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“Well, yeah. Oh, and by the way, just so you know, Cocosino will be coming for both our asses after your little stunt last night.”
“Killer croc? Isn’t that a Batman villain?”
“Well, yes and no. I assure you Cocosino is real, and we have a trail of bodies to prove it.”
“You’re saying you have a supervillain straight out of a comic book in Miami-Dade?”
“We have a killer for hire straight out of your worst nightmare. A guy who doesn’t care. An enforcer. A guy who everyone’s afraid of. And you wrote your name on a wall. I really hope you understand the implications of that. Cocosino will be coming.” Kaino gave Bolan a very shrewd look. “But that’s not why you’re here, you’re here because...?”
“What’s cocodrilo?”
Kurtzman spoke triumphantly across the link. “Spanish from the Russian, krokodil, and that’s our link!”
“What does this crocodile stuff mean, Bear?”
“It’s bad.”
Kaino nodded. “Muy malo.”
“Krokodil is Russian for crocodile,” Kurtzman said.
“I picked up on that.”
“Krokodil is a new designer drug. It’s a desomorphine, or morphine derivative.”
“A heroin substitute,” Bolan stated.
“Right.” Kurtzman clicked a key and a window of text appeared on Bolan’s and Kaino’s laptops.
“The main ingredient is codeine,” Kurtzman informed them. “In the U.S. codeine is a controlled substance, but in Russia codeine is widely available as an over-the-counter drug.”
In Bolan’s experience what was readily available in Russia over the counter, much less under it, was appalling. A frown passed over the soldier’s face. “Most heroin addicts I’ve met would consider codeine a pretty piss-poor substitute for heroin.”
“It’s what they mix it with.”
“Like what?”
“Try gasoline, paint thinner, iodine, hydrochloric acid, even red phosphorus.”
“Bear, I’ve had Russians throw red phosphorus at me in anger. Now you’re saying they’re injecting it?”
“According to reports, the high is similar to heroin—a whole lot rougher, but if you’re a degenerate heroin addict, krokodil will get the job done, and it’s about ten times cheaper. The other benefit is, given the ingredients, you don’t need a friendly heroin dealer. You can get all the ingredients and cook it up on your own.”
“Should I even ask about the side effects?”
“The side effects are how krokodil gets its name.” Kurtzman hit a key. “Hold on to your breakfast.”
Bolan stared long and hard at the jpeg. He could tell it was a human ankle because two hands pulling down a sock framed it. Where the flesh wasn’t gray it was green. In between the blotches of necrotic color, the skin rose and cracked like a lizard’s scales. Bolan easily identified several suppurating injection sites. “This isn’t good.”
“It gets worse. A heroin high can last four to eight hours. Krokodil lasts for about ninety minutes, and by all accounts the withdrawal symptoms are obscene. Once you’re hooked on krokodil you need to hit three to four times per day. All you live for is to cook it or score it. According to the Russian medical service, once you start taking krokodil your life expectancy is a year or less. It’s the cell death and scaling that give the drug its name, and those scales eventually rot off. I’m reading accounts here of advanced users being found still alive but with their bones showing. In Russia they call it the drug that eats the junkie, literally and figuratively. It is the absolutely lowest form of addiction I have ever heard of.”
“And now it’s here in Miami-Dade.”
Kaino spoke quietly. “I’ve seen it. Smelled it, too. Any lab cooking the cocodrilo smells to the skies of iodine. So do the cooks. Most of the cooks are junkies themselves. Sometimes they pour the iodine into their wounds as remedial first aid. Sometimes they drink it. There’s some misguided mythology that drinking what they’re cooking with will make them stronger.”
Bolan had found himself drinking potassium iodide on several occasions; however, that had usually been after exposure to spent nuclear material. “So, the skin is rotting off their bones but they have very healthy thyroid glands.”
Kurtzman smiled bleakly. “That’s about it.”
“So now that El Hombre is here to save us, what are we going to do?” Kaino interjected.
