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.”