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

by J. T. Brannan

  I nodded my head as I considered what he’d said. I knew my dogs, and the Ovcharka was a huge Russian mountain dog often used to guard flocks of sheep. It was regarded by some as being the most fearsome guard dog in the world, and I wondered what that said about Konstantin Kozlov. Was it his appearance, his attitude, or perhaps both?

  It sounded like South Boston had become a high-value target for the Russian mob here in the US, and I wondered why. Was it just a natural expansion, or had they seen something of particular value here?

  ‘What sort of jobs do you do for Andrei?’ I asked, pursuing my train of thought.

  ‘Ah, you know . . . Letting them know about any operations in their area, that sort of thing . . . Stepping in sometimes when we’re needed.’

  ‘Needed how? Like tonight?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How many times have you done things like tonight?’

  He paused for a while as he held the torn remains of his hand, gagged from the pain. His eyes filmed over, and I feared for a moment that he would pass out. Then it passed, and he looked up. ‘A handful, I don’t know . . . Like a half a dozen, something like that.’

  I was beginning to feel less bad about his hand; this asshole had executed at least six people at the command of organized crime.

  ‘You bust heads for the Russians too?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘A little bit, I guess.’

  ‘So what did these people do, the ones you killed, the ones you beat on? What was the mob’s interest in them?’

  ‘They’re trying to take over the area, okay? Get a piece of the action all over – restaurants, bars, grocery stores, gyms, you name it, they want to control it.’

  ‘You shake down dealers for them?’

  ‘Not much,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘Secure shipments, anything like that?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘You help out with the girls, the sex trade, anything like that?’

  Again there was a shake of the head.

  ‘How many cops have the Russians got working for them?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ he breathed softly. ‘There are a few of us I guess, maybe a dozen, two dozen.’

  ‘Do any of them work the drugs trade, the girls? Any other side of the business?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he offered, ‘I’m not really sure.’

  ‘But they do carry out the same work as you?’ I persisted. ‘Helping with extortion, moving in on businesses, property, things like that?’

  He paused for a moment, thinking. ‘Yeah, I guess they do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why are the Russians using you for this type of work, the rackets? Not anything else?’

  ‘Why does any mob do it? Protection money, I guess.’

  ‘Nothing else?’ I probed, not able to get over the feeling that something bigger was going on here than simple extortion. It seemed too minor for the Russians, somehow, and a terrible waste of precious police resources.

  ‘Does everybody pay?’

  ‘Most do, for a time at least,’ he said. ‘But sooner or later, most of them can’t make the payments, no matter how hard they try.’

  ‘And what happens then?’ I knew, of course, I just wanted to hear it from the cop.

  He looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘They take the businesses over, the property too,’ he said as if speaking to an infant.

  I nodded slowly. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘and how much property have they acquired in this way?’

  He breathed softly for a time, closed his eyes and rocked back and forth; I wasn’t sure if he needed to deal with the pain or if he was wondering how to answer. ‘I don’t know . . . I guess . . .’

  ‘Just a ballpark figure,’ I said.

  He exhaled a long, full breath. ‘Well man, now I think about it, I guess it’s quite a lot.’ He chuckled, nodded his head. ‘Yeah, a hell of a lot.’

  ‘Where do they operate?’

  He started to weaken, and I removed the bundled shirt that I was using for a bandage on his shoulder wound and reapplied a torn-off leg from his uniform pants in its place, using the opportunity to finally bandage his wounded hand at the same time. It wouldn’t do me any good at all if this guy bled to death.

  When I was done, he started listing names of streets, of neighborhoods, of businesses the Russians had taken ownership of in recent months. He’d been right; there were a hell of a lot of them. And they all seemed to be north of William J. Day Boulevard, between Thomas Park to the west and City Point to the east; a lot of property stretching across the waterfront of the Old Harbor.

  I was beginning to get an idea of what the Russians were up to, how the Thistle Café – while being all-important to Gerry and his family – was only one small part of a much larger picture.

  Could I protect the café, without getting dragged in deeper?

  Or would I be forced to deal with everything, head-on?

  ‘What were your orders tonight?’ I asked him. ‘What were you told?’

  ‘Got the call from Andrei about the same time dispatch alerted us to the fight at Whitey’s.’

  ‘The other car with you?’

  ‘With me, as in with the Russians?’ he asked, and I nodded. He, in turn, shook his head. ‘No, no, they’re clean . . . Well, clean as you can be down here, anyway.’

  ‘So what were you told?’

  ‘Find you if we could, bring you to him. When we saw the car escaping – I recognized it as the Russians’ – we chased, called for updated orders. Told us to capture you if possible, kill the driver in case he’d talked.’

  The fear came back into his eyes as he remembered the extent of Russian retribution, but I patted his arm, tried to calm him.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to kill you, not now. When I leave here, I’m going to knock you out so you don’t get any ideas about letting the Russians know about me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t, I –’

  I held up a hand to stop him. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t, but I’m going to do it anyway. When you wake up, I suggest you go straight home, get your family, and find a new place to live, somewhere far away from here.’