“Russian chatter brought me, but it was tied up with the gang situation here in Miami-Dade. That’s why I asked for your help. Speaking of which, what are you willing to do, Master Sergeant?”
“After last night?” Kaino sighed, and not unhappily. “I’m looking forward to exploring the envelope of my first open-ended, paid, consulting leave of absence for the health and safety of the greater Miami-Dade metropolitan area.”
“Glad to hear that, Kaino.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Well, I’ve got Russians chattering about gangs. You’ve got gangs spilling Russian filth on your streets. I think we should go talk to some Russians.”
* * *
“J UST SO YOU KNOW ,” Kaino warned, “the Russian mafia isn’t one of my areas of expertise.”
Bolan sat in Kaino’s unmarked car and watched the back door of Papi’s Tea Room through binoculars. “It’s one of mine.”
“You’ve been staring at that door for five minutes.” Kaino regarded Bolan dryly. “Has it done anything yet?”
“No, but it’s not happy.”
“The door isn’t happy?” Kaino queried.
“No.”
“It’s not a happy door.”
“No, someone violated it,” Bolan said.
“It’s a violated, unhappy door?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?”
“Look closer.”
Kaino squinted into his binoculars. “Well, it is a filthy door covered with graffiti.”
“Look at the hinges and the knob,” Bolan suggested.
Kaino looked, then slowly smiled. The steel security door was filthy, old, weathered and well covered with spray paint. The hinges were brand-new. So was the knob, and the metal around them was dented and blackened. Whoever had rehung the door had taken a pretty cavalier attitude toward his job. “Someone took a Masterkey to that door.”
Bolan nodded. A Masterkey was usually a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with sand or some kind of granulated composite designed to slam off door hinges and locks. The soldier shook his head at the door. “You know, if you’re not going to do a job right, you just shouldn’t do it at all.”
“My mother always said that.”
“My mother always said everyone deserves a second chance.”
“A second chance to do what?” Kaino asked.
From the bag between his knees Bolan removed a Remington 870MCS shotgun with a fourteen-inch barrel and a pistol grip. “To hang a door correctly.”
“Now, that’s not the kind of shotgun a good, God-fearing Justice Department Observation Liaison Officer should carry.”
Bolan slid two metal-cased shells into the shotgun and put three yellow plastics in behind them to bat cleanup.
Kaino slid from behind the wheel and pulled his revolvers.
The men walked nonchalantly down the alley. It was midday but Russian rap music made the poorly hung door vibrate. Bolan pointed the brutally shortened 870 at the top hinge and the laser sight in the grip put a red dot on it.
“So,” Kaino inquired, “you’re just going to light up that howitzer and announce—” The shotgun made a dull slap-click noise and the hinge twisted and broke as though hit by an iron fist. Kaino stood staring. “You have a silenced shotgun.”
“No, it’s the round that’s silent. The gunpowder hits a piston inside the shell and the piston rams the breaching load out of the shell down the barrel. The piston jams in the shell mouth so the entire detonation is contained inside the shell.”
“Very James Bond.”
Bolan’s weapon slap-clicked and the bottom hinge smeared away under the breaching round’s blow. He shucked in two more yellow rounds. “You want to go first?”
“Oh, no, you’re a guest.” Kaino generously waved his guns at the door for Bolan to take point. “By all means.”
Bolan kicked the door.
The music hit them like a wall. The bass thud-thud-thudded loud enough to rattle bones while someone snarled in Russian, undoubtedly about how bad he was and how many women he had. Bolan moved down the narrow hallway, passing a kitchen with notices that it had been closed by order of the health department. Bolan and Kaino peered through the windows in the double doors that led into the main tearoom.
The place looked like a cross between a shooting gallery and a strip joint. If any tea had ever been served here, the patrons had probably smoked it. Kaino made a disgusted noise. “Well now, that’s just sad.”
Bolan nodded at the tableau in front of them. “Tragic.”
