Page 6 of The Deeper Game (The Kinky Bank Robbers #3)

Chapter Four

We headed back to my guys’ place, a mod hideout hidden in the hills. We needed to clean up and change and get back to the bank. It was Matteo’s shift to sit on the bank.

Odin took the souped-up Navigator up the steep drive and parked it next to the souped-up Camaro and the souped-up Jetta. My bank robbers liked a shitload of horsepower, if you know what I mean. He engaged the emergency brake and the three of us hopped out.

Odin was the first to spot the package on the stoop. “What the hell is that?” he said, stretching out an arm to the side as if to say no further.

We all just stood there, some twenty feet away, staring at the package.

It was definitely weird for there to be a package waiting for us.

The mailbox was way down at the end of the drive, and we only ever got junk mail anyway.

Not like any of us would ever whip out a credit card and order something online, and all of our bank accounts were offshore, if not offshore of offshore.

The only people who knew where we crashed were our closest comrades.

And they would know not to leave a package.

Thor squinted at it, eyes brilliant blue in the sunshine. “There is no way this is good,” he said.

It was about the size of a shoebox and wrapped in white paper.

“Get back behind the Nav,” Odin commanded. We all went back behind the SUV. Odin grabbed a stone and threw it at the package with impressive accuracy. Bop . The package rolled and slid.

“Bomb test?” I asked.

Thor, not to be outdone, threw his own damn rock. Thor’s rock was larger and he threw it harder. The package rolled.

I gasped.

There was one word written on it in huge, childish block letters: Isis.

It wasn’t the cute kind of block letters, either. More like scary-dude-in-a-basement-bent-on-vengeance kind of lettering.

Trust me, crazed-dude-in-a-basement-bent-on-vengeance is not a font you ever want to see your name written in.

“Ice?” Odin asked. “Any ideas…?”

“None.”

“What the hell,” Thor muttered under his breath. He’d already pulled out his silver Sig. Were they going to shoot it, now?

“Written with the left hand,” Odin observed. “To make the writing untraceable. I need gloves.”

Thor yanked open the door and pulled what looked like a tissue box from the glove compartment, except it was full of latex gloves. He handed a pair to Odin.

Odin snapped them on. “Stay there.”

I held my breath as he headed around and up to the stoop.

He picked up the box and held it, simply contemplating it, one hand on either side, like a basketball player about to make a free-throw.

Then he lifted it and sniffed it. After that, he put it to his ear and listened, and turned it to examine the paper wrapper folds on one end.

For his final act, he licked those folds.

“Yuck,” I said.

Thor put a quieting hand on my arm. Odin just stood there, brows drawn low in a scowl at the package, as if, having exhausted all five senses, he now hoped to receive an ESP communication from it, a feat that wouldn’t entirely shock me, I suppose.

Odin was the most brilliant of us—a kind of artist who sailed through the highest stratospheres of techie-ness and psychological understanding.

I held my breath as he shook it. Then he turned to us. “I’m going-g to open this fucker up. You mind?”

“Go for it,” I said.

“Do it,” Thor said, strolling up.

“No, stay back.” Odin said.

“You better be downwind,” Thor grumbled.

“I am.” Odin set it back down on the stoop and undid the white paper, careful not to rip anything, pulling it off in a large piece. One of the sides was kind of shiny.

It turns out it was the size of a shoebox because it was a shoebox, with the Nike swoosh on the side. Somehow I doubted it contained shoes. I held my breath as Odin flipped off the lid and bent over the contents.

“What is it?” Thor asked.

“Come see,” Odin said.

We went up and stood with Odin, the three of us peering into the box, which contained a plastic baggie with a feather and some gloppy, partly dried, dark reddish-brownish fluid inside of it.

Not shoes, then.

The feather had once been white, but was now half-stained with the fluid, which, let’s face it, looked an awful lot like blood. Some of the fluid clung to the sides of the baggie.

“Not really my style. I mean, what ever would I wear them with?” I said, going for the joke, like that might make this less alarming.

My guys weren’t amused. Odin carefully unfolded the note. It read, “YOU ARE MINE.” In that same blocky, childish lettering.

Okay, now I was scared.

“Do you think this is related to the Abe Lincoln warning?” Thor asked.

“All I know is that I’m fucking-g going to kill somebody,” Odin said, yanking out his gun. “You stay here with Ice and keep a good eye on the surroundings. I’m taking a walk around, then inside.”

