Page 17 of The Hard Way (The Kinky Bank Robbers #5)

Chapter Thirteen

“Shopping?” I said.

“We need to get up on Nancy,” Odin said, and he didn’t mean it in a sexy way.

I followed the three of them into the store.

Apparently getting up on Nancy required a trip to Walmart. I didn’t see the connection, but Odin and Zeus were in their spy hive mind about it.

We headed in. Odin grabbed a hand basket and we went to housewares.

The two of them started throwing in tools—screwdrivers, slipknives, and other suspicious items. We then trekked to electronics where Zeus picked out an iPhone and Betty Boop phone case.

“Are we doing a break-in?” I asked. “A break-in that we’re live-tweeting? ”

“Close,” Zeus said. “When we were at Nancy’s, did you see what kind of phone she had? Out on the table? The phone and the case?”

“No,” I said.

“We did,” Zeus said. “And she bought it here. Luckily.”

“What’s the thinking? ”

“Odin’s going to steal her phone and replace it with this one, which will be dead of course.”

“Because we’ll fucking-g break it.”

“And we’ll lose our follower. If we have one.”

They got a laptop computer, too—a cheap PC.

Odin picked out a hat and coat. A disguise. “We can’t use that car.”

“But Thor has our other car,” I said. “We don’t have three cars.”

“No, we don’t have three cars,” Zeus said crowding me up against a phone-for-assistance kiosk. He touched the collar of my shirt. “Who are we, Ice? Do you need a reminder? We have three hundred cars.”

I grinned. “Riiiiight.”

We bought the stuff, and Odin went into the bathroom to change. Zeus walked me to one of the big arrays of doors. “You stand right here. You’re just waiting for somebody. See what you see out there.”

“Got it,” I said.

Zeus disappeared.

A little while later, Odin came out. He walked like an old person, bag in hand, and passed by like he didn’t recognize me. I barely recognized him. I never understood how much you could disguise yourself through posture until I hung around with my guys.

Odin headed out into the crisp, sunny afternoon and disappeared into the sea of cars. I watched people come and go. One of them would be getting their car stolen.

Eventually, Zeus came back, not in a disguise. “Let’s grab some fries. Thor just texted—he needs more time. And we need to set up the computer for Odin.”

We went to the grubby little Walmart fast-food café and split an order of french fries.

He unwrapped our new laptop and charged it up.

He asked me things about the town. Some of the questions related to the case, but most weren’t.

He wanted me talking, wanted my mind off Denko. Or maybe he wanted his mind off Denko.

We went through several orders of fries.

Odin came back not even an hour later and slid in across from me, next to Zeus.

“Got it?” I asked.

“I even got the car back into almost the same parking spot. I’m the shit.” He pulled out a phone and set it on the blue plastic tabletop. Nancy’s phone.

“Sweet,” I said.

Zeus angled the laptop to Odin, who plugged the phone into the side. Odin was our resident techie, and he was being all techie for sure. His amber eyes began to move back and forth, reading the screen. He hit keys now and then.

I lowered my voice. “You’re breaking in?”

“Mm-hmm.” He took a fry. “Could take a while. Luckily she hasn’t updated her operating system.”

“I can’t believe you just walked in and switched Nancy’s phone.”

Odin looked up. “She doesn’t even lock her doors.”

Thor arrived while we were waiting for Odin’s program to work. He slid into the booth on my side. “Your sisters didn’t tell anybody. I’m convinced.”

“You let Vanessa talk to them alone like I said?”

“Yeah. I took a walk around the grounds and let her talk to each of them.”

He’d walked the grounds. “How does everyone seem?”

He shrugged. “Same. I told Vanessa we were looking into foul play, and she’s all over it. She knows she’s being framed. She also heard the rumors that Nancy Zietlow was having an affair. Just for the fuck of it, I suggested Andy Miller was the boyfriend. She thought it was hilarious.”

I nodded, wishing I could’ve been there to laugh with my sister about the idea of Andy going after Nancy Zietlow. Nancy had to be fifteen years older than him. But more than that, Nancy had that sophisticated-lady thing going on, whereas Andy was more like, sup, dude.

I made Thor tell me every little detail of what my sisters said and how they seemed and even what they were wearing.

“Vanessa’s fierce like you,” Thor said. “Your younger sisters believe in the system, they believe the truth will come out. Like there’s some mistake. Vanessa is keeping the whole idea of a frame job to herself. She’s a protective lion to those two.”

My heart did a little flip. “Did you ask who Rhonda married?”

