Page 16 of The Deeper Game (The Kinky Bank Robbers #3)
Chapter Eleven
The Gigis had once pointed out that my guys chose the most difficult and dangerous form of robbery to specialize in—bank takeovers.
There was always a lot of yelling and screaming during our robberies, and lots of problems always cropped up that we had to fix on the fly.
They blew in there like it was nothing.
This entire investigation was making me see things a little differently.
My guys could be robbing mansions in their sleep. Running sophisticated con games without a thought. Hell, they could probably have started five different companies and made five different fortunes by now, but scary takeover robberies was what hurt ZOX the most.
So that’s what they did.
It was amazing—and incredibly sad, too.
So Odin and Zeus glided in like flash ninjas, guns drawn, splitting up and becoming invisible while Thor and I waited inside the dark foyer.
“Okay, come on,” Thor whispered, responding to a signal I neither saw nor heard. He went in, also with his gun drawn, keeping me behind him. Thor was playing defense.
Zeus appeared out of nowhere and pointed at a spot in the darkest corner of the kitchen. I waited there while the three of them did whatever they did. The walls of the kitchen and dining room beyond were lit by streetlights outside.
Judging by the photography, Ingvey was very into architecture.
Muffled exclamations sounded from the dark hallway. Moments later, Zeus and Odin were hauling a sleepy-looking man into the living room.
Ingvey wore boxers and a T-shirt. His long brown hair was mussed and messy, and he was trembling visibly. “I didn’t do anything,” Ingvey protested as Zeus and Odin parked him at the head of the kitchen table.
“You know her?” Odin asked him. “You recognize this woman?”
Ingvey regarded me, wide-eyed, like I was going to attack him or something. “Am I supposed to?”
Zeus grabbed his hair, as if to point his head more firmly in my direction. “Answer the question.”
The man cringed. “No!”
I felt sorry for him. What if he wasn’t the guy?
“You fucked up when you threatened her,” Zeus growled.
Ingvey looked bewildered.
Odin put a hand on Zeus’s shoulder. “I’ve got it.”
Zeus let go, and Odin took the chair next to him. “What about the package?” Odin asked. “We know it’s you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ingvey turned and addressed me. “Do I know you?”
“You don’t talk to her, you talk to us,” Zeus said.
“Look at me,” Odin said. Apparently they had a kind of good cop, bad cop thing going, or more a scary cop, less-scary cop thing.
Odin rattled off questions. Ingvey answered as Zeus stormed off and started tearing through the house, opening drawers and dumping garbage.
Either Ingvey was innocent, or he was doing a very good impersonation of a man completely bewildered by the situation.
And then the detail of his fingerprints on the shoebox came up. They were on the baggie, too.
“Well shit, I work at Giorgio’s,” Ingvey said. “The shoe store.”
“You work at a shoe store?”
“I touch shoeboxes all day.”
“How do you explain their presence on the plastic bag?”
“I don’t know. I work in a store. I touch things all day.”
Odin narrowed his eyes. Then he stormed out to the truck and came back in with the shoebox. “This from your store?”
“We have those. Or had them. Last year’s model.”
“You know this to be from your store?” Odin barked.
“May I?” Ingvey held out his hands. Odin let him take the shoebox and Ingvey lifted the lid. “You mind if I rip it?”
Zeus had returned. He and Odin exchanged glances.
“Go for it,” Zeus said.
Ingvey pulled apart a corner of the lid. “Yup, it’s ours.”
“There’s a tracker in there?” Odin asked.
“Anti-theft device. Other stores use this kind, but the way it’s inserted, this one’s probably ours.”
“Can you tell us who bought this model?” Zeus asked.
As it turned out, he could—if the person had used a credit card. It would be a long list, he warned, and he’d have to get into work and get it off the computer. His shift didn’t start until ten.
“We’ll be in there at ten after ten, Odin promised, pulling a few bills out of his pocket and slapping them down on Ingvey’s kitchen table. “That’s for waking you up. There’ll be more for the list. Okay? We good?”
Ingvey regarded him grimly.
“And if you have cops waiting for us, we’ll know,” growled Zeus.
“And you will feel the wrath of us beat down upon you like a thousand blazing fists, and we will crush you and this house,” Odin added.
We used the interim to grab dry clothes from a nearby department store and clean up. Thor called Matteo, who reluctantly agreed to sit on the bank for our shift even though he’d said he wouldn’t.
We were parked across the street and down a ways from the shoe store by 9:30.
My guys thought it was unlikely Ingvey would have cops waiting for us, but they wanted to check.
I certainly thought it was unlikely after Zeus’s manhandling and Odin’s thousand-blazing-fists threats—one of his more colorful ones of late.
