I realize now how ridiculous I must look: eyes wide with panic, my whole body woefully overdressed for the occasion and underdressed for the weather, my feet bare and blue except for the holey hosiery. Slowly, the car window rolls down with a faint buzz, to reveal a middle-aged cop with a shaved head giving me a dubious look.
“Anything the matter, ma’am?” he asks flatly.
“Y-yes, sir,” I begin, my voice wavering. “I think I’m being followed.”
The cop leans out of his window and looks around the empty lot. “By who?”
“Some guys. From… from a warehouse.”
At this, the cop’s attention flicks back to me instantly, his eyes suddenly full of interest.
“Hold on a sec’, miss,” he says. He leans away and says something into a receiver, too low and soft for me to catch the words. Then he gets out of the car to stand up in front of me. He’s barrel-chested and paunchy, with a bit of a beer gut. He glances down and does a double-take at my lack of shoes before fixing me with a raised eyebrow.
“Where are your shoes?”
“I, um, took them off when I was running.” It sounds even stupider out loud.
“You must be freezing. Here, hop in the back,” he offers, opening the car door so I can slip inside. I hesitate at first, but then I slide into the seat to get out of the rain.
He shuts the door and stands outside, speaking quietly into the receiver. Over the gentle patter of the rain I can’t make out a single word. I hope that he’s calling for backup. For several minutes we wait like this, and I surreptitiously take out of my cell phone. It doesn’t look to be damaged or anything, but when it hits me that I totally forgot to record any of the scene I witnessed at the warehouse I want to smack myself in the face.
Maybe I’m not cut out for this investigative journalism thing, after all.
Finally, in the distance, I can hear the growl of engines approaching. I strain my eyes to look out the window and make out the approaching shapes of what looks like a fleet of motorcycles. I wrinkle my nose. That’s weird. Why would the cop call for backup in the form of moto-cops? Where are they going to put the guys when they arrest them?
But as the bikes get closer my heart sinks. These guys aren’t wearing police uniforms. They’re dressed in leather jackets and jeans, and they all look mean as hell. They look like trouble. They pull into the parking lot quickly and hop off their bikes, dusting off their hands as they walk over to the squad car. My heart is racing in my chest at this point. Where is the backup? Where are the other cops? We can’t face these guys without help!
The cop leaning against the car seems unperturbed by the bikers’ arrival, standing nonchalantly with his arms crossed on his chest. I want to bang on the window, tell him to take out his gun or something — anything!
What is he doing?!
“Yo! Caught this one. Held her for ya,” calls out the cop. I look up at the back of his head through the window, unable to process the words he just said. Caught me? Holding me?
“Get any information out of her?” barks one of the bikers walking up. I realize with a jolt that it’s the guy from the warehouse with the blue shirt — the one called Lukas.
“Didn’t ask. Just waited for you guys. Like I was told.”
“Good work,” says another biker. I recognize his voice long before I can make out his face: Leon. The guy in the black shirt who chased me.
The cop is working with these guys. He’s a crooked cop. I’ve been tricked. The realization is coming over me slowly, as it seems just too outlandish to be real. This isn’t happening. It can’t be. This only goes down in the movies, on true-crime shows.
I’m just some puff-piece journalist from the Big Apple — not an undercover detective.
What if they kill me?
“Whatchu want me to do with her?” asks the cop. In a panic, I slide across the seat to the other side and try to open the door, but there’s no way to open it. I’ve never been in the back of a squad car before, but I’m pretty sure he’s got me stuck in here. I pull my legs up to my chest and try to recoil from the scene unfolding outside.
“Just let me talk to her, khorosho?” answers Leon.
“I don’t want no blood on my seats, eh? You got that?” warns the cop.
“We’ll get it detailed for you,” sneers Lukas sarcastically.
“Hey man, I’m serious. Chief is on my tail about my unaccounted hours and whatnot. I don’t want him gettin’ suspicious on me, alright?” complains the officer, holding up his hands.
