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

  INT. LILY’S ROOM - NIGHT

  Lily Hoffman bathes in the shifting blue glow of the latest art house film from groundbreaking auteur Lars Von Trier. The movie is entitled Women Shitting on Bull Testicles and was called “empowering” by Slate magazine, “uniquely transgressive” by the Guardian and “wonderfully thought-provoking” in the New Yorker. For Lily, it has only provoked thoughts about how Charlotte Gainsbourg could possibly poop that much. She’s so skinny. She must have eaten nothing but Mexican food and black coffee for a solid week and held it in until the shoot. That kind of dedication easily deserves an Oscar, but the movie seems pretty thin in all other regards.

  Lily reaches for the video box as Willem Dafoe offers up a monologue from her iMac screen. “It could be nothing, but you just pooped three times, and then one time, and then four times. Did you know those are the first three numbers of pi?” Lily sweeps over the little lettering on the box in her search for the runtime. When she finds it, she gasps.

  “Approximately eight hundred minutes! What the fuck?!”

  In the movie, Charlotte Gainsbourg answers Willem’s question with one of her own. “Did you know that four is divisible by two, which is the number of bull testicles I’m squatting over?”

  Lily hops up from the bed and walks across her room to stop this pretentious trash movie. It’s an ice cold turn off, and she’s expecting some very hot company shortly. She flicks through a plethora of other movies before she gets the shivers from standing out in the open in nothing but a black lace babydoll with the air cranked up high. She quickly settles on American Psycho for the thousandth time so she can get back to her warm bed.

  Rugged arms violently close around Lily. A steely hand clamps down over her mouth to stifle her startled shriek. Teeth press into her neck. Her assailant is like a gorilla, squeezing her in his crushing embrace.

  “Did you kill the Russians?” she asks.

  “Killed ‘em dead,” Sid Hansen answers as he moves his other hand up the hem of her sheer lingerie.

  “How many?”

  “Four.”

  “Mmm,” Lily hums. “I guess that means I owe you four blow jobs.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anywhere. Any time.”

  “That’s right,” he says, pressing on her shoulders and forcing her down to her knees. “Get started.”

  “Right here?” Lily cocks an eyebrow up at him. “In my room?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But we could do anything in here.”

  “Are you trying to talk your way out of this?”

  “No! I just think you’re missing the whole point of on-demand blow jobs. In here it’s whatever. It’s just a runner-up to sex, but out there it’s illicit. It’s exciting. You know what most guys would give for a blow job on a plane, or a metro bus, or anywhere besides their boring bedroom?”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “Is it?”

  Sid narrows his soulless black eyes as he stares down at her, as though he can’t quite make up his mind whether to believe her.

  “Tell you what,” Lily says. “Kayla and I are going to mall tomorrow. Why don’t you come with us and I’ll show you what I mean?”

  Sid whips her up off the floor and throws her down on the bed. “Deal.” He removes his clothes as she lies in wait, gently sliding her fingers over her own body.

  “So...” Lily whispers. “Tell me about the one with the face tattoo. How did he die?”

  “Threw a knife in his guts. Then cut his throat.” Sid pounces on top of her like a jungle cat. His naked body is rock-hard against her. His arms are cluttered with old scars from a childhood spent killing and new scabs from his fight with the jihadists last week. “It was ugly.” Something clatters loudly next to Lily and she turns her head to see the big black handgun he just dropped on her nightstand. “Picked this nice gun off one of them.”

  “Mmmm,” she purrs. “That’s a big gun.”

  Sid wastes no time removing her lingerie before he slams into her. He maintains a cold intensity against the flickering backdrop of Toshiro Mifune, Robocop, Rambo, and the other action movie legends that plaster her walls. He might as well be one of them.

  Lily moans loudly as fiery pleasure fills her body. She presses her head back against her pillow and squeals while her vision fades to black and everything else she ever cared about becomes meaningless. She lives in the primal now, where she wants nothing but for him to flood her with his seed. She wants to swell with his spawn over and over until she’s a sagging and bloated old husk that they put in the ground.

