by Mike Leon
“That is number of a shipping container at the Port of Los Angeles. It will be left out of stack so you can pick it up. Talk to Antonin Smilodonovich if you need a truck,” Volchenko says. “The container should be delivered to the return address on the postcard.”
The address typed in the corner of the card belongs to LGC Management Properties LLC and is located somewhere in the mountains north of the city by Dmitry’s estimate. There is no return address.
“Sergei delivered these trucks personally for many years. I could entrust this to Nikos, but Nikos is a bit, eh, unpolished. You agree? Yes?” Dmitry almost giggles with delight at that statement, but he manages to keep his cool.
“He is a barbarian,” Dmitry says. This is absolutely huge news. This means Volchenko is looking at Dmitry to take Sergei’s place, and it sounds like Nikos was never even in the running. If Dmitry gets Sergei’s job he’ll be able to buy a yacht! And not just a small one either.
“It is important you work with great secrecy. This place on post card. No one else in our business knows about it. No one else need to know. You drive truck there alone. You drop off shipment alone. We are clear? Yes?” Igor Volchenko smiles quietly. It is a smile filled with ruthless intimidation. The secrets held behind it must number in the hundreds, all of them terrible, and even in this moment of fright, Dmitry feels a certain allure. To be like Igor Volchenko is to be like God, omniscient, omnipotent, revered.
“Absolutely clear,” Dmitry says.
“Daddy!” comes a shrill female voice as the door to Dmitry’s office flaps open suddenly. “Daddy, this is shit!”
Igor spins around in surprise. “Babochka?” he says in an uncharacteristically soft tone. “I told you wait in car.” The statement carries an uncertainty Dmitry has not heard yet from the all-powerful syndicate head.
The girl standing in Dmitry’s office has a long thin nose and dust colored hair with light freckles, things she undoubtedly inherited from her father. Her pale blue party dress almost matches his suit, and together they look like they could be attending a very exclusive school’s father-daughter dance.
“I was waiting in the limo, daddy, and then you know what I saw?” Igor’s daughter says. Her English seems native, but her voice is a screeching whine of disrespect that makes Dmitry uneasy. Igor kills people for talking to him in that tone. “I saw a black guy using the same iPhone I have! A black guy! I have a fucking black people phone, daddy!” She waves said cell phone in front of him between two fingers like a playing card
“What is wrong with that?” Volchenko asks in soft placation.
“What the fuck, daddy? How am I supposed to be a style icon if any broke ass hood rat can afford the stuff I have?” She emits a disgusted grumble. “You’re such an idiot.”
“That is hottest new phone, Babochka.” The conversation, which notably lacks gunshots or strangulations, is just now becoming real for Dmitry, who watches in dumbfounded silence as the little witch screeches back at her father.
“I don’t care! I don’t want it anymore!” She throws the iPhone down against the tile floor in front of Dmitry’s desk so hard that it bounces back up and then clatters back down along with several chips of broken touch screen.
“Calm down, Babochka! We fix this. I get you gold plated iPhone today.”
“You better! How long do we have to wait here at this stupid place?”
“Not long. Almost done.” Volchenko seems to notice Dmitry’s profound disturbance for the first time and he moves to introduce the girl. “Dmitry, this my daughter, Katya. Katya this Mr. Fedosov.”
Dmitry waves politely and smiles, but Katya doesn’t seem to notice.
“He looks old,” she says as she pulls another cell phone from her Italian leather handbag. Dmitry is thirty-four. Nobody ever called him old before unless they were kidding with him.
“Kids.” Volchenko shrugs and frowns powerlessly at Dmitry. “You know how they are.”
“How old is she?” Dmitry asks.
“Twenty three.”
“You! Old guy!” Katya demands Dmitry’s attention. She places her pinky finger over the middle of her lips as she gazes coyly into the cell phone in her outstretched arm. “If I put the little pizza slices on my eyes, but I also do the black and white filter, do you think that will make me seem artsy but still fun?” she asks, without taking her eyes off the phone screen.
Dmitry has no idea what she’s talking about, and from the look on his face, Volchenko doesn’t either. “What do you mean?” Dmitry asks with an overcautious pitch.
