Page 18 of The Deeper Game (The Kinky Bank Robbers #3)

Chapter Thirteen

Odin and Thor and I were sitting outside the bank two days later, squished together in the front seat, when Thor’s phone rang.

“Yeah?”

The caller had a lot to say, rambling on and on. You could hear his tone, but not the words. Thor thanked him and told him he’d courier over some money, and then he cut the connection.

“That was our panther guy from the university with the results on the feather.”

The feather was over seventy years old, apparently, and from an eagle. The panther guy and his colleagues thought that it might be from an old taxidermy piece, judging from the dust and dirt pattern.

“That’s weird,” Odin said.

“What’s weird?” Thor asked.

“There was no taxidermy in Travis’s place. Or his mother’s.”

“Maybe it was there and you didn’t see it,” Thor said.

“No, there wouldn’t be any,” Odin said. “Ever. All the dirt and dust? Those two wouldn’t let a stuffed eagle within a hundred feet of their door.”

Thor grumbled.

Odin swore under his breath.

Zeus and Odin had paid a visit to Travis in the prison hospital the night before.

Travis had denied being the stalker, but Zeus and Odin had expected him to deny it. I’d asked them if they were convinced. “He was drugged up,” Zeus had said simply.

Odin hadn’t liked it. “ You can see so little in a drugged man’s eyes,” he’d said. But the circumstantial evidence was there. The paper was in his dumpster. He bought the shoes. He’d done that type of crime in the past.

Odin stared out at the bank steps. It was nearly eleven, almost time again for my deposit.

“On one hand, it makes no sense he’d use such a dirty object when he’s practically germaphobic, judging from the many hand sanitizers. But I could make a case for it.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“That he keeps a fucking-g vice grip of sterility over his home and thoughts, that he associates functions of the body, and in particular anything sexual, with dirt and sin. Therefore, he would seek out something horribly besmirched as a gift to you.”

“And as we know, there’s no better way to a girl’s heart than a horribly besmirched gift,” I said.

“Or else it wasn’t him,” Thor said.

“We didn’t get a confession, it’s true,” Odin said.

“But in any investigative work, unlike police shows, it typically is the obvious that is the solution. And since he’s been inside, Isis hasn’t had any contact from her stalker.

There were two communications from the stalker within twenty-four hours, but nothing for two days now. That’s a clue in and of itself.”

“Should we wait to be sure?” Thor asked. “Considering how soon…” How soon we hit the Prime. He didn’t have to finish that sentence. We were eating, breathing, and sleeping the Prime.

Odin watched a pair of blonde women in pink track suits cross the road. He considered this for some time.

“When I was a boy,” Odin said, “my brother and I used to fish in this lake in the High Atlas Mountains. Right off the shore.” He described the color of the water, the smell of the air, the fishing poles he and his brother had made.

I glanced at Thor. His face was perfectly neutral, but I suspected he was just as surprised as I was.

And not only about Morocco having lakes.

Odin never talked about his childhood. Zeus and Thor had figured out that Odin’s mother was mentally ill and his father had left, but nothing much beyond it. Odin’s using the term my family made me think this story could be from before his father had left.

“My brother and I dipped our lines into a patch of dark water and waited,” he said.

“But then we heard the loud splash of a massive fish jumping some thirty paces down the shore. We pulled out our lines and ran to that spot and put in our lines to fish there. Soon after, we heard a large fish, perhaps the same, jump in the water near where we had first been. We pulled out our lines and ran back to our original spot and fished there, hoping to catch this fish. And then it happened again. The sound of a fish, jumping in the new spot. We were running back and forth like fools.”

“Somebody throwing rocks,” I guessed.

Odin regarded the bank with a dark look. “My mother throwing rocks. Making fools of us. We didn’t realize it until we heard her screeching with laughter.”

“That’s mean,” I said.

“Not at all,” Odin said. “It was one of the few valuable lessons she taught us. Proceed with confidence. Know that you chose the path you chose for a reason. Don’t let the plunk of stones down the shoreline distract you, or you will forever be running back and forth like fools.”

Thor and I sat silently. Sure, okay, it was a good thing to bear in mind, not to chase willy nilly after every passing notion, but it seemed a horrible thing for a mother to do. And then laugh.

“This taxidermy information. Perhaps it is a stone,” Odin said quietly.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He turned back to meet my eyes. “An island in Tunisia. That is a stone.”