  He breathed hard, looked pained, but I knew he understood this was the best option available to him; at least this way he and his family would have a chance. Finally, he nodded his head in acceptance.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I just have one more question though . . . Where were you going to take me?’

  ‘They’ve got . . . they’ve got a massage parlor on Chestnut Street up in Chelsea, you know, a sauna place, Andrei hangs around there a lot. That’s where he told me to bring you.’

  Okay. It was time to quit reacting to events, and become more proactive; and this sauna place sounded like an ideal starting point.

  ‘Great,’ I said to the cop, smiling for about the first time that evening. ‘I could do with a massage right about now.’

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  I watched the front door of Oksana’s Russian Steam Bath from the window of a stolen car parked in a small lot across the road.

  The bath house was, as the cop had said, up in Chelsea – about six miles north of the warehouse where I’d questioned him, across the Mystic River. Kane and I did the journey in a little Citroen hatchback that I’d stolen.

  I reconnoitered the bath house on foot, getting a feel for the area. It was decidedly low-rent, with garbage cans overflowing on the sidewalks and abandoned vehicles dotting the run-down streets while the traffic on Route One soared past on the overpass above us.

  Oksana’s Russian Steam Bath was a two-story structure set well back from Chestnut Street, a parking lot in front holding three black Mercedes S-Class limousines; more than a little out of place for the area. The lower level was a sprawling brick affair, with a white wood-clad box of a second level dumped carelessly on top. There were two doors on the first floor, and another on the second.

  A
ccording to the signs, the place should have been closed, but the lights were on and the outlets were dumping steam into the cool night air with a vengeance.

  I’d checked out the far side on Cherry Street and – although there were plenty of windows – I couldn’t make out any other exits, although there was another parking lot attached to the side, this one with a few older vehicles, cheap and badly maintained. For the staff, I figured.

  I sat in the car, deciding on my next course of action as I ruffled the soft fur on Kane’s big head. A part of me just wanted to race in there, break some skulls and get some answers; but the stronger part told me that this would be near-suicidal. I had no idea who was in there, how many of them there were, and what weapons they might have. I would literally be going in blind and – if I was really going to do that – I would like to be substantially better equipped. Flash-bangs, grenades, an assault rifle or maybe a submachine gun, and a large amount of ammo – at a minimum. As it was, the police had provided me with a shotgun and a Glock 22 handgun, and I also had the old Browning 9mm I’d taken from the Russian outside Whitey’s. I also had a second knife that I kept in my boot, a folding Benchmade with a three-inch blade, as well as a punch-dagger hidden in my belt buckle. I had Kane too, I mused, and for a moment I actually wondered if it could be done.

  But my chances would be fifty-fifty at best without better intel, and that is what I decided to try and get by staking the place out.

  From what the cop told me, I guessed Andrei would be fairly high up in the organization, but not at the top. The bosses wouldn’t entrust contact with the cops to their streets hoodlums, but nor would they want their key lieutenants to be exposed, in case their police contacts suddenly developed a conscience and decided to talk.

  The cop I’d questioned hadn’t known a hell of a lot about the group he was working for, and I assumed that was because the ‘Ovcharka’ was good at his job. If he was typical of his type, that job would entail drug dealing, prostitution, gambling, people smuggling, protection and embezzlement, burglary and street crime, and a whole host of other sordid – but profitable – activities. A key part of that job was also keeping off the radar of law enforcement – local, state and federal – and also staying safe from competitors and rival gang lords. Kozlov – who had evidently been operating here for some time – had been successful in this respect, with his base of operations still unknown.

  Andrei might be a key part of Kozlov’s business – and this bath house might be a hangout for Russian goons – but I knew it wouldn’t be the gang’s headquarters, and I doubted Kozlov himself would ever have set foot in there.

  But someone in there would know where Kozlov was, and where he ran his business from; it was just a question of finding out who.

  I continued watching from my reclined position in my car, keeping low and out of sight.

  Nothing was happening, nobody was coming or going, and as I stared out of the window, I started to remember a recon op I’d been on in Afghanistan, years before.

  The Regimental Recon Detachment had been tasked with getting eyes on the Tora Bora cave complex, where Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda boys were thought to be hiding out after Nine Eleven. The complex was huge, spread over a rugged and mountainous region of the country, and US forces were having a hell of a time trying to map it, explore it, and get an idea of where its countless entrances and exits were located.

  My four-man team had to hole up in an observation post – basically a trench six-foot long by four feet deep, with camouflage strung netting over the top – and watch a designated area of the complex, recording everything that we saw. According to the reports we’d been given, it should have been a hot-bed of activity.

  The hours went by, and there was nothing. Then the days went by, and there was still nothing. And then the weeks went by . . . and still we hadn’t seen a damn thing.

  Three weeks we waited in that trench, watching a bare mountainside in the blistering heat of the day and the freezing cold of night, eating cold rations and shitting into plastic bags, waiting for something – anything – to happen.

