Ben

 

Four Months Later

 

“Ben, my good friend,” said the man in a thick Russian accent. He spread his arms out wide to pull me into a hug. “Welcome, welcome,” he said, patting me on the back. “It is good to see you. It has been very long.”

 

“Good to see you, too, Ivan,” I said.

 

“Come, sit, please.” He pointed at the chair across from his desk as he returned behind it and settled in, crossing his hands over his fat belly. Snapping his fingers at the pale young teen standing at attention on the far wall, he barked, “Petrov, go get a drink for my old friend, Ben. Vodka.”

 

“Little early for vodka, isn’t it?”

 

“Never too early for vodka.”

 

“You’re a Russian through and through,” I remarked.

 

“Ah, what can I do? It is in my blood.” He leaned forward in his seat and eyed me up and down. “You don’t look so well,” he said bluntly.

 

“Yeah, well, you look like shit, too, you fat old man,” I retorted sarcastically.

 

Ivan chuckled. The chains looped across his chest bounced as he did, dazzling in the light from overhead. We were sitting in his office in an underground bunker on the far side of town. It looked like an out of business deli from the street level, but anyone who knew anything about the shadier businesses that ran through this city knew more money and power was concentrated in the Bratva’s headquarters than just about anywhere else that wasn’t the Dark Knights clubhouse or that rotting dump the Wild Kings called home.

 

He patted his stomach and shrugged. “It is true. Perhaps I am a bit heavy these days. But, that is the life we lead, no? I drink the best liquor, eat the best food, fuck the prettiest women. I have no complaints if I must gain a few pounds as a result. Cost of doing business, you might say.”

 

Nothing he said was surprising. Ivan had always been a man of appetites, to put it nicely. To put it not so nicely, I might have said that he was a fat, greedy pig. But saying such a thing to the man’s face was a quick path to more pain and suffering than I was willing to deal with at the present moment.

 

I was fucked up enough in the head as it was. It had been, what, four months since the strike on James’s warehouse? Four months since the party? God, I couldn’t believe how quickly that time had gone. It seemed like just yesterday that Slick was dragging huge satchels of cash into my office while we cackled over our good fortune.

 

Since then, though, it had been a slow unraveling. I knew why, at least in part. I hadn’t said her name out loud since the morning she left, but those eyes stuck with me. They damn near haunted me, showing up every time I managed to grab some shuteye or even just paused to think for a moment. Those grey fucking eyes.

 

But there were other things bothering me, too, mostly business-related. We hadn’t heard a peep out of the Kings in the days and weeks since their stash got taken. It didn’t make a goddamn bit of sense. Who gave up that much money, over a million in cold, hard cash, without even looking for it? For Christ’s sake, at the very least they could have bothered to put up a fucking “Lost—Please Return” poster. But no, it had been stony silence. All of the gossip channels had fallen dead quiet. I didn’t like that shit at all.

 

And if I didn’t like something, then Jay was sure as hell brooding over it. I pictured him as he was waiting for me outside, chain-smoking those Camels like the end was nigh. He had a funny way of being nervous. Looking at his face, you’d think he was at a funeral, but I knew damn well that his leg started bouncing frantically whenever he thought no one could see him.

 

Then again, it was his job to worry. In this case, it was justified. Men with a reputation for bloody retribution—men like James Sanders—didn’t just let things go. They didn’t simply allow their money to walk out the door and say, “Aw, shucks, shouldn’t have let that happen.” No. What they did was strike back with double the strength, inflict double the pain. We’d been braced for it, on the off chance that he had discovered who was responsible for the theft. But the weeks of tension were starting to take their toll on my nerves.

 

“So, Ben, tell me: what is it that brings you here today?” Ivan’s eyes were glinting an icy blue. He picked up a switchblade knife from his desktop, flicked it open, and began shaving down his fingernails.

 

I glanced down at my hands in my lap before clearing my throat and launching into the spiel we’d rehearsed. “We’ve been giving this some thought, Ivan,” I began. “We think that there’s been, let’s say, a little bit of unrest in the city as of late. Nothing major, nothing to be too worried about, but definitely some tremors here and there. Little upstarts. Guys edging in on each other’s turf. Some illicit business that no one in charge ever condoned.”

 

The things I was saying were true, to a certain extent. There’d been a prostitution ring shipping in hookers from Eastern Europe that got some unpleasant attention from the local PD with the full backing of the feds. I looked down on that as much as the next man, but the fact of the matter was that any extra focus on organized crime put a crosshair on the back of me and the men in my MC. We preferred to stay under the radar rather than star on the six o’clock news.

