Chapter 21 "The Crazy Badger"

In downtown Denver, Juri Nevedyev's eyes glowed blue reflecting the monitor before him on his small desk on the 3rd floor of a glass and tan stuccoed building on Cherokee St. He was puzzling over some paper reports and photographs that he had just transferred to his computer. Juri frowned as he clicked on the mouse repeatedly, cycling photo after photo. As he did this with his right hand, he reached into his desk drawer with his left hand. His fingers tiptoed over a coffee cup, a folded newspaper, his Sig Sauer model P229 9mm pistol and holster, a half eaten bag of pistachios and finally, what he was looking for.

It was a gift from an old partner of his. A rather large, black, and ungainly ionizer ashtray. It had a little fan in it and an air ionizer that supposedly kept cigarette smoke at bay. He flicked it on and set it on the desk. It, like the computer monitor before him, glows an eerie blue. He stood up and looked down the small row of cubicles in the center of the office. It was a little before six and everyone was pretty much gone.

He tapped a Marlboro out of the pack in his front shirt pocket and dangled it from his lip. He was still transfixed by the images on the computer in front of him.

"No. This doesn't look right," he whispered. Even whispering, Juri had a very noticeable Russian accent. He lit the cigarette and blew a rolling, glowing blue cloud towards the ashtray. It whirred as it dutifully tried to suck up his pollution. He smirked and cut deep lines into his tan face around his eyes, as he continued to cycle through the photographs. "This is not right at all."

Juri prided himself on being a relatively simple man. Not simple in the sense that he was mildly retarded, but more like efficient. He was relatively medium in stature and in build, stayed in shape, but was not "ripped" or "jacked", had short cropped dark hair, and brown eyes. He was 46, but had the energy of a much younger man and women always said he looked younger than he was and that he was quite handsome. He had angular, chiseled features and the flat nose of a boxer. Although ladies liked him, he had never married. He ate very little, slept very little and for a Russian, drank very little. Juri often thought of himself as an evolved human, a survivor type with very little structurally or mentally wrong with him that would cull from humanity prematurely.

He was clever and decisive too. Juri lived outside of Moscow as a child, and when he was 14 both of his parents were killed in a car accident.

He was at school the next day, and pretended as if he had not lost both of his parents. He was a little young for the services and a little old for the orphanage, and under communist rule, he was not exactly sure what the local Ministry would have done with him, so he kept a mournful secret for a few years and kept the few who knew the secret of his tragic emancipation at bay with bribes and favors. He stayed with friends and relatives on a seemingly random, but regimented schedule as to not arouse the communist suspicion of nosy neighbors. He lived like a ghost passing through the last compulsory years of Soviet high school, as a little teenage Juri in parenthesis. He finished school and joined the Army.

In Soviet Russia, basic training for the Infantry was a crucible of blood, pain and cruelty. He always had laughed at the ideal of an American drill sergeant. Chest puffed out, red faced, barking orders and insults at the recruits. For punishment...exercise, calisthenics. American drill sergeants reminded him of lovable bulldogs or maybe even dachshunds.

Drill sergeants in the Russian Army are called "Father" or "Comrade Sergeant" and they are many and they are more like Sharks. The Sergeants are stern and quick, less likely to remand you words than with physical violence.

If that wasn't bad enough, the worst treatment came after the training from your own army brothers on your first assignment. The "Grandfathers" are 2nd year troops that you would meet in your first infantry assignment.

They call their right of hazing, Diedovshina, which means "Rule of the Grandfathers" They sense weakness and pain and smell blood. They swarm and pounce and expose your every flaw.

They steal from the first year troops and treat them like slaves. They will beat you and create more pain and more blood until you think that you will break. One of them shoved a razor blade into Juri's mouth once and slashed his cheek open. Juri doesn't even remember why the confrontation with the Grandfather got to that level. It started as a seemingly good natured ribbing about the cleanliness of his teeth, but it probably had more to do with the new toothpaste that his uncle had sent him which was stolen from him that night along with all of his money.

