THE THOUSAND DOLLAR CONTRACT: Colt Ryder Is Back In His Most Explosive Adventure Yet!

by J. T. Brannan

  I just hoped she would be able to help.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘So how can I help you, Mr. . . .?’

  ‘Fisher,’ I told her as I showed my badge. ‘Simon Fisher.’

  Christine Cooper was an attractive lady in her mid-fifties, strawberry-blond hair cut short to the shoulders, framing a face that was perhaps more handsome than pretty. She was well-dressed, her suit cut nicely, and she obviously kept in shape. She’d come round to the other side of the desk to greet me, putting down the mug of hot black coffee that she’d been drinking when I’d arrived.

  ‘You said this was a private matter, Mr. Fish . . .’ she asked, but then her face fell as she examined the badge. ‘New York?’ she asked with a raised eyebrow. ‘Is it something to do with Mark?’

  ‘No,’ I said, deciding on my story. I was guessing that Mark was her son, probably studying or working in New York. She had the mother’s instinct, and I wanted to exploit that. ‘And it’s not a personal matter. So don’t worry about Mark. The truth is, I’ve got no idea who he is. In fact, I’ve got no idea who you are, except that you’re an expert in Russian.’ She stirred, but I put up a hand. ‘But it is urgent,’ I insisted.

  ‘I think you should leave,’ she said.

  ‘Please, just hear me out. Give me two minutes.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘I have a class to get to.’

  ‘I’ll be quick.’

  She didn’t reply, but she also didn’t repeat her instruction to leave, and I took that as my cue to begin.

  ‘There’s been a kidnapping,’ I said. ‘The son of my client, who is based in New York, he’s working here in Boston. He’s been taken, and I have reason to believe that the Russian mafia is involved.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Cooper breathed.

  I nodded in agreement. ‘It is.’

  ‘The police?’ she asked. ‘The FBI?’

  I shook my head. ‘He’ll be killed if we contact them, my client has given me express instructions not to involve them.’

  ‘So what do you want from me?’

  ‘One of my colleagues found some evidence,’ I lied. ‘I’m hoping it might give me some sort of clue as to where they’re hiding him. There are some handwritten notes, and a voice recording. The trouble is, I don’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘Show me the notes,’ she said, and I could see she was hooked. She would help.

  I pulled out the few sheets of paper that I’d taken from the bath house, handed them to her.

  She scanned through them, and began shaking her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but this really isn’t going to help you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s just a couple of recipes,’ she said, and my heart sank, along with my hopes. ‘One page is for beef and beet borscht, and then you also have one for raspberry vatrushka buns. Oh,’ she said as she flipped a page, and here’s one for blini, Russian pancakes.’

  Damn it. So much for the handwritten notes then.

  She looked up at me with an apologetic expression.

  ‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘it was a longshot anyway.’ I pulled out the digital voice recorder and held it out for her. ‘Can you check this?’

  She looked again at her watch, and I could see that the results of her first translation had hardly filled her with the sense of urgency that I needed. ‘I really need to get to class,’ she said.

  ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘but I really need you to check this.’

  ‘I will,’ she responded, ‘but I really don’t have the time now. How long is it?’

  ‘Twelve minutes,’ I said, and before she could protest, I pressed the ‘play’ button. The sound of moaning and crying filled the room, and I turned the volume down.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ she asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘There’s a message here, it’s been overlaid onto a DVD, an adult movie, it’s one of the methods the mob’s started using to hide their communications. I recorded the bits where there’s a guy talking over it, just listen.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ she said, but to her credit, she did listen, at least for a few moments. ‘The sound quality’s terrible, I can barely hear anything over those other people,’ she said with evident distaste. ‘It’s going to take a while to sort out, if you want an accurate translation.’ She listened for a few more moments, and winced. ‘If you want any sort of translation,’ she corrected herself. ‘And I really, genuinely can’t do it now.’ I was about to speak again, but she got in first. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I promise I’ll take a look right after class, I’ll come back here for my lunch break, try and clear my schedule for the afternoon and work on it for you, okay?’

  I smiled; it was the best I could hope for, under the circumstances. I had the Video Vault to go and visit in the meantime anyway. ‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘When do you think it’ll be ready?’

  She had already started to gather her things, coffee still unfinished in her mug as she moved toward the door, ushering me out.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have a phone. Can we meet somewhere?’

  She paused at the door as she thought. ‘Sure. You know the BU Pub?’

  ‘No,’ I said with a shake of the head.

  ‘It’s about five minutes from here, on Bay State Road. It’s on the lower level of the Castle. I’ll see you there, let’s say around five?’

  I smiled at her as we left the office together. ‘Five sounds good,’ I said.

  If something didn’t happen at the Video Vault first, I thought to myself.

  The way things were going, I could be dead by five.

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  It was just after opening, and the Video Vault was already filled with customers. It was a small place though, so perhaps that wasn’t so hard.

