Sons of Anarchy: Bratva (12 page)

In a place like this, the management wasn’t likely to bother calling the cops for a bar fight—not with the backroom blow jobs and front-room drug deals likely happening on the premises—but he couldn’t chance it.

Ablaze with fury, he shoved his way through the bar with Opie and Joyce in tow. Several times guys tried to get in the way before seeing the rage on Jax’s features and changing their minds. Chibs had stayed by the bar, where Jax had left him. He saw them coming and drained the last of his beer, dropped some money on the bar, and smiled at the same waitress he’d charmed when they’d come in. She tucked a piece of paper into his hand that might have been her number, and he stroked his goatee like he was one of the Three Musketeers.

“Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Jax snapped.

Chibs didn’t have time to reply. The doorman had taken over for the jarhead bouncer, who moved to block their path.

Jax threw his hands up. “The trouble’s back there, brother, and we don’t want any of it. Step aside, and you won’t see us again.”

The jarhead flared his nostrils and for a second, Jax thought he would put up a fight. Then he moved to let them pass.

“Don’t come back,” he said. “The Russian pricks have connections. I throw them out twice a month, no choice in the matter. But you guys ain’t Russian.”

Joyce started to say something, but Jax shoved him forward, into the foyer, and then all four of them were pushing out through the front door and into the parking lot. They were awash with piss-yellow light from the lampposts, and Jax kept moving until they were in the darkness beyond that sickly illumination, not far from where they’d parked their bikes.

“What happened back there?” Chibs asked.

“One of the girls was a little too eager,” Joyce said. “Got on the Russians’ nerves.”

“You didn’t help,” Opie said. “You could’ve gotten rid of her before it blew up like that.”

An eighteen-wheeler blew by on the main road, kicking up wind and grit. Joyce turned to glare at Opie like he’d just insulted his mother.

“I just did you a favor, asshole.” The coiled burn marks on his face had a pearlescent hue, catching the light from the parking lot. When he grimaced, one side of his mouth did not move as freely, thanks to those burns.

“You let it fall apart,” Opie said.

“All right!” Jax barked. “We’ll figure out another angle. Let’s just—”

Chibs tapped him on the back. “Jackie.”

Jax turned and saw Yurik emerging from Birdland. The Russian glanced around, looking jaundiced in that yellow glow. Jazz still played on the outdoor speakers, a jubilant tune that seemed almost absurd as theme music to this hardcore Bratva leg breaker. Yurik spotted them and started over.

“Careful,” Joyce said.

“He’s alone,” Jax muttered. “If this was trouble, you think he’d put himself out here like this? You guys keep back.”

Jax strode back across the lot—back through that piss-yellow light, awash in too-happy jazz—and met the Russian halfway. Yurik had a split lip and a bloody nose and his left eye had started to swell, and Jax wondered if it had been the bartender who’d managed it or if one of the noble bystanders had gotten in a lucky punch.

“There’s a Russian Orthodox church on E Street, right across from the park. Ninety minutes, you be on the steps of the church.”

“You can help me find my sister?”

Yurik dragged a hand across his nose, leaving a bloody streak on his arm. “Ninety minutes. Maybe you help us find Oleg. Maybe we let you take your sister away before she gets hurt.”

9

Behind the
hotel was a rusted old swing set that sat on a concrete block with grass growing up through cracks. Trinity could see it from the window of the room she shared with Oleg and had felt the lure of it for days. She’d resisted, mainly because she had earned a level of respect from Kirill and the other men in Oleg’s Bratva and she thought sitting on the faded, dirty yellow swing and kicking her feet back and forth would undo the image she’d cultivated with them.

Tonight, she didn’t care. Oleg and Gavril had gone into Las Vegas, searching for any sign of Lagoshin and his men. Boredom and anxiety had crept inside her, made nests under her skin, and now the little twitchy spiders of dread were being born and crawling all through her body. Some of those spiders were doubt—doubt about her choices, doubt about her love, doubt about her chances of surviving the next twenty-four hours, never mind the next twenty-four days.

