Christopher Golden - Sons of Anarchy - Bratva

“You missed your calling, Detective,” Thor replied. “I’m sure there’s a spot for you on stage at Caesars.”

Izzo offered a pained smile, waiting. Thin and jittery, he needed a haircut and a shave. Thor and Rollie had explained that he was a detective with the Las Vegas vice squad and that he dipped into the product of his arrests more often than not—hookers, drugs. He wasn’t the sort of cop who wanted to be a kingpin, just a guy who couldn’t control his taste for the forbidden.

“Mike Izzo, meet some friends of mine,” Thor said at last.

“No colors on you boys,” Izzo said, gesturing with his cigarette toward their clothes. “No gang affiliation?”

“Sons of Anarchy isn’t a gang, Detective,” Thor said.

“I know, I know, it’s a ‘motorcycle club,’ but these guys ride motorcycles, too.”

Jax gave a shrug—small, but enough to make his body remind him of Lagoshin’s fists.

“We’re not the joining type,” he said.

“They’re friends of mine,” Thor said, as if that explained it all. “My friend here is searching for a missing family member and thinks some of her associates might be connected to the murder of Oscar Temple.”

Izzo cocked his head, eyes narrowing. He smoked and exhaled through his nose.

“You’ve got interesting friends,” he drawled, but he nodded. “Trouble is, I don’t know shit. Homicide’s not my beat.”

Jax stiffened. Had they wasted their time with this cokehead?

“You sing this song every time, Mike,” Thor said. “We both know you’ve always got your ears open, hoping to hear something you can sell or trade.”

Izzo flicked ash off his cigarette. From the way his nostrils flared, he hadn’t liked Thor’s observation much.

“Maybe that’s true,” he said, “but this is fresh. Happened yesterday.”

Jax glanced at the others. Chibs looked pissed, turned and spat onto the cracked pavement. Opie seemed to have been drifting, barely listening, maybe because of the blood loss, but suddenly he perked up.

“Who found the bodies?” he asked in his familiar low rumble.

Izzo stared at him. “You boys don’t look too good,” he said, turning to study Jax. “And you look like you got your ass handed to you. What are you really after?”

“We told you the truth, man,” Jax said, hands up. “We’re not bringing trouble. We’re trying to get my sister out of it.”

Izzo nodded knowingly. Vice detective in Las Vegas, he’d seen more than his share of sisters in trouble.

“Wish I could help,” he said. “Not least because I could use the scratch Thor and his boys would pay for information. But the investigation is just ramping up. I can give Rollie a call at the Tombstone if they turn up anything. What I can tell you is that Oscar Temple’s in the gun business—sponsors the big gun show out there in Summerlin—and homicide figures it was a side deal gone wrong.”

Chibs glanced at Jax. “Illegal guns?”

Izzo scratched at his stubbled chin and took a drag on his cigarette. “I know, right? People breaking the law. Can you imagine?”

Jax cocked his head to one side, trying to figure the cop out. “You never answered my friend’s question.”

“Sorry, right,” Izzo replied, waving toward Opie with his cigarette. “One of the dealers from the gun show, an old friend of Temple’s, went up to the house to have coffee or something after he’d packed up. Found the bodies.”

“This gun dealer, does he have a name?” Thor asked.

“He’s an old dude. Older, anyway,” Izzo said. “Irish guy, I think. Last name is Carney.”

Thor stiffened. “John Carney?”

Izzo dropped his cigarette, crushing it under his shoe. “You know the guy?”

“Heard of him,” Thor admitted.

Jax watched Izzo’s eyes and realized the detective was thinking precisely what he’d been thinking—that if Thor knew the old man’s name, maybe John Carney hadn’t gone up to Oscar Temple’s house for coffee at all.

“I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything,” Izzo said, digging out his keys as he returned to his car. He paused just inside the open door. “You make sure you do the same. I could use a little career boost.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Thor told him.

None of them believed it, not even Izzo.

John Carneyhad slept poorly ever since the death of his wife. Over time he’d developed the habit of falling asleep in the recliner in the living room, bathed in the flickering blue light of the television. Living in Arizona required air-conditioning, but his backyard opened up to nothing but scrub and distant hills, and it could get awfully cold at night. He kept the windows of his little adobe house open and covered himself with a thick blanket, never taking his slippers off. Past the age of fifty, his feet had begun to feel cold pretty much all the time. And he’d left fifty in the rearview mirror quite a while back.

Tonight he moaned and shifted in the chair, rising up from the shadows of dreamtime, cobweb memories of a nightmare clinging to him. He frowned and rubbed his eyes, sleepily contemplating the possibility of leaving the chair and actually sleeping in his bed for once. Instead, he pulled the blanket up to his neck and nestled deeper into the chair. The ghost of his dead wife occupied that bed, and he figured it always would. Whenever he tried to sleep in there, he felt her presence. No, that ain’t it, he corrected himself. He felt her absence .

Drifting in that gray fog between sleeping and wakefulness, Carney thought he heard voices. He groaned softly and slitted his eyes open. One of his animal shows played on the TV. A baby gorilla clung to its mother, and the sight made him smile, still more than half-asleep. His animal shows could be grotesque at times, and even then they were fascinating, but there was something soothing about the programs concerning bears and monkeys and apes.

Knock knock.

Thump thump .

Carney jerked in the chair, adrenaline burning him awake. He threw the blanket aside and stood, barely noticing the arthritis pain in his knees. Turning slowly, he tried to locate the source of the noise, and it came again. Thump thump . He spun, staring at the short little corridor that led into the rest of the house.

A rapping came from the back of the house, a fist on glass, urgent but not angry. Not on the verge of shattering.

Carney twisted the little iron key, opened the body of the grandfather clock, and stopped the pendulum’s swing with his left hand. With his right he reached past it and grabbed the shotgun that always sat waiting there, just behind the tick of the clock.

The knock came again as he made his way down the little corridor, giving him a chance to zero in. The sound hadn’t come from his bedroom or the bathroom or the smaller second bedroom he used as an office. There wasn’t much house out here in the desert, but how much house did an aging widower need?

He ducked into the kitchen, stared at the blinds that hung over the sliding glass door that led onto his patio. A low adobe wall ringed the patio. On any ordinary night there’d have been nothing but snakes and coyotes beyond that wall, but snakes and coyotes didn’t knock on the wall or rap on the glass. The blinds were closed. The patio light was off.

“Who’s there?” he shouted at the closed blinds, leveling the shotgun at the slider. If they wanted to kill him, his voice gave them a location. They could start shooting right now. But did murderers knock?

“Friends, Mr. Carney,” came a reply, a raspy voice—not an old man’s rasp.

Carney slid to the side, toward the stove, and sidestepped past the kitchen island so he came at the blinds from an angle.