Katya rolls her eyes. “I’m sending a snap. Duh. I need Spencer to think that I’m like, not dumb, but that I still put out.”
“I don’t like this boy,” Volchenko says.
“His daddy practically owns New York Fashion Week, daddy. This is about my brand. Ugh. You wouldn’t understand. You’re so stupid.”
“You do not have brand, babochka.”
“I have a hundred and twenty thousand followers! I’m a diva!” She growls at her iPhone. “Ugh! Another stupid Le Zob popup.”
“We talk about this at dinner,” Volchenko says.
“We better go to Giroud’s. If you take me to Le Garde one more time, I’m going to scream.”
Volchenko points back at the postcard as he turns to leave with Katya still sniveling ahead of him. “No one sees this place,” he reiterates. “I trust you to get job done alone.”
INT. MORSTON GENERAL HOSPITAL
“Have we met before, Ronald?” says Detective Burnett as he squints at Sid over a cheap pressboard table riddled with coffee mug rings in the dimly lit hospital basement. He is a husky man, but not particularly muscular, and hardly alert by the way he never checks corners as he enters rooms, and never looks over his shoulder despite facing away from the door. Burnett is a poor warrior.
“No,” Sid says, leaning back casually in the square wooden chair across the table. He lowers an eyebrow at the other cop, who looks on menacingly from the corner of the room.
“Are you sure?” Burnett winces as he strains through his memory. “You ever been picked up for anything? Little warrants? Drugs? A little of that sticky icky?”
“No.” Sid remembers everything, and he has no idea how this man might know his face.
“You got any cop relatives or you play on any sports teams? Maybe somebody hung a picture of you somewhere?”
“No,” Sid grunts. He had a circular conversation with the other cop, whose shiny metal name tag identifies him as Belman, for the better part of an hour before this one arrived. He apparently outranks the uniformed one, though he seems no more competent. “I’m really confused about this. Why are we here?”
“That’s a really good question, Ronald. Why don’t you tell me why you think we’re here?”
Sid sits up in his seat. “I was under the impression that this is just what you do in a hospital, but now I’m starting to think that’s not how it is.”
“Don’t get smart with me, kid. Girl’s got bruises all over her. She said you hit her. We have you on assault and battery, maybe domestic battery, so this will go a lot better for you if you cooperate.”
“Is she dead, by-the-way? How did that turn out?”
Burnett cocks his head at an unusual angle and scrunches his face as though slighted as he prepares to answer Sid’s question. “By-the-way? Like, by-the-way, I picked up more mustard while I was at the store?”
“I suppose so.”
“Vesper Mills—Mrs. Mills, will be fine according to the doctors. What I’m more interested in is the location of Mr. Mills—Mr. David Mills, wanted for questioning in a narcotics investigation. Let me read you a description of Mr. Mills and you tell me if he sounds familiar.” Burnett flips a page in a packet of papers he pulled from his blazer. “David Mills, six feet and two inches approximate, black hair, brown eyes—here’s an interesting part—heavily scarred arms due to self-mutilation. Does that sound like anyone you know, Ronald….What is your last name, Ronald?
”
“McDonald,” Sid answers dryly.
“That’s it,” Burnett stands up from his chair. “Put your hands on the table, Ronald. You’re gonna go share a cell with your buddy the Hamburglar.” Burnett whips out a pair of handcuffs as he comes around the table. Sid grabs Burnett’s cornflower blue tie and gives it a yank as he places a foot in front of the detective, tripping the man and sending him flying into the hard brick wall behind them. Sid gets up from his seat and growls at Belam.
“What the fuck?” the uniformed cop says as he reaches for his gun. Sid makes the short distance across the room too fast for Belam to draw and catches the man in the jaw with his flying knee. He uses Burnett’s handcuffs to chain both men to the table, then closes the door to the little holding room.
Outside the door, he stops at the small monitor bank which displays views from all the hospital’s security cameras. He locates the large desktop computer which is connected to the monitors and rips it free from all its connections. Without any flammable chemicals to destroy the damn thing, he tosses it over his shoulder and takes it with him.
