Stained Glass

Chapter 8

Strange Kitty was an hour ride on the Pelham and J lines from my Mott Haven squat, a narrow dirty building crammed between a dodgy barbershop and a dirt parking lot. It was marked by a six-by-five-foot steel plate bolted over a pair of metal blast doors. The sign featured a grinning Cheshire cat: silver raised detailing, black burned outline, anodized rainbow fill. It had a mouthful of pointed teeth crafted from old bullet casings. The sign, the building, and my bones thrummed with sound, filling my mouth with clashing colors and textures. It pulsed behind my eyes like migraine aura.

Six motorbikes were parked out on the sidewalk. Harleys, Triumphs, Indians… custom bikes that gleamed with chrome and slick color under the lights on the bar and the street. A crowd of neon signs on the blacked-out windows advertised American beer, German beer, some other kind of beer, and bourbon.

Bikers. Prim little Talya had sent me to a biker bar.

A couple of skinheads lingered outside, smoking and laughing in drunk delirium with a man in white coveralls and a rubber Regan mask. They stared at me in my military surplus sweater and jeans and boots as I dug around in a pocket and came up with some Altoids in a tin. They were clearly expecting something other than candy when I took out three, put them in my mouth, and then very deliberately cracked them under my teeth. The chilly mouthfeel took the edge off the impending sensory assault. Barely.

The unseen bouncer rose up from his crouch by the door to greet me on the way inside. His legs just kept on going until he quite literally towered over me and everyone else on the street. This guy was close to seven feet of sleek muscle. Even under a puffy black SECURITY jacket, he looked like he was cut from red-brown marble.

“How’s it hanging, buddy?” He asked the question with the kind of slow accent and sincere warmth that told me he was from out of state. His shaven scalp was tattooed with leaping fish and a large tribal hook design. It looked Polynesian, maybe Maori.

“It hangs in the breeze, chilly, as usual.” I pulled up at a respectful distance, turning the peppermint tin around and around in my hand. I took a moment to gather details and then looked up to be able to meet his eyes. “Nice hair.”

“You too.” The quip earned me a guarded twitch at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were green-gray and intelligent, startlingly pale in his dark face. “This place is invite-only after ten, Cuz. You got a card or something?”

I took out the business card Talya had given me and held it up. “I’m here to see someone.”

“No offense, but I don’t recognize you,” he said. His voice was smooth and beveled, a pleasant green rumble under the jagged mess of sound leaking from the club. “Mind telling me who gave you the ticket?”

“Talya,” I said. “She told me to come late. I’m here to help her with a problem.”

His mouth quirked. He sucked on one of his canine teeth, then nodded. “No worries. You have a good night, man.”

“And you.” He opened the door for me, every inch the gentleman. I caught a trace of his cologne on the wind as I walked on through the door and was promptly ejected into filthy chaos.

Strange Kitty was hot, excruciatingly loud, tightly packed, and dirtier than any bar had any right to be. Every inch of wall was covered in sloppy paint or ragged posters, signs, and fliers. A punk band was in full swing on a tiny stage in one corner of the building. Everything smelled of alcohol. If someone dropped a lighter, the place would go up like a barrel bomb.

Most nightclubs at least had the decency to play bass-heavy music, but not Strange Kitty. No… this was the worst of the worst. High slashing treble, screeching, sharp mechanical noise, voices barking out of nowhere like needles to the tongue. My vision whited out as I ran face-first into the wall of sound. I pressed back against something, gasping as my hands cramped and twisted, and rocked in place until my body simply gave up under the assault and began to throb in time with the ‘music’. When my fingers began to work again, I crammed three more mints into my mouth and pushed off through the raucous crowd. I could only hope that ‘Zane’ had the good grace and common sense to be sitting down somewhere quiet.

I shouldered, elbowed, and slid through to the bar, only to be pushed up against it by a girl on rollerskates who collided with my hip and then bounced off, shrieking with laughter. The bar and bartender were exactly what I expected out of a place like this. The bar itself was old, scratched up and stained by the ghosts of beer long past. A sea of old bras hung from the ceiling above. The bartender was paunchy and balding, with stringy sideburns and a heavily patched leather vest that identified him as ‘Big Ron’. Vietnam vet, ex-Marine, proudly from Tennessee, and blooded. I didn’t recognize his Club patch: a roaring tiger’s head with the letters ‘T.T.C’ staggered around the frayed border, or his rank patch, which read ‘B.C.C’.