Nikita “Papi” Popov sat at a table flanked by two of his goons. In Russian parlance the goons were typical Russian “hammerheads,” big men, probably former military with mixed martial arts physiques filling out their designer tracksuits. The man on Popov’s left had the typical stubble hair cut. Popov’s right-hand goon bore a startling resemblance to a six-foot-six Jesus.
No one at the table was happy.
Indeed, all three mobsters appeared to have been beaten into pulps. They were well bandaged. Popov’s right-hand man had his right arm in a sling. The left-hand goon’s head was wrapped like a mummy. Popov appeared to have gotten the worst of it. He sat shirtless with his ribs taped and his left arm in a sling. Contusions grossly contorted the Russian prison gang tattoos covering Popov’s skin.
In typical Russian mobster fashion they sat grim-faced, drinking vodka and staring into the middle distance. The sea of bottles on the table indicated they had been at it for a while.
“Those sure are some sulky Russians,” Kaino observed.
“I’d go so far as to say morally devastated.”
“Morally devastated. I like that.”
“Let’s see if moral devastation has put them in the mood to talk,” Bolan said. “You take Bullethead and I’ll take J-man.”
Bolan and Kaino strode through the doors. Between the pounding music, the pounding of vodka and the Russians’ pounded state of being it took them far too many moments to notice.
The soldier shouted over what he could only loosely describe as music. “Mr. Popov! We need to talk!”
“Shit! Fuck!” Popov went apoplectic. “Kill them!”
The goons rose and kicked back their chairs. Bolan and Kaino closed the distance. The Jesus-looking hammerhead tried to go for the gun under his jacket. Bolan put the ruby dot of the Masterkey’s laser sight on J-man’s slung right arm and fired. The Russian screamed and dropped to his knees as his already injured wing took a 12-gauge rubber baton round.
Kaino snapped his revolvers forward with practiced ease. He rammed the muzzle of his left-hand gun into the Russian’s solar plexus like a fencer, then clouted the Russian behind the ear with the butt of his right. The Russian mobster went boneless across the table and slid to the floor in a cascade of vodka bottles. “There goes my pension...” Kaino muttered.
Bolan put a riot round into the stereo and the Russian rap ceased in a shower of sparks. He shook his head at Popov’s state of affairs. “So, besides me, who could have done this to you?”
“Fuck you!”
Bolan pumped his shotgun’s action and the laser designated Popov’s sling. Popov screamed. “No! For fuck’s sake! Please!”
“For the duration of this conversation I would advise you not to make me ask you anything twice.”
Popov stared sulkily at the tabletop.
“Tell your boys to resume their seats.”
Popov snarled. J-man sat back in his chair cradling his arm. Bullethead managed to scrape himself off the floor and did the same.
Kaino tsked as he confiscated their pistols. “Someone messed these boys up but good.”
Bolan nodded. The Russians had been systematically worked over, severely, and by pros. The soldier’s instincts told him that the beat down hadn’t been punishment or a warning. Popov and his men had been interrogated. “You seen the like around here?”
Kaino eyed the collection of contusions and broken bones with a professional eye. He lifted his chin at the bloody bandages. “Not in a long time. Let’s take a look at the wounds.”
Bolan ripped a dressing off the top of Popov’s shoulder, which elicited a shriek. Bolan’s eyes narrowed at a very nasty, ragged laceration across the Russian’s medial deltoid. The wound looked as though an animal might have made it. Kaino let out a long breath between his teeth and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Blackjack?” Bolan suggested.
“Close. I’d say a flat, beavertail slapjack sap with a coil spring in the handle, lead- and clay-loaded. A snap of the wrist will break bones. You swing side-on—” Kaino nodded at the Russian’s wound “—they’ll cut right through flesh. Jeez, there was an old-timer on the force when I first came out of the academy. He could put his halfway through the Miami phone book with a good windup.”
“Miami-Dade doesn’t use saps anymore, do they?”
“Nope.” The master sergeant sighed wistfully as he gazed backward into a bright, shining, never-to-return time in Florida law enforcement. “Banned them years ago.”
“Someone worked over our Russians.”
“Someone beat them like rugs.”