He decides he should look into getting some kind of mask because finding and destroying video evidence is becoming tiresome.
EXT. PORT OF LOS ANGELES - NIGHT
“So these guys go to a bar after work, right?” continues Tony the Tiger. The man can’t stay quiet for a full thirty seconds at a time, and he seems to know an infinite number of long form jokes. This is the fourth one in succession. “They get completely fucking hammered. So fucking done. And the one guy, he goes and barfs all down the front of his shirt.”
The air here is sea air, and reminds Dmitry of his boat. He wishes he was on his boat with whores—luscious painted whores—instead of listening to Antonin’s terrible jokes while scouring the port, but it turns out that finding a particular shipping container at the Port of Los Angeles is like looking for Bigfoot unless one has a knowledge of—and access to—the computer system which catalogs all of the containers. The men Dmitry brought with him have neither of these things. And so they’ve spent the last hour walking Yard C with flashlights checking numbers. Vasily Kovorsky was a longshoreman for exactly two days when he was eighteen, and he seems confident, for reasons Dmitry does not understand, that the container is in that yard.
“So the guy, barf all over his nice shirt, he says ‘my wife is going to kill me. She almost left me the last time I did this.’ And so his friend says ‘Here’s what you do. Take a ten dollar bill, put it in your shirt pocket. Tell her some guy at the bar threw up on you and he gave you ten bucks to get your shirt dry cleaned. She’ll understand.’”
Dmitry runs his flashlight beam over the container number in front of him. He glances down at the postcard to triple check. Despite having memorized the number quite a while ago, he holds out hope that his memory is incorrect and that on a second or third look it will turn out to be a match and they can hook the truck up and be on their way. No such luck.
“So the guy gets home later and his wife is furious. She’s yelling and screaming about what a drunk he is, and he says ‘No. See what happened is, this guy threw up on me, and he felt bad, so he gave me ten dollars to get my shirt dry cleaned.’ And she looks at the money and she says ‘This is a twenty dollar bill.’ And the guy says ‘Yeah, well, later on the same guy shit in my pants.’”
Vlad bursts into hysterical laughter. No one else laughs, but Vlad alone is loud enough that Dmitry almost can’t hear one of the others shouting.
“I think we found it!” the distant voice comes from Arkady Volgin, over by one of the other stacks. “What was the number again?” Dmitry saw Arkady write that number down on his arm, so he is annoyed the man is asking now. He doesn’t want to shout the whole string of numbers. “Wait, nevermind. It’s not it.”
“You know more jokes?” Vlad asks. And it starts again.
“So this guy feels sick, and he goes to see a doctor, new doctor he’s never been to before. Doctor checks him out and says ‘Yep, you got a Chinese tapeworm. Very rare. No problem though. Just come back tomorrow with one hard-boiled egg and a chocolate chip cookie.’”
“Over here!”
Dmitry practically takes off from a track start toward the flashing beam of Arkady’s flashlight. Tony the Tiger turns to watch him go with a surprised look and Vlad follows without question. When they get there, Arkady and Piotr Bogdonovich are standing under the reflective block lettering of GMBU3574564. It is a bright red shipping container, with a heavy stainless steel padlock dangling from the locking mechanism.
“This is it, yes?” Piotr says, holding up the matching number he scrawled on his palm at the beginning of their search.
Dmitry nods. “Yes,” he says, lifting up the padlock to verify that it is closed.
“What’s in there?” Tony asks.
Dmitry shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t care. Let’s hook it up to the truck and go.”
EXT. LILY’S HOUSE - NIGHT
It is dark by the time Sid pulls up in front of Lily’s house in Vesper’s car. He had to stop at Wal-Mart for gasoline and then burn that computer in a secluded dumpster behind an apartment complex. He will return the car tomorrow.
As he walks up to the house he spots a thick brown envelope on the welcome mat atop the porch. The lettering on the outside is immediately disconcerting. KILL TEAM ONE, it reads, in hand scrawled deep red smear that appears to be blood. He sniffs it to be sure.