Juri's first 2 year assignment was a security detail near a cauldron of missile silos on the coldest, windblown plain that they could find outside of Tomsk in Siberia.

One day, one of the first years in his unit went a little crazy and stabbed a Grandfather and a cook in the kitchen and escaped out of the camp into the other worldly frozen tundra. 18 year-old Juri and seven other men, all first years, were given rifles and were told to hunt him down. As an added cruelty, they were not to take their winter coats or hats. They were to be dressed as the mad escapee to "add an element of urgency to their search". The Grandfather in charge of the watch thought that he was particularly brilliant. The crazy escapee was wearing fatigue pants and a standard issue T-shirt.

The chase, spurned on by the cold, did not take long. The footprints of the mad first year's path were clearly visible through the dehydrated, hard and crunchy snow. They chased him into a small grove of trees in a ravine about two kilometers away from the camp. There, he was pacing back and forth, tired and frozen from his flight, but still with disturbing amounts of energy. He had a pistol. The pack of eight hunters caught up with him there. That Crazy Badger was screaming about racist devils and hunters and prey. He was also screaming about the Grandfathers. Two of the more level headed and probably warmer guys in Juri's team tried to calm the crazy badger and bring him around. Juri could feel his thoughts growing dim and his body began to numb. It was probably -7C and the wind made it so much worse. His thoughts were comical as two of his comrades futilely tried to argue with this insane animal of a man that was now squarely in Juri's Kalashnikov rifle's sights.

Then it happened. The Crazy Badger's voice grew to a fever pitch on a particularly passionate tirade and he flailed and gesticulated with that damn pistol in his hand for the last time. 3 shots rang out in almost synchronous succession. Juri's rifle rocked back into his shoulder and the muzzle flared. His ears popped, muffled and then rang from the almost unreal concussion of his shot. In the distance, three perfect holes flared by red shredded meat and pink spray appeared on the T-shirt of the Crazy Badger before he crumpled to the ground.

To this day, Juri doesn't know if he fired first, or was startled into firing by one of the other two men in his unit who fired as well, but the end result was the same. The Crazy Badger was dead. Curiously, Juri and the two others that fired the deadly shots did the exact same thing. They dumbly turned around and started trudging back to the camp leaving the others to haul the body back. In some sick way, they felt that they had earned that. Each one of them gripped their rifles tighter and headed back to camp with one thing on their mind. They felt they might be killers now. They felt that they had now learned what the Army had repeatedly bashed into their skulls over and over, and that as sick as it sounds, they had now instantly matriculated from this hell into a much deeper one. Now, they were elevated above the rest of them, even the grandfathers. They had mortally spilled the blood of a comrade. None of the three could ever be touched or stolen from at the point of a knife or butt of a rifle, or at the heel of a boot. The Grandfathers now seemed like little boys without the watchful eye of a mother, and in that instant, Juri and the two other first years had become something that the fraternal order of Grandfathers or the Diedovshina couldn't teach or remotely understand.

None of them can remember who fired first, or the one who did wouldn't admit it. Perhaps it was the twitch of a frozen, trembling finger. It didn't matter. The Crazy Badger was dead.

Juri was never hazed again, nor were his two assassin brothers.

The old civilian cook that was stabbed died. The hated Grandfather made a full recovery.

Juri spent 5 years in the Army and was decorated as a security officer. After he left the regular army, he ran security details for the Cultural Ministry. On one particular assignment, he accompanied a prestigious ballet company to Reykjavik, Iceland to keep an eye on the dance company during a two week run of shows. Soviet security for such artistic outreach involved more of a herding of the artists so that they would not stray and defect, read or watch any unapproved material and essentially act like good communists rather than protecting the artists from outside threats to their person.

During the run of the highly touted and popular show, Juri fell madly in love with one of the dancers and she convinced him to run away with her. Svettlana.

They disappeared one night into the sterile and frozen streets of Reykjavik. They eventually forged some passports and flew to Canada. From there, they stole a car and drove then walked across the border into Maine and into the arms of US authorities. In the 80s, defectors were treated kindly and debriefed by the CIA and FBI and whoever else wanted to interview them, and in return the government set them up with Aperican papers, fake identities and told them to go their merry way. US authorities were particularly interested in Juri's military experience, but out of duty and a sense of honor he did not reveal any secrets that he deemed sensitive and played a little stupid.

