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

by Mike Leon

“Hey!” the old man shouts. The lap of his grey sweatpants is a foot-tall tent. “This Viagra doesn’t last forever, sweetie.”

  “Who are you?” Yvonne asks, suddenly quivering with fear.

  “I made Sergei go away. Now I feel like making the whole syndicate go away,” Sid says. “Volchenko.”

  “I don’t know where to find Volchenko. I never met him.”

  The geriatric client cranks at them again. “Buddy, can’t you see the lady’s trying to make an honest living over here?” He sucks up a big drag of vapor from a glowing e-cigarette.

  “Who will know?” Sid says, ignoring the man.

  “I—Is Sergei dead? Really?” Yvonne squeaks in delayed reaction. Her eyes rapidly shift with nervous excitement.

  “Who knows where to find Volchenko?” Sid snarls. “And where can I find them?”

  “It has been years. I never knew any of the others. Sergei didn’t let me talk to them. He was jealous.” Yvonne shakes her head slowly as she fails to recollect anything useful. Then a spark of something shines in her eyes. “But the whorehouse where he met me, Happy Harmony Dream Spa it is called. The madam there works for them. Denise.”

  “Where is it?”

  “This woman is dangerous. I once saw her beat a girl half to death over ten dollars.”

  “Where is it?” Sid repeats, more forcefully this time.

  EXT. LILY’S HOUSE - NIGHT

  Red searches for something heavy in the mulch below the rear windows of the Hoffman house. Red watches from a stolen Ford Taurus in front of the house. He watches from in back of the house. He can’t find a brick or anything sufficient, so he smashes the glass with his fist. He uses his elbow to clear the pointed teeth that remain in the sash. It bleeds profusely afterward, but he does not care. He climbs into the window sill and rolls forward, falling on his shoulder and leaving a bloody smear along the wood floor near a kitchen table. He brings himself to stand, dripping blood down the tips of his fingers.

  “Hello?!” he says. “Is anybody here? I don’t want to hurt anybody. Just want to smoke rock.” There is no reply. He tries again as he combs over the photographs pasted to the refrigerator. There is a tall, vivacious red haired woman in some of the photos. She is quite the specimen, and judging from her scant outfits, is a woman the kill team would appreciate. “Yep, I just need money for crack,” he loudly declares. He hears no creaking in the house, and sees none of the windows illuminate from outside. It seems no one is home.

  More of the refrigerator photos feature a much younger woman, pale and vicious. She appears like the bride of some vampire in all but the oldest of the pictures, in which she is just a child. Her eyes are a vibrant blue but her long hair is the blackest black. Could it be? Could she be? Red leans near the largest photo, a picture from some formal event, perhaps a high school promenade. He examines her face, the clear definition of her jaw against her skinny neck, her sharp eyebrows, her black painted lips and encircled eyes. It is hard to make out any resemblance through her make-up, but it seems the most reasonable conclusion. She is his daughter.

  Red snatches a towel from the oven nearby and wraps it around his bleeding arm as he goes through the rest of the house. He wants only to confirm the presence of his old enemy. He has no hope of overpowering the kill team. For that he will need to return with reinforcements.

  On his way up the stairs he shouts again to no response and passes rich collections of baubles and fringe that can only be the trappings of women. It is peculiar to imagine the kill team tolerating these stupid bits of sentiment in this drab middle class existence. What identity does he use? Does he masquerade as some mundane retiree? An old salesman or travel agent perhaps? Does he cringe every day in secret at the Precious Moments figure on the little end table at the top of the stairs?

  Red picks up the stupid porcelain thing intending to dash it to pieces on the floor, but then he remembers a figure Gloria kept that was much like it. He sighs quietly and then gently sets it back on the table.

  The master bedroom is also girlishly decorated, but it also lacks any male elements. Red rips open the dresser drawers and finds only women’s clothes in them. There are no guns, no boots, none of the things the kill team would keep handy. In the adjoining bathroom he finds only one toothbrush, and the only razor is a bright pink thing with five blades. Most damning, the toilet seat is down.

  Could he have the wrong house? What if the Arabs simply lied to him? It does not seem unlikely.