“Fuck,” Sid grumbles. He opens the front door and sweeps the first floor before he heads upstairs. The loud snoring from the master bedroom informs him that Jeanette is here and alive, but he does not find Lily anywhere. Sid sits down on Lily’s black and white striped Jack Skellington bedspread and tears open the package. Beyond the brown paper and a half inch of bubble wrap padding is a plastic case containing a generic looking DVD which reads WATCH ME in black magic marker. Sid does not hesitate to put the disc in Lily’s iMac, which is always left running in the corner of the room. It autoplays.
The picture cuts to a darkened room. Lily sits slumped over in a folding chair. Her chest is covered only by a white dress shirt which is buttoned haphazardly. Her thick black eye-shadow runs down her cheeks. Her pale green underwear features brightly in the darkness of the shot.
“Help me,” she cries.
“GREETINGS,” speaks a disembodied, unnaturally deep, electronically scrambled voice. “As you can see, we have your woman.”
The source of the voice appears from the left side of the frame. He’s a huge man, broad shouldered and pot-bellied. His face is hidden behind a black balaclava. He steps behind Lily with a heavy stainless steel butcher knife in hand. He puts the knife to her throat.
“You have insulted us, stupid Amerikos, and so we are to make her suffer for glory of the motherland,” the threatening kidnapper says. A gloved hand moves to her left breast, skimming it lightly in a circle, then patting quickly and with an open fist, as though attempting to smother a small fire with bare skin. “If I am not too clear, we make our way with your woman many times... AND THIS MEAN ALL OF THE WEIRD BUTT STUFF.”
“Wh—?” Lily yelps. The video skips.
The kidnapper again holds the butcher knife to Lily’s throat. He points his gloved finger menacingly at the screen.
“Now your woman will die,” he says. He wraps his fingers around her mouth and lifts her head, exposing her soft jugular. “For Soviet Russia! For the motherland!”
“No!” Lily shrieks. “No!” Her torso jolts upward, pulling at the handcuffs that hold her to the chair. Lily screams as the fat knife enters her body. Her blood pours from the wound as the kidnapper draws it from her belly and drives it back in. Then again. And again.
Watching Lily die is like swallowing acid. It’s as bad as every ache Sid has ever had as he watches her sputter and choke, unable to fill her shredded lungs with anything but more blood. It seems to flow from her, filling Sid’s world. Smothering him even as it drowns her. It fills his vision
as Lily stalls into the final stillness of death, her eyes wide open in terror. The flood of red is illusory, but he feels the rage enough to make it real.
“This is just the start,” the kidnapper says. “You will pay for what you did to Sergei, American dog.”
The video cuts to black, but the world remains red. By percentage, almost everyone he has ever met is dead—mostly from him killing them. But none of them were Lily. She was special. A rumble builds in Sid’s throat, slowly changing to a growl and then a roar. He puts his fist through the iMac screen. Sparks fly and the little fan inside the machine makes a depressing whirr as it dies.
“The Russians…” Sid rasps as he walks from the bedroom dripping blood from his knuckles.
EXT. LGC MANAGEMENT PROPERTIES LLC - NIGHT
It is close to midnight when the truck slows to a stop inside the gated turnaround driveway of LGC Management Properties LLC—although no one would know it has that name from the lack of any distinguishing signage outside. Dmitry had to pick through the mailbox to verify that the address belonged to that company.
The building itself is a two story house with dark wood siding. It may have been a farmhouse once, but there is no farm here anymore. The house looks old, 1800s old, but the stone wall at the front of the property appears much newer, and the motorized iron gate across the driveway is certainly not original. Whoever is waiting inside had no issue buzzing Dmitry’s caravan in once he identified himself.
Dmitry steps out of the eighteen wheeler’s driver door and looks down the length of the shipping container’s left side, easing some paranoid and impossible notion that it may have fallen off unnoticed during the drive. Only seconds later, a man in a maroon bathrobe emerges from the front door of the house with both hands ahead of him, a show that he is not armed. He is a lanky man, fuzzy chested, with long hair that only grows on the sides of his head all held back in a long ponytail.