“Shut up,” Leon says, “and open up that door.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
“No,” I murmur softly as the officer pops the door open and Leon reaches inside to grab at me. I slide as far away from him as possible, shaking my head. “No!”
“Come here,” Leon growls, grabbing me by the wrists and dragging me out into the rain.
My lungs clinging to that last wisp of oxygen.
“No! Don’t hurt me, please!” I cry out, flailing at him.
There’s laughter from the biker guys, but Leon doesn’t even flinch, pinning me against the slick side of the police car with effortless ease. He leans in close to my face and even in my stark terror I am taken aback by how handsome he is. His eyes are a jade-green, a color surely too vivid to be natural, and there’s dark stubble shadowing his strong jaw. His lips are barely parted, his breaths slow and measured, as though he’s done this a thousand times. Like this is nothing to him. Like my life is nothing to him.
Even hunched over to get in my face, he towers over me, but I refuse to shrink away — there’s nowhere to run now anyway. I am surrounded. There’s no way out.
“Who the hell are you?” he asks, his voice so low and deep it sends a thrum through my chest. “Who sent you?”
“Nobody.”
“What is your name?”
I close my lips tightly, giving him the fiercest glare I can muster. If I’m going to die in this shitty parking lot, then I am damn sure not going to die cowering like a wimp. It’s the least I can do. Be brave, like dad would have wanted. Not give in to the people who very well might have killed him.
Anger flashes in his green eyes and he shakes my shoulders, pressing me harder against the car. “Why were you in that warehouse? What did you see?”
“Why were you in that warehouse?” I snap, narrowing my eyes.
There’s some unrest among the bikers as they look around at each other, surprised at my brazenness. I gulp.
“None of your damn business,” Leon snarls.
“Right back at ya,” I reply, surprising even myself. Leon inhales slowly, clearly fighting to hold in his fury at me. One of his hands releases me to swipe back through his dark hair, as he shuts his eyes momentarily. He’s losing patience, I can tell. I don’t know exactly what that means for me, but it can’t be anything good. That’s for sure.
“Look,” he growls, his voice so low I doubt anyone else can hear him but me, “I don’t want to hurt you. But I ask the questions here. Not you.”
Well, at least he says he doesn’t want to hurt me — unlike Lukas behind him, who is rubbing his knuckles and giving me the coldest glare on planet earth. Still, with Leon’s hands pinning me like this, his words aren’t particularly comforting.
After a long, tense silence, I finally break a little.
“I saw you and that guy behind you,” I sigh, gesturing toward Lukas. “You had some other man chained up on the floor in the warehouse. I couldn’t really hear what you were saying, though,” I lie. It’s only half a lie. After all, I did hear some of what they said, but I can’t really put it into context at the moment, so it’s not especially helpful intel.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Leon says, easing up ever so slightly.
“But I’m not going to tell you why I was there,” I add, tilting my face upward defiantly.
“Oh, come on! Just shake the information out of her! We don’t have all day!” shouts Lukas, waving his arms
angrily. He’s definitely the hothead of the crew, that much I can tell.
“Let the man work,” drawls the cop, surveying his fingernails as though this is the most routine of activities in the world. And who knows — maybe this is everyday fare for him.
“You do realize you’re completely surrounded here, right?” Leon prods, raising an eyebrow at my obstinate refusal. “You know you’re in the very definition of real and present danger, don’t you?”
I nod, still keeping my lips shut tight.
A flicker of something akin to a smile crosses Leon’s face, to my surprise. Surely I imagined that. There’s no way he’s finding any of this amusing.
“Damn, you’re one stubborn devushka, aren’t you?” he murmurs, so softly I barely hear him say it. And there it is: an unmistakable little half-smile. I don’t know if it’s a good sign, though. I don’t know if it means he’s going to let me go or if he’s just really excited about the prospect of torturing me for information.
“You plan on telling anyone what you saw today?” he persists, his smile giving way to a businesslike, flat expression once again.