“Reggie Baker. Know him?”

“No way!”

“You know him?”

“Dude, I know everyone here. Huh.”

“What?”

“Oh, Rhonda and Reggie hated each other in high school, but I guess that’s how it goes.”

“Combustion,” Zeus said. “You think he could’ve engineered this?”

“Hmm.” I sat back and folded my arms. “Reggie was a band guy. Tuba.”

“Tuba, huh,” Thor said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe not, then,” Thor said.

Zeus nodded in agreement.

“What? Being a tuba-playing band guy means he can’t be devious?” Odin asked.

“Well…” I said, trying to think how to explain the entirety of American high school culture to Odin.

“Sort of. Let’s just say, whoever Nancy is having an affair with just moved up a notch on the suspect list,” Thor said. “Anyway, it’s beautiful out there. The sheep are great. Petey was out there barking. ”

“Petey!” I said. “Such a good dog.”

“They’re taking good care of that place, baby.”

I sighed. “At least it’s not a fracking-sand mine. That whole ridge would be shaved off if Hank Vernon would’ve gotten it. Leveled. No trees. He’s an asshole.”

A few of the hard-up farmers had sold their land for sand mining.

People often thought of the environmental damage from fracking, but most of the sand used in fracking came from our part of Wisconsin—mining it damaged a lot land.

Sadly, I dragged a fry through a blob of ketchup.

“I’d give anything to be able to walk that land.

I would give anything to see my sisters again. ”

“Ice—”

“I know,” I said.

Odin’s face had begun flashing across the table, which meant the computer screen was flashing. He looked up, as if he felt my gaze. “I’m in.”

I smiled.

He was hitting the keyboard furiously now. “She made two phone calls in the minutes after we left.”

Zeus had a napkin and a pen in his hands, and two seconds later Odin was rattling off phone numbers and times, which Zeus wrote down. Thor grabbed his own phone and punched them in, doing a reverse search.

My guys. They were fast and efficient as an Indy 500 pit crew, except way hotter and definitely more destructive.

“Look at this,” Odin said. “She received a call from one of those same numbers sixty-four minutes before we arrived. That was who alerted her that we were coming.”

“Which led to the donning of the bra,” I said.

Odin read the number, and Zeus scribbled the time on the napkin.

“It’s a private number,” Thor said. “Yeah, that would’ve been too easy, I guess. To get a name.”

Zeus sat back. “What do you think? ”

“Why not?” Thor said.

“What?” I asked. “Call it? Just call up the number?”

“Worth a try,” Zeus said. “My number will come up Unknown. He or she will probably let it go to voicemail, but maybe that gives us something.”

“Do it!” I said.

He put it on speaker and dialed. Sure enough it went to voicemail. “I’m not here. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” Ding .

I stiffened. The voice…So familiar…

“Damn,” Zeus said. “Always so much easier when they say who they are.”

“Oh my god,” I breathed.

Three handsome bank robber faces turned to me. “What?”

My heart pounded faster and faster. “I know that voice. I think it’s Hank.”

Thor’s mouth dropped open. “Hank Vernon? Bank owner Hank Vernon? No way.”

I put my fingers to my lips as the enormity of it all unfolded in front of me. “I’m ninety-five percent sure.”

“Could you see Hank Vernon having an affair with Nancy Zietlow?” Thor asked.

“Have an affair with a woman whose husband is dying of cancer? And just when that man is getting better, to kill him or help kill him?” I said. “Hell yes. He’s devious. Without conscience.”

“So he takes out Tim Zietlow,” Zeus said.

“Possibly with Nancy’s help,” Thor added.

“How?” I asked. “They can’t make Tim eat the cheese.”

“He was eating stews,” Thor said. “Maybe Nancy mixed some of the cheese into a stew that Tim ate, and the whole thing about him being unable to resist it sitting in the fridge was bullshit.”

I grit my teeth.

“I’m feeling good about ruling out Denko now,” Zeus said .

I nodded. It was horrifying to think my old nemesis Hank was behind this, yet a relief that Denko might not be sniffing around like a dangerous hellhound. Hank was dangerous for sure, but not a trained assassin out to kill us.

“I can’t fucking believe Hank would frame your sisters,” Thor said. “He can’t have the farm, so he makes sure they lose it anyway? Spiteful fucker.”

“No. You guys. He’s getting the farm.”

“I thought the Millers were buying the farm.”

“Oh, they’ll have it for a few years. But guess who they’re getting the loan from?

Remember how I was wondering how the Millers could possibly have the cash to buy our farm?