  “I love you,” she says. Oh no. She didn’t want to say that. She doesn’t even know where that came from. He’s going to freak out, she thinks. He doesn’t want a stupid girl with stupid girl feelings. She opens her eyes and watches in horror for his reaction.

  Nothing changes. He continues pounding away at her, as though he didn’t even hear it. What does that mean?

  Sid finishes inside her, and it’s different this time. She wishes she could keep it all inside. She wishes she could melt into him like a twisted abomination from John Carpenter’s worst nightmare.

  In the moments afterwards, she lies beside him, engulfed in the sheets and wrapped in his arms. She feels safer there than she has ever been. This has become their nightly ritual since he began living in her house last week. It still feels strange having him here all the time, but Lily is getting used to it. She draws herself closer until she’s grinding up against him in the dark.

  “Hey,” she whispers. “You know that thing I said?”

  “You asked me to hand you a towel…”

  “I mean when I said I love you.”

  “Oh yeah. You said that too.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that. I mean—I don’t know—I’m not like that. I don’t say stuff like that.”

  She can feel him shrug behind her. He doesn’t seem disturbed about it at all, but that just makes Lily feel worse. Does that mean he doesn’t care about her at all? Or is he saying he feels the same way? No. No way.

  “Do you love me?” she asks without thinking about it first.

  “No.”

  The answer hurts, even though it is exactly what she knew he would say.

  “Is it because I can’t have babies?” she says, delving deeper down this rabbit hole than she should for the sake of her emotional well-being.

  “No.” He practically snorts at her with his tone. “Why would I care about that?”

  “I don’t know. Why then?”

  “Love is for the weak,” he icily recites. “A warrior has no love.”

  “Of course.” Lily sighs at the common rhetorical construction she’s heard from him so many times. These are things Sid’s father taught him. Lily never met the legendary old warrior that pounded Sid into the relentless world class death dealer he is, but she feels like she knows him through his many cheesy little mottos. “Love is for the weak. Fear is for the weak. Incontinence is for the weak. Your dad’s not right about everything, you know.”

  “Feelings like that are a tactical liability.”

  “Fuck. I’m just like my mom.” Lily’s mother has a long history of emotionally unavailable partners, and the repercussions that accompanied them. Sid might actually be worse than all of them though.

  “You’re way different than your mom.”

  “Really?” Lily smiles. Maybe he can be decent sometimes.

  “Yeah. She has red hair and bigger boobs.”

  Lily growls. “They’re fake.” She mashes her elbow into his chest and pushes herself to the other side of the bed.

  The kill team pursues her doggedly. She feels a vice grip around her bicep, and with a quick squeak, she is whipped back across the mattress. His arms coil around her like steel cables that might suspend a bridge. There is no escape.

  “I like holding you,” he says. It’s a bit startling. She didn’t expect even that much sentiment out of him. She’ll take what she can get.

  EXT. V
OLCHENKO ESTATE - DAY

  Igor Volchenko’s estate is a limestone palace. Dmitry stands at the top of the fifteen front steps admiring all three stories of pristine yellow-grey masonry as he lifts the golden lion-headed door knocker and drops it against the hulking oak double doors.

  A stern looking man in a simple suit opens the door, looks him up and down, then steps aside for Dmitry to enter. “You have any weapons?” he asks. His name is Madec, and he is the head of Volchenko’s mercenary bodyguards, a man Dmitry has met a few times before and never liked.

  “No,” Dmitry says, opening his jacket to display his lack of weapons, although Madec pats him down anyway. Dmitry wore his best Armani suit for this. It’s black, with a black shirt and a red silk tie. Face time is important at times like this.

  “Good. We have lots.” Madec motions to the half dozen other suited mercenaries occupying the space behind him. One of them is holding what appears to be a submachine gun and others have plainly visible weapons strapped in shoulder holsters. “Behave yourself in Mr. Volchenko’s house.”

  Dmitry has no interest in doing otherwise. He confirms this with a silent nod.

