“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.