Price of alfalfa hay and all that? Maybe your minds were too consumed with milkmaid porn, but I was thinking about the case and how it didn’t make sense.

Because they don’t have the cash. Hank will lend it to the Millers, and he’ll do what he did with my folks—put something tricky in the loan that gets him the farm if they miss a payment.

Or maybe not even tricky—nobody ever thinks they’re going to miss a payment. ”

“That’s what Andy was hiding,” Zeus said. “A condition of the loan was probably to keep it confidential.”

Odin usually chimed in on these brainstorming things, but he sat there perfectly silent. Okay, silent wasn’t quite right; his stormy expression was loud as thunder. Which meant he was really fucking angry. Dangerously angry.

“Exactly—he’d want them to keep it quiet. But nobody else in their right mind would lend to the Millers. They’re bad with money! This is it. The answer.” I looked around at my guys. “Right? We have him.”

“Not yet,” Zeus said. “We still have to prove all of this.” He glanced nervously at Odin. He, too, sensed the stormy thunder. “We can’t just go shoot him in the face.”

“So what if we go around to all the motels with their pictures?” I tried. “You know we’ll find a clerk who’ll identify them together.”

“Probably.”

“So we got him, right?”

“We got him for capitalizing on this tragedy,” Zeus said. “We got him for being the asshole who gets the girl and the farm. But we can’t connect him to the cheese.”

“But we have phone records, the affair, probably the loan…”

Thor shook his head sadly. “We need the cheese.”

“He put it in the case,” Thor said. “Does the Piggly Wiggly have an anti-shoplifting system? Cameras?”

“If they do…Christ, this was six weeks ago,” Zeus said. “If they have it on video, they probably didn’t keep it.”

“Hank Vernon ,” Odin growled, staring thunderously into the middle distance. “He kills a man and frames your sister. He thinks he can get away with that.” He turned his gaze to me, then, and the darkness I saw there scared me. “He won’t.”

Thor and Zeus turned their gazes to Odin.

“Which is why we’ll handle it,” Thor said in his calmest and most serene tone. “We’re on the job.”

“Don’t act like you don’t see exactly what I see,” Odin said. “This is a good crime with very little physical evidence.”

“Maybe they’re storing footage in the cloud,” I said. “Maybe they have surveillance in every aisle. Maybe they never clear the cache.”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe. You think Hank is stupid?” Odin asked.

“He would let himself be filmed putting tainted cheese into the dairy case? Do we have film of him sneaking to the farmhouse and taking it from the dumpster? If that’s what even happened?

Because that’s what saves your sisters. Short of a confession.

And Hank isn’t Andy. It would take a lot to make him confess… ”

I sighed and slumped back in my molded seat. Detective work was a lot harder than it looked on Law & Order . It was amazing any cases ever got solved in real life .

“We keep going forward,” Zeus said, eyeing Odin. “Look how far we got by following the leads.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, noting the worry in Zeus’s voice.

“No reason to start hacking off anybody’s limbs or pulling out their intestines like rope,” Zeus added.

“Wait, what?” I said. Was that the a lot it would take to make him confess?

Odin’s hard and stormy gaze was fixed on Zeus. “Of course. No reason.”

“I would think not !” I said.

“We go forward,” Zeus said to Odin.

I was not loving this conversation. “I vote for not having a man’s intestines being pulled out like rope to be on the table. Let’s opt for following up with those motels instead.”

“Are you propositioning your husbands?” Thor asked, trying to inject humor into the whole situation, but it wasn’t working. Bloody intestines like rope were out on the table now.

I pushed away the ketchup-drenched fries. “I’m officially done with these.”

“Thor, you should follow up on the motels.”

It was a bit of a surprise that Zeus said that. Yes, Thor was the sparkly people person, but Odin was better at questioning strangers.

“Should I go with Thor?” I asked.

“You’re with us. The three of us break into the grocery store,” Zeus continued. “It closes at ten.” He glanced at the clock.

“No hurry,” I said. “Stock boys won’t be gone from the Pig until eleven.” I knew that from having friends who worked there back in high school.

“What? Everyone calls it the Pig?” Zeus asked.

“Yeah.”

“We can’t get out of this town too soon.”

“What would you call it?” I asked .

“A store shouldn’t be named Piggly Wiggly in the first place,” Zeus declared.

“That’s not an answer,” I said.

Zeus shot me a stern look.

“Oh dear,” Odin said, shaking his head gravely. “What will we do with you?”

I bit my lip.