  But nothing ever did, and in the end we got recalled when the intelligence section finally realized they’d given us the wrong coordinates and we’d been watching the wrong patch of land for the past twenty-one days.

  It wasn’t the most fun I’d ever had, but on the one hand it did remind me of how patient I used to be.

  On the other hand though, I considered as I caressed the stock of the police shotgun that lay next to me, it also reminded me that sometimes a stakeout could provide you with jack shit, and just be a massive and pointless waste of time.

  I knew what the sensible thing to do was, I knew I should wait and observe, and yet . . . and yet . . .

  I breathed out, long and hard.

  Damn, I didn’t know when that famous patience of mine had left me, but – as I stared interminably out of the car window as nothing happened at the bath house across the street – I knew I wasn’t going to be sitting there for much longer.

  And in the end, I just thought fuck it.

  I was going in.

  Chapter Two

  I took my time as I worked my way from the stolen car back onto Cherry Street, keeping to the shadows and careful to avoid being seen by any passersby. I could hide the pistols and the knives, but the shotgun was a bit more obvious.

  It was past three in the morning and the streets were far from busy, but I didn’t know what sort of anti-surveillance precautions the Russian might have taken. I hadn’t seen any CCTV on my first trip round, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any. Did the Mercedes, with their blackened glass, have anyone watching from within? And were there people looking out from the building itself?

  Shotgun hidden uncomfortably down one pants leg, I strolled as casually as I could west on Chestnut Street, rounding onto William Street before turning back east on Cherry Street, heading for the rear of the complex.

  My assessment of the place was that it wasn’t a major base for the Russian mob, just a convenient place to meet up and relax for some of its members. If it was anything more than that, it wouldn’t have been on the cop’s radar at all, they wouldn’t have let him have so much information. Andrei probably wanted to wait for the dirty cops somewhere relatively unconnected, and when they arrived he would have probably then transferred me from the police cruiser to one of the limousines, and then taken me on to a secondary, more secure location – one that the police didn’t know about.

  It would still be classed as a relatively secure place for the meet though, otherwise Andrei wouldn’t have been here at all. The only question I had to ask myself was, how secure?

  I crept past an office block on the left, an empty parking lot on the right, edging slowly down the narrow, dark street. Cherry Street was more of an alleyway really, just wide enough to fit a single vehicle down without scraping its wing mirrors; the rear of Oksana’s backed up onto the road itself, and I paused while I was still a building’s length away, assessing the scene once more.

  Opposite the rear of the bath house were a couple of houses separated by a small parking area, a pattern which continued on that side all way down the road. I didn’t know if anyone was watching from those houses either, but I assumed not; it would be altogether too much trouble to go to for a place like this.

  From the shadows, I checked out the cars that were parked nearby, and didn’t see anyone inside.

  On the side of the building nearest me, there was a one story extension to the two-story bath house, with steam vents and windows right above its flat roof. I noted that there were no lights coming from inside the building on this side.

  I carried on down the street and made an assessment of the far side, which bordered the staff parking lot. Again, there didn’t seem to be anyone inside the cars, but this time I did see a discreet CCTV camera mounted on the corner of a building opposite, taking in the parking area and that side of the bath house. I was careful to avoid coming into its
path – it had probably caught me on my first trip past, and I didn’t want to alert anyone who might be watching by going past a second time.

  I retreated back down the alley, and – checking once again for hidden observers but seeing none – I slipped between the one-story extension and the small house next to it, finding myself in a pool of shadowed darkness.

  Hoping that I was out of sight, I gripped the rough brickwork of the wall, attacked it with my boot and kicked myself up until I caught hold of the lip of the roof. In the same action I heaved myself up and over, rolling low onto the top of the flat roof.

  I pulled the shotgun out from my pants, held it against my chest, and lay still for a while, waiting for any sort of reaction from the Russians; if I’d been picked up by some sort of unseen monitoring system – infrared beams, motion sensors, even someone watching from a window – I would know about it soon enough.

  But minutes passed, and there was nothing; and so I crawled slowly across the rooftop, slithering like a snake, belly scraping along the rough surface, until I reached the first window.

  The place was old – the signs out front claimed it had been in business for more than a hundred years – and the ventilation system was clearly far from the best. The steam vents were working overtime, but it was apparently still not enough for what was being generated and – as a result – most of the building’s windows were cracked open. The ones I was next to now were no exception, and I wondered if confidence in their local power just made the Russians careless, or if the open windows were an invitation for people like me, to draw any intruder into a trap.

  My gut told me it was just carelessness though – the Irish mob were doing their own thing, the police had evidently been paid off, and no street criminal would be stupid enough to break into a place clearly linked to the Russian mafia.

  I edged closer to the window, ears straining to hear any noises coming from inside. Even at this time in the morning the noise of the traffic from the Route One overpass was terrific, and I had to work hard to blank it out and concentrate on any sounds happening closer to home.