 

Along with the heavily publicized bust of that particular organization, there’d been the usual spate of shootings, stabbings, and bodies left to hang as some of the lower level gangs duked it out for control of one or two city blocks.

 

Taken altogether, it was nothing too far out of the norm, but Jay and I had agreed that this was the best angle to drum up. We had one goal in mind for this meeting, and it depended on us convincing Ivan that he needed us as much as we needed him.

 

“Sure, sure.” He nodded. “And?”

 

“It makes us a little, oh, I don’t know…uncomfortable,” I continued. “I like the status quo. I don’t want to see it changing anytime soon.”

 

Ivan blinked and waited for me to go on.

 

“The real straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was this theft. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. For some reason, it was kept very quiet.”

 

His eyebrows shot up. I had his attention, but this was the tricky part, the one most liable to get us in a hot, heaping load of trouble if we triggered the wrong reaction. “Do tell,” he said.

 

“Someone—no one knows who—stole an awful lot of money from the Wild Kings.”

 

“James Sanders’ crew.”

 

“Those’re the guys.”

 

“Not the most, eh, friendly of men is James?”

 

“He is the farthest thing from it. Devil spawn, if you ask me, but you didn’t, so I won’t say that.”

 

Ivan didn’t laugh this time. “Ben, what does this have to do with you and me?”

 

I steeled my gaze. “Given the unpleasant history between James and myself, we’ve got a suspicion that he thinks we’re the ones responsible for robbing him blind. That, combined with all the other troubling things going on in every damn corner of this city, got us to thinking we could do with an ally right about now. Someone to watch our back while we watch theirs. Call it a defense pact, if you’d like.”

 

Ivan eyed me for a long few seconds, then went back to carving off the ends of his fingernails. I had no choice other than to sit and wait. He was the kind of man to take his time before speaking. And when he said things, he said them once only. Every word was final.

 

Finally, he set the knife down, steepled his fingers, and looked at me again. “I like you, Ben,” he said. “Hell, my wife likes you, too. When we have done business before, it has gone very well for both of us, and what is there not to like about making money?”

 

My heart sank. I knew this couldn’t be headed in a good direction.

 

He wagged a finger sadly in the air between us. “But I cannot say yes to this right now. Perhaps even you were the one to take James’s money. I have no way of knowing, and I will not insult you by asking. What I do know is that there is much bad blood between James’s club and your own. That was very bad business that took place those few years ago, very bad, indeed. I do not like to be mixed up in such things when I have no skin of my own in the game, you know? I am very sorry, friend, but I cannot help you.”

 

The teenager returned with a bottle of vodka and two glass tumblers in hand, looking like he’d just run up a dozen flights of stairs.

 

“Here you are, Ivan,” he mumbled as he set the items down in front of his boss.

 

“Ach!” Ivan said. He smacked the boy in the back of the head and the kid recoiled, then stood there shame-faced. “What good are you? Taking hours and hours just to find the goddamn drinks? Get the hell out of this room. I don’t want to look at you.” He turned to me and gave me an apologetic shrug of the shoulders. “My apologies, Ben. My son is often useless. You have no children of your own, no?”

 

“No.”

 

“Well, perhaps one day you will. You will see then how you love them so much and still want to slap them in their stupid heads every time you see them. Anyway, here, drink.” He poured a few fingers’ worth of vodka into the tumbler and slid it across the table to me. I reached out and brought it to my lips.

 

The smell almost made me vomit. Tangy, brutal, cold, it was everything I felt personified in a drink. “To old friendships,” Ivan said solemnly, toasting me. I inclined my glass towards him and threw the drink back in one gulp. He smacked his lips and let out a satisfied, “Ahh.”

 

“Thanks for your time, Ivan,” I said in a low voice.

 

“For you, Ben? Always. Must you be off? Can I interest you in anything else? Drugs? Girls? Perhaps a girl. You look so pale, my friend. Maybe a good blowjob will improve your color. Petrov, go get Kisha!”

 

The boy turned to leave, but I held up a hand. “It’s okay, really. I’m fine.”

 

“Are you sure? This girl gives head like your dick is a straw and there is only the littlest bit of water left! It is incredible!” He guffawed and slapped the desk.

 

“No, I’m all good,” I repeated. I set the glass back on the tabletop and stood. “I gotta get going anyway. It’s good to see you. Thanks for the drink, Petrov.”