I toy with the idea of telling him I’m going straight to the papers with this. But the more practical, self-preserving part of my brain prevails, so I simply shake my head.
And with that, both his arms fall to his side, leaving me free to move. I hesitate, blinking at him in confusion and disbelief. Surely he’s not going to just… let me go?
“What are you doing, man?” Lukas exclaims.
Leon rolls his eyes and turns back to him, facing away from me. “Relax, Luke. She doesn’t know anything. No point in interrogating an empty witness, moy brat.”
“You want me to take her in anyway? For trespassing?” asks the cop, barely glancing up.
Leon waves his hand dismissively. “No need.”
“Alright,” the officer replies. Then he stands up straight and starts yelling, “Okay, okay, disperse the troops. You all have to get outta here before somebody sees you talking to me. You’re not the subtlest crowd, you know.”
“Embarrassed to be seen with us?” laughs one of the other bikers.
“That hurts our feelings, sotrudnik,” cackles another one.
“Yeah, yeah,” groans the cop. “Just scram before my chief comes along.”
They all start walking back to their respective motorcycles and the cop shoots me a withering glance as he climbs back into the driver’s seat of the squad car. “You, too!” he grunts.
“Oh — oh yeah, okay, sorry!” I stammer, hurrying away toward my car. I can’t help but feel Leon’s green eyes following me as I go. Piercing me straight through.
“Remember what we talked about here today!” he shouts after me.
He doesn’t have to add the two words implied to follow…
Or else.
Leon
I founded the Union Club because us dock workers have to stick together. Because the bosses want to bleed us dry, and the cops want to make it easy for them to do just that. We keep each other safe together, ride together, live together. And if I mean to keep the cops off the backs of the hard-working men and women who keep this rusty chunk of New Jersey running, I’ve gotta get all of us to work together.
Pushing open the door to The Glass, I step into the smoke-filled bar like it’s closer to home for me than my own bed. In a lot of ways, the rough-looking dive next to the drydock really is. It’s more than just my bar.
It’s our bar.
About a dozen heads turn to look me over as I stride across the faded, worn red carpet, and most of them wear the Union Club’s patches on their backs. They either raise a hand in greeting or their faces split into a grin as a few voices shout greetings across the bar.
“Hey, Prez!”
“Welcome back, Leon.”
“Roy, get our man a beer!”
Even if this weren’t where the Union Club went to unwind and talk over how the suits were trying to fuck us over next, I have something of a reputation around town that gets a degree of respect when I walk into places like this. I’m 6’2” of second-generation Russian clad in denim jeans and a worn, dusty leather jacket emblazoned with all the colors of the most well known bunch of men in town. I’m the leader of this pack of hounds, and I look it. My dark hair is shaved on the sides, and the top of it is spiked and sideswept. My cut jaw is covered in stubble, and my pale green eyes demand attention when they lock onto someone else’s.
I give a friendly smile back to the rugged bunch of bastards and clasp arms with the giant of a man posted up nearest to the entrance. His face is covered in a large black beard that covers his beaming smile and comes to a rest halfway down his portly body, but I know there’s a layer of muscle under all that extra love that could drop a man cold in an instant.
“Missed you today, Genn,” my voice rumbles to my old friend, the club’s Sergeant at Arms. Gennady Filipov, Genn for short, has been my right-hand-man in the Union Club since I founded it, and I couldn’t ask for a better man.
“Heard you had a hell of a weird run-in today, yeah?” he replies as we make our way towards the bar.
The Glass is a safe place to talk business. Probably the safest place in town — it’s our base of operations. The first round of Russian immigrants opened this place and called it the Glasnost. Used to be where all the Russian dock workers who could hardly put together a sentence in English met to talk about how things were going.
But all that’s our parents’ and grandparents’ story, and since we all grew up here, it got shortened to The Glass pretty quickly. A few of the older members allowed to wear the club’s kutte — jackets covered in our patches — still meet up and swap stories in the mother tongue, but most of us, myself included, only have a trace of a Russian accent in our voices.
