Sons of Anarchy: Bratva Read Free Page B

highway, Jax thought the police could still be miles away.
    Maybe .
    “Come on,” he said, leaping the guardrail and running back the way they’d come. He wished he could toss the Glock away but knew how foolish that would be, with his prints all over it and the cops certain to search the pine grove.
    A car swerved to avoid killing Opie, the driver laying on the horn.
    The two of them ran through the trees, Jax gambling that none of the Russians were suicidal enough to have stayed behind to finish the job when the others had taken off and the sirens were growing louder.
    Opie’s pickup remained where they’d left it, jammed against a couple of pine trees, most of the windows blown out. The engine choked a bit as Opie turned the key in the ignition, but then it growled to life, and he threw it into drive, pulled back onto the side road, and hit the gas. They were headed away from the sirens, but Jax was sure cops would be coming the other way. No way they could stay out in the open with windows blown out. “There!” Jax said, pointing to a narrow, tree-lined street on the right.
    Opie spun the wheel, and the pickup groaned and slewed in gravel as they turned onto the back road. In seconds, they were out of sight of Highway 99, driving a curving lane that climbed gently into the same hills they had left behind such a short time ago.
    Two miles up that lane, they found an old logging road that had been transformed into a hiking trail. Opie drove down it until they reached an unfamiliar leg of what Jax assumed was the river they’d fished in that morning.
    Opie backed the truck up to the water, where they wiped down their guns and hurled them as far out into the river as they could. Only then did Jax take out his cell phone and call the clubhouse. Chucky answered but put Bobby on the phone as soon as he heard the urgency and anger in Jax’s voice.
    When Jax ended the call, phone clutched in his hand, he turned to Opie. “Only thing we can do now is wait.”
    Opie nodded toward the hiking trail. “You think we oughta wait up that way, in case the cops get here before Juice does?”
    Jax took a deep breath and then nodded as he exhaled, trying to make sense of the shitstorm they had just been through.
    “What was that?” Opie asked as they started walking up the trail.
    “You asking me why we’re still alive?”
    “I’m asking why double the Russians didn’t mean double the bullets headed our way.”
    “That first bunch wanted us dead because they think we killed Putlova,” Jax said. “Maybe the second bunch didn’t like Putlova as much as the other guys did. Maybe we did those guys a favor.”
    “I thought we had solved our Russian problem,” Opie said, his boots scuffing the ground as he walked. “At least for a while.”
    “It’s a tough economy, Op. A job opens up, every asshole and his brother rushes in to try to fill it.”
    “So what do we do about it?”
    Jax smiled. “If we’re smart enough, we steer clear and hope the morons kill each other.”

 
    3
    John Carney saw the redhead coming from fifty yards away. Not that he was a perv or anything. Hell, he hadn’t been on the prowl for twenty years, not even after his wife, Theresa, had left him back in ’04. Carney’d had a girlfriend or three, but always someone he’d met through friends. No online dating for him, and he certainly wasn’t going to pick up women in bars.
    Bars were off-limits if he wanted to keep his fifteen-year chip in his pocket. Sober life might get boring at times, but boring was preferable to dead.
    The Summerlin Gun Show had seen a dip in business the past few years, but he continued to set up out of loyalty to Oscar Temple, the fellow who’d run the thing from the beginning. This year Carney’s loyalty had paid off—the first two days of the Summerlin show had brought booming business. Americans had been growing paranoid about their right to bear arms being curtailed or taken away entirely, and any time that