 

Shit. That didn’t go the way I wanted it to go at all.

 

# # #

 

“So now what?” Jay asked me. We were standing outside in the simmering heat of the late afternoon, smoking cigarettes and racking our brains for just what the fuck we should do next.

 

“I don’t know,” I replied. This had admittedly been a bit of a Hail Mary, and one born out of nervousness, too. “The problem is that we would gain way more from a defensive partnership with the Bratva than they would gain from us. Especially since, you know, we were the ones who took the money from James in the first place.”

 

Jay snorted. “Ivan believed you?”

 

“I never know what that bastard is thinking. He’s as cold-blooded as they come.”

 

“But you didn’t tell him the truth.”

 

“We didn’t exactly get that far.”

 

“He knew.”

 

“Probably.”

 

He shrugged. “Could have been worse. At least he didn’t threaten to rat us out to the Kings.”

 

“For the right price, that Russian motherfucker will do anything. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”

 

“Says the one who just lied to the man’s face.”

 

I turned and glared at him. “Whose side are you on here?”

 

He took a long drag on his cigarette, then dropped it to the sidewalk and ground it out beneath his booted heel. “I’m just sayin’.”

 

“Yeah, well, don’t. It ain’t helping.”

 

“So, the question remains—now what?”

 

A long sigh came whistling between my teeth. “Even if it hadn’t been us, James’s going to suspect it. He hates us like we’re the fucking plague.”

 

“He ain’t exactly our favorite, neither.”

 

“True. I just wish the bastard would react already. Do something, you know?”

 

“Yeah. I don’t like the silence.”

 

“I wish Olaf was still around to convince Ivan to reconsider.”

 

“Yeah, the old man had a real soft spot for Olaf.”

 

Olaf wasn’t around, though. He was six feet underground, and therefore very unlikely to come running back to give us an easy fix for the current situation. But Jay was right; Ivan did love Olaf, almost like he was his own son. Olaf had been a Dark Knights member for years, had grown up in the club. He used to work a bit of gun running on a patch of territory near where Ivan first set up base in the city, and over the course of a few months, they’d struck up a friendship, bonding as they reminisced about their homes back in Europe over straight vodka and cigars. When Ivan became the boss of the Bratva, one of his first calls was to Olaf. Their connection had led to some very profitable business between the Kings and the mob, one that left us both much richer and better off than we would have been without it. It looked like we would have a long future of mutually beneficial partnership ahead of our two organizations.

 

Then everything changed suddenly. Olaf was murdered in the same attack that got James Sanders’s wife. It had taken us all by surprise, and without Olaf around, our friendship with the Bratva had faded somewhat, though Ivan and I both did our best to keep paying it lip service whenever a convenient opportunity arose. But it just wasn’t the same.

 

“You been to see Dina lately?” Jay asked me. Dina was Olaf’s widow. I still remembered how goddamn happy he’d been on the day they got married. I’d been at the ceremony, along with the rest of the club. The bastard couldn’t stop smiling. Every time he looked at her, it was like he was seeing her for the first time. I’d chuckled, thinking he was a lunatic. Now, though, I had an inkling of what that might feel like.

 

“No, not in a long time. I should go by there. See how she’s doing.”

 

“Yeah.” Jay checked the time. “Gotta go,” he said. “Duncan and Spark are getting back from the long haul mission. I’m gonna check in and make sure they had a miserable time.”

 

I chuckled. “We’ll knock some sense into those kids yet.”

 

“Or die trying.”
 

“They ain’t worth that, Jay. Don’t you dare die on me. You’re irreplaceable.”

 

He looked at me somberly. “Get some rest, Ben. You look tired.”

 

I didn’t say a word. Instead, I stood and watched as he mounted his motorcycle and pulled away down the road, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

 

Leaning back on the brick wall behind me, I closed my eyes. It felt good to soak up the summer heat and feel my muscles unclench one by one. I was so on edge without even realizing it. My breaths were short and shallow; my fingertips were always drumming on my leg or the desktop. Sleep was damn near impossible. Something in the air just didn’t feel right to me, and I couldn’t find a way to let go of it. For now, though, I had a few moments to sit in the sun and rest.

 

Those eyes. Grey. Bright. Staring at me. Blonde hair falling over them. Dark lips, open in a moaning O…

 

I shot them open again, feeling more restless than before. Growling, I turned and walked down the street to where my bike was parked. Dina lived just a few blocks away. I figured I’d go pay her a visit.