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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 fu
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?”
Jax shook his head. “Nah. She took off with him. Left home. But from everything Oleg said before they left, I know there’s some serious shit going on with you and your people and I want to get my sister back before she ends up in a ditch with a bullet in the back of her head. I want to get her out of this, and I’ll do whatever I have to do to make sure she gets home safely.”
Iov scratched at a spot under his left eye, thinking.
“You want us to help you find your sister? To tell you where to find Oleg?”
“He’s not your brother, is he?” Joyce asked, looking a little squirrely. A sheen of sweat had formed on his forehead.
“I can pay,” Jax said.
Iov’s eyes sparkled. “I work for a man who would also like to find Oleg. Right now, we don’t know where he is, but maybe my employer will want to meet you. Maybe you can help him, and he can help you.”
He sent Yurik to make a call, and the thug headed toward the men’s room, where the thumping music wouldn’t prevent him from hearing voices on the other end of the line. Los Lonely Boys’ “Crazy Dream” came on the sound system, and the girl on the rear stage dropped down and began pumping her lace-covered crotch at the bachelor-party guys. All the while, she stared longingly at Iov—the Russians tipped way better than suburban dads. She caught Jax watching her and scowled at him, pissed that he’d drawn her best customers away.
A waitress floated their way, a lithe brunette who looked closer to fifteen than twenty, which had to be an illusion given the law. Her purple eye shadow had sparkles in it that changed color with the shifting lights in the club. She wore a little tartan skirt that must have sparked a thousand Catholic-schoolgirl fantasies, and she made a beeline toward Joyce. Her eyes lit up like she knew him.
“Hey, Harry. Give a girl a taste?” the waitress asked. “You’ve always got the good stuff.”
Joyce gave her a dark look. “Now ain’t the time.”
Jax bristled. He didn’t much care if Joyce was using drugs to buy favors from strippers, but if he was selling in clubs, that was the kind of small-time shit that could get the whole charter jammed up. It was something for Rollie to take care of—and Jax would bring it to his attention—but right now the girl was just a distraction.
Jax saw Opie signal him and looked toward the front of the bar to see what had gotten Opie’s attention. One of the bouncers—the bodybuilder, not the jarhead—stood beside the main stage watching Jax and Joyce talk to the Russians.
“Maybe next time, honey,” the waitress said, before she turned to the rest of them. “What’ll you have, boys?”
“Go away, girl,” Iov rumbled.
She glanced at Jax. “You look like a whiskey man.”
Iov grew angry. “Are you blind or stupid? We want a drink, we find you. Now fuck off.”
She looked him up and down with the belittling disdain only a beautiful young woman could muster.
“I can’t decide if you’ve had too much to drink or not enough,” she said, and then she turned to Joyce, moving close enough to give him a whiff of the perfume that had already filled Jax’s nostrils. “I’m dancing in about half an hour, honey. I hope you’ll stick around for my show. Trust me, you won’t be—”