Then the Camaro had gone past. Chibs and Joyce shot at the car as it whipped by them, but it skidded into a left turn at the next corner and vanished as instantly as it had appeared. The engine screamed as it raced off through the neighborhood.
Lagoshin’s men were shouting in confusion, trying to help the wounded even as Lagoshin himself shoved his way out of the SUV and started barking orders. The sedan tore away from the curb in a hopeless pursuit. Even groggy, Jax knew they had no chance of catching the shooters.
Fury etched on his face, Lagoshin stormed up the church steps toward them. Jax realized Opie was no longer pressing him to the steps, and he sat up wearily, sneering. He knew the look on Lagoshin’s face, and now he wished he and Opie hadn’t left their guns up in front of the church door—hell, he wished he hadn’t let the guy beat the shit out of him.
“What in hell was that?” Lagoshin roared, one of his men scrambling up behind him, alternately watching the street for further attack and covering Jax and Opie with his gun.
Jax spit again. Not so much blood this time. He took a deep breath to clear his head and staggered to his feet. Gun barrels swung his way.
“Are you shitting me? You think we had something to do with that? Those bullets were flying our direction, too, asshole.”
Lagoshin’s huge fists opened and closed. “Two of my men are dead—”
“It’s your business that almost just got us killed!” Jax snapped.
“But you two are unharmed!” Lagoshin shouted, pointing toward the park. “And your men there … they’re still standing!”
“My friends were shooting at the damn Camaro!”
“Hey…,” Opie muttered.
Jax didn’t like the tone of his voice. Troubled, he turned to see Opie pressing a hand to his left side, dark stains soaking into his T-shirt and spreading.
“Shit, Op…”
Opie hissed in through his teeth and took his hand away, showing the center of the blood spot blossoming on his shirt. “Grazed my ribs, I think. Nothing some stitches and a shit-ton of whiskey won’t cure.”
Pressing his hand against the wound again, Opie turned to Lagoshin. “You still think we’re in with whoever those guys were?”
Doubt flickered across Lagoshin’s scarred features, and he exhaled loudly, deflating. He waved his man away, and the guy hesitated only a second before starting back toward the SUV. The driver had gotten out and was putting the dead man into the trunk … the other corpse had been in the sedan that rushed away.
Police sirens warbled in the distance.
“Oleg works for a man named Kirill Sokolov,” Lagoshin said. “The men in that car were Sokolov’s—”
“You saw their faces?” Jax asked.
Lagoshin bared his teeth like a snarling dog. “I don’t need to see their faces.” He gestured toward Opie. “Do not think a little blood is very persuasive. We all bleed.”
The police sirens grew louder as Lagoshin turned and hurried down the steps to the waiting SUV, which tore away from the curb the moment he’d climbed inside.
“We gotta go,” Opie said, wincing as he started toward the street.
Wounded, he’d forgotten the guns. Bruised and bloody, head still ringing, Jax hurried to the church doors and retrieved them, then hustled back down. Chibs and Joyce were already on their bikes and kicked the engines into life. Jax and Opie straddled their bikes. Joyce started asking questions, but Chibs snapped at him to shut up and turned his bike around, glancing back at them, ready to fly.
“How we gonna play this?” Opie asked, ignoring Joyce. He grunted in pain as he kick-started his bike.
Jax started up his Harley. “Follow the lead we’ve got. Oscar Temple.”
Opie glanced at him. “You really gonna call Lagoshin if we figure out where Trinity and Oleg are holed up?”
With a grunt of pain, Jax wiped blood from his mouth and stared along the street where the Russians’ vehicles had gone.
“Damn right I am,” Jax said. “I can’t wait to see that prick again.”
They tore away from the church, two by two, maybe fifteen seconds ahead of the cops’ arrival. Jax held on tight as he rode, blackness swimming at the edges of his vision. His head and ribs throbbed with pain, but he held an image of Lagoshin in his mind, and that helped him focus.
He wasn’t leaving Nevada without Trinity.
But he also had no intention of leaving without seeing Lagoshin again.