  I hadn’t gone straight in; as normal, I’d recced the area for a while beforehand, making sure I wasn’t about to walk into a Russian mafia ‘hoodlums anonymous’ meeting. But the people walking in and out seemed like genuine locals out to rent a movie. And despite the questionable disc that I recovered from the steam bath, from the evidence of the store’s advertising, it seemed like a regular video store – an independent, to be sure, but fairly mainstream in its choices. There were some odd types entering the premises too though – not quite wearing dirty raincoats, but close – and I supposed they might have been there for the ‘specialist’ material that was presumably also on offer.

  Jamaica Plain was rough, a polar opposite to the leafy avenues of Boston University that I’d left just an hour earlier. The video store was on the corner of a cross-roads which housed Latin markets and auto-repair shops, storage units and payday cash loan companies.

  The Video Vault was one story high at the level of the main street, but as I walked down the hill past the side, I saw it tapered into a secondary level at the rear, like a basement. The lower level had a couple of doors with steel shutters, and led into a small parking lot enclosed within an eight-foot-high chain-link fence. There were a couple of old cars there, and the walls were covered with graffiti.

  I’d strolled around for a while, taking it all in. We weren’t too far from Brookline, which I’d heard had a significant Russian presence, but there wasn’t much that I could see here. Certainly, the ubiquitous Mercedes mobster limousines with the blacked-out windows were nowhere in evidence.

  Once I’d decided the place was okay to have a look at, I’d gone in; but I’d not gone in defenseless. I had two handguns tucked into the waist of my pants, a couple of extendable batons I’d retrieved from my backpack, and a variety of ‘combat cutlery’ secreted about my body; knives had helped me out so far, and I was happier when I was carrying. My experiences with the Filipino martial arts made blades feel like an extension of my arms and hands. I’d toyed with the idea of carrying a machine pistol on a sling, and wearing a coat to cover it; but the weather was warm, and it would have seemed too suspicious to anyone with
even an ounce of street smarts.

  When I walked in, I saw that the store was small, but packed to the rafters with DVDs in every genre imaginable. There were traditional staples such as Western, Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Rom-Com, War and Kung Fu movies, as well as more specialist fare including Mediterranean, Nordic and Middle Eastern cinema. There were classics, documentaries, sports films and even a section on movies connected to Boston.

  But what I couldn’t find any evidence of was Russian midget porn. In fact, there were no adult movies of any kind here, save for a single shelf of soft-core ‘erotic thrillers’.

  It was then that I noticed that the guys I’d pegged as ‘odd’ when I’d seen them entering the store, were now nowhere to be seen. The building, I remembered, had two levels – although you couldn’t tell from the front – and I wondered if those men hadn’t all found their way to the basement.

  I looked at the guy behind the desk as I wandered around, wondering if he was connected to the Russian mob somehow. He was in his mid-forties, his hair long and greasy and tucked under a baseball cap. He had thick, coke-bottle glasses that he wore as if they were back in fashion, and he had some fluff on his chin he probably hoped looked something like a beard. I didn’t peg him as being connected to the mafia at all; but appearances could be deceiving.

  I was about to sidle up to him, looking furtive, and ask him where he kept the ‘good stuff’; but then I saw it for myself, it wasn’t disguised at all. At the far left hand side, sandwiched between two large shelving units of DVDs, was a narrow doorway with a small sign that read ‘Adult Movie Store, Over 18s Only’.

  I left the clerk at his desk and made my way over to the door; I opened it and saw a set of stairs leading down into the basement that eventually led out to that lower-level parking lot. Another customer was coming up, and I moved out of his way; as I presumed was customary in that sort of store, we didn’t make eye contact.

  Once he’d passed me, I started down the stairs, wondering what the hell I might find down there.

  The basement level was larger than the one above, probably about twice the square footage. There were a few guys down here, a few women too, but nobody that overtly looked like a Russian gangster. I began to wonder if I was barking up the wrong tree, if the voiceover to that DVD would prove to be of no more importance than that handwritten blini recipe that I’d found alongside it. Maybe it was just a mistake, a DVD copied over an old movie, with the sound mixing the two together instead of recording properly? It was probably a man describing the lifecycle of a butterfly from a nature documentary, or something equally unhelpful.

  I started to explore the store and soon discovered that – like the regular movie store – this one catered for all tastes and genres.

  As I wandered the aisles, searching for anything Russian or Eastern European, I was struck by just how wide-ranging the world of sexual tastes was; I was hardly a monk myself, but it made me feel decidedly conservative, and not a little unadventurous. How do people discover they get turned on by watching people defecating into plastic bags, anyway? They’d have loved coming out on surveillance ops with my unit back in the Rangers, we had to do it for weeks on end; it would have been paradise for fans of that particular perversion.

  And that was far from the weirdest stuff, either.

  The material seemed to be graded, from the more sedate stuff nearer to the stairs, building up in graphic content to the far end of the room where the really bizarre and unpleasant stuff seemed to be held – coprophilia and necrophilia, alongside some other -philias I didn’t even know existed. There was even a shelf of ‘snuff movies’, although from the looks of them, they were probably – hopefully – not real.

  There was a clerk down here too, but it was fair to say that he looked very different to the one upstairs. This one was clean-shaven and intense, a wiry frame covered by a black t-shirt and leather vest. His hair was dark, his nose aquiline. But it wasn’t his features that set him apart; rather, it was his demeanor. Whereas the guy upstairs had been uninterested and – like most people – pretty unaware, this one seemed to take a keen interest in his clientele. He was trying to observe people subtly as well, watching people without them realizing.