So she sat on the swing. After a little while, alone behind the hotel in the middle of nowhere with the red hills behind her, she began to gently kick her feet, swinging a few inches forward and backward. Little flakes of rust dusted onto her hands where she held the chains of the swing, and the whole apparatus creaked, but she didn’t mind. It was a lovely, familiar sound, almost like an old friend from childhood whom she hadn’t seen in far too long.

She thought about Sacha and Vlad and the other guys who were still inside the hotel, and she wondered what must be on their minds. Kirill and Logoshin both answered to Bratva higher-ups back in Moscow, men who had once been allies, part of the criminal hierarchy that ran the Russian Mafia. When their operation in America had fallen apart, ripples had traveled all the way back to Moscow, leading to the violent deposing of the man at the top, Anton Maksimov.

The Bratva boss had fled Russia, or so it was said, and the Bratva had splintered in two. A quiet civil war had erupted, with each man attempting to persuade the rest of the Bratva captains that he was the right choice to lead. It was mostly a chess match, a power struggle in which each man attempted to assert his control over pieces of the Bratva’s business, and if Trinity understood it correctly, the largest remaining piece was the money that came from their operations on the west coast of the United States. Whoever won this fight would win it all, and that meant violence and bloodshed. The squeak of the rusty swing turned into something else, and Trinity paused, dragged her feet to stop herself. To silence the swing. She sat and listened. Had she really heard a howl in the distance? The romantic in her wondered if it had been a coyote or a wolf. Were there wolves in Red Rock Canyon?

The wind picked up, and she shivered despite her thick, wine-red sweater. With a glance up at the stars she began to swing again, throwing her head back to study the constellations.

Off to her left, there came a cough. She glanced over but did not stop her slow swinging. In the darkness, someone struck a match. In the flare of orange light, she saw Kirill light his cigarette and then shake the match out. A dark silhouette from that one ember burning in the night, he approached her slowly and sat down on the swing beside her without a word. He drew deeply on the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke, and then he began to swing.

“It’s nice here,” Kirill said, taking another drag on his cigarette. “Quiet.”

Trinity glanced at him, making her swing twist sideways. The barbed-wire tattoo that circled his neck seemed blacker than black in the moonlight, and it made the sight of this killer on a swing set even more absurd. She couldn’t help but smile.

Kirill understood without asking, and he smiled in return. It faded instantly.

“Feliks was a good man,” Trinity said. “A good friend.”

“A good brother,” Kirill said, swinging his legs, making the rusty swing shriek as he rode higher.

They were lost in memory for a moment, and Trinity allowed herself to swing a bit higher as well, forgetting her fears of looking foolish. With Kirill beside her, the other Bratva men could hardly think less of her.

When Kirill stopped pumping his legs, Trinity did the same, and slowly their pendular motion ceased.

“It is frustrating, yes? Being stuck inside the hotel?”

Trinity nodded. “I’m gettin’ claustrophobic. Not just with the hotel—”

“I feel it as well,” Kirill interrupted. “We are trapped by our desire to stay alive. We must keep out of sight because we know they are hunting us, but remember: we are also hunting them.”

“They don’t seem intimidated by it,” Trinity said. “There are more of them. More guns, more shooters, more money.”

Kirill glanced up at the stars, perhaps wondering if Feliks’s kindness had earned the key to heaven, in spite of his sins.

“This is why we hide,” he said. “They believe they are smarter and stronger, that they will destroy us. But their confidence can be used against them.”

“You sound sure.”

He smiled, but this was a different sort of smile—thin and cruel. “There is nothing for you to fear, Trinity. Soon we will not be hiding. We will kill them or they will kill us. Either way, it will be over.”

“That’s not as comfortin’ as you seem to think it ought to be,” she said.

But Kirill wasn’t listening.

They heard footfalls coming around the side of the hotel. Trinity stiffened a moment, but when she saw that Kirill wasn’t troubled and heard the calm, easy pace of the crunching steps, she relaxed. The silhouette that appeared from the corner was tall and whip-thin, and she knew it had to be Timur. He’d been a thief and pickpocket as a child and into his teen years before he’d been caught and sent to prison, where the Bratva had taken him under their protection. Oleg didn’t trust him, which meant Trinity didn’t like him, but the skinny thief slunk toward Kirill with the proper air of deference, and so Kirill approved of him.

Timur said something in Russian.