10
Trinity heard the rumble of the Camaro’s engine and put aside the copy of The Great Gatsby she’d found under the counter in the motel’s lobby. Reading more classic literature had been on her to-do list for years, but she’d never been able to stick to it. Oleg had suggested Anna Karenina because he wanted her to read something Russian, but Trinity had always despised the very idea of classic novels about melodramatic rich girls struggling with love. Maybe she shouldn’t judge, but sappy shit like Pride and Prejudice made her want to puke.
Tugging her shoes on, she shut off the light and left the room. They’d cleaned up some, but walking around the abandoned hotel barefoot would have been stupid. There had been enough teenagers partying around the place that shards of broken beer bottles were more plentiful than spiders, and there were plenty of those.
She crossed the cracked parking lot. A door opened behind her, and she glanced back to see Pyotr emerge from his room. The young Russian had blue eyes so pale they were almost white. Oleg liked him, and Trinity was trying, but Pyotr barely spoke to her. Even now he only nodded and kept his stride steady, making no attempt to catch up and walk with her. She did the same, reaching the rear door of the lobby ahead of him. The main entrance and the lobby were dark except for the moonlight, but she only had to pass through and head down a side corridor to reach the motel’s conference room.
When she walked in, most of Oleg’s Bratva were already there. Cigarette smoke swirled and eddied in the room. Heavy blackout curtains covered the windows, and so they congregated there, out of sight of the road. Trinity could have waited out back for Oleg and Gavril—even now they would be parking the Camaro back there—but she wanted the others to see her as herself, and not just the ginger who followed Oleg around. Some of them already had accepted her, and others, she knew, never would.
“Trinity,” Ilia called as she stepped inside. “Have a drink with me!”
He raised a bottle of rum—his beloved—and shook the remnants of it around so it sloshed against the glass.
“I’m grateful, but no, thank you.” She smiled at him, and he seemed happy enough with that. She wondered how drunk he had to be before it pissed off the rest of them.
Kirill was in the small office adjoining the conference room. He had made the place his own and had maps of Las Vegas and the surrounding areas all over the floor, lines and circles drawn in red marker indicating areas they’d identified as likely haunts for Lagoshin and his men.
Voices came along the corridor, and then Gavril walked in, followed by Oleg. He smiled at her, and Trinity nodded to him, but he had more pressing matters on his mind than his girlfriend. Oleg knocked on the office door, and Kirill called that he’d be right out. A few moments later, they were all clustered even more tightly around the conference table.
“You found them,” Kirill said as he came out of the office. “I see it on your faces.”
Oleg nodded grimly. “We hit three or four of them. There were two I don’t think will be getting up again. One was Vasily. I didn’t see the face of the other.”
“Krupin?” Timur asked.
“He was hit in the shoulder. Probably not a killing wound,” Gavril replied.
Kirill frowned, studying them. Trinity noticed that they all seemed to be holding their breath.
“There is something you’re not saying,” Kirill observed.
Oleg and Gavril exchanged a glance, and then Oleg nodded slowly.
“Lagoshin was there,” he said. “I’m sorry, Kirill. We could have ended it tonight if w
e’d gotten him.”
Silence descended among them. The whole hotel seemed to tick and shift, as if she could hear it breathe.
Kirill said something in Russian. Trinity had listened to them talking enough that she understood a little, knew it translated roughly to “good job” or “you did well.”
“Lagoshin is down by two men, maybe more if the others who were shot are badly wounded,” Kirill went on, scanning the room. “I call it good fortune. Our friends are looking out for us.”
Ilia scoffed. “Friends.”
Kirill glared. “Don’t let the bottle speak for you, Ilia.”
“We have no friends or we would already know where to find Lagoshin and Krupin and the rest,” Ilia said, all of his drunken amiability turned to slurring scorn.
“You can’t blame them for being wary,” Oleg said, and from his tone, Trinity realized how much Ilia’s remarks unsettled him. “Our contacts are afraid. They want to help us, but if they do so openly and Lagoshin is the victor here—”
“Cowards!” Ilia snapped. He stood drunkenly and moved to the heavy drapes, peering out between them at the darkness. “They are cowards, and so are we, hiding here and striking from shadows. I say we talk to our ‘friends’ again, let them know they can’t stand by and wait to see who is still standing at the end. They must choose, and if they do not choose us, then we make them regret the choice.”
