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

by Mike Leon

  “You want me to play it back again?” Dmitry says, smiling in a way that he feels is audible, as though Max Wintergreen can see it through the telephone.

  “It’s like porn for my ears,” Wintergreen says. “I need a copy for when the Mrs. isn’t in the mood. Frigid bitch. Where are you now?”

  “I’m at Volchenko’s private safe house up in the mountains—get this—alone with Volchenko.”

  “I think I just came a little. Is he gonna be there for a while?”

  “Yeah. We’re on lockdown because of this fucking bogeyman you said wasn’t real. I think he killed fifty of our people today, Max. By himself.”

  “Well, just hold tight. I can have a tactical team there in two hours. We’ll put Volchenko somewhere with metal toilets and get you to the other side of the country.”

  “And the snuff house?”

  “Gets toppled like the Big Bad wolf wants in. I’ll huff and I’ll puff. All of that shit.”

  “Just move fast. If the death ninja or whatever he is tracks us down we’re fucked.”

  “I’ve been waiting for this for six years, Chad. It’s game time. It’s prom night. I’m on it.”

  Dmitry ends the call and checks over both shoulders for any sign of approaching vehicles. The safe house is an old farmhouse on a piece of open property nearly a mile wide. A solitary dirt road leads up to the crooked old structure from the interstate. Dmitry got a good long look at the house while he talked with Wintergreen and it is clear that no one has lived in the property, or at least maintained it, for a long time. Some shutters are missing from the second floor windows and a few tiles have come off the roof. The place must leak like a sieve when it rains, but tonight it isn’t raining, not on the farm house and not for Dmitry.

  He pulls his handcuffs from the little cardboard box in the spare tire well where he also keeps his FBI badge and he slams the trunk. He pockets the cuffs and walks casually across the creaking old porch and in through the front door. It could be safer if he takes Volchenko himself and gets the old man to Wintergreen without any wait. The longer they stay here, the more time they give the bogeyman to find them. He quietly peeks into the farmhouse kitchen after cutting through the front room. Volchenko is a hard boiled killer, and someone Dmitry—Chad Billingsley—has no business tussling with, but if he can catch the old man sleeping, or showering, or on the crapper, or compromised in any way, then it just makes sense.

  He walks down the hall from the kitchen to a rear bedroom on the first floor. He says nothing, but he maintains a polite demeanor. He doesn’t want Volchenko to hear him coming, but if the old man does see him first, he won’t appear suspicious. He reaches the end of the hall, and the bedroom, and he hears a hushed conversation coming from inside.

  “You bring Katya to make exchange. I don’t get Katya on spot, you don’t get Fedosov,” Volchenko says. Dmitry slows his pace to a creep at the mention of his name. He sees the back of Volchenko’s blue suit coat as the boss leans his head solemnly against the far wall, speaking into his cell phone. He doesn’t need to hear the other voice to know who Volchenko is talking to. That crusty old mandavoshka is selling him out! “I don’t know. I don’t know. I get him to you somehow. But you hurt one hair on Katya head...Hello? Pizdet.” Volchenko hangs up the phone and shakes his head, snorting with frustration. He turns and lazily glances around the room behind him. His eyes freeze as they reach Dmitry standing in the doorway.

  Both men remain still for a pause that is too long for anything but the chess match being played out in their heads. What move to make? Fight? Lie? What lie to tell? Dmitry has an M&P Shield 9 in a holster around his ankle. He could go for it, but there’s no guarantee. Volchenko didn’t get where he is without dropping a few bodies and the old man almost certainly knows the score here…

  “Was that Grigory?” Dmitry asks, cautiously measuring Volchenko’s response.

  Volchenko doesn’t breathe or move. Not a muscle in his face twitches even slightly. His stillness is unnatural. “Eh? Oh, yes. That was Grigory.” It’s bullshit. Does Volchenko know he knows it’s bullshit?

  “Is he on his way?” The smart answer would be no, or not sure, because Volchenko can’t possibly know since he wasn’t really talking to Grigory, and that will be exposed if he says yes and then Kuznetsov is still at the mansion the next time they hear from him.

