Sons of Anarchy: Bratva (21 page)

Oleg reached out to touch her cheek, lifted her chin. “And if you have to choose?”

Trinity’s breath quickened. She cocked her head, trying to mask her alarm. “Are you going to make me?”

“If you had to,” Oleg said, “who would you choose?”

Trinity gave a small laugh and shook her head. Her life back home had sometimes been troubled, sometimes lonely, and sometimes dangerous, but to her it had always been a beautiful life. School, working in the bakery and later in Keegan’s Pub, seeing her friends, and fighting with her mother. There were churches and cobblestones, and on a nice day there were musicians busking all through the city. Beautiful.

There was beauty here as well. The badlands and the mountains. At night, even the lights of Las Vegas had a brittle beauty. Trinity had believed that she and Oleg could make a beautiful life, but she felt apart from it now, as if the only loveliness she could see was through the barred windows of some prison cell.

“A man who loved me would never ask me that question,” she said.

Oleg nearly growled. She saw him fighting within himself, the grim Russian demeanor in conflict with his feelings for her.

“A woman who loved me would be able to answer it,” he replied.

“You bastard…”

He reached for her, but she shook his arm off. “All I’m asking is … if it came to that…”

Trinity pointed a finger at his face, bared her teeth. “He’s my
brother,
which makes him the only thing my father ever gave me. He’s family.”

A brutal silence descended upon them.

They heard the shush of clothing and a heavy footfall, and they turned to see Jax coming around the corner at the end of the hall. He stopped, meeting Oleg’s gaze in an open challenge, and Trinity wondered how much he had heard.

“You got a minute?” he asked.

Oleg scratched at his stubbled chin. “She’s got all the time in the world.”

He turned to walk away, but Jax called him back. “I was talking to you.”

Chin high, Oleg regarded him coolly. “Go on.”

“Me being here complicates things for you,” Jax said. “I recognize that. Kirill and I have an understanding. At the end of this thing, we may not all be friends, but we’re not gonna be trying to kill each other. I get the impression you and I need an understanding of our own.”

Oleg wetted his lips. “Putlova recruited Kirill. Kirill brought me into the Bratva, freed me from an ugly life. I had great respect for Viktor Putlova.”

Trinity watched her brother’s face. His features betrayed nothing, were as smooth a mask as Oleg’s.

“I respected Putlova, too,” Jax said. “But it’s hard to keep respecting a guy when you’ve got a knife in your back. Or at your throat. Trinity loves you, so I’m gonna promise you something. All my cards are on the table. My only agenda is to make sure my sister is safe. I know you want that, too, Oleg, but I have to ask … are all of
your
cards on the table?”

Oleg hesitated, glanced at Trinity, and a veil of aggression seemed to fall away from his face. “Yes,” he said, “all the cards.”

For a second, Trinity thought they might shake, but Jax did not extend his hand, and Oleg only nodded and turned away, striding along the corridor until he reached the turn in the hall. She heard the sound of the metal release bar on the exit door, then listened as it thumped shut.

“That went well,” Jax said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm.

“I think it did, actually,” she said. “He may not want to respect you, but I think he’s startin’ to. Harder to hate a man if you know him.”

Jax laughed softly. “Yeah, that’s not really been my experience.”

“Regardless, we’re allied now, all of us. Once Lagoshin’s out of the way, all of this fear will end.”

For half a second, Jax stared at her as if she’d grown an extra head. His doubts aside, she believed that this alliance would be propitious. Awkwardness lingered between them, but it was quickly being replaced by a deep kinship. Jax had made it clear that he had her back, no matter what, and though she’d spent her life learning to deal with men who disappointed her, she had begun to believe in
this
man. Her brother.

Trinity told herself she would never have to choose between her new life and her old one. She could almost believe it.

15

Thor felt
a hand shaking him. He felt the crick in his neck and the ache in his spine and tried to twist himself into a more comfortable position. The hand shook him again, like God had reached down into his dreams and rousted him. He pulled away, determined to cling to sleep, but as he moved he slid off the sofa cushions that he’d laid out on the floor of the poolroom in a makeshift bed, and just that two-inch drop to the ground was enough to make his eyes pop open.

“Up and at ’em, thunder god,” Baghead said, worried sincerity in his eyes. His breath could have peeled a century’s worth of paint off a barn.

