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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 go
Jax started up his Harley. “Follow the lead we’ve got. Oscar Temple.”
Opie glanced at him. “You really go
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 A
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 we’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, sca
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—”