Red Scare (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 3)

by Mike Leon

  “But I talked to her and she didn’t run away!”

  “What do you mean? You’re not going to keep talking to her, are you?”

  “I’ll probably have to if I’m gonna fuck her.”

  “You better be joking.”

  “No. She was smoking hot. Of course, it’ll probably turn out she’s some kind of weird exotic assassin trying to kill me, because that’s what always happens when girls talk to me, but if she isn’t I’m gonna take her to pound town for sure.”

  “I can’t believe you.” Lily pauses to reconsider. “No. Actually, I can believe you. But that doesn’t make it any better. You’re a jerk!”

  “What for?”

  “You want to cheat on me and you’re telling me about it! I’m pretty sure that qualifies you for jerk status!”

  “Cheetah what now?”

  “You want to have sex with other girls!” Lily shouts. The Berean shopkeeper glances startlingly at her.

  “Yeah. For sure. Lots and lots of them.” That causes the shopkeeper to mutter some disdainful comment under his breath and shake his head.

  “That’s not okay!”

  “What do you mean, it’s not? What if they want to?”

  “It doesn’t matter if they want to! You’re my… my… You’re only supposed to have sex with me!”

  “What? Who says? What if you’re not around?”

  “Then you don’t have sex!”

  “But that’s stupid. I’m supposed to say no to fucking? Where did that come from?”

  “From me! Okay?” She’s loud now. Too loud. Mall walkers have stopped and begun to stare at them. “If you want to keep doing whatever it is we do, you’re not calling that dumb slut, or any other dumb slut!”

  “You’re attracting attention,” Sid grumbles as he glances around, noting the faces of those who might be watching this exchange in case they make a more threatening appearance in his future. Then he glares down at her with quiet condescending anger. Lily is a girl who bleeds cynicism. It isn’t like her to lose her cool over something less than a homicide. “You’re acting really weird.”

  Lily breathes deep. Her next words come at a low volume. “I know. I just—I… I’m pregnant.”

  “What?”

  “I’m pregnant. And it’s yours.”

  “You said that couldn’t happen.”

  “I didn’t think it could! Like five different doctors told me it would never happen. I guess they were wrong. I don’t know what to do. I—”

  “You have to kill it.”

  Lily stops short of whatever else she was about to say and stares into his eyes. Her lips curl slowly into a feint visage of disgust.

  “Don’t do it!” shouts the shopkeeper in the Berean store. “There are places you can go for help!”

  Kayla exits Hot Topic holding up a t-shirt plastered with an image of Rex Octane as Jack Reacharound. “This was on clearance!” Kayla says, displaying her t-shirt excitedly. “Seventy percent off! It’s really ironically cool, you know, because that movie was so bad.”

  Lily smacks Sid in the mouth. He almost feels it, and he is a little impressed by that.

  “Whoa!” Kayla says. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “What?” Sid says. “Babies are a weakness. A massive tactical liability.”

  Lily’s pale skin heats to a shade of rageful red before she turns away from him and stomps away without a word.

  Kayla shuffles after her. “What happened? Lily?”

  The girls leave Sid standing in front of the Christian book store. He glances around the mall, looking for any sign of spies, and sees nothing but the bitter eyes of the judgmental shopkeeper.

  “What did I do?” Sid says.

  “You’re a bad man,” says the shopkeeper. “A very, very, bad man.”

  Just then, Vesper exits Hot Topic carrying her overly large spike-studded black leather purse. She stops when she sees Sid standing next door and waves. “Hey! You’re still here? Where’s your girlfriend?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Sid says.

  Vesper smiles innocently. “You want to see my CD collection?” she says.

  INT. OLYMPUS GYROS - DAY

  “I’m telling you, man. That hooker is pulling your chain,” says Special Agent Max Wintergreen as he picks up a bundle of cheese fries with his splotchy stainless steel fork. “The Ultra Lounge hit was a bunch of Koreans. It had to be.”

  “The whore said one man.” Dmitry sits in the corner of the very last booth at the back of Olympus Gyros, squishing himself into that crease as though he could somehow vanish completely into it in the event that someone who matters might happen to walk in looking for baklava and find them here. He ducks behind a wire menu holder he placed at the end of the table to screen his face from anyone outside the booth. “He wasn’t Asian.”