Odin and Zeus were sure it wasn’t Ingvey at this point. Zeus had a theory that the culprit had given Ingvey the plastic bag to touch during some transaction.
Odin peered through binoculars. Fifteen minutes later, Ingvey met an older woman at the shoe store door. “He looks nervous. Don’t see cops. They’re going in.”
At ten after ten, Odin went in. Five minutes later, he came back out and crossed the street with a shopping bag. He swung into the passenger seat. “Got it.”
Zeus peeled out.
Odin handed the bag back. “A gift for you,” he said.
A shoebox was inside. “Thanks,” I said.
“You got a name?” Thor asked.
“More like a hundred,” Odin grumbled. “That’s as far as he could narrow it. The box he used was from a fucking-g popular brand.”
“Can I open it?” I asked.
“Please,” Odin said.
I pulled off the lid of the shoebox. Inside a nest of white tissue paper lay bejeweled, pink high heels. “These are like candy,” I said. “In a good way.”
“We’ll always take care of you,” Odin said.
I smiled. “Thank you.”
“And now maybe you’ll stop disrespecting the tattoo with unkempt feet,” Odin said.
I snorted.
“Her feet are awesome,” Zeus said, merging onto the highway. He was unhappy with the length of the list. The stalker definitely upset my guys more than he upset me.
Odin split the list with Thor, and they began to vet the names on their smartphones, knocking out the females, the out-of-state buyers, and buyers under the age of eighteen and over the age of sixty. Thor gave Odin his list and Odin narrowed down the people more from their Facebook pages.
“Seriously?” I said. “You’re ruling out people by their Facebook pages?”
“Best OSINT ever,” Odin said, thumbs flying over his keypad. Open-source intelligence, he meant. They’d used the term before. I couldn’t remember what the NT was.
By the time we were ten minutes from home, Odin had the list narrowed down to five. And at the top was one T. Hansen, a.k.a. Travis Hansen. Or in Thor’s words, Sleazy Travis Hansen.
Apparently everybody in their set knew Sleazy Travis, though the man hadn’t shown his face lately because there was a warrant out for his arrest. He’d been locked up twice for sexual assault, and he had jumped bail on rape charges.
He was known for stalking his victims, including leaving strange gifts.
“Travis dies,” Zeus grumbled.
“If we can find him,” Thor said. “He might not even be in town.”
He and Zeus discussed the way they’d work the grapevine. The problem, apparently, wasn’t whether they’d learn where he was holed up, it was whether they could learn where he was holed up without his knowing they were after him.
“Because then he’ll really disappear,” Odin said. “Hiding from the cops is a lot easier than hiding from us.”
I didn’t doubt it.
Zeus pulled off at a gas station and Thor took over driving on the next leg. I sat on the passenger side while Odin and Zeus worked the phones in the back seat, conferring and beating the bushes for Travis, going hard at some people, soft at others.
We grabbed gourmet breakfast sandwiches at a place near downtown, then made stops at two bars and one apartment building—both times Thor and I had to wait in the SUV. Both times Odin and Zeus came out looking a little more mussed than when they went in.
After the last stop, we had an address. Travis was staying in the shed behind his mother’s house.
“The cops couldn’t find him?” Odin spat out. “At the mother’s house? It’s Sex Offender 101. The mother’s house.” He seemed almost annoyed.
“Matter of time now,” Zeus said to me, low and hard. “We protect our own, goddess.”
Shivers ran over me.
We parked on the far end of the street. Zeus and Odin slipped out and melted into the neighborhood. Thor and I were to keep watch at the front with the motor running, just in case.
Thor checked his email again.
“Any news?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “The midwives still hope they can turn the baby.”
“She’s lucky to have you,” I said.
“I should be down there,” he said.
“You can’t just sit there. You said yourself it could be weeks before she goes into labor.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You’re just two hours away,” I pointed out. A little more, actually, especially if it was rush hour. “And the midwives are there. Don’t they know what they’re doing?”
“They’re the best, but neither of them has delivered a breech as risky as this one. Well, one of them has, but it went badly, which is worse than no experience.”
A car came up the street behind us. The driver, a lone man, matched Travis’s description—somewhat.
Thor slid down in his seat, watching the side mirror. “Too old.”
Zeus called and Thor put it on speaker. Travis wasn’t there, but they’d found evidence in the shed. Definitely him.
“Damn.” Thor clicked off. “How are you doing? You don’t seem freaked out.”
“I was at first, but I know this will be okay. I wish he was there, but hey, of all the people who have threats against them in the world, I think I’m the safest.”
“I’d say you’re safer than the president.
” He gazed out at the street, scanning a new car coming down the way.
A woman. “It’s hard to believe that anybody would decide to go after you.
It’s like poking a hornet’s nest, but then again, people do stupid things.
And sometimes people have a death wish.”