“Wassut be, buddy?” He had to shout to be in any way audible.

“Business.” I yelled back, and extended him the card. “Talya sent me to speak with Zane.”

Big Ron frowned, brow creasing with deep lines. He took the card between stubby fingers. When he read the back, he made the ‘oh, right’ face, nodding. “Hold up fiddeen minutes, okay?”

“Okay,” I took it back, feeling less comfortable by the moment. “Is there a place I can wait?”

“Yeah, out back. Go outside, past the shitters. I’ll tell Zane I sent you there.”

The shitters. I forced a brief smile, and stepped back into the crowd before the effort broke my face.

I wound my way through the dancers and drunkards to the back of the club, and burst out into a comparatively quiet, narrow hallway. The walls crawled in my vision, green tracers pounding with the noise that followed me through the door. The music trailed off to a dull roar near the end of the corridor, quiet enough that heavy breathing, moans, and rhythmic thumping became clearly audible from behind one of the bathroom stalls. I scurried by, pulling my gloves up along my wrists while my stomach roiled and lurched with nausea.

The door burst out into blessed fresh air, an open space of relative quiet. I inhaled deeply as I stepped out and looked around, rolling the peppermint across my tongue. The dirt lot I’d seen out front wound around back here, separating Strange Kitty from another free-standing house on the same plot of land – a ramshackle two-story clapboard with boards nailed up over the windows. Ten more motorcycles were parked right outside of it. Two men were counseling a female friend through some kind of drug high, cupping her shoulders and crooning slurred reassurances as she rocked back and forth. Bored young people lounged on plastic chairs: a girl with heated black-rimmed eyes looked me up and down before toasting me with her beer. With nothing to return the gesture, I stared at her for a moment before stumping off to find a place to rest.

There were empty chairs undercover just outside the exit. I found a place to wait where I could sit down and huddle, arms wrapped around my chest against the cold. I never used to feel the cold, but I’d had access to good clothes back then… suits, overcoats, scarves. Camping in an overturned dumpster under a pair of coveralls and two sweaters, cut off from my savings and my dignity, had given me a yardstick by which to measure my former privilege. The sigil-seal had something to do with it as well, no question about it. When it got chilly, the skin around and over it buckled and stiffened.

Over the next fifteen minutes or so, people filtered in and out of Strange Kitty in dribs and drabs, but few were willing to stay out under the drizzle that peppered the dirt separating the club from the house behind it. Eventually, the door opened and the huge bouncer from the front entry ducked through, straightening to search the yard with narrowed eyes. Then he turned and looked down at me, a puzzled frown on his face.

I picked myself up from the chair, knees creaking. “You’re Zane, aren’t you?”

He was about as surprised as I was. “Yeah, that’s me. You’re Rex?”

“The ugliest dog you’ve ever met on two legs,” I said.

For a moment, a real smile lit his face. It passed quickly, even bashfully, before the stony resting biker face returned.

“Zane Salter.” Awkwardly, he offered a hand. With equal awkwardness, I accepted. His grip wasn’t as firm as mine, until he felt the power in my arm and cranked it accordingly. A good Russian shake. “I thought you were here to see Talya?”

“I am,” I replied. “But she told me to speak to you. I presume you’re the security screen.”

“Yeah. Tally’s not really the streetwise type.” He smiled a Mona Lisa smile, reserved and aloof and far more perceptive than muscle had any right to be. There was a threat there, but as threats went, it was fairly benign. “And speaking of that, give me your real name. You’re too Continental to be going by the name ‘Rex’.”

“How would you know?” I let go of his hand, but didn’t back away. “I might be an Ancient Roman king.”

He gave me another thin-lipped smile. “You got an accent. Call it a hunch.”

“Fine,” I said. “Alexi.”

“Alexi what?”

I paused for a moment. “Sokolsky.”

“Sokolsky?” Zane echoed. He thought for a moment. Abruptly, his eyes widened. “You’re shitting me. Alexi Sokolsky, as in, the Brighton Beach Mob spook?”

I tensed. The trap had been set by Talya, the honey-pot, and now I was stuck. There was a good chance I could beat Zane to the fence line. From there, it was iffy. “My reputation precedes me in only a few very select circles.”

“Yeah. It does.” He regarded me with an air of deep suspicion. “Circles I don’t want Talya having anything to do with.”

