Christopher Golden - Sons of Anarchy - Bratva

Planning an escape, he thought, amused and horrified at the same time.

“Guy who owns this place must be a loon,” he said, moving up beside Joyce.

Joyce shrugged as if to say, of course he is. “On Sundays, he’ll only play jazz in here. The girls who want to keep him happy… they’ve learned how to dance to that stuff. You’d be surprised how many people show up for it, too. They do brunch.”

“It’s shit, though, right?” Opie said, raising his voice to be heard over the grind of AC/DC. “I’ve never eaten anything in a strip club that didn’t taste like ass.”

“Might be best we don’t talk about what you’ve eaten in strip clubs,” Chibs said aloud.

Opie gave a sheepish grin, and Jax laughed. Joyce seemed curious, but it was a story for another day. Jax glanced back toward the bouncers, saw their eyes tracking him and the others, and clapped Chibs on the back.

“End of the bar. Shit goes down, the jarhead’s yours.”

Chibs knew better than to look at the bouncers. He nodded and moved off immediately toward a waitress picking up drinks from the end of the bar. She had dark skin and bright red hair and was wearing a half-shirt and a skirt so short it displayed her pink panties in all their glory. Chibs said something to her, and she grinned. Jax had seen the soulless smile that hookers and strippers put on for the men who were paying their bills, and this wasn’t that. Something about Chibs just charmed them. Part of it was the accent, but Jax thought the scars did something to them as well—suggested the beginnings of a story that they finished in their own heads. Lost girls liked broken men. Jax had a taste for women like that, but today he kept his mind on the job at hand.

The bartender came over to make sure Chibs wasn’t troubling the waitress, glancing at the bouncers, but the girl touched Chibs on the arm and must have passed along his drink order, because when he turned toward the bar to set up camp there, nobody tried to move him along.

Jax didn’t know how many people Birdland drew on its busiest nights, but tonight’s crowd was substantial. Clusters of young guys in business suits were side by side with truckers and contractors and housepainters, not to mention the occasional freak. The freaks were the easiest to spot because they sat alone, usually at the rounded corners of the stage, and they doled out single dollar bills and nursed watered-down beers for hours. Jax had seen a particular brand of strip-club freak more than once, guys who would lean in when the girls came near, inhaling deeply, trying to catch a whiff of pussy that would carry them through their daydreams for months.

Joyce led them past the pool-table area and into the thick of the crowd around the stage. A waitress in a see-through plastic top brushed close against Jax, her smile like a mannequin’s, but he only scanned the faces ahead. Opie stuck close behind him, but Jax wasn’t expecting trouble unless they started it themselves.

The music switched over to “Crazy Train,” and the two girls on the main stage used side snaps to remove their panties. They did it in synch, facing each other and then air grinding so that their hips nearly touched. It was almost enough to coax a smile out of Jax. Not all the girls looked like they were having fun, but those two did.

Joyce changed direction slightly—moving like he owned the place—and Jax stayed with him. The rear stage was less populated than the one at the front of the club. A group of middle-class suburban types were along one side, probably a bachelor party, but on the other side, not far from the beaded curtain that led into the back room—and presumably to the back exit—there sat a trio of darkly clad men with rugged, stony Slavic faces. The stripper there, a Latina with enormous fake tits, crawled toward them on her hands and knees to retrieve the trio of twenty-dollar bills the three men had laid upon the stage. Two of the men wore wolfish grins, but the third had an expression Jax could almost have called a sneer. He watched the girl closely enough, but almost as if she disgusted him.

“Opie,” he said, nodding toward the beaded curtain at the back.

With a wary glance, Opie moved toward the curtain. He stopped ten feet away, near a high round table laden with abandoned glasses. A waitress would approach him quickly enough, and he would order a drink, but it was a strategic location from which he could observe the rear section of the bar. His attention would not be on his beer.

The Russians saw them coming. One of the wolves tapped the sneering man, who looked up to watch as Jax and Joyce approached. The second wolf stood and moved to block them, but Joyce didn’t slow. He sidled a bit, moving like a snake rising from a street charmer’s basket.

“Down, boy,” Joyce said, one hand raised as he spoke loud enough for the Russians to hear over the pounding music. “It’s Yurik, right?”

The grizzled Russian nodded. “I know you?”

“Naw, man, but we have friends in common. Lizzie Broski, you know her? She pointed you out at a party one night. That’s how I recognized you.”

Yurik looked confused. When his mouth opened, Jax saw yellow teeth and a bit of sweat on his lips. The guy’s pupils were pinpricks in his glassy eyes. He was high on something, and suddenly this seemed like it might have been a terrible idea.

“What you want?” Yurik asked.

Which was when the sneering man rose up behind Yurik, put a hand on his shoulder, and physically moved him aside. He stared a moment at Jax, then turned to Joyce. His sneer had deepened.

“Go away, you idiots. Don’t you know you don’t interrupt a man when there are naked girls around?”

Jax smiled.

The sneer died on the man’s face. “Did I say something funny?”

Jax stepped in close to the sneering man, almost but not quite crowding him. He opened both hands to show he held no weapons and stared right into the Russian’s eyes, knowing he could match the bastard cold stare for cold stare.

“I’m real sorry we interrupted your pussy gazing. It’s pretty clear you’re a serious man, and I’m not going to waste your time. I’m looking for a guy named Oleg Voloshin, and I heard you guys might be able to tell me where to find him.”

The sneering man blinked in surprise, studying Jax more closely.

Yurik said something in Russian, guttural and full of arrogant condescension. The name Voloshin appeared in the midst of a host of other words that sounded like made-up spy language to Jax. But he’d heard that one.

Thanks, Yurik, Jax thought. Now he knew which side these pricks were on.

“What you want with Oleg?” the sneering man asked.

Jax glanced at Joyce as if trying to decide whether or not to confide in these Bratva goons, but he didn’t need Joyce’s reassurance.

“Nothing he’ll enjoy,” he said.

The three Russians stood together a moment, looking like nothing so much as a trio of black crows on a telephone wire, the uniformity of their black coats and shirts and pants almost laughable, if not for the guns they surely carried and a history of murder.

“I am Iov,” the sneering man said, moving closer, so that he and Jax were intimately, uncomfortably near. “What if I told you Oleg is my brother?”

The music throbbed and the lights flashed. Glasses clinked and men whistled and howled for the new batch of strippers as they began to remove their tops, revealing first one breast and then the other, playing coy. They were the worst actresses in the world.

“Iov, my name’s Jack Ashby,” Jax lied. “If Oleg’s your brother, then you and me—we’ve got a problem. The prick has my sister.”

The Russian cocked his head dubiously. “Oleg kidnapped your sister?”