  “No. Not yet.” Clever. “He needs you to meet him in an hour in the river bed, under the viaduct.” Even more clever. He’s trying to turn the conversation into a setup.

  “What for?”

  “He collected my emergency cash supply and you need to get it.” It’s like Volchenko had his own writers come up with this stuff ahead of time. His lies are impressively well constructed even when he invents them on the spot.

  “Why can’t he just bring it here?”

  “He’s afraid he could be followed. You need to go now if you’re going to make it.”

  “Yeah.” Dmitry agrees without any sign of actually going anywhere. Volchenko eyes him with quiet uncertainty for a moment.

  Elsewhere in the house, a door slams. Both men change focus like it was a bomb blast.

  Dmitry crouches down for his gun. He tugs at his pants leg to expose the little black polymer pistol in its nylon and kydex holster. He has practiced this, but not much, and in the actual moment he seems to move at a geological pace. He manages to get the gun up in time to zero in on the large frame revolver Volchenko has produced from somewhere in his three piece suit.

  “Drop the gun, Igor!” Dmitry shouts, stepping further into the room so he can watch the doorway. Volchenko doesn’t flinch. The man is a cold-blooded killer, but for some reason he hasn’t shot Dmitry yet. That can only mean he has a compelling reason not to. Dmitry should take advantage. He should kill Igor Volchenko, but he hesitates. He has never killed anyone before. Too many worries run through his mind. What if he misses? What if Volchenko lives long enough to shoot back? What if no one believes his story and he goes to jail for this?

  “What the fuck?!” yells Yuri Moldovich as he enters the bedroom, still carrying that colossal machine gun he has had with him all night.

  “Don’t shoot!” both Dmitry and Volchenko shout simultaneously, banishing any doubt they may have had about each other’s intentions.

  “Don’t shoot you, or don’t shoot him?” Yuri says.

  “Don’t shoot anybody!” Dmitry says.

  “Shut up! And put the gun down!”

  “Yes, Dmitry!” Volchenko adds. “Put the gun down!”

  “Fuck that! You can’t shoot me! You need me alive to get Katya back! But I don’t need you alive for anything! I win, Volchenko. Put the guns down!”

  “You shoot him, I shoot you!” Yuri’s threat is made into a frightening hyperbole by the giant gun he points at Dmitry.

  “And if you shoot me…” Yuri says. “I don’t know what happens.”

  “If you shoot him then I shoot you because I know you’re going to shoot me,” Volchenko says.

  “So we all agree that anybody shooting anybody right now is a bad idea?”

  “I am not sure,” Yuri says. “Can someone explain this to me?”

  “The bogeyman wants me for Katya,” Dmitry explains. “Volchenko wants to sell me out!”

  “Pizdet!” Volchenko says. “I never sell out a bratva. Is vory code.”

  “Vory code is bullshit, Igor!”

  “Is not bullshit!”

  “Is a little bit bullshit.” Yuri nods in acceptance.

  “Yuri, if he’ll sell me out he’ll sell you out just as fast,” Dmitry says. “Better to shoot him now and we both walk away.”

  Yuri’s eyes shift tellingly in Volchenko’s direction, then back to Dmitry.

  “This is what that maniac wants!” Volchenko shouts. “He cannot get to us. He needs us to come to him or kill each other for him. Either way, he wins.”

  “Except there’s one way where you win, and it’s if you talk your way out of this standoff, se
t me up for the bogeyman, and shoot Yuri to keep his mouth shut.”

  “I don’t like that so much,” Yuri says.

  “Fuck!” Volchenko grumbles. “Fine! We do this old fashioned way. Yuri, how many zeros you want on your check?”

  “Oh, I like zeros.”

  “Gentlemen, is this a bad time?” says someone in the doorway just beyond Yuri. His voice is unusually calm for a man walking into a three-way Mexican standoff.

  “Get the fuck out!” Yuri shouts at the newcomer, confusingly, as he maintains his pinpoint focus on Dmitry while he shouts.

  “Are you sure? It looks like you need our help.”