“Got it,” Thor said, weapon at the ready.

“Then we’ll print it, though I don’t imagine we’ll find much,” Odin grumbled. “I can think of a dozen people who know we’re here, and none of them would be stupid enough to leave prints.”

“Nobody we know is stupid enough to do this in the first place,” Thor said. “Maybe somebody is off the rails.”

“Maybe.” Odin headed off to the side to make a check of the area around the house.

“Oh, my God,” I said, heart pounding. Just the writing was so bizarre. And the blood.

“Pig’s blood, I bet,” Thor said. “Because this paper, it’s butcher paper.”

“It’s blood .”

Thor looped his arm around my shoulder. “We’ll keep you safe, Isis. Nothing and nobody comes between us. Ever. Got it? You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, though I couldn’t stop shaking. In all the mayhem that was our life now, the one place I’d felt secure was this hideout.

He pulled me tighter. “This shit does not stand.”

After a few minutes, Odin came out the front door with a handful of large plastic Ziploc baggies. “Nobody’s here.” He and Thor bagged the stuff separately and we went in.

“It could be worse. It could be your real name,” Thor said once we were safe inside.

That freaked me out even more. If anyone knew my real name, it meant that they could get to my sisters.

They thought I was dead, though I sent them money by buying up the wildly overpriced “Paris Hilton” model of sheep wool comforter.

It’s possible they suspected it was from me, but that’s as much as I could do.

He set the package on the kitchen table next to what looked like a tackle box, except it was full of brushes and tiny bottles. A fingerprint kit. Thor pulled on a pair of latex gloves and spread out the paper.

“We have a fingerprint kit?” As soon as I said it, I realized it was a stupid thing to be surprised by. I knew Odin and Zeus as bank robbers and thought of them that way, but they’d come out of intelligence. Spies.

They’d been super cops once.

“You’d be surprised how handy something like this is,” Thor said. “Though the last time Zeus used it, it was to find out who pissed in the bird bath during a poker night.”

“Zeus was mad as hell,” Odin said.

“I’d think that was more the realm of a DNA test,” I said, watching Odin brush powder off the butcher paper.

“There’s a pole next to the birdbath,” Thor explained. “People were drunk. He figured whoever it was would’ve held onto it for support. And he was right. He made the guy come out and scrub it.”

“But, to run fingerprints you need a database of fingerprints,” I said.

“There are a few federal databases we can still get into,” Odin said.

I nodded. Right . They still had a friend or two deep inside the web of government agencies.

“And most of the people we know happen to be in that database, which is convenient at times like these,” Odin added.

“We can’t tell Zeus about this until he’s home with us,” Thor said. “He’ll go ballistic. No good to have him finding out while he’s inside those HVAC ducts.”

“Fuck,” Odin said, emphatically.

Thor examined the shoebox. “No price tag anywhere. This is a pretty common style, I think. But let me check it out.” He grabbed his iPad from his pack.

“No prints on the baggie,” Odin said. He opened it up and pulled out the bloody feather with tweezers and set it into a smaller baggie, sealing it up. “Get online, Isis, and see if you can determine the type of bird this comes from.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

“Figure it out,” Odin barked. “I’d think if a person is able to find entire cartoon porn websites devoted to fetishes about being taken captive and forcibly ravished by woodsmen, then you could identify a simple feather, right?”

I snatched the baggie. They weren’t supposed to tease me about my taste in cartoon porn anymore.

Being taken prisoner while walking in the forest and ravished by hunky hooded woodsmen in tights wasn’t a fun thought now, in light of this horrible package.

If there were no fingerprints, how were they supposed to figure out who sent the box?

“Who cares what bird it’s from?” I asked.

“It all matters,” Odin said.

“Are you sure you’re not just trying to give me something to do so I’m not freaking out?”

“This is an investigation. We glean all the information we possibly can, and then and only then do we assess whether it is worthwhile to know,” Odin said.

I sat down at the far end of the table with my laptop and started on my task, trying not to focus too hard on the horror of the darkened blood marring the white feather. Or that somebody would send that to me. I looked up ornithology sites.

It turned out that feathers looked similar from one bird to another, but there were differences.

The little feathery strands were called barbs and they had really tiny parts coming off of them called barbules, which is how the barbs stuck together.

It was lucky the thing was only half-coated in dried blood.

“Can I borrow the magnifying glass?” I looked up to see Odin using it. “After you’re done?” I added.