“You made your point on that,” I said.

“Did I?” he asked.

I gave him a look. “I need to do my deposit,” I said, gathering my things. I slipped out the back and onto the sunny sidewalk.

Making a bank deposit is far easier when you don’t have vibrating implements along for the ride.

Less fun, but much easier. I guess this made me the horse running on dry land now.

I went in and out as I had on so many days, wearing my wig of fabulous long blonde hair with a fabulous outfit.

The fifteen-minute window was still as soft as ever.

The guard flirted with the far-end teller.

The desk clerks checked their phones, and everything loosened up as soon as the evil overlord took his break.

I thought angrily of my old bank boss, an unfortunate cross between a gross perv and a greedy megalomaniac, but I realized I should be thankful for him. If he’d been a nice boss, maybe I would’ve tried to defend the bank instead of helping the robbers.

Sure, I didn’t like that the Prime Royale would be so difficult and possibly dangerous, and I definitely didn’t like this new tattoo idea as much as I did at first, but I loved how they defied the entire world, how they lived large in spite of all the odds being aligned against them.

I loved them, that was the truth of it.

My guys needed me, and I would do anything for them.

I stepped through the open doors, past the doormen, and out into the sunshine, feeling suddenly hopeful.

My guys were intensely fixated on vengeance, but maybe pulling off a robbery of the Prime would quench it, like a big glass of bank robber lemonade hitting a parched throat.

The Prime was the ultimate prize, after all.

Unless you counted something like Fort Knox.

Needless to say, I wouldn’t be mentioning that to my guys!

The rest of the stakeout went like clockwork.

And Lupe, our expectant mother and criminal sister in Santa Rosa, was feeling good.

The midwives hadn’t turned the baby, but she was doing well otherwise.

Everything was looking up. Odin was even talking about playing chess later, which made me think that maybe he’d abandoned his plans to complete our non-life-positive tattoos.

Wishful thinking, as it turned out.

That evening, Thor and Zeus took off to grab takeout and champagne for our two-nights-before-a job celebration.

A few minutes later, Odin strolled into the kitchen where I was clicking through the Farfetch site.

One of the great things about being in a bank robbing gang is that you can afford designer outfits—the real ones, not the knockoffs.

“Tattoo time,” he said.

“You’re finishing it now ?” I asked.

He smiled his beautiful and dangerous smile. “You have a problem with that?” He came and spun me around on my stool, standing between my legs.

I had a problem all right—with a tattoo like a curse. But at the end of the day, if my guys were getting it, I wanted it. Showing that I was a true part of the gang was more important than the specifics of some tattoo.

He kissed my neck. “Are you ready?”

“Sure am,” I whispered, reaching down and pressing my hand to his cock, hoping to bypass his mind by communicating directly with his libido. I wrapped my fingers almost all the way around it in a way that I hoped was saying, Can’t you think of something better to do?

He removed my hand. “Go sit on the couch, goddess.”

Sigh.

I cast around for a delaying idea, but without sex, my bag of tricks was pretty empty.

And, after long hours of getting the angel holding the scrolls, I was used to sitting still for the painful little needles without being tied down, so I didn’t need erotic distraction. “Timing seems a bit much.”

He spoke close to my face. “I want us to have them complete for the Prime.”

“You mean to finish them all tonight?”

“And tomorrow. As much as I can.” He pulled me gently to him, kissing me. My heartbeat kicked into double-time as he pushed his tongue into my mouth, body hard and good up against mine, and the swivel stool was just the right height.

“I’m ready to start the lettering,” he said as I wrapped my legs around his waist. Maybe this was just an elaborate game of chicken. Maybe he really did want to bang.

“It’s a dark wish of somebody else’s,” I whispered.

He slid his hands under my butt cheeks and pulled me off the stool then, putting me on the floor in front of him. “Stop trying to control the group.”

I snorted. As if I was controlling the group.

“Go into the living room and wait for me.”

I stood there. Did he really mean to complete the tattoo then and there?

“Is that a Mississippi?” he asked.

I turned and walked into the living room and sat on the tattoo chair in my tank top and yoga pants.

Five minutes later, he was walking in with his box of tattoo gear. He brought over the other chair he always used, setting it next to where I sat, facing away. He had me hang my arm over the back of the chair, which he straddled.