  He clocked me straight away, and I had to play the same game – pretend that I wasn’t really watching him. I wondered if he knew what I was doing, the same as I knew what he was doing.

  In the end, I thought I could kill two birds with one stone, and walked up next to him. ‘Can I help you, my friend?’ he said in an unmistakably Russian accent. Jackpot. Unless, of course, it was just a coincidence.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Have you got anything Russian, or Eastern European?’

  He grinned, and I saw two uneven rows of nicotine-yellowed teeth staring back at me. ‘You are in luck, my friend. If you like that sort of thing, we have a whole section. One of our specialties, in fact.’ He smacked his lips. ‘Of course, I don’t like it myself – seen too much of it in real life, you know?’ He laughed, and nudged me. ‘Know what I mean?’ I nodded politely, and he continued. ‘Of course, you always find boring, what is usual, eh? You are American, so you look for Russian beauties, yes? It makes perfect sense. I am Russian, so I look elsewhere. I like the Asians myself.’

  I smiled and nodded along with him. ‘Asians are okay,’ I agreed, now the dialogue was open, ‘but I have to disagree with you about Russian women, They’re the best, hands down. Beautiful and dirty, the perfect combination. Am I right?’

  He grinned again. ‘Maybe,’ he allowed. ‘Maybe. The section you want, it is against the side wall over to the right, middle shelving unit.’ I was about to thank him and be on my way, when he spoke again. ‘Are you a member?’ he asked. ‘I don’t remember seeing you in here before.’

  ‘First time,’ I said, thinking fast. Did he have some idea of who I was? I’d burnt Oksana’s Russian Steam Bath to the ground, presumably along with any CCTV footage there was of me.

  But had I been spotted somewhere else? Had they got ahold of recordings from Croke Park Whitey’s? Or the dash-cams from the police cars? Had they distributed images of me to their contacts around the area? I watched the guy’s hands, just in case he reached for an alarm of some sort.

  Even if there weren’t pictures of me – or even a description – it was possible that the Ovcharka or his sons had put out a warning about a troublemaker in the area, asked for their people to be vigilant, to treat strangers with caution, to report anything they found out of the ordinary.

  Either way, I had to be careful.

  ‘New to the area,’ I continued. ‘Do you have to be a member?’

  ‘Only if you want to rent,’ the guy said. ‘Not if you want to buy.’

  ‘I’ll be buying,’ I said, before turning to walk off toward the shelves he’d pointed out. I turned to look back over my shoulder. ‘If I find anything I like.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you will, my friend,’ his voice trailed after me. ‘I’m sure you will.’

  Chapter Two

  The clerk had been right – there was a good selection of Russian and Eastern European adult movies here. No more midgets, but pretty much everything else.

  I wondered how it worked; presumably none of these discs would contain anything incriminating, because they could be bought or rented by anyone. I supposed the ‘special’ discs would be stored somewhere else, given out to the right people. If anyone else accidentally came across one, they wouldn’t initially be able to distinguish it from the real thing. And I supposed that was why the chosen movies were at the more extreme end of the pornography spectrum, to discourage the casual observer, just in case they fell into the wrong hands.

  I was, of course, making an assumption that more than one disc had been altered in this way. But maybe I was wrong? Maybe there was only one disc with a voiceover, and no more.

  And yet I had the feeling that there was more to it than the single example, that this was a method of communication they used regularly. I didn’t know wh
y, but I had a feeling about this entire place, too. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but my gut was telling me that there was more going on here than movie rentals; and I trusted my gut above all else.

  I kept checking back over at the guy – as covertly as I could, hoping that he wouldn’t notice – and saw that he was paying me no more attention. Was I just being paranoid?

  The clerk was busy – checking IDs for new memberships, selling and renting movies, and fielding questions like an expert. But then one customer came downstairs, and his demeanor changed entirely; he instantly became more serious, even stood up straighter behind the counter.

  I watched as a squat, barrel-chested man with a flat-top haircut and an ill-fitting suit strode through the store toward the clerk; kept watching as the man reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a DVD that he handed over to him. The clerk took it and slipped it under the counter, and then the pair exchanged words in muffled Russian.

  The clerk said something and nodded in my direction, and I slipped back behind a stack of DVDs so I wouldn’t be clocked straight away.

  Was that how it worked, then? Discs would come in – presumably after being doctored by the ‘voiceover guy’ – and then the clerk would give it out to someone else, later on. That way there was no direct contact between the messenger and the recipient. There would merely be customers, either returning or renting a movie.

  The squat Russian turned to leave, glancing briefly in my direction, and I wondered what to do. Should I follow him, see where he went, if he linked up with anyone higher up in the organization?

  Or should I wait in the video store, wait and see who the movie was going to be picked up by, and then follow them?

  But I figured that if this guy was bringing in the discs, then he was higher up the food chain than the person picking up the discs; he might even have direct contact with the bosses themselves, Konstantin Kozlov and his sons.