“Spare me from self-righteousness. If you know me by name, then you’ve had dealings with the Red Hook Bratva.” I crossed my arms, frowning up at him. “My name and profession isn’t common knowledge outside of the Organizatsiya.”

“The Club doesn’t run in that scene.” Zane shook his head. “But I know people who get talking sometimes.”

“Who?”

“You expect me to tell you that?” He narrowed his eyes.

“I was invited here to help with a problem, and I can walk straight back out,” I said. “Talya seems to think I can do something for you. If I decide to take the job, I have a right to know what your connection to my ex-Organization is.”

Zane could have exploded. Instead, he mulled my words for several moments, then shrugged. “I fight in the underground scene. Cage fights, pit fights. There’re four or five Russian guys who show up regularly. You know Petro Kravets?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, stiffly. He was the current Kommandant of Brighton Beach, and a juiced up, spoiled, lazy asshole.

“Petro comes in with his guys to work out. They were talking about you with me and a bunch of other big bruisers.” The corner of Zane’s mouth twitched into a rueful smile. “You know, just in case anyone happened to want to do business with you. They say you killed a lot of your friends recently.”

“I’m sure they say a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they’re true.” A flash of anger spiked through me, burying itself like a thorn. I glanced back, looking for eavesdroppers. The girl with the shakes was throwing up now, and one of her male friends was gone. The other was too busy holding her hair out of the way to care about us. “Petro is the last man who should be blaming others for betraying him.”

“Did you screw them over?”

“The Organizatsiya screwed me so badly that my family is dead.” I rolled my shoulders, trying to loosen them. Between the cold and the stress, my back felt like it was made of planks. “I was trying to get out of the life. Before I could, Mr. Yaroshenko decided I’d reached my expiration date and reneged on our contracts.”

Zane licked his teeth while he digested that, patient as a golem. To my mild surprise, he seemed to understand the word ‘renege’, which was unusual enough to be interesting. Nuanced vocabulary wasn’t usually a high priority for guys who earned their living by fighting in a cage.

Finally, Zane rubbed his face with the back of his hand and sighed. “Damn… I seriously can’t believe Talya went to the fucking Russian mob for help. Isn’t that like a bad stereotype?”

“The Bratva have their good and bad,” I replied, with a shrug. “More bad than good. But like all things, there are reasons men like me exist.”

“Because an ethnic neighborhood just isn’t a real neighborhood until it has a protection racket, right?” Zane quirked a brow.

“Because people do bad things regardless of whether the Bratva exists or not,” I replied. “And the lines between business and crime are often blurred.”

Slowly, Zane nodded. “Fair enough. You still got Talya’s card with you?”

Without a word, I passed it to him, still warm from my pocket. He took it and read over the back, as Big Ron the Barkeep had done. “Why do you want to help her?”

The question caught me off guard. “Why? Why not? She had a difficult question, and I can provide her with what she needs. I need work… so I can’t claim sentimentality or chivalry, if that’s what you’re fishing for.”

“Pragmatism’s fine. It’s an honest reason.” Zane sighed, cracking his hands, his elbows, and his shoulders in short succession. “Come on… I’ll walk you into the clubhouse, but I better not regret this.”

The clapboard house loomed large across the yard, but I dug my heels into the gravel and crossed my arms. “Wait. Before I go anywhere, I want to know what I’m being brought into. Give me something solid, starting with some info on the club.”

Zane glanced at me with those slow, pale eyes. “I’m Road Sergeant of the Twin Tigers M.C, also known as the Big Cat Crew.”

“Show me your colors.” I motioned to his featureless black jacket.

Without a word, Zane zipped it open and shrugged it off. He had a pistol in a police-style shoulder holster, and a vest and t-shirt on under that. He turned to show me the back of his vest. It was taken up by a dust-worn patch, a pair of Chinese-style tigers mirroring each other within the confines of an elaborate egg-shaped frame. The lettering was plain by contrast: ‘TWIN TIGERS M.C’. Underneath that was a much smaller patch, the same snarling tiger badge on the front of Ron’s vest. The badges I expected to be there were there. He was a One-Percenter, a veteran, a mechanic, and a Sergeant in the club.