  “She’s lying.” Wintergreen continues to shovel fries into his face without a care in the world. He doesn’t have to worry about a misstep getting him fitted for cement shoes.

  “I don’t think so.” Dmitry shakes his head in grim disagreement.

  “Maybe she believes it. You never know what chicks like that are on. Junk, poppers, molly—she might have mainlined a melted down bottle of Oxycontin and Flintstone Kids two minutes before the hit. She might think it was Kermit the Frog and Captain Kangaroo in there. Where’s she stay? I’ll have the guys pick her up and work her over.”

  “Actually, I want to talk to you about that.”

  “We’re not relocating the hooker.”

  “Volchenko will kill her.”

  “Good. Then we’ll at least have something on the son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Max, really?”

  “Fuck you, Chad. Fuck. You.”

  “And her two kids.”

  “Three people? You want three people in WITSEC? This is getting very expensive.”

  “Cry me a river, man. You have the funds.”

  “No. The Federal Government of the United States of America has the funds. And you’ve got me spending them on some street walker who made up a ridiculous fairy tale to string you along.”

  “What if she wasn’t lying? What if Sergei did something to piss off the wrong guy?”

  “Like who? Mack Bolan? John Wick? Nick Carter? Some guy who’s impossibly skilled in the art of ending people horrible and will singlehandedly and systematically take apart the entire mob while the boss screams ‘why can’t you kill him, you idiots? He’s just one man!’”

  “Humor me, Max. If it were possible, who would he be? Who around here can do that kind of thing?”

  “Nobody!” Max laughs. “Those are fantasies for retired army vets and zitty teenagers that can’t get laid.”

  Dmitry smirks as he weighs his meager evidence against the senior agent’s experience and emphatic insistence. “Yeah. You’re probably right.” He even chuckles as he thinks about it. “She even said he had ammo bandoliers. You know, like Rambo.”

  “See? She was tripping balls. It was the Koreans. Had to be.”

  “Probably. Do the I.T. people think they can recover the video?”

  “Fuck if I know. The bureau has us all turning over loose rocks in Morston for durka durka Mohammad jihads. The Ultra Lounge is LAPD shit. It’s not even our ballgame until you think you can bring RICO. And speaking of…” Wintergreen points a forkful of fries at Dmitry with a suspicious glare. “What do you have for me?”

  Dmitry pulls a sealed white business envelope from his pocket and sets it on the table between them. “You know Antonin Smilodonovich?” He pushes it until it bumps Wintergreen’s plate.

  “Tony the Tiger?” Wintergreen says, grasping the envelope and checking its width between his fingers. He shakes it near his ear to confirm the plastic rattling from within. It’s a mini-cassette.

  “Yeah. I have him on tape going over resupply, in detail, with two of his people.”

  “He’s a soldier, Chad. He’s a fucking goon. I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Yeah. H
e’s a mandavoshka, but—”

  “A what? Jesus Christ. Do you even realize when you’re doing the accent anymore?”

  “It’s called method acting, Max. I need to become the character.”

  “You’re becoming a schizophrenic looney toon. You’re not Dmitry Fedosov! There is no Dmitry Fedosov! We made him up! You’re not even Russian! Your name is Chad Billingsley. You’re from fucking Portland!”

  “Okay! Okay! Just keep it down!”

  “I’m not gonna keep it down. I’m worried about you, man. You’ve been on the inside for six years! Nobody does that! There’s people at the bureau forgot you exist. They had you on an in memoriam thing in the back of the newsletter last month! I had to go to the AD to remind him you were still alive. If I have a heart attack or something, you’re fucked. That’s it! You’re Dmitry Fedosov then, russian mob boss, permanently! And I’m not sure that would bother you anymore.”

  “I just need a few more months.”

  “That’s what you said a few months ago. That’s what you said a few months before that, and a few months before that, all the way back to the beginning of this thing, when we were just trying to nail Nikos Petrovich for tax evasion. You just keep moving up—Dmitry Fedosov keeps moving up anyway. And you keep promising me bigger and bigger fish, but we’ve got nothing.”

  “I’m close now, Max. I think I’ll be able to put RICO on Volchenko. I just need a little more time.”

