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

by Mike Leon

“Who is Bodark?” Vlad says.

  “Fedosov!” someone shouts from the balustrade above them. It’s Grigory Kuznetsov. “We need to get Igor out of here!”

  Dmitry rushes up the steps to meet the accountant. There is dried blood in Kuznetsov’s well-trimmed beard. “What happened?” Dmitry says, following Kuznetsov down a long hallway.

  “I don’t know. I hid in the kitchen pantry. Volchenko sealed himself in the panic room. They took Katya, Dmitry. He’s—I’ve never seen him like this.”

  Kuznetsov leads him through Volchenko’s bedroom to an opened steel vault door that looks like it could withstand a missile attack. Inside, the inventory is spartan at best. A stack of canned goods sits in the corner next to a monitor bank where five flat panel screens display the CCTV feed from the house. Some guns are propped against a sealed safe at the end of the room. On the cool concrete floor in front of the safe’s combination lock, Igor Volchenko sits quietly.

  “My babochka…” he whispers. “He took my babochka.”

  “We need to get him out of here,” Kuznetsov says. “The police are coming.” For a moment, Dmitry considers taking his chances with the cops. The mansion is a mess with guns which are illegal in California without special dispensation from the DOJ—something they don’t hand out to Russian gangsters. The question is whether those charges would ever stick. The blame could easily be shifted to a patsy, especially if the bastard owns as much of the LAPD as Dmitry thinks he does. And spin is on Volchenko’s side too. He was attacked in his own home by a psychopath who kidnapped his daughter.

  “Mr. Volchenko,” Dmitry says. “Did you see him? Who is he?” Kuznetsov bends down next to the monitor bank and begins ripping cables from the back of a desktop computer tower.

  “He had a mask,” Volchenko pouts. “It was one man. You were right, Dmitry. I...I just want my babochka back.” He lowers his head regretfully and begins to sob.

  His plea seems thick with irony, considering his business at LGC.

  Kuznetsov takes Dmitry by the shoulder. “You need to throw him in a car and drive him to his safe house now!” He hoists the desktop computer off the floor and forces it into Dmitry’s hands. “And take this with you!”

  “What is it?”

  “The surveillance footage. The LAPD will make this complicated, but if anybody even says the word kidnapping the FBI will swarm this place like a plague of locusts. We can’t afford that heat!” Kuznetsov coaxes Volchenko up off the floor like he’s beckoning a cat, and the shell shocked man follows them down to the first floor.

  As Dmitry hands the computer tower off to Vlad, a loud thump startles them all. Yuri fires off a volley of machine gun bullets that cuts a bowling ball sized hole in one of the walls and Kuznetsov screams like a child. Vlad drops the tower on the atrium floor, smearing blood across several tiles and possibly damaging the machine.

  “Pizdet!” curses Kuznetsov after Yuri quiets the machine gun.

  Dmitry turns to see that the loud noise which triggered this idiocy was caused by a corpse falling from the balustrade two floors above and smacking into the floor nearby. He shakes his head and helps Vlad pick up the computer from the slimy pool it landed in.

  “The safe house is at twenty-two-eleven Winchester. In the mountains. Got it?” Kuznetsov says. He points aggressively at Tony. “You! You know how to work a shredder?”

  Tony shrugs. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Come with me.”

  Dmitry ushers Igor Volchenko out of the house to the dramatic score of approaching sirens. The police are close. Yuri pushes Volchenko into the passenger’s seat of the Audi as Vlad dumps the computer in the back seat. Dmitry floors it.

  They’re gone before the cops arrive, but barely.

  EXT. VOLCHENKO ESTATE - NIGHT

  Red groans quietly to himself when he sees the legion of LAPD officers swarming Volchenko’s mansion. He’s too late. Kill Team One was already here, and that means his business is already done. With his woman dead, he has no reason to go back to Morston. He’ll go off the grid and disappear. It could take years to find him, if the old bastard even lives that long.

  He parks his car at the bottom of the driveway and walks toward the crowd of police cruisers with their flashing lights and the fire engine crowded by burly men in heavy nomex suits. A charred car smolders ahead and cracked skeletal remains lie beside it. Two police are pulling yellow crime scene tape around the mansion stairs using their cars as posts. There are those here Red can use. He knows it already.