We’ve never stopped talking over the same things, though.
As I make my way into the place, the old familiar faces greet me, each one of them with a story that brought ‘em here.
We sidle up to the bar, and my bartender Roy already has a couple of cans out for us. I crack open mine with a nod to him and sit down, leaning back on the bar as I look out around the place.
“We had a run-in with an outsider,” I explain as Genn takes a seat beside me, “caught her eavesdropping while me and the boys were finally having a chat with Jack Chandler.”
“The old contractor who’s started cozying up to the cops?”
I nod with a grimace. “Yeah. I think he’s been in their pocket for a while now, and if he has, he’ll know what the pigs have been covering up for a long while.”
Genn’s face started to look more grave, and he took a drink of his beer thoughtfully. “So you’re not giving up on running down John LaBeau’s murderer, are you?”
I shoot him a look. “Genn, if we let them get it in their heads that the Union Club will allow this kind of shit slide under our watch, they’ll walk all over us.”
Gen nods thoughtfully. “No doubt. Just sayin’ it’s a hard search, Prez. Investigators would call it a closed case if they weren’t half as crooked as they are around here.”
I frown. “Anyway, there’s no question she’s an outsider. She took off from the warehouse as soon as we saw her, and she ran straight into one of the cops on our payroll.”
Genn snorted a laugh. “Maybe she just didn’t do her homework.”
One of my eyebrows goes up as I try to read Genn’s expression. “Homework? So you think she sounds like a fed come to keep an eye on us?”
There’s something in Genn’s eye that tells me what he’s about to say before he even opens his mouth. He lowers his voice as he speaks, even though we’re in a bar full of the most loyal men I know. “I dunno about us, Prez, but you…they might have some old loose ends they’re looking to tie up.”
I let out a low murmur and take a drink from my beer. As much as I don’t want to talk about my past, Genn knows me better than anyone else, and he knows what only a handful of the other patch-members k
now.
A lifetime ago, my Russian heritage was a lot closer to home. I worked for the Bratva. No, I didn’t just work for the Bratva, I killed for them. I was just a kid back then, but I stuck up for the Russian presence around town. The Russian mafia had enemies, and they needed someone who could work swiftly and quietly to do what inevitably needed to be done. It paid well, and the kind of men they had me kill weren’t the kind I’d lose a wink of sleep over.
But something got to me. I still don’t know what it was, but something in me knew I couldn’t keep doing that forever. Some of the more streetwise locals started to know me, started to fear me. I wouldn’t build a career with the people I wanted to protect being afraid. This is my home, and these people are my family, not my victims. So I tried to go straight.
Got a job at these very docks a few years back. Wasn’t glamorous, but it was honest, and best of all, our union was solid. Where the old times were a long and awful history of making sure us Russians at the docks got shit lives for shit pay, the union let us have a voice together. It gave our little community a heartbeat that spoke loud and strong. We all had fair pay, our jobs were protected, and we worked hard to make sure there was enough to go around for everyone. What had long been a neglected back end of New Jersey was starting to shape up, the community felt stronger, and we were going to provide more jobs for honest, hardworking immigrants and their children.
Then corruption from above came down on us like a hammer, all because we dared try to make a fair living for ourselves. The bosses of the old shipping and drydock companies who’d long held our community in a vicegrip got uneasy. Unions have that effect on the fat-cats that mooch off our hard work. So they worked with the feds, lining their pockets until they could trump up some fake allegations of illegal activity — smuggling, larceny, embezzlement, anything they could get their greasy hands to use against us.
The union bust ruined everything. Our best workers got “laid off,” and the old union policies got blamed for it. Men paid by the bosses went around spreading rumors that the union had been smuggling drugs into the community, and incidentally, the cops started turning a blind eye to drug sales from outside the docks to inflate the numbers.
Sights on the SEAL: A Secret Baby Romance Page 39