  “I’m pulling the plug.”

  “You’re pulling the plug on your career then. What do you think is gonna happen when the AD finds out you ran this case for six years and got dick? Your career is fucked. You can have that if you want. Or you can have Volchenko. The Obshchiy Syndicate, Max!” Dmitry leans down behind the menu, so that his chin is nearly touching the table as he whisper-yells. “The whole thing! They’re gonna pin a fucking medal on you. Fuck the AD—they’ll make you director. You’ll be having lunch with the president. All I need is a few months.”

  It is a barefaced lie, of course. Dmitry has everything he needs to take down Volchenko’s syndicate neatly arranged on a bookshelf in his condo. He has hundreds of tapes. There are tapes of Sergei talking about hits, Sergei talking about importing women, Nikos beating a pedophile to death, meetings with their heroin connection in Afghanistan, Sergei bribing public officials, LAPD detectives tipping all of them off about shipments and stash houses, conversations with the accountants who launder their money—including Volchenko’s money. Dmitry has a goldmine of the stuff, enough to put an end to everything the second it becomes too risky. Wintergreen might suspect. He might not. It doesn’t matter. Dmitry knows he has the special agent right where he needs him, and from the quiet expression he can see now, he knows he has won this argument yet again.

  “Six more months,” Wintergreen sighs. “No more. And I want Volchenko after that.” This is exactly the same line he used the last several times they had this talk.

  Dmitry leaves the check with Wintergreen and his FBI expense account. The FBI has an abundance of such tedious things—accounts, reports, releases, documents, forms, forms, forms. It made him sick every day that he was there.

  Vlad has the car ready a few blocks away in a Chic-fil-A parking lot. Dmitry gets in after circling the block on foot looking over his shoulder. Sheena is waiting in the back seat for him, still looking tired from whatever she did last night after the boating excursion ended. It doesn’t stop her from clinging to his shoulder as soon as he sits down.

  “To the office,” Dmitry tells Vlad over the seat.

  “Aw, Fedsy,” Sheena says, as Vlad turns the ignition. “Why do you have to work so much?” She tickles his arm playfully.

  “I thought it was so I can afford to pay expensive whore to suck my khuy, but expensive whore just sleeps in my car all day, so I don’t know.”

  Sheena smiles at him and leans over to undo his pants.

  Seeing this, would anyone wonder why he does what he does? In Portland, Dmitry was a pathetic slug. From the time he was a child, his life was nothing but bleak boredom. His father was a sociology professor at PSU and his mother was a child psychologist who fed him kale. He had no friends and only educational toys to play with well into his teens. He attended an experimental elementary school that assigned every student a grade of S+ for being a unique soul. His family did not own a television. He was not allowed to play sports. His mother called them violent gorilla games. In high school, he was president of the five-member chess club and was not allowed out past nine any night. In those days, he yearned for the vibrant elements of excitement just outside his grasp, outside his window, outside his life. He wanted to eat cheeseburgers and get in fights and run wild with pretty girls. He had a small taste of those things in school at PSU, where he secretly majored in criminology while his parents thought he was studying social work. He wanted to be suave and a little dangerous. So as soon as he could, he ran away, all the way to the FBI...and found nothing but forms.

  The FBI wasn’t any of the things he thought it would be. Most of his time was spent behind a desk checking memos and forwarding emails. There were no secret liaisons or femme fatales. They had him going over white collar crimes that didn’t involve anything but combing bank accounts for the first two years he was a full agent. They rarely even produced any charges since the suspects were usually connected with Washington royalty. He practically jumped at undercover work as soon it seemed like even a remote possibility. The rest of the story requires no explanation.

  Would Chad Billingsley from Portland have a boat, two sports cars, a high-rise condo in Manhattan Beach, and a loaded 9mm strapped to his ankle at all times? Would he have a torso covered in gulag tattoos? Would he curse at whores in Russian for not properly sucking his khuy while he snorts mountains of cocaine on the deck of his boat?

  No. Chad had nothing but a lonely one bedroom apartment and a cat that hated him. He’s never going back to that.

