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"I told you I wanted them opened at the table."
Her look asks if I'm kidding.
My glare back tells her I'm not.
One of the Russians gets up and goes down the hall toward the bathroom, only he walks right past it.
What is back there?
"I'm going to use the little girl's room while our server is getting us ourunopenedbeer." Lucia stands up.
No way is she going down that hallway alone. Cameras be damned.
I stand.
"Are you going to escort me to the bathroom?" she asks with a laugh.
"Might as well drain the elephant."
"Elephant is right," she says sotto voce, but loud enough for the snarky server to hear her.
Putting my hand on the middle of her back, I walk with Lucia right past the table of bratva.
"Thepakhan's vtoroyexpects it to be handled by the time he gets back from San Francisco," one man says in Russian.
That one word confirms who they are.Pakhanis the head of a bratva. The fact theirpakhan'ssecond is in San Francisco is also a wealth of information. There are only two bratva families active in that territory.
The Golubevs in Oakland and the Semenovs, a neutral bratva that controls most of San Francisco proper. I don't recognize these soldiers as being from either bratva brotherhood.
The man closest to the wall says, "There's some company trying to buy the shipping yard. They already put their bid in."
They're talking about the abandoned shipping yard at the port on the Columbia River, and our company, Cerberus Inc. No chance they'll find us. The principals listed on the paperwork don't exist anywhere but in falsified records.
Like a lot of so-called legitimate businesses, we handle buying and selling property through a shell company based in the Cayman Islands. For us, it's not only a tax shelter, but an additional layer of security between us and the enemies that we don't want to know what businesses we own, the FEDs included.
"After tonight, we will have the leverage we need to make the broker accept our terms of sale. The port is ours," the first man replies.
That's something we need to deal with immediately. The Russians like to use threats to family as leverage. We don't, but that doesn't mean we are ignorant of who is important to the commercial real estate broker.
I shoot a text off to Zeus telling him what I heard as I follow Lucia down the hallway.
She stops at the door of the women's restroom. "I'll meet you back at the table."
I'm not leaving the hallway, but I nod anyway. No point arguing andÃlios mouwould tell me she doesn't need a babysitter. Like she tried to do repeatedly in the club on both Friday and Saturday night.
Didn't stop me from sticking close then and it won't now.
Keeping the door she went through in my line of sight, I walk casually toward the men's room and then beyond it. There are three more doors at the end of the hallway. The one on the left has a scratched and grimy plexiglass insert, allowing me to see a kitchen beyond.
A woman is loading trays of glassware for the industrial dishwasher. I suck in a shocked breath and then force my lungs to release it, shaking my head.
It's not her.
I can't see the dishwasher's face, just her profile. But it doesn't matter. The woman she reminds me of is dead, killed by bratva scum allied with the Golubevs.
My mind is playing tricks on me. I turn away and examine the other two doors, the women's bathroom never out of my peripheral vision.
Clearly leading to the outside, the center door is big and made of steel. Lifting my phone, I pretend to text and move so I lean back against the third door. Dropping one hand behind me, I try the handle and it turns. With the camera app open on my phone and set on selfie mode, I push the door open a crack.