“Bag…,” Thor managed to say, too tired for any imaginative profanities. He pulled away from that hideous breath. Glancing around, he found the hair band he’d taken off the night before and used it to pull his red mop into a topknot, keeping it out of his face.

In the midst of this, Bag kept putting his hand out. Thor blinked and realized his friend was trying to give him something.

“Phone’s for you,” Bag said.

Thor squinted, rubbed his eyes, and glanced at the door. Was it morning yet? Had the sun come up? Sure as hell didn’t feel like it could be morning.

He took the phone. “It better be fucking good o’clock,” he said. “Who the hell is this?”

“It’s Izzo,” a raspy voice said. Someone else who didn’t like being awake at this hour. “Trust me, I’m not happy to be talking to you, either. Something I figured you and your MC would want to know.”

Thor felt a tightening in his chest. He glanced up, saw Baghead watching him intently with those mad little rat eyes of his. “Get me coffee, Bag.”

Thor watched Bag retreat from the room. He had to go around Antonio, who’d been sleeping on the floor but who now raised his head to gaze blearily around the room. Jax had sent Thor back to the Tombstone the night before with a request that Rollie keep them ready to move, which meant every member of SAMNOV in the area had bedded down in the rooms at the back of the bar. Baghead had been sleeping in the other crash room with Mikey the Prospect, who was a nineteen-year-old ex-football star, and a short brute with a shaved head and blond eyebrows that they all called Clean.

“You call just to breathe heavy?” Thor asked.

“I thought you were still talking to your buddy,” Izzo said. “Guy sounds half-crazy, by the way.”

“Maybe both. You’re stalling, man. Tell it.”

Thor could hear Izzo sigh over the phone, almost as if the cop was afraid to speak the words that would come next. The sound was chilling.

“Little more than half an hour ago, we got a call from a guy out doing his morning bike ride. Found two bodies on the side of a remote road in North Vegas, runs through an old family ranch that was foreclosed on a couple of years back.”

A small wave of nausea undulated in Thor’s belly.

“One of the dead guys is a Russian. Our gang task force ID’d him as one of Lagoshin’s men. The other is your man Joyce.”

Son of a bitch
. Thor exhaled, the news a gut punch. He and Joyce had argued over the years, even brawled more than once over the sweet little Korean girl at the bakery with her tattoo fetish. But the MC made them brothers, and he knew Joyce would have taken a bullet for him, and vice versa.

“What’s it looking like?” he asked.

“You know it doesn’t work that fast,” Izzo replied, some of his natural growl absent from his voice. “Crime-scene guys are still there. Forensics will take their time.”

“Not what I asked you, man. You know Rollie’s going to want to know, so tell me … what does it
look
like?”

The phone went silent, so flat it seemed like he’d lost the call. Then Izzo spoke again.

“Definitely other people involved. Fresh tracks from a truck and a bunch of bikes. Three bikes were there. One’s a Harley—I’m guessing Joyce’s—but the other two are Japanese rockets, and I know you MC guys wouldn’t ride those bitches even if your mamas asked you nicely.”

“Two bodies but three bikes?”

“What I said,” Izzo muttered. “Detective on the scene thinks the Russian shot Joyce and then someone else tagged him for it. But the scene’s still hot. Got nothing else for you right now.”

Thor took a deep breath. He heard a grumbled voice in the corridor and the creak of floorboards under substantial burden, and he glanced up to see Rollie standing in the doorway with Baghead hiding behind him like a third-grade tattletale. Antonio had pushed himself up to lean against the wall.

Rollie had gone deathly pale.

“Call me when someone needs to ID the body, and let me know when we can pick him up,” Thor said, the words sounding callous even as he spoke them.

He ended the call without a good-bye and sat a moment, gripping the phone so tightly it hurt his hand.

“Joyce?” Rollie asked, his body filling the door frame.

Thor nodded, then laid it out for him exactly as Izzo had explained it. When he’d finished—and it only took seconds, so little time to sum up the end of a life—Rollie slammed a hand against the door frame. A dark intelligence glittered in his eyes, reminding Thor how often people underestimated SAMNOV’s president. Rollie acted like he was everybody’s friend, a big amiable bear of a man more interested in obscure movies and even more obscure beers to put on tap at the Tombstone. But the man was president of the North Vegas charter of the Sons of Anarchy for a reason.