  He makes his way down the hall, past an empty bedroom containing only a made bed and some dry accoutrements, and to the next bedroom. This one is nothing like the master bedroom. The walls are coated with loud images of blood and guns and death. The bed is disheveled, and the floor is littered with black thong panties and high heeled shoes. A rifle cleaning kit sits on the nightstand atop a stack of old VHS tapes which includes Troma’s War, Killer Condom, and Inseminoid. It is a curious sight, but a more curious sight is the brown envelope on the desk in the corner, just below the cracked flat panel Apple computer. The envelope is addressed to Kill Team One. Next to the envelope is an empty CD case marked with the words WATCH ME.

  INT. HAPPY HARMONY DREAM SPA - DAY

  It’s a good day for a whore house barbecue.

  Sid kicks open the front door to the Happy Harmony Dream Spa. He carries the FNX-9 pistol, a bunch of packed magazines, and a duffle bag containing fourteen gasoline filled Molotov cocktails he made himself. The Molotov cocktails, devised and named during the 1939 Winter War to censure reviled Soviet Chairman Vyacheslav Molotov, are made from 40-ounce malt liquor bottles Sid picked up at Food Mart, filled with gasoline, resealed, and affixed with four-inch storm matches as wicks.

  Sid is immediately confronted by a tiny Asian woman wearing a kimono. She’s the ringleader; the one Yvonne told him runs all of this for the Russians. She yells directly into his face without any regard for her own safety. “Hey, micro dick, this ain’t—” Sid grabs hold of her wrist to keep her from going anywhere, then he kicks the knife of his foot right through her closest shinbone. Her leg folds in half as she screeches toward the floor. Sid plants his boot on her chest and unzips his duffel bag next to her.

  “Oooohhh no! My leg! My leg!” she screams. To be fair, her leg looks like it could be tied in a knot right now, and she is lying on top of her foot in a way that no human should. She screams almost incoherently as Sid yanks the cork from a Molotov cocktail and pours the highly flammable contents out onto her face.

  “Are you Denise?” Sid says.

  “What do you want?!?” she bawls through a steady stream of tears.

  “Volchenko,” he says. He smashes a cocktail next to her head as she continues to blubber and squeal. “How do I find him?”

  “I don’t know! Please don’t kill me! I don’t know anything!”

  “Volchenko.” Now he has an audience. Several greasy looking skinny women have gathered in a doorway at the rear of the room. Wrinkled, sweat clothes cling to them. One girl’s cotton shorts say JUICY. Sid throws a cocktail over their heads, into the hallway beyond them. The women scatter. “Volchenko,” he repeats.

  “Never met him! Honest! Don’t even know what he looks like!”

  Sid scoops up the duffel bag, and flips it upside down, raining bottles down on the disgusting bitch. “You run this place for him, right?” He picks up one of the unbroken bottles.

  “I only see Sergei! Except somebody killed him!”

  Sid raises his gun and pops off a shot into the cheap ceiling panels. Chalky white mineral fiber falls from above as he yells into the back of the massage parlor. “Time for all the whores to leave. This is your only warning.” Then he points the gun down at Denise as he backs toward the door with the last cocktail in his hand. “Give me names, or you burn alive.”

  “Nikos Petrovich! Dmitry Fedosov! They work for Volchenko!”

  “Where do I find them?”

  “Petrovich has a butcher shop. The Prime Cut. It’s in West L.A.. Fedosov I don�
�t know.”

  Sid shoots Denise between the eyes. Her body twitches violently in the soup of broken glass and gasoline. He strikes the storm match against the sidewalk outside the door and then pitches the cocktail bottle inside as he turns to leave.

  The Happy Harmony Dream Spa burns behind him. It is an inferno by the measures of most men but just a small bonfire to the kill team. Half-dressed whores run screaming from the billowing black smoke, tracking burning fuel on their feet and clothes. A tall man in a cowboy hat shoves his way through a gaggle of them and tumbles to the sidewalk while wrestling to remove his flaming pants.

  Sid gave them fair warning. He is not a barbarian.

  INT. THE PRIME CUT - DAY

  Sid enters the Prime Cut Butcher Shop and N.Y. Style Deli just after noon. He walks in through the front door and finds the thirty by thirty store devoid of customers. The floors are grimy and the three short aisles of shelving are stocked with dust covered canned goods and some other freeze dried boxed items. A pudgy man wearing a white apron stands alone behind the glass deli counter.