  What he finds in the mansion is nothing short of a massacre, a swamp of tacky blood and fear-faced corpses. This is the kill team’s work without a doubt. The uniform police in their dozens are like frightened monkeys in the way they hover over the carnage without touching it. The one in charge is a husky sergeant, clean cut with a head like an upturned pickle bucket. He holds his ear to the radio on his shoulder, deciphering chatter that has no significance here.

  “Hey, sarge,” says another cop in the atrium. “Is that a SPAS-12 right there?” The man points at a heavy looking shotgun on the floor near the stairs.

  “Dear God,” the sergeant says. “I thought we got those weapons of mass destruction off the streets years ago. When will they learn, Davis? When will they learn?”

  “Where is Volchenko?” Red asks.

  “We haven’t found him yet,” Davis replies.

  A group of five police appear at the top of the stairs dragging a bloody bearded man with a sullen face and loosened tie ahead of another that three of them have to carry because he won’t stop struggling. The lead cop shouts down the stairs to the sergeant. “Found these fine upstanding citizens upstairs shredding documents, sarge.”

  “That’s not illegal,” the sergeant says.

  “No, but the skinny one had THIS on him.” The cop holds up a very normal-looking Colt 1911 .45 handgun. “It doesn’t microstamp the shell casings!”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” the sergeant loudly exclaims, turning an angry shade of red. “That’s a violation of the Unsafe Handgun Act. You could KILL somebody with that thing!”

  “Does anybody here know where we can find Igor Volchenko?” Red asks.

  “I do,” says the man being carried by three LAPD officers.

  “Wonderful.”

  “What the fuck, Tony?” his accomplice shouts. “Don’t you say a fucking word to the cops!”

  “We’ll take him back to the station,” Red says.

  “Yeah,” the sergeant says. “You take him back to the station.”

  INT. RAPE VAN - NIGHT

  Sid pulls open the heavy rear doors of the utility van and climbs up the bumper into the darkness of the vehicle. Inside, Katya Volchenko lies face down and hog-tied on the cold aluminum floor. She shrieks through the band of duct tape that covers her mouth and encircles her head tightly. Sid holds her gold plated iPhone over her body as she struggles to turn her head to see him. She can only see the werewolf face anyway.

  The phone flashes as he snaps a photo of her exposed glittery white lace underwear. He sends it to ❤❤DADDY❤❤ in her contact list. She screams again.

  “You can scream all you want,” Sid says. “No one can hear you.” He brings the KA-BAR out of its sheath in a fluid instant. He cuts the tape that binds her hands to her feet behind her and then he turns her body over. The pointed black blade finds its way to Katya’s chest. The cold steel glides between her breasts and under her satin blue dress. Sid tugs the handle up and turns her conservative neckline into a much more provocative one. Katya screams more. He saws his way down the front of the dress and snips her bra apart, liberating her heaving sweaty breasts. He snaps another photo and sends it to ❤❤DADDY❤❤. That should give the fucker a scare.

  Katya’s writhing body is warm against him. Her skin is soft. Her speckled breasts keep their engorged dome shapes even as she lies flat on her back. Sid lays the phone on her chest and squeezes one of her tits in his palm. It is fleshy and wet, but has a stiffness that sets it apart fr
om the few other living breasts he has touched. He wants to feel it more. He wants to taste it, bite into maybe. He wants to fuck her.

  And why not? She’s a squealing annoyance, and his enemy. He has already beaten her, kidnapped her. How would this one little thing be any worse? Maybe he’ll do all the things to Katya that they did to Lily. Maybe he will make sure ❤❤DADDY❤❤ sees it all.

  Sid rips Katya’s underwear from her waist like cheap toilet paper and plucks the phone from her chest. He snaps a series of photographs as she struggles to cover her naked body. He presses the KA-BAR blade to her throat to draw the attention of her hands and gets a good picture of her waxy box. They raped Lily before they murdered her. They fucked her, tortured her, and they made sure he knew it. Sid will get to that too, and he’ll make sure Volchenko knows it.