  He follows Madec into a large square atrium. Looking up from the center of the room, Dmitry can see all the way to the roof, which is just an enormous skylight. The floors above overlook him on all sides with balustrades that encircle the atrium. This is the kind of showy architecture Dmitry would expect from a four star hotel, not someone’s home. He wants to have a place just like this some day.

  They walk up a ballroom staircase to the second floor where Dmitry can hear music faintly playing through the walls. Madec directs him to the end of a long hallway filled with other doors. “Mr. Volchenko’s study is in there.”

  Beyond the door, Dmitry is met by Nikos Petrovich, a street level bratok named Istvan, two suits he does not know, and Igor Volchenko. The syndicate head sits at an oversized oak desk, tapping his fingers to the rhythm of the Edita Piekha record on the antique phonograph in the corner of the room. He is an aged man, but not what Dmitry would call elderly. He has an aura of strength despite his white hair and yellow fingernails. He is smooth shaven and tastefully dressed in a light blue suit, matching tie, and diamond cufflinks that twinkle like none Dmitry has ever seen before.

  “Mr. Fedosov!” Volchenko gleefully proclaims. “There you are!”

  Nikos glares back at Dmitry from a chair opposite Volchenko on the other side of the great oak desk. His appearance clashes in every way with the syndicate head. His suit is a tacky bright purple. His prominent gold front tooth twinkles almost like Volchenko’s cufflinks. His bald head has not been properly shaved in weeks and looks scraggly.

  “Mr. Volchenko,” Dmitry says.

  “Right on time. Everyone else was early. Fedosov, he follows orders, yes,” Volchenko says. His Russian accent is thick and marked with fillers and repeated words, an unusual quality in a man of such serious stature. “We have business. Business. Yes? Would you like a drink?” He does not wait for Dmitry to answer. Volchenko picks up a bottle of Stolichnaya from the desk and begins pouring it into a table glass for Dmitry. “Come. Come.”

  Dmitry picks up the glass and sips the vodka. He never developed a taste for the stuff. Even the expensive brands all taste like paint thinner to him, but he doesn’t want to insult Volchenko. He nods to signify his approval. Looking around the room, he notices Nikos and Istvan also have vodka, in addition to Volchenko himself. All of the seats have been taken, so Dmitry remains standing in front of the big oak desk, hovering behind Nikos, hopefully making him uneasy.

  “Good. You like? Good.” Volchenko says. “Now, without wasting any more time. We have problem we must discuss. What happened to Sergei?”

  “It was the Italians,” Nikos says. “It had to be. He had meeting with Sal Morricone yesterday. It did not go well.”

  “And this Morricone? He destroys good business ties over spilled coffee often? Yes?”

  Nikos’s upturned jaw and widened eyes silently give away his surprise that Volchenko already knows about the meeting—and knows exactly why it went badly.

  “Yes. I know about this,” Volchenko says. “Spilled coffee. Just coffee. I know this. I know much. I know you were making stops during that meeting so you were not there. I know you were not at club last night because you have weekly date with American girlfriend. She is widow. You played, eh, Apples to Apples with her children. She thinks you are stockbroker—pretty girl, not so smart. So we try again now knowing this, eh, information. What happened to Sergei?”

  Nikos doesn’t have anything else to say, not after Volchenko just let him know he’s already way ahead of him. This is not good. If Volchenko knows that much about Nikos, he knows that much or more about Dmitry. He probably knows where Dmitry was last night, what he had for breakfast this morning, what kind of gun he keeps under his pillow. He might know everything… No. If he knew everything, Dmitry would be dead already. Unless that’s why they’re here now...

  “Koreans?” Dmitry chimes in, attempting to create the appearance of being helpful more than actually being helpful. “They had beef since the thing in Chinatown.”

  “That beef was with Johnny Seong, and he’s dead,” Nikos says, gleefully shooting down Dmitry’s idea. “Gooks had him for a rat.” It was a shot in the dark anyway, metaphorically speaking. The actual shot that killed Johnny Seong was taken in broad daylight from a motorcycle on the I-5.

  “But Johnny’s brother Eddie was not happy about what we did there.”

  “Eddie Seong is in Indonesia dodging extradition from murder rap.” Nikos rolls his eyes. “Everybody knows.”