The room seemed to hold its breath. Trinity glanced at Pyotr, Sacha, and the others and realized that they agreed. This was why Oleg seemed so wary of Ilia’s words, because he knew the others felt the same.
“Throwin’ away through haste what might be gained through strategy is a fool’s gambit,” she said.
They all stared at her, and she felt more than ever like an intruder. Even Gavril curled his upper lip in disapproval of her interference. Only Oleg looked kindly upon her.
Kirill walked slowly to Ilia. Even drunk, he had the good sense to take a step back as his captain approached.
“It is my brother lying out there in a grave with no name,” Kirill said. “I want Lagoshin dead more than any of you, but I want to do it without burying anyone else in this desert. I agree that we must put more pressure on some of our friends to choose sides, but it must be done carefully and wisely … and soberly. In the morning, Ilia, we will speak of this again.”
Ilia looked terrified, but he raised his chin in a show of defiance and, in his own language, agreed.
Kirill turned from him. “Oleg, Gavril, come into the office.”
Oleg and Gavril followed him into the little side room with its maps and markers while the others began to disperse, realizing that nothing more would be happening until morning.
Ilia, who had been so welcoming to her before, paused to glare drunkenly at her. “If they find us before we find them, they will kill us all.”
Trinity nodded slowly. “They might. But if we rush into their gun sights without a plan, we die even faster.”
The drunken man flinched, sniffed at her logic, and marched out of the conference room. The trouble was that she agreed with him. He was drunk and foolish, yes, and she didn’t think they ought to do anything without preparing for the consequences, but the time had come to force the truth out of the Bratva’s local contacts, even if it meant pain. Even if it meant blood.
No more hiding in shadows.
* * *
The crowd at the Tombstone Bar was significantly more subdued than the usual suspects back at Birdland. Chibs stood by the bar and waited on Baghead, who’d slipped behind the oak counter and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. Hopper had been tending bar, pulling pints of local ale off the tap and setting them in front of patrons with the foam still spilling over the rims. Now he turned to glare at Baghead and mutter something sharp. Bag replied, and Chibs saw Hopper look up, search the bar, and settle on him, then nod. Bag may not have explained exactly what was going on in the back room, but he knew it wasn’t good.
Chibs and Joyce had let Jax and Opie ride in the lead, just in case one of them took a spill. Despite the blows to Jax’s head and Opie’s blood loss, they’d made it back to the Tombstone without any real difficulty and guided their bikes into the lot at the rear of the bar. Patrons leaving the last showing at Rollie’s little next-door movie theater stared at the snorting Harleys as they vanished behind the gate. Chibs hoped the darkness had hid the crimson soaking Opie’s shirt and the blood on Jax’s face.
“Got it,” Baghead said proudly as he emerged from behind the bar. He did a little two-step as if to celebrate his achievement, and Chibs wondered just how crazy the guy might be. With Tig and Happy, they had their own madmen back in Charming, but Bag seemed to walk a fine line between good-natured idiot and raving lunatic.
“Brilliant,” Chibs said as they fell into step together.
Bag handed him the bottle as they strode toward the back hallway, and Chibs nearly choked. Talisker single malt, twenty-five-year-old scotch. A rare beast, and surely one of the most expensive bottles of liquor behind the bar.
“This isn’t the sort of thing you give a man to take the edge off,” Chibs said.
Bag shrugged. “Honored guests, man. Jax is VP of the mother charter. You guys get the best. Rollie said so.”
Chibs thought Rollie might shit his pants when he saw how literally Bag had taken this instruction, but he stopped arguing about it. He was looking forward to a little taste of the fine stuff himself.
They went through the back of the building to the crash pad. In the poolroom, Joyce and Thor were playing a round of eight ball while Rollie used peroxide to clean the wound on Opie’s right side. Jax had already washed most of the blood off his face and lay on the sofa with a plastic bag full of ice against his head.