So Juri and his dancer lover, Svettlana Nobrova, left for New York. Svettlana had to dance. Things fell apart rapidly, as Svettlana embraced and exclaimed her defector status to anyone who would listen and used her Soviet fame to garner special auditions and eventually jobs of some notoriety. Juri never felt safe, and would constantly tell her to use her fake identity. New York was a bustling town full of immigrants, any one of which could carry the blade of the Soviet sickle in their back pocket to cut their happy little life to shreds.

Svettlana ended up leaving him for another dancer and started touring the US with a very famous ballet troupe. Juri looked at a map of the US and decided that he would like to start a quiet new life somewhere in the middle of this great land. He chose Denver, Colorado. He decided to go to a place where he could buy a pick-up truck and he could hike, ski and fish. It was a place where he couldn't stare over a vast ocean and imagine the dark wraiths of his motherland coming for him.

After about six months in Colorado, he received a call in the middle of the night. It was a hang-up. A few days later, he read in the paper that his noted dancer and lover Svettlana was found dead in a hotel near San Franscisco of a drug overdose. That never was true for Juri. She would never...

He decided to do what he knew best and enrolled in the police academy and was a highly decorated Denver police officer as he became a full US citizen and changed his name back from his assumed identity to his given Russian name. Glastnost was all the rage and the Berlin wall fell, so it was excellent timing. The fake identity of one Henry Chinaski never suited him.

Juri was promoted to detective and eventually, Homicide. His no nonsense approach and discerning eye made him especially suited to the work, and deep down he believed that it often took a killer to catch one. He was especially suited to sniffing out the cold blooded when the murder was a crime of passion, rage, or a horrific deed spawned by dumb luck.

As he reviewed these ghastly preliminary photos on his computer, he decided that what he was looking at was far from dumb luck. This was murder with a flavor that Juri couldn't taste. This was a planned and meticulous act with a distinct flair for the dramatic. He grunted as he thought that long dead Svettlana may have more insight into this strange killing than he did.

Currently, he was looking at a picture of a somewhat decayed and bloated corpse that was posed like a Chinese Buddha. Ritualistic killing. Oddly enough, not the first one he has seen in the past three months. Juri's brain was raking over photograph after photograph of the crime scene as he calmly puffed on his cigarette. A room full of pot. Iguana. Dead chunks of meat. Candles. Runes on wood floor. A blood-soaked headband with the chevron on it. A single branch of a pot plant wrapped in Mylar on the floor...

"Yo Mayo!" He exclaimed. "YOU ARE NOT RIGHT!" He pointed at the screen and stood up triumphantly. His boss, Lieutenant Adler had been standing behind him and coughed preemptively and surprised him.

Adler was an older man that looked like a fatter, greyer Radar O'Reilley from MASH, complete with the round wire rim glasses that were from a bygone era. Adler was from a bygone era, when Denver was a much sweeter, and slower place to live. His era was spawned when burnt out hippies became inspired by the nostalgic art from the misunderstood generation before them. Those hippies searched out the old dusty stomping grounds of Kerouac, Ansell Adams and Georgia O’Keefe for a quiet contemplation of the massive canopy of sky and the rugged mountains that cut huge powerful silhouettes into them.

"How's it going, Juri?" Adler intoned.

"Life is shit." Juri shot back, and pointed at the screen, "Why is this here?" He pointed at the close up of the single branch of pot. Adler put another thick folder on his desk.

"You know you can't smoke in here, Juri. Next time I'll write you the citation myself." Adler said with an aw-shucks grin. Juri impatiently stubbed out the cigarette.

"You can't smoke anywhere in this god damned country! Perhaps I should stick them up my ass. That would be better!" Adler just nodded as if to say 'yep' and trudged off.

Juri picked up the phone on his desk and said in his best English accent, "Hello. Evidence Room? This is detective Nevedyev."