  “I said get out!” Yuri says, swiveling the machine gun around toward the mysterious intruder. He has to hop back to make enough room between them for the gun’s lengthy muzzle. His feet don’t even touch the ground again before the other man is holding Yuri’s gun and Yuri is flat on his ass.

  “Power sprouts from the barrel of a gun,” the visitor says, studying the machine gun in the gentle grip of one hand. “A thing so easily taken by the combined might of the proletariat.” He sighs quietly, with a dry expression of tired boredom, then throws the machine gun over his shoulder into the hallway outside the bedroom. “We can come back later if you like, but you need us now if you don’t want Kill Team One to slaughter you all.”

  INT. WENDIGO JOE’S - DAWN

  The sun comes up over the tree line at Sid’s back as he walks across the vast stretch of empty parking spaces surrounding Wendigo Joe’s Injun Casino and Card Room. Volchenko called him back, and promised Fedosov would be at this location. Sid let the Russian pick the place because it just doesn’t matter. There is nothing Volchenko’s goons can do to him.

  There are cars parked ahead, clustered closer to the behemoth building. Sid has never been to a casino, and knows only of them from viewing James Bond movies. He spots a few people milling around the building’s great glass main entrance and suddenly Volchenko’s choice of location makes sense. There are people here, even this early in the morning. The Russians probably think all those potential witnesses will prevent violence from breaking out. The Russians are wrong.

  Sid brought two CZ P09 pistols, four extra mags, an M67 frag grenade, and a KA-BAR knife. It was everything he could hide under his hooded sweatshirt, and should be more than adequate to deal with the syndicate’s pathetic goons.

  He reaches the entryway and peers through one of the four sets of double doors, expecting to see them waiting for him in some feeble attempt at an ambush. He does not care if that’s the case. They would just be feeding him more of their manpower.

  There are no suspicious looking figures immediately inside the casino. A lone man, tall with straight black hair and red tinted skin, stands at a small podium inside the doors. Sid walks inside and approaches him while glancing at the surrounding environment.

  The inside of Wendigo Joe’s looks like someone set off a thermobaric explosive packed with rainbows instead of propane. The spectrum of bright blinking colors is strangely jarring, as it differs from any other place Sid has ever been. It feels intrusive somehow, like an assault on his senses. To his left, blinking machines. To his right, blinking machines. They ding and they chirp and they play little jingles. He expected to see tables of card players here, like in the 007 movies, but there is not one in sight—only machines. The music piping down from the ceiling above is the same music he hears in shopping malls and Wal-Mart, as if it is the only music that exists. In a faraway corner, he sees a set of barred windows where people seem to be trading money. Overhead, a sign directs him to go left for Cage/Wampum Exchange or forward for Strong Firewater. None of this means anything to him.

  “How, paleface. Welcome to Wendigo Joe’s Injun Casino,” says the deep voiced and rather stoic Indian at the podium. “May I see your driver’s license or state ID?”

  Sid shows him a Virginia driver’s license for a Karl A. Wais, someone he detonated with an HE grenade during a misunderstanding in Austin, Texas. There are char marks along the edges of the card and the laminate has bubbled and melted. He also looks nothing like the person in the photo.

  The Indian studies the photograph intently, then shifts his gaze to Sid, then back to the card again. This man poses no threat to the kill team, and appears unarmed, more of the security theater that is so common in the civilian world. Still, it would be best if Sid could at least make it to his meeting before dropping any bodies.

  The Indian nods and waves for Sid to continue. “Good spirits be with you.”

  “Which way to the bar?” Sid asks.

  “Big Wigwam. Strong firewater that way. One hundred paces.”

  Sid heads in the direction the Indian pointed, toward the middle of the casino floor, past hundreds of the curious video games with their brightly colored revolving displays. The people who sit at them appear like zombies, mindlessly engaged in a single unending pursuit. Some are disheveled and stink of body odor. Many are terribly fat. Most are elderly. Sid stops and leers over the shoulder of a stinking grey specimen far too corpulent to walk unassisted, and studies the shapes on the screen: numbers, stars, horseshoes, meaningless junk. The cyclopean blob waits for the pictographs to stop spinning, then pushes a button to start them again, then repeats. Sid snaps a finger next to the specimen’s ear and fails to interrupt the cycle. He keeps moving.