  “Hi,” is the butcher’s cursory acknowledgement as he eyes Sid suspiciously. It’s not a good start to the customer service experience. The district manager at GameStop would have reprimanded Sid for that kind of lackluster greeting.

  “I’m here to see Nikos Petrovich,” Sid says.

  “Never heard of him.” The butcher’s response is too quick and practiced to hold any veracity. He picks up a meat tenderizer from the cutting board on the ledge near his belt buckle.

  Sid has the FNX stuffed in his sweatshirt, but he doesn’t need to make that much noise just yet. He punches the butcher in the face over the deli counter and the man topples backward into a stainless steel countertop. The meat tenderizer hits the ground with a dull thud just before the butcher flops down next to it. Sid walks around the counter and pushes his way through the flimsy plastic two-way swinging door that leads into the rear of the shop.

  The room behind the deli is a cramped space, populated by a large steel table, two meat slicers, and a big sink stained with red grime. A heavy wooden door at the back of that room confirms there is more to this building beyond the butcher shop facade.

  Sid raises a boot and stomps against the door. The wood cracks in half and falls noisily to the floor in the next room as he steps through the doorway. Ahead of him, five men sit around a collapsible card table covered in stacks of cash money—money in boxes, money in bags, money flowing through their startled fingers. One man reaches for a pistol which is holding down a stack of hundred dollar bills on the card table, but Sid quick draws and fires a shot from the FNX into the goon’s hand, then another into his crotch.

  “AAAGGGH! Moy khuy!” the goon screams as he flops back into his chair.

  Another man reaches into his tracksuit jacket and Sid shoots him in the genitals as well. That one just collapses into a squirming heap on the floor.

  Sid pulls the pistol into a low ready position and glares at the table of gangsters. “Does anybody else want to go for a gun?” he says.

  Two of the unwounded stare at him silently. The third shakes his head in the negative.

  “Which one of you is Nikos Petrovich?” Sid demands. Three of the men around the table stare back at him like stone statues, and the man on the floor might as well be dead. The fifth man, the one with a lap full of pooling blood, quickly and wordlessly fingers a balding, middle aged, gold toothed, pink suited gentleman across the table.

  “Blyad!” shouts Nikos. He lurches to his feet and shakes his fist at the snitch, cursing and flinging bits of spittle all over the table. “Yobanaya suka!”

  “He shot my fucking dick off!” screams the man with his dick shot off.

  Nikos is the only one Sid needs alive, and he doesn’t see any reason to let this scene play out any longer. He waves the pistol across the collection of gangsters and squeezes the trigger four times, nearly as fast as the weapon can cycle, doling out four kills in a half-second headshot sweep arpeggio.

  Nikos Petrovich is left standing with his arms crossed defensively in the middle of a group of corpses. He looks to Sid and the smoking pistol through watery eyes and his next action might as well be written on his forehead. He bolts for the rear exit. Sid watches him go as he thumbs the decocker on the FNX and tucks the gun back into his pants.

  Petrovich makes it to the tan steel door and shoves his palms against its waist-high push bar. The bolt clicks free of the strike plate, and the hinges creak, but the door halts suddenly, only an inch out of the jamb. Nikos smashes his face against it and reels backward.

  “I parked there.” Sid says. “I didn’t see a sign. Is that okay?”

  “Fuck you,” Nikos says. Blood pours from his nose like a faucet. He grabs dizzily for the emergency fire extinguisher mounted on the wall next to the door. On his second attempt his fingers wrap around the handle atop the bright red canister and he rips it from the wall.

  “I didn’t even think of that,” Sid says. “It’s probably a fire hazard.” He yanks the fire extinguisher away from Nikos and kicks the gangster up against the door. “Good thing we have this.”

  Sid squeezes the extinguisher lever and sprays freezing white foam all over Nikos’ face and shoulders. The gangster yaks and coughs as he tumbles to the floor, wiping sheets of chalky white powder away from his mouth and nose.

  In a flash, the KA-BAR knife is out and Sid is pressing the point of the blade up Nikos’ left nostril.

  “Mind if I pick your brain?” Sid says.

  “You!” Nikos chokes. “You killed Sergei.”

