The Stamp

By Ed Brodow

What would you do if your sister is murdered and the killer gets away with it?
Tommy Courten, an IBM sales executive, finds his life upside down when his baby sister is murdered and the prime suspect escapes to South America. The police and the F.B.I. give up on the case but Tommy, who is addicted to the violence he experienced as a marine in Vietnam, is intent on revenge. He embarks on a lone manhunt to bring the psychopathic killer to justice. Tommy tracks the man from a Virginia suburb to a dangerous, remote area of Colombia that is controlled by the drug mafia and indigenous tribal people. When he and the killer finally come face-to-face, Tommy is shocked by what he discovers about his own true nature and the path to personal redemption. The Stamp was inspired by a sensational 2007 murder case.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ed Brodow
• Release date: Jan 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465884718

Ed Brodow

Ed Brodow is the bestselling author of Fixer, Negotiation Boot Camp, Women From Venus, and Beating the Success Trap. An internationally recognized expert on the art of negotiation, Ed was dubbed "King of Negotiators" by SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt. Ed has appeared as negotiation guru on PBS, ABC National News, Fox News, Inside Edition, and Fortune Business Report. As a speaker, he has enthralled more than 1,000 audiences in Paris, Milan, Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok, Sao Paulo, Athens, Nairobi, Toronto, and New York. Ed is a veteran member of Screen Actors Guild, appearing in American and European movies with Jessica Lange, Ron Howard, and Christopher Reeve. A former Marine Corps officer, Ed graduated from Brooklyn College and lives in Monterey, California. His latest book is In Lies We Trust: How Politicians and the Media Are Deceiving the American Public.

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THE STAMP

Ed Brodow

Author of Fixer

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

The Stamp

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Copyright © 2012 Ed Brodow

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Published by Ed Brodow

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The medal on the cover page is the Navy Cross.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: The Stamp

Chapter 2: The Crime

Chapter 3: In Country

Chapter 4: The Guajira

Chapter 5: Prey

Acknowledgements

Reviews

About the Author

Adventure is not outside, it is inside.

Chinese fortune cookie

Chapter 1: The Stamp

Some people have a year stamped on their forehead. This year defines who they are and prevents them from growing emotionally. I’m sure you’ve known a few of them. They confuse the present with the past. Please forgive me, but I am stuck in such-and-such a year, it was the most intense experience of my life and try as I may, I just can’t get beyond it.

1918 was stamped on the forehead of my grandmother’s brother Phil. He was in the First World War, bleeding in the trenches, up to his ass in mud and guts. Mud and blood and guts and shrapnel and bayonet charges and mustard gas and rats and dead bodies piled high one on top of the other. He never quite got over it. Uncle Phil struggled from job to job for twenty years or so and then finally gave up and moved in with Aunt Gayle and her husband and did nothing much except go to the beach every day for the next twenty-five years until one day he simply dropped dead. His life had really stopped back in 1918.

The year stamped on Aunt Jeannette’s forehead was 1946, the year Cousin Paulie was born and she had to give up her modeling job in New York so she could live in that dreary little house in New Jersey married to a dour insurance salesman who wouldn’t go into town to see a Broadway show if his life depended on it, which it obviously didn’t, because all he could ever think about was closing more insurance contracts. After a while, Jeannette made up alternative realities and lived in those stories and fantasies that eventually became more real for her than her own deadly existence. Who could blame her? When she developed Alzheimer’s Disease I wasn’t surprised. What the hell did she have to remember, after 1946? In spite of my medical training, I have always believed that Alzheimer’s is really a refuge for people who have nothing in their entire lives that they want to remember.

The year stamped on my friend Tommy Courten’s forehead was 1968. In that frightful year, it was First Lieutenant Thomson Abraham Courten, USMC, at your service. Or really in your service, which was the service of the military-industrial complex as it was known back then. When I met Tommy, it was 1971 and he was working for one of those big corporations that tried to use him up the way the government had used him up in Vietnam. I had just begun my first year in medical school at Mt. Sinai and needed a roommate. A friend introduced me to Hardy DeVaux and I moved into his apartment on East 87th Street down the block from Gracie Mansion. It was a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood and Hardy was supportive of me as I suffered through my medical studies.

I had moved in only the week before when Hardy came home