  He pries Katya’s legs apart and grinds his body between her thighs. She shuffles backwards, scraping away from him along the floor, so that he has to rise up with her and place her back down on the floor on her shoulders, grinding his hips down into her curled body as her feet point up toward the ceiling. This is something he saw Victor do many times...

  Sid snorts against the wet latex of the werewolf mask. Something about the recollection of Victor Hansen makes him considerably less interested in his current endeavor. He snarls angrily as he glares down at the naked woman underneath him, under his knife. He backs off the girl and she rushes to scoop up the tatters of her dress from the floor. She bunches the shiny blue fabric against her naked body as she curls into a fetal position against the back of the driver’s seat.

  Sid sits down on the bumper. He roars as he sends the last photo to ❤❤DADDY❤❤ and then pitches the iPhone into some foliage. He peels the werewolf mask from his head and gathers a deep breath of night air as Katya tears at the duct tape wrapped around her mouth and head.

  “You should think about leaving that on,” Sid says. “I want to kill you less when you’re not talking.”

  Katya gives pause, fearfully studying his features. She resumes pulling the duct tape free of her face anyway. It takes some of her hair with it, but she gets it all off. Then she stays quietly and uneasily in the corner, waiting to see what he does next.

  “You know any place around here that sells Frappuccinos all night?” he says.

  Katya slowly opens her mouth to answer, then closes it and looks down at the floor.

  “I’ll just Google it,” Sid says.

  INT. FREEWAY - NIGHT

  “When Katya was child, she like to wear purple butterfly wings all day, and won’t take them off,” Volchenko says. “This why I call her my butterfly. My babochka.”

  The syndicate boss sits with his arms folded in the front seat of Dmitry’s Audi A3. His expensive smartphone is broken on the rubber mat at his feet. The old Russian threw it down and stomped on it after a succession of text messages Dmitry did not see, and several frantic failed attempts to place a call afterward.

  “She was sweet girl, Dmitry. Good girl,” Volchenko says. He’s on the verge of tears again. The things he says about his daughter seem like outright delusions to Dmitry, but Volchenko undoubtedly believes them. There seems to be something about people’s children that permeates all of their other layers and becomes an exception to every other aspect of their being, even beyond the extent of contradiction. Dmitry has no children, at least that he knows about, and does not understand. “I can’t believe this happened. Why would they do this? She was innocent girl!”

  “It will be alright, Igor,” Dmitry calls him Igor instead of Mr. Volchenko. He pauses briefly to see if the boss corrects him. “We will get Katya back.”

  “That monster has done terrible things to her. My poor little babochka. I should have listened to you, Dmitry. You were right all along. You were the only one who knew! I should have run and taken Katya with me, to the safe house, back to Moscow. Anywhere that animal cannot find us. It is my fault.”

  “No, Igor. It is not your fault. There was nothing you could do. You are not a fortune teller.”

  “Before Katya’s mother died I promise her I always keep Katya safe and far from my business. I was fool and now she is gone, Dmitry! Gone!” Igor Volchenko regresses to a sobbing mess, burying his face in his hands.

  “She is not gone. She is worth more to him alive than dead. He knows that or he would have killed her in front of you. He will try to make a trade.”

  “He only wants me! He is the devil!”

  “He is NOT the devil, and we will find a way to beat him.” That is a lie. Dmitry hasn’t the slightest idea how they can ever beat the unknown and seemingly superhuman butcher targeting them, and he has some inclination to believe it is actually the devil given flesh. He has every intention to flee the state and change is identity the very second he has something to hand Wintergreen. As luck would have it, that second is this one.

  “It is the devil, Dmitry. It is. He has come for me for what I have done—for that place, for all those girls, Dmitry.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Volchenko?”

  “You know what I mean! You saw it yourself! LGC Management Properties! Where we murdered all those girls! Danny Velour and that freak of his! That house of horrors made me fortunes for ten men! I would give it all back for my poor babochka!”

  Dmitry couldn’t have written a better script for Volchenko to read into the microphone.

