs exploded with a crunch, as something I assumed was a boot dug into
my body.

‘Careful with the merchandise, or we won’t
get paid,’ someone said.

His words made me forget the pain and I
wanted to sing out ‘Hallelujah!’ If I was worth a paycheque, they were hardly
likely to blow out my brains. Once more, they dragged me to my feet and my body
hurtled in one direction while facing in the other. My back slammed against an
obstacle. Fingers felt what I imagined was aluminium. A creak of door hinges
and heightened senses gave me a feeling the door opened outward. They hustled me
up two metallic-sounding steps. The floor creaked underfoot. I bounced off
objects, giving me the impression it was a narrow corridor. Someone forced my
head down and my backside hit a cushion. Above the stench of body odour mixed
with the smell of cannabis there was a faint aroma of coffee. It had to be a
trailer, or an RV.

One of them said, ‘Pass his things here,
but take out the ammunition clip and hide his gun in that old tin chocolate box
under the sink.’

The electronic tones of a cell phone
indicated a call. I wasn’t proficient in Spanish, but good enough to hear a
greeting followed by something that didn’t make sense when translated.
Something about posting a letter and I assumed a coded message saying they had
me for collection. Then, he finished the call with something I understood. The
final words I translated were ambiguous enough to send my mind into a spin.

‘You sure that’s what you want us to do
with him?’