  “So it looks like that is not right either,” Volchenko says, emphatically scratching his chin. After a few seconds of this, his mouth stretches into a wide smile and he snaps his fingers. “I have idea! We ask witness who was bodyguard for Sergei at club last night what happen.” He turns his attention eagerly, almost amusingly, on Istvan. “Istvan? What happen at club last night?”

  The slim and sweaty Istvan occupies the chair to Nikos’s right, directly across from Volchenko. He kneads his knuckles together above his belt buckle and looks down at them like they’re the most enthralling thing he has ever seen. “I—uh—Sergei had that girl upstairs last night. That whore he likes. The blond one.”

  “Her name?” Volchenko prods.

  “I don’t know. She’s blond.”

  Nikos leans slightly to his right, questioning Istvan from the corner of his mouth without turning to look him in the eyes. He won’t look completely away from Volchenko. “Blond like Markie Post or Heather Thomas?”

  “What? Who is that?”

  “From all-time greatest American TV show Fall Guy. You don’t know this? Markie Post is ugly cow whore with mullet like MacGuyver. Heather Thomas is beautiful goddess who deserve to be worshipped and give diamonds.”

  “The one with poofy hair.”

  “Nina. That stupid mandavoshka. That explains why they found him with his pants around his ankles. Do you think she was part of this?”

  “Maybe,” says Volchenko. “When Nina was upstairs with Sergei, who else went up there with them?”

  “Alexei was up there,” Istvan tells them. “The others were downstairs with me.”

  “Yes. Yes. And why did the others go upstairs? Who else went up there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you were guarding the stairs, so you would have seen something. What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “That seems impossible. There is only one staircase in that club and you were standing right in front of it.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were standing right in front of it? Yes?”

  “Maybe not all night.”

  “Maybe not all night. Of course. Nature calls of course. But you were not away for more than a minute for that. And surely not for anything other than most urgent bathroom emergency. Yes?”

  “Yes. Never more th
an a minute.”

  Volchenko snaps his fingers and one of the suits wraps a piano wire around Istvan’s neck faster than a Moscow bullet train. The bratok goes over backwards in the chair and Nikos leaps up from his own seat as he is startled by the sudden action beside him. Istvan kicks at the desk wildly. The other suit goes for his legs even as Volchenko instructs him to do so.

  “Get his feet!” Igor says. “He’s scuffing furniture!”

  The choking gags are not that loud, but they easily drown out the fearful silence from Nikos and Dmitry as the suits drag Istvan into a corner, his tasseled dress shoes twitching along the floor all the way.

  “Zalupa konskaya,” Volchenko spits. “He was shooting up all night. Only a minute? Nyet! Nyet! Stupid narkoman, suka blyad!”

  Nikos shakes his head and laughs. “Fucking bitch. I would feed him to woodchipper feet first to hear the screams,” Nikos says.

  “Yes?” Volchenko questions. “That is quite extreme. And you, Mr. Fedosov? What would you do?” Volchenko asks, gazing at Dmitry inquisitively. He wants more than a nod. He wants a real answer. It’s like being put on the spot for not paying attention in class back in grammar school. Dmitry doesn’t like it, but he decides to react the same way he did back in grammar school—with smug indifference.

  “This is business. We have problem. We fix problem. No reason to act like animal.”

  “Good,” Volchenko says. “I like this way you think. You have job now.” Volchenko stands up from his seat and leans imposingly with his hands planted atop his desk. “Find that whore Nina. Find out what she knows. Then...” he waves his flattened hand across his throat in the universal sign for killing. “We do not need her talking this and that with people. Is no good.”

  The guards carry Istvan’s floppy corpse from the study ahead of them, as if Dmitry needs a warning what will happen if he disappoints Igor Volchenko.

  INT. LILY’S HOUSE - DAY

  Sid sits perfectly still, staring uncomfortably across the kitchen table at Lily’s mother amid total silence. She seems unable to look him in the eyes. Instead, she focuses on the floor somewhere to the right of his feet. Her arms cross around her body in a deep embrace so that her fingertips touch her shoulder blades.