Kirill took another drag on his cigarette. “Be polite, Timur. Speak English.”

The thief sniffed the air, as if he’d smelled something he didn’t like. He glanced at Trinity, but only for a second.

“Gavril called in,” he said. “There was a fight at Birdland—”

“The strip club?”

Timur nodded. “There was a fight earlier. Some of Lagoshin’s men were involved. The doorman heard them talking about a meet at the Russian church on E Street. You know the one?”

Kirill flicked the ashes from the end of his cigarette. “Stupid question. I assume Oleg paid the doorman?”

“He paid.”

“Too easy. How sure is Gavril that this isn’t a setup?”

Trinity frowned. “They couldn’t have known you’d have people there tonight, askin’ questions.”

Kirill smoked and knitted his brows. “Maybe not. But if they know we’re looking, they could be setting out bait for us all over. No way to confirm if they’ve laid a trap or not.”

“How many of our men are with Oleg and Gavril?” Kirill asked.

“Two others.”

Kirill nodded slowly. “All right. Tell them to be careful. And to kill as many as they can.”

Timur grinned a weasel-like grin, then turned and slunk back toward the motel.

Trinity felt as if she’d turned to ice. She stared at Kirill. “You’re just gonna stay here? The rest of us need to go, right now, and back them up. We have enough guns now. They need—”

“Stop.” Kirill took a long drag, then flicked his cigarette onto the cracked concrete. “They are all the way on the other side of the city. By the time we reach the church, whatever is going to happen will have happened. If it is not a trap, four men will be enough to cause problems for Lagoshin. If it
is
a trap and we all go, then they will kill all of us, instead of only four.”

He pushed off, rusty chains creaking, and began to swing again.

Trinity stared, feeling hollow inside.
Only four,
he’d said. But one of those four was Oleg.

“Breathe, Trinity,” Kirill said. “Whatever comes, it is out of our hands right now. In this moment, at least—when we can do nothing and we do not yet know the consequences—we are free.”

The swing set squeaked and squealed. She felt as if she ought to speak, to protest. Once again she thought she heard something howl in the distance.

She exhaled. In some perverse way, Kirill was right. What happened next was not within her control. Slowly, she pushed backward and then raised her feet, letting herself swing forward.

Breathing, for now.

*   *   *

They parked the Harleys a block from the church, away from the nearest streetlight. The sky to the west was lit up with the neon brilliance of the Vegas Strip, but here on what the locals called the alphabet streets, there were no jackpot winners. Some houses had been kept up well or recently restored, an attempt to drag the neighborhood into the light, but others had cracked or boarded windows, cars on blocks in the driveway, and badly peeling paint. Tourists wouldn’t come here, and in Jax’s experience with neighborhoods like this, the police wouldn’t bother to swing by very often either.

“Stick with the bikes,” Jax told Chibs. “If there’s trouble, you make the call. Joyce, you’re with Chibs.”

Joyce made a little noise about the order, but Jax ignored him. He and Opie headed for the church without looking back. If things went to shit, Chibs would either wade in, bullets flying, or he’d withdraw and make sure word got back to Rollie—and to SAMCRO—that the situation had changed. Jax wanted to keep the Russians in the dark about who they were dealing with, but if things went so badly wrong that he and Opie ended up dead on the curb, the Sons of Anarchy would go to war. Every member of the Bratva in Nevada—both factions—would meet Mr. Mayhem.

“Joyce ain’t happy,” Opie said as they approached the church steps.

“He can leave anytime he wants,” Jax replied.

The Russian Orthodox church had been beautiful once. The domes still gleamed gold, and the crosses on top of those were stark white, but the building looked faded and tired, as though it had surrendered to its own abandonment. Long planks had been hammered across the front doors and cardboard
NO TRESPASSING
signs hung there, torn and dusty. Jax couldn’t decide if the houses that were kept up indicated a neighborhood on the road to recovery or a last handful of homeowners fighting a losing battle, but it seemed the patriarch of this particular church had given up a long time ago.

“His lead was good,” Opie said. “Birdland got us here.”

“The lead was good, yeah, but he nearly pissed it away, not handling that waitress better back at Birdland. Didn’t inspire much faith.”