  Inattention is for the weak. A warrior has no inattention.

  Sid reaches the central bar, which glowing box letters denote as the Big Wigwam. He circles the structure, a roofed building designed to look like some kind of enormous hut, but made from hollow plastic painted to look like clay and wood. It is open on all four sides, and contains a square bar that surrounds a mountain of illuminated liquor bottles. A single bosomy bartender taps her bright red enameled fingernails on the bar top as she looks up at a television hanging from the ceiling. Sid checks for any signs of a trap: men sitting in corners with inappropriately large coats on, anyone speaking into a microphone or wearing a headset, Russian prison tattoos. He sees none of those things. There is only one customer at the bar, a slender man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a crisp suit. He has no hair except for a neatly trimmed goatee. An olive drab scarf hangs around his shoulders. He squeezes a green lime slice into a glass of dark liquid and ice cubes. Sid sits down on the tall barstool next to him.

  “Fedosov,” Sid says.

  The man at the bar calmly looks to Sid as he stirs the lime juice into his drink with a skinny black straw. “We did not expect an errand boy.”

  “This is a bad time to get shitty with me, Fedosov.”

  The man takes a long sip of his cold drink and smiles. “Fedosov is not here.”

  “Too bad. You can tell Volchenko to expect his daughter’s eyeballs in the mail.”

  “We will do no such thing.”

  “We? I just see you, douchebag. And I’m about to bullet fuck your brain case and go on my merry way.”

  “We are not alone. A spectre is haunting this place—the spectre of communism.”

  “I’m not afraid of ghosts.”

  Someone else answers Sid’s comment. “What do you fear?” he says. It’s a man wearing an argyle bathrobe and slippers. The bathrobe is coffee stained like his teeth, and as he shuffles toward the bar from the sea of slot machines, the smell of cigarettes grows stronger. The stranger squints through filmy glasses as he looks at Sid. “Do you fear the winds of change? Do you fear revolution? Do you fear the spreading rust that grows on the chains of the workers?”

  “I don’t have time for this.” Sid quick draws the right hand CZ and fires two hollow points between the dirty old man’s eyes in a few flaps of a bee’s wing. He stands and waits for chaos to erupt as everyone who isn’t part of this peculiar ambush flees screaming in terror.

  Only the bartender runs. She bolts from the wigwam screaming for her life. No one else moves. No one even looks his direction.

  “The fuck?” Sid says after a bewildered few seconds. He can
see seventeen people from where he stands, and none of them have even looked up from the flashing screens in front of them. Either these people are absurdly addicted to the slot machines, or something is very seriously wrong here.

  “Have you discarded the heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, and philistine sentimentalism to bow at the altar of free trade?” The words come from a grotesque walrus of a woman sitting atop a bright red motorized scooter as she rolls toward him. “Do you sacrifice your worth and labor for the blessed sacrament of cash payment?”

  Sid shoots her in the throat. The woman tumbles from the scooter seat and flops on the floor jiggling like a beached whale being rolled back into the sea. “I keep telling you people I don’t care about money.” He turns back to the bar, but the man with the dark scarf is gone. Even his cocktail is missing.

  The gelatinous behemoth Sid just shot continues to sputter nonsense at him as she flops on the carpet clutching her gullet. “You are being exploited!” she crackles through a waterfall of red vomit before she goes completely limp.

  “You are nothing but a slave to the capital of your masters,” says a man wearing a Denver Broncos cap and matching blue and orange jersey. “Your masters in their greed have forged the weapons that will bring them death and raised the hands to wield them. Behold the instruments of labor! Behold the proletariat!”

  The last of his monologue is punctuated by the rustling fabric of a hundred people standing suddenly and in perfect unison from padded seats in front of slot machines. They are dirty young men with sores on their faces. They are twenty-something bleached blond bimbos. They are decrepit old fossils propped up on canes, crutches, walkers and wheelchairs. They are crew cut men with gold jewelry and decorative blue jeans. They have no uniformity—except that they are all glaring at him with unblinking robotic intensity.

  “Fucking zombies,” Sid grumbles.