Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
Dante kept his pace steady. Hands at his sides, shoulders loose. Just another man walking into a strip club on a Friday night.
The main floor was packed. Stages to the left, bar along the back wall, tables scattered between.
The music was loud enough to make conversation difficult, which was the point—a room full of people who couldn't hear each other was a room full of people who couldn't hear anything else.
Naked girls moved through the crowd in the practiced way of women who knew exactly how close to get and how long to stay.
He clocked the security immediately. Two men at the bar, trying to look like customers and failing—too still, too sober, eyes moving instead of watching the stages. A third near the illuminated staircase that led up to the mezzanine. Sonny still on the door behind him. Four.
Sofia had said four. So far, she was right about everything.
He found a spot at the end of the bar and ordered a whiskey he didn't intend to drink. It gave him a reason to stand there and something to hold. He positioned himself so he could see the mezzanine staircase in the mirror behind the bar, and he waited.
Three minutes.
He could feel the mezzanine without looking at it. Borya was up there. The man would have been watching the door feed from the moment Sonny called it in.
The whiskey sat untouched. Dante turned the glass once with his fingers and kept his breathing even.
Four minutes.
Movement on the staircase. He caught it in the mirror—three figures descending, one behind the other. The first two were security, wide and deliberate, scanning the floor. The last one was smaller, unhurried, one hand on the railing.
Borya Sokolov reached the bottom of the stairs and paused, adjusting the cuff of his shirt.
He looked exactly the way Dante remembered—older, obviously; his face leaner, his eyes more recessed. He wore a beige shirt, open collar, and pressed trousers. He looked like someone's grandfather.
The security from the mezzanine fanned out onto the floor, the two who'd come down with Borya joining the two at the bar, repositioning without making it obvious. A man at the base of the staircase stayed.
Five. Not four. Borya had added one more.
Dante let it go. One more body didn't change what he was here to do.
Borya crossed the floor. The crowd parted around him without being told to, the girls steering away, the noise and the pink light continuing as if the most dangerous man in the building wasn't walking through the middle of it.
Dante turned from the mirror and faced him.
His eyes found Dante's and held them, and what Dante saw there wasn't the satisfied collector receiving a long-overdue delivery. It was the controlled fury of a man who'd been given half of what he'd asked for and was already calculating who was responsible for the missing half.
“Daniel,” Borya said. His voice was soft, pitched just below the music. “Come,” he said. “Sit with me.”
He gestured toward the back of the floor, where a booth sat in a recessed alcove.
Dante didn't move immediately. He scanned the floor one more time—security positions, exits, the crowd.
And there, at the edge of his vision, moving toward the mezzanine staircase with the unhurried ease of someone who belonged exactly where she was, was Sofia.
She didn't look at him.
The clock had started.
Dante picked up the untouched whiskey and followed Borya to the booth.
The alcove was quieter—the bass still thrummed through the bench seats, but the music dropped enough for conversation. Borya slid into the far side, back to the wall, and one of his men took a position at the end of the booth. The others spread to nearby tables.
Borya folded his hands on the table and looked at Dante, and the mask was in place now – the fury tucked away behind something calmer and more dangerous. The look of a man who'd decided to get what he needed from the situation in front of him before dealing with the situation behind it.
“You understand,” Borya said, “that this is not what I asked for.”
“What did you ask for?”
“I asked for the girl. I was very specific about that. I was specific with Sofia, and I was specific in my own mind, and I have been specific about it for two years.” His voice remained soft, almost conversational, but the temperature of it had dropped.
“She doesn't know anything that can hurt you.”
“That is not for you to decide.” Borya unfolded his hands and placed them flat on the table. “And it is not for Sofia to decide, either. Yet here we are. You, sitting in my booth, and the girl—where? On a bus? In a motel? Do you even know?”
“I don't. That was the point.”
“The point,” Borya said, tasting the word.
“The point was that Sofia, my Sofia, made an arrangement that directly contradicted my instructions, without consulting me, and delivered to me the lesser half of what I required.” He looked at Dante with those pale eyes.
“Tell me, Daniel—if you were in my position, how would you interpret that?”
Dante said nothing. He didn't need to answer the question. Borya wasn't asking—he was thinking out loud, and the thinking was headed somewhere that would have made Dante's blood run cold if he'd had any investment in Sofia's wellbeing beyond the next twenty minutes.
But right now, the only thing that mattered was the twenty minutes.
And Borya, for all his fury about Jessica, was sitting in this booth instead of upstairs.
He was talking instead of moving. The anger had actually worked in their favor, it had given Borya something to chew on, a new problem to process.
Keep him here. Keep him chewing.
He shrugged. “She came to me with the terms. I accepted them. Jessica walked free, and I turn myself in. That's the deal, and I'm here, and it's done.”
“It is not done,” Borya said, and for the first time the softness in his voice slipped, revealing something underneath that had edges. “It is not done until I say it is done. You are half a payment. I do not accept half payments.”
The building was exactly what the Yelp photos had shown and nothing like what they'd prepared Jessica for.
Black facade, no windows, a flat awning over the entrance with THE DOLLHOUSE in pink neon script.
A line of men waited at the door—maybe fifteen, shuffling forward in the resigned, slightly embarrassed way of men who wanted to be inside and didn't want to be seen wanting it.