“No word from Jax or his guys?” Rollie asked, staring at the floor, his hands clenched into fists.

“Nothing,” Thor said. “I left him three messages during the night.”

The room seemed to shrink, the floor to tilt. The air felt strangely heavy.

“You know what I’m wondering?” Rollie asked.

“You’re wondering why Jax sent me back here last night instead of just calling you,” Thor replied. “I figured maybe it was personal.”

Rollie huffed like a bear unhappy with its dinner. He turned to look into the hallway, where Bag twitched and scratched himself as he waited.

“Baghead … wake everyone right now,” Rollie said. “I want them up and moving in ten minutes.”

“Moving where?” Antonio asked, still rubbing at his eyes. “What are we doing?”

Rollie shot him a frigid glance. “I’ve got questions,” he said. “You guys are going to find me answers.”

“Where do we start?” Antonio asked.

“You start by finding Jax Teller.”

*   *   *

Izzo sat in the faux-leather reclining chair in his family room with a tumbler of spiced rum and pineapple juice in his left hand. He’d dropped his cell phone on his lap, and now he stared at the gleaming colors of his wall-mounted flat screen and wondered how this business with the Russians and the MC was going to shake out. He still paid alimony to his first wife, and his second—a blackjack dealer named Sarajane—liked shopping even more than Izzo liked booze or pussy. He was starting to think that a second alimony might be less expensive than his second wife.

Something made him glance down, and he realized his cell phone had been buzzing for a while without his noticing.

“Izzo,” he said, picking up.

“It’s Thor.”

“I just hung up with—”

“Last night I brought that guy to you,” Thor said. “You gave up John Carney’s name. Rollie wants you to head over to Carney’s and ask him what he told the guy.”

Izzo drank again. Sweet fire in his throat. He’d had a pleasant buzz going before he’d gotten the call about the dead bodies on the ranch road, and now this. Why the hell did he keep answering his phone?

“The sun just came up, and I haven’t been to bed yet,” Izzo rasped, swirling the ice in his drink. “Let me get a few hours’ sleep and kiss my wife. Carney won’t want visitors this early anyway.”

He could hear Thor breathing, heard him curse quietly.

“Joyce is dead. You think we give two shits how much sleep you got or whether Carney is feeling friggin’ hospitable? I’d go over there myself, but you’re a cop. The old man’s less likely to shoot you. If I show up at his door right now … Look, Rollie wants you to do this. Whatever Carney told him, we need to know. Right now.”

Right now.

The trouble with having a second job that involved illegal dealings with violent criminals was that you could never call in sick.

Izzo downed the rest of his drink. Suddenly the pineapple juice had started to taste sour in his mouth. Couldn’t be the rum.

“On my way,” he said, setting his glass down. He thumbed the button that ended the call. “Asshole.”

The drive to John Carney’s place took a little over half an hour. Izzo passed joggers and bicyclists trying to get some exercise in before the day heated up any further. He saw a woman running with her dog, the beast too small to keep pace with her without struggling, and he fought the urge to roll down the window and shout at her.

At Carney’s place, he pulled into the driveway and sat a moment, watching the house. It seemed very still, very quiet. You couldn’t be a cop as long as Izzo had without developing some intuition. His told him the place was empty, but it made more sense to think that Carney was still sleeping.

He stepped out and gently closed the door, then walked to the garage. Carney’s old Cadillac sat inside the gloomy space, dust motes spinning in the light streaming in from the small windows in the garage doors.

Izzo went to the front door and knocked, but the sound came back hollow. Nothing moved inside, no curtains were drawn back. The house itself seemed disinclined to creak. Most houses seemed to breathe, but not this one.

He drew his gun, pulse quickening. Moving around the side of the house, he looked in windows as he passed. In the back, he saw broken glass on the patio and then turned to see the shattered kitchen door.

“Shit,” he whispered, quickening his pace.

He didn’t have to go any farther than the door. The diffuse morning light reached through the window above the kitchen sink and the jagged shards of glass jutting from the door frame. That golden glow cast a sepia tone across the floor and the tipped-over chair, revealing the sprawled corpse of John Carney. Izzo spotted a single bullet hole in his temple and a pool of drying blood that made a deep scarlet halo on the floor around his head.