While I studied his colors, Zane looked back over his shoulder. “You’re meeting the Captain and the Prez tonight in that house over there, along with some others who are…” he paused, searching for the right words. “A more law-abiding set of folks. We’re having a cross-factional meeting tonight over some bad business. Talya’s our link between the people who are representing tonight. She’s got one foot in the Tigers, one foot in the Fires. We’re hoping to bring her on into the club soon.”

“A woman?”

Zane shrugged. “This is 1991. We’re an equal opportunity club.”

That did not put me at ease. Zane had the kind of straight-backed energy and bearing I associated with policemen, not bikers. I’d pick him as an undercover cop from his vocabulary alone. From what I was reading off his vest, he was an ex-soldier who’d seen action in the Gulf War, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been set up. “What about cops?”

“A couple of the Four Fires guys are cops, but they’re off-duty tonight. You know what I mean?”

Cops were never really ‘off-duty’. I was beginning to get a tension headache. “I see. How do I know you aren’t on the Yaroshenko payroll?”

“You kidding me? The Prez would kill me.” He turned back to face me, his expression inscrutable. “I mean, we aren’t out there doing charity rides for kids, but we aren’t exactly gunning down people in the street, neither. Talya bringing someone like you into the Club is worse for us than it is for you.”

“Why would you say that?” My mouth ticced. I was fairly certain that Zane could crush my head between his hands.

“Because the Russians are good at vanishing people, and we just lost a lot of ours.” For the first time, something other than calm, self-contained wariness showed on Zane’s face. He looked… upset. “So as far as they need to know, you’re Rex the Spook. Just Rex.”

I nodded, plucking at the cuffs of my gloves. “Fine with me.”

The man comforting the tweaker girl got up to his feet when Zane strolled up, giving him a nod that was returned as the huge man ducked for the door that led into the garage. This first room was a bar with a pool table and a jukebox, and here was where we found the bikers. A mixed crowd of men and women in dirty denim and leather lounged, laughed, bickered, threw darts, drank and played pool. The interior was mismatched and second-hand, everything handmade or scrounged. The air was thick with smoke, not all of it tobacco, but it was solid and comfortable. Cases behind the bar displayed militaria, photos, and motorbike parts. The Tiger theme was omnipresent. Banners, posters, patches, and murals featured the club crest. Pictures of tigers and other big cats hung from the walls. The bar was in a corner of the room. Beside it was a red door with a big hammer hole right through it and a modified road sign that read: Warning – Private Property. Keep out unless you have Really Big Boobs.”

Zane made for it, pushed it open, and beckoned me to follow. It seemed that the big boobs rule was flexible.

Shoulders hunched, I followed him as he headed down a carpeted hallway. I’d come armed: my knife was in a pocket, the hilt solid in my hand when I jammed them down to reassure myself that it was at hand. “These cops… what are they assigned to?”

“Assigned to?”

“Unit or division,” I replied. “Homicide, beat cops, FBI…?”

Zane paused for a moment. “Aaron’s a Police Chaplain stationed in Hempstead. Ayashe is FBI. She supports an Arcane Support Unit in Harlem.”

I jerked to a stop. “Wait. A Vigiles agent?”

Zane waved it off. “Don’t worry about it. Like I said, she’s off-duty. She knows that we’re expecting a spook. It’s why we’re all here.”

Easy for him to say. I’d spent my adult life inventing ways to stay out of sight and out of mind of the Vigiles Magicarum, the recently-formed branch of the FBI dedicated to hunting down and putting away ‘uncontained supernatural threats’. The agency wasn’t even ten years old, but they’d been hammering away at the magical population of the city ever since they set up practice. They were the worst combination of governmental gray-faces and religious fanatics, because the biggest organizations with the biggest stake in putting away people like me were the Fed and the Churches – all of them.

In July of this year, me and half the senior management from the Yaroshenko Organization and the LaGuetta Cosa Nostra were involved in the magical fire-bombing of a casino in Atlantic City. The Manellis had sent in one of the strongest and most genuinely obnoxious mages I’d ever met to take us out in revenge for a murder we didn’t commit. The Vigiles had been part of that investigation. We’d gotten away clean despite the body-count, but if the Vigiles had any way of identifying me after the fact… well.

There was only one peppermint left in the tin. I got it out and split it under my teeth, working the muscles of my jaws as Zane knocked on a closed door, opened it, and motioned me into the lion’s den. I cocked my jaw, rolled my neck, and went inside without a word, every inch the street-hardened wizard.

GOD-dammit. I really wish I’d had time to buy that gun.