  “That’s right. And now I’m going to kill all the rest of you. Everybody on Igor Volchenko’s payroll is going to die, from his best guns, down to the guy who just cuts his grass. But first, I want the fucker who killed my girl. I want his name. I want his home address. I want the size color and consistency of his last three shits. And you’re going to give it to me.”

  “Fuck you!” Nikos spits up at Sid, but most of the gory muck comes down on his face.

  “That’s what I thought you would say.” Sid scans the room for possible implements of torture: hot pokers, blow torches, pliers, straight razors, or perhaps a bench vise, but he sees none of those things. What he does find is almost as good. Sid skips away to a small desk in the corner where some office supplies lie with scattered stacks of documents. He returns as Nikos is attempting to stand up. Sid pins the gangster back down to the floor under his knee. “I want a name.”

  “Fuck you, mandavoshka.”

  Sid plants a palm on Nikos’ forehead and presses his head down against the floor. He opens the teeth of the staple remover and clamps them down around Nikos’ septum. “How do you feel about body modification, Petrovich?”

  “Wha-”

  Sid squeezes the staple remover and the teeth bite into the cartilage that runs up the center of Nikos’ nose. He whips his hand back and the staple remover tears its way out, bringing bits of flesh with it. The gangster screams as blood runs from the open flaps of skin where his nostrils were.

  “Guess this isn’t what they use for nose rings then,” Sid says. He places the staple remover on Nikos’ right earlobe and asks again. “I want a name.”

  “Never.”

  The staple remover bites down on the earlobe with jaws like an attack dog. Sid pulls back and the glob of skin stretches free like warm mozzarella cheese.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahh!” the gangster howls.

  “I can keep finding pieces to pull off for a very long time, Petrovich,” Sid says. He tears open Nikos’ bloodstained button down dress shirt. He clamps the teeth around the man’s left nipple.

  “Fedosov!” Nikos screams. “It was Fedosov!”

  EXT. CHINATOWN - DAY

  Dmitry’s cell phone buzzes silently in his shirt pocket. He lifts just enough of it out to see that it is Nikos calling, then drops the phone back into the pocket. He has no interest in talking to that mandavoshka right now.

  “Are
you high?” Wintergreen says. He sits on a public bench in the open, next to Dmitry, his gaze lost in a large library hardback of The Tip is Never Enough: A Jack Reacharound Novel, by Ron Jingo. He didn’t look up from that book a single time while Dmitry told him all about the horror house.

  “No.” Dmitry quickly changes his plea. “I mean yes. A little. I thought it would help.” His eyes are sore. His face is greasy and his fingers feel slick. He didn’t bring a book, and he wouldn’t have his nose in one anyway. He’s too busy glancing around for anybody who might make him, even though the chances are slim. His boys don’t come around here. Triads run Chinatown. “I didn’t sleep. How could I after that?”

  “A snuff house. Where they make snuff movies…” Dmitry can tell from Max’s facetious tone that he isn’t being taken seriously.

  “EEEEeeee-yah!” A sudden shriek startles Dmitry and he redirects his attention to the nearby seven foot bronze statue of Bruce Lee. An early morning tourist has removed his shirt and is flexing in front of the Kung Fu legend while making imitative kiai sounds.

  “You think I’m making this up?” Dmitry says. His cell continues to buzz. He squeezes his shirt pocket to push the button that sends the incoming call to voicemail. “This is real. They’re killing those girls in there.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Some of these human trafficking operations run like the ninth circle of Hell, but an underground network of snuff collectors? That’s a tall tale as old as video cameras. The bureau has files on this, you know. When it happens, it’s isolated insanos doing insano stuff: Leonard Lake, the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs, Bittaker and Norris. Never once have we found anyone shooting it for profit. That’s digging your own grave. The product itself would get you the needle. Nobody would do that.”

  “Velour would. He’s exactly the right kind of megalomaniac.” Dmitry’s phone begins to buzz again. He immediately rejects the call. “I checked him out. His real name is Magarian. Parents were Armenian immigrants. Big up and comer at Berkeley film school, but he trashed his career when he called the chairman of Universal a cock gobbling sack of kike jizz on Twitter because she turned down his pitch for Schindler’s List 2.”