  And why should he? People say the Russian mafia is so terrible—even he thought so when he first took this assignment. But the truth is far from it. The mob is a business. They don’t want to hurt anybody. There’s no money in that. They simply provide a service. They provide drugs, prostitution, bootleg brand name products—these are victimless crimes! Dmitry hasn’t murdered anyone. He sits behind a desk all day. And the rare few hits that go down are always scumbags who deserve it—guys like Istvan who knew exactly what the stakes were and blew it by doing something exceedingly terrible and stupid.

  Chad will never put RICO charges on Igor Volchenko. Chad is dead. There is only Dmitry Fedosov now, and Dmitry Fedosov has a good thing going.

  INT. VESPER’S APARTMENT - DAY

  Vesper’s tiny apartment is just barely a step up from living in a heap of garbage. A pile of soiled sheets, sprinkled with what appear to be cereal flakes, lies strewn across the carpet to trip anyone coming in from the front door. A light fixture dangles on the end of a power cable from a jagged hole in the ceiling, plaster still clumped around the cord from before it was ripped free by some hanging hooligan. The kitchen is just a stovetop and small counter in the corner, and it is filthy with crumbs and old frozen food wrappers. Sid takes a look at a framed green and white poster for Wicked, which sits propped against the wall near the door. The glass over the photo has a large crack in it and the wall above it is gashed at eye level.

  “My friend did that when he was drunk,” Vesper says, closing the door behind them. “I’d offer you something to drink, but all I have is bad milk and a half bottle of sour mix.”

  “I’m not thirsty,” Sid says.

  “Okay.” She smiles. Sid puts his hand on her hip and encroaches on her body. “You’re frisky!” she says. She lets loose that dolphin chatter again and then pushes him away with a very sudden uncertainty. “Are you just pretending to be cool to get the cookie?”

  “I don’t eat cookies.”

  She gives a dry false laugh. “Ha. Ha. What I mean is you’re not one of those boys
who’s afraid of commitment, are you?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “Oh really? If you’re so hard, then why do you cut?”

  “Cut?” Sid shrugs. “You know. Sometimes you have to stab a ninja.”

  “Is that what you call it? Stabbing the ninja? That’s so dark. I understand though, because the ninja is elusive, like the pain you’re chasing away.”

  “Uh… Sure.” Sid pulls Vesper close to him and nibbles at her neck.

  “Do you think it would be romantic if we cut together sometime?”

  “That’s kinda kinky…” Vesper’s right butt cheek begins to vibrate as Sid wraps his hand around it. She reaches back and pushes his hand away so she can reach into that pocket. From it, she removes a small black cell phone with a badly shattered screen.

  “I’m a kinky girl,” Vesper says, looking at him seductively, then glancing away at the cell phone. “Give me a sec. I have to take this.”

  Sid shrugs and wanders farther into the apartment as Vesper takes the phone call right beside him. He takes a bored look at some of her mostly broken accoutrements as he circles the perimeter of the room, but he doesn’t make it far before the side of her conversation that he can hear pulls in his attention.

  “Yeah. This is she,” Vesper says. “Right. What do you mean he filed a motion? A motion for what? What does that mean? HE THINKS HE CAN TAKE BRIANNA AWAY FROM ME?!?! THAT FUCKIN’ PIECE OF SHIT THINKS HE CAN TAKE HER AWAY?!!”

  Sid stops walking around the room to look on in cold silence as Vesper screams into the phone with a rage unparalleled by most of the suicide bombers Sid has killed.

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN MERIT FOR LITIGATION?!! BEST INTEREST OF WHO? WHAT ABOUT MY BEST INTEREST?!! I’LL FUCKIN’ FUCK HIM UP IF HE THINKS HE CAN GET OUT OF HIS PAYMENTS LIKE THIS! IT WAS ONE GODDAMN JOINT! SO WHAT? YOU CAN’T GIVE YOUR OWN CHILD A PLANT THAT GROWS IN THE GROUND?! OF COURSE I MADE HER DRIVE! I WASN’T ABOUT TO DRIVE HOME THAT FUCKED UP WITH HER IN THE CAR! I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA! WELL FUCK YOU TOO! HELLO? GOD DAMN IT!”

  Vesper whips the cell phone against the closest wall. Tiny chips of phone glass come loose from the phone and tumble to the stained carpet along with it.