Chibs raised the bottle of Talisker. “If you need a painkiller, Jackie, this one’s a beauty.”
Opie extended a hand for the bottle. “Whatever it is, pass it over.”
Rollie glanced up from his handiwork and sighed. “Shit, man, that’s a three-hundred-dollar scotch.”
“Honored guests, that’s what you said,” Bag reminded him.
Chibs took a sip and handed the bottle to Opie, who slugged back several long gulps.
“Get it done,” he said.
“Let’s give it a bit for the scotch to work its magic,” Chibs said.
Opie took another swig, this one not as deep. “Just do it. We can’t waste time.”
“You’re going out again tonight?” Joyce asked, clearly surprised.
Baghead sniffed.“You deaf or stupid? Opie already took a bullet. If the Russians are getting close to an all-out street war, Jax’s sister is gonna be right in the middle of it. We’ve gotta get her out before that happens.”
“Not ‘we,’ Bag,” Rollie said. “I don’t want you near any part of it.”
“Yeah, yeah. I can’t keep my cool. I’ll only make it worse,” Bag replied, waving his prez’s words away as if they were irritating houseflies.
Chibs wondered how long Clay would have put up with the guy. A wild card could be useful, but a loose cannon was always a danger to the club. He hadn’t yet decided which one Baghead might be.
“Stitch him up, Chibs,” Jax said from the sofa.
Rollie stepped out of the way to let Chibs work. It wasn’t the first time a member had been stitched up in this room, and Chibs figured it wouldn’t be the last. Fortunately, that meant Rollie had everything he needed to sew up Opie’s wound. “Turn,” he said.
Opie shifted sideways to present the wound, and it pouted open a little. Chibs has treated his share of wounds as a medic in the British Army, and taken care of more than a few for his brothers in SAMCRO, but the scotch could only do so much. When he started stitching up the wound, Opie grimaced.
“So,” Opie said, taking another pull from the Talisker bottle. “How we gonna take these pricks down?”
Jax sat up slowly, and took the ice pack from his head, steadying himself. Chibs had thought he’d cleaned up more, but
now he saw the blood in Jax’s beard and the swelling on his face and jaw. At the church, he hadn’t been close enough to see how bad Lagoshin had beaten Jax. Now his hands twitched with the desire to throttle the big Russian.
“I’m not worried about taking them all down,” Jax said. “They’re already trying to kill each other, so all we need to do is get out of the way. We get Trinity, make sure Lagoshin goes down, and we’re done here.”
Opie grunted, teeth grinding as Chibs sewed.
“From what Lagoshin told you, the only lead we’ve got is the murder of this Oscar Temple,” Chibs said.
Jax nodded painfully. “Which is why we talk to a cop.”
Rollie glanced over at him. “How hard did that Russian hit you?”
Jax stared at him. “I know you have someone on the local PD who’d be willing to give up information at the right price.”
Thor sank the seven ball in a corner pocket and glanced up. “There’s Izzo.”
Joyce snickered. “Izzo, man, you can’t trust that guy. He’d sell his mother for a line of blow.”
“We don’t want his mother,” Jax said. “But he does sound like a man we can do business with.”
* * *
They met up with the cop in the parking lot of a defunct home-improvement store just south of Nellis Air Force Base. Jax put his bike up on its stand as the echoes of its engine died on the wind. He sat astride it for a few seconds as the throbbing pain in his chest and head subsided.
After a moment, he dismounted and forced himself to stand up straight.
“You all right?” Opie asked, coming toward him.
Jax cocked an eyebrow at him. Opie’s features were pale and drawn from the blood he’d lost, but he seemed remarkably well for a guy who’d been kissed by a bullet a few hours earlier.
Chibs killed his Harley’s engine and climbed off just as Thor circled round to them. He had led them here and then taken a quick ride around the building to be sure they would be alone. Jax had always liked Thor Westergaard. With his imposing size, he seemed an unlikely candidate for chef, but he conducted himself with a calm, methodical style that belied the motorcycle-club lifestyle. Now Jax could see that Thor brought the same Zen aura out into the real world. They’d never been under fire together, but Jax had a feeling that Zen calm would carry over.
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