Bass leaked through the walls, a low, rhythmic pulse she could feel from fifty feet away.
Dante was in there. That was all that mattered.
She checked the Ruger in her pocket one more time. It wasn't enough. But she was going in anyway. She crossed the street.
The line moved faster than she'd expected.
The men didn't pay her much attention—a woman approaching a strip club alone registered as staff, not customer, and the assumption bought her a kind of invisibility that she leaned into.
She kept her head down, the denim jacket zipped to her throat, her hair tucked under a black cap she'd bought at a truck stop in Virginia.
She looked like a waitress arriving for a late shift. That was the idea.
A huge man was on the door. She knew his type—big, wide, stuffed into a suit that barely contained him.
He had face of a man who'd been standing in doorways long enough to have seen everything and decided most of it wasn't worth reacting to.
He was checking IDs with the mechanical efficiency of someone who'd done it ten thousand times, waving men through without looking up.
Jessica fell in behind a group of three, loud, already half-drunk, the kind of Friday-night cluster that drew attention away from whatever was behind them. She kept close, matching their pace.
The bouncer waved the first two through. The third fumbled for his wallet. Jessica sidestepped him and moved toward the door, her eyes down, her body language saying staff entrance, I'm late, don't bother.
The big man's hand came up. It was an aggressive gesture, but it filled the space between her and the door with a palm the size of a dinner plate.
“Cover's twenty,” he said.
“I'm meeting someone inside,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
The man looked at her for the first time. His eyes moved over her face and she felt the assessment happen in real time, the bouncer's calculus of threat and trouble and whether this was worth the effort.
She pulled a twenty from her jacket pocket and held it out.
He took it. His gaze lingered a half-second longer than it should have—on the jacket, on the way she was holding it close to her body—and then he stepped aside.
Jessica walked through the door and the Dollhouse swallowed her whole.
The noise hit first, a loud bass, then heat and perfume that pressed against her like a physical thing.
Pink light everywhere, turning the room into something underwater, making faces soft and distances uncertain.
Stages to the left, a long bar along the back, tables scattered through the middle where men sat in clusters, their attention fixed on the dancers moving through the light.
She pushed through the crowd, keeping to the edges, letting the room absorb her. The cap helped. The jacket helped. She was one of dozens of women in the building, and as long as she kept moving and didn't stare at anything too long, she was furniture.
She scanned the main floor, looking for Dante, and didn't find him.
The room was too big, too crowded, the pink light flattening everything into shapes she couldn't resolve.
She moved along the bar, using the mirror behind it, checking angles without turning her head.
Stages, tables, the illuminated staircase leading up to a mezzanine level that was roped off and guarded by a man who looked like he'd been grown specifically for the purpose of standing at the bottom of staircases.
Then she saw the booth.
Back of the main floor, recessed into an alcove.
Two men sitting across from each other, one with his back to the wall.
The one facing her was in a beige shirt, leaning slightly forward, talking.
Older, lean, composed. She didn't recognize him, but her body did—something in her chest contracted, a physical flinch that arrived before the identification, the animal response to a predator she'd never seen but whose presence she'd felt.
Borya Sokolov.
And across from him, his back to her, his shoulders rigid beneath a red jacket, was Dante.
He was alive. He was sitting upright, holding a glass, apparently having a conversation.
He didn't look injured. He didn't look restrained.
He looked like a man in a booth at a club, and the ordinariness of the image was so disorienting that she had to stop walking and grip the edge of the bar to keep her legs from doing something stupid.
He's alive. He's right there.
Her hand moved involuntarily toward her pocket, toward the Ruger, and she stopped herself.
Not yet. Not here. There were four—no, five—men positioned around the booth in a loose perimeter, plus the man at the staircase.
Even if she got the gun out, even if she fired, she'd be dead before she cleared the second shot, and Dante would be dead a second after that.
She needed a plan that wasn't walk up to a table full of armed men and start shooting.
She moved to the far end of the bar, as deep into the shadow as the pink light would allow, and ordered a drink she wouldn't touch, and watched the booth, trying to make her brain work faster than her fear.
That was when she noticed the man working his way through the crowd toward her.
He wasn't obvious about it. He moved the way the other security men moved—with the crowd, not against it, using the dancers and the noise as cover.
But his trajectory was wrong. He wasn't circling the room.
He was cutting across it, angled toward the bar, toward her end of it, his eyes fixed on something he'd already identified.
Her.
The bouncer. The half-second too long he'd looked at her. He'd made a call.
Jessica turned her body slightly, as if watching the nearest stage, and felt the distance between her and the approaching man shrink with every pulse of the bass line. She had maybe thirty seconds before he reached her. Maybe less.
She could run. The front door was behind her and to the right, maybe forty feet through the crowd. She’d be on the street in fifteen seconds, and Dante would still be in that booth and she'd be standing on a sidewalk again, useless, having come thirty-one hours on a bus to accomplish nothing.
She could pull the gun. End this in the loudest, most chaotic way possible, and bet on the confusion to buy her something—though what it would buy her, other than a few seconds of noise before someone put a bullet in her, she couldn't say.
Or she could stay exactly where she was and let the man reach her and see what happened next.
Jessica didn't run. She didn't reach for the bag.
She turned and faced the man coming toward her and waited.