  INT. RAPE VAN - NIGHT

  Sid sits down in the driver’s seat of the utility van with two cold glass bottles of Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino from the Safeway station outside. He dumps a plastic box containing a cheap pre-paid cell phone on the bench seat and hands one of the drinks over the back of the seat to Katya. The girl sits on the floor behind him with a length of heavy gauge steel chain padlocked tightly around her waist, lashing her to the skeletonized railing that runs along the vertex of the van ceiling. She wears one of Sid’s black t-shirts, which is like a dress on her frail body.

  “What are you going to do to me?” she says, uneasily accepting the bottle and setting it on the floor next to her.

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” Sid growls back.

  “You’re not going to rape me?”

  He snorts in contempt. “Not really my style.”

  “Oh.” Katya relaxes her posture into something Sid reads as annoyance, but that makes no sense. “Are you just more of a butt guy or what is it?”

  “What?” He scowls skeptically as he thinks he misheard her.

  “I know I’m kind of flat back there, but daddy spent a lot of money on these tits. I got Kylie Jenner’s doctor!”

  “So you want to have sex right now?”

  “With you?” Katya scoffs at him. “Yuck. You look like you’re from Kentucky. It’s just… Like… You don’t want this?” Katya puffs out her chest and brushes over her ample breasts with both hands motioning down at the rest of her body.

  “I’m really confused right now.”

  “I just was thinking while you were buying coffee. And I was like what the fuck? Was I not pretty enough? And then I thought about what people are going to say. They’ll be like ‘He went through all the trouble to kidnap her and then he didn’t touch her? What?’ What if they think I have like beef curtains or something gross? And then I thought some more, and you know if I get raped, everybody will feel sorry for me and I can probably get like a ton of followers.”

  “Followers?”

  “Yeah. Twitter. Facebook. Tumblr will blow up. I’ll get so many likes.”

  “So you want me to rape you?”

  “I don’t like WANT you to, but if it’ll expand my brand…”

  “You were screaming and crying before.”

  “I’m over it. I just don’t understand girls that are like ‘I got raped! My life is ruined!’ I mean really, like, get over yourself, right? Take a shower or whatever. Worse things could happen. I got the wrong color G-Wagon for my sweet sixteen, but I didn’t start wearing goth make-up and stripping or whatever.”


  Sid reaches for the roll of duct tape sitting on the passenger’s seat beside him. Katya continues rambling on obliviously.

  “Do you think I should do that? An edgy kind of, like, Taylor Momsen image make-over might be good for me after this. What if I start a charity for sexual abuse survivors?”

  Sid hops over the seatback and unfurls a generous length of tape with a loud peeling sound.

  “Hey! What?! What are you—” Katya protests as he slaps the tape over her mouth and wraps it around her head several times. He pauses briefly, considers covering her nose as well, decides against it, then moves on to wrapping her feet and hands.

  Katya grumbles angrily at him through the tape as he grabs the cell phone and exits through the van’s back door.

  Behind the van, Sid stabs his KA-BAR through sonic welded packaging to free the device inside, a little bar phone manufactured by some vast and shadowy Chinese corporation. He disassembles the phone and inserts the Subscriber Identity Module card that came in the package. He calls up Katya’s father as soon as the phone finds a signal. It takes Volchenko four rings to answer.

  “Who is this?” Volchenko says. Sid recognizes the worn old voice as the same one he heard on the mansion intercom system.

  “You know who this is,” Sid says. “If you ever want Katya to see you again, you’ll give me what I want.”

  “How do I know you didn’t kill her already?”

  “I didn’t say I would kill her, Volchenko. I’m not a monster. I’ll just cut her eyes out.”

  “Babochka… Please don’t hurt her. Just tell me what you want. What do you want?”

  “Fedosov. You give me Dmitry Fedosov and I’ll let Katya go.”

  EXT. SAFE HOUSE - NIGHT

  Dmitry leans into the trunk of the Audi, listening to the playback of Igor Volchenko’s voice, as he presses his cell phone against the audio receiver’s speaker. “You saw it yourself! LGC Management Properties! Where we murdered all those girls! Danny Velour and that freak of his! That house of horrors made me fortunes for ten men!” the speaker rumbles in Volchenko’s dull old Russian rasp.