Page 18 of The Hard Way (The Kinky Bank Robbers #5)

Chapter Fourteen

We headed out to dine on steaks and frog legs at the Cobblestone Supper Club, which was not much more romantic, what with the glassy eyes of decrepit mounted buck heads.

A girl I remembered from a rival high school, Annie, was our waitress. She’d been a cheerleader, and she still had that really sunny way about her where you couldn’t help but like her.

Between courses, we plotted out a map of shady motels for Thor to visit.

He wanted to deal with the night clerks, because night clerks were the easiest to bribe.

One of those sorts of things criminals seemed to just mysteriously know, the way baby spiders just mysteriously know how to build perfect webs.

“I could take half these motels and you two could break into the store,” Odin said.

“I need you with us,” Zeus said.

Odin gave him a hard look. “It’s a fucking cakewalk to get in there.”

Zeus shrugged. “You’re the computer guy.”

“Oh, come on,” Odin said. “Their username is admin. Their password is one-two-three. You saw it as well as I did.”

“You both noticed all that when we were there?” I asked .

Odin turned his amber eyes to me. That would be a yes . A really sexy yes . Odin saw so much, it was scary sometimes. He was smart, beautiful, and more dangerous than ever. Right at that moment, I would probably even do hu-cow with him if he asked.

“The three of us are in the Pig,” Zeus said.

Odin’s expression grew dark, but then Annie came back, and it was time to order dessert. My guys each ordered their own. Our marriage might involve group fucking, but my guys drew the line at one-dessert-with-four-forks action.

I still smiled to think about that. We had a marriage . And things were looking dire, yes, but together we could do anything. I really did firmly believe that.

We’d get through this.

My optimistic mood lasted exactly one second longer, because just then, Hank Vernon himself entered the restaurant.

Hank Vernon. The man who destroyed our family.

I forced my gaze to the saltines.

“What is it?” Odin asked.

I felt my guys all staring at me. They probably thought I was having a bad reaction to the food. Or maybe I just hated the saltines.

“Isis?” Thor said.

My heart pounded as I tracked Hank’s movements out the corner of my eye.

Hank was maybe fifty, and he was with a younger version of himself—one of his cousins.

He wore a nice houndstooth sport coat with a turtleneck, and he had his sunglasses perched atop his swept-back hairdo like the avid downhill skier he liked to remind everyone that he was.

He led his cousin to the corner booth, the nicest booth, without waiting to be seated.

It was like he thought he owned the place, which of course he probably did.

He’d barely sat down before he began waving and pointing violently at the table, as though to call a dog onto the carpet.

I looked over at Annie, who was up at the bar—ordering Hank’s drinks, I guessed. She’d lost her sunny expression. She looked a little scared, even.

Bile rose up in my throat. It wasn’t that I worried Hank would recognize me.

He probably wouldn’t even recognize me without a disguise—he was that self-absorbed.

It was just that I couldn’t bear to look at his smug, demanding, overprivileged face.

I couldn’t not think about Mom and Dad, so desperate to keep our family together on that farm that they perished out at sea doing a job they had no business doing.

I’d always suspected he probably laughed when they died, astounded at his good luck.

And there he sat.

He was saying something to his companion. It looked like he was scolding him, but you couldn’t tell with Hank. The man probably burned through hundred of dollars of skin care products a week, but not even an act of God could keep the meanness off his face.

Annie sped across the place with two drinks loaded onto her tray. She set them down with extreme care.

Hank addressed her, saying something with that smug look of his. That look had always gotten to me. He was so proud of himself, so satisfied. He felt powerful and smart, and he could do whatever he wanted—that’s what the smug look had always said to me.

“Do we need to go back to Margie’s?” Thor asked.

“She’s not sick,” Odin said, directing his gaze to Hank and his cousin. “It’s him .”

Zeus stiffened. “Vernon.”

They’d never laid eyes on Hank, but they knew me .

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Motherfucker,” Thor said.

“You guys! Don’t sit there staring at him. Let’s just go.”

“Agreed,” Thor said, with a quick glance at Odin, who was definitely more than staring at Hank. He was assaulting the man with his eyes.

Zeus pulled bills out of his wallet. Several hundreds, double what our meal probably cost. He set the money on the table, and we stood. “We’re not here to draw attention.”

Odin had different ideas, it seemed. He grabbed the money and his jacket and headed over to Hank.

“What the fuck,” I breathed.

We all watched as Odin interrupted whatever was happening.

“He’s good,” Zeus said. “He just wants a look at him.”

Odin handed Annie the money, then turned and strolled toward us. We headed to the heavy, stained-glass door, with Odin right behind us.

“What the fuck?” I said once we were in the parking lot.

“Just wanted a look at him,” Odin said. “Told Annie we’d been called away.”

“I can’t believe you did that.”

“Sometimes you need to get a look at a man,” Zeus explained, like it was so obvious and simple.

We sat around at Margie’s for a while and headed back out after eleven. Thor took off to the motels in the smaller rental car while Odin and Zeus and I waited on the street near the Piggly Wiggly.

Splitting us up into teams of three and one made little sense.

When the last car was gone, we stole around to the delivery entrance. Odin went to work on the locks. Zeus leaned up against the building in the shadows, keeping watch.

I leaned next to him. “What’s up with you and Odin?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have him help canvass motels?”

He glanced at Odin, who was crouched in front of the door, hard at work. “I want him with us.”

“Why?”

“He’s just, you know, not sleeping.”

“You think he isn’t making good decisions?”

“His decisions so far have been good,” Zeus said .

“You think that could change?”

“You have a calming influence on him. When you touch him, his pulse actually lowers. Have you ever noticed?”

I shook my head. But I understood now. He wanted me to be with Odin to calm him, but for him to be with him if he did really go dark.

“I’m not going to lie to you, goddess—this really is a careful crime. It’s a strong, well-planned crime without a lot of hope of physical evidence. He was right about that.”

“Are you preparing me for failure?” I asked.

“We’re not giving up. But sometimes the bad guys win. Right now, it looks like the bad guys might win. We’ve seen it before, and we handle it, but Odin’s in some kind of trauma network. Did you see his face when you recognized Hank’s voice?”

“No.”

“I did. Look at Hank. A despicable man with a lot of power over other people. A bad man getting away with hurting others. Who does that remind you from Odin’s life?”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t need to say it out loud. Mahfoud the Sadist. The man who ran the prison Odin was kept in. The place his nightmares came from.

“So let’s just keep Odin close. I don’t need him paying a visit to Hank Vernon. It won’t be good for Hank, but it’s Odin I’m worried about.”

I nodded.

“It’ll be hard from here,” he added.

“If we have a little more evidence, I bet we’ll be able to make Nancy tell.”

“Why would she tell? There’s no way she doesn’t do time if she’s the one who fed him the cheese. Without a lot of pressure, anyway. And Hank won’t confess. He’s a stupid, sneaky asshole, and that’s the hardest kind of guy to get a confession out of. These are things Odin knows.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, thinking about my beautiful sisters—especially Vanessa. Even a day in prison would be unimaginable…but twenty-eight years? “It isn’t fair. They did nothing wrong. Vanessa can’t go away—she couldn’t handle prison.”

“We won’t let her go away,” Zeus said.

“Over my dead body does she go away,” Odin growled, strolling out of the shadows.

“But we’re going to exhaust our death-free options first,” Zeus said. “Because if we start doing professional fucking hits and extreme interrogation, that shows Denko we’re involved.”

Odin didn’t address this last bit. “Door open, alarm off. Come on.”

We headed into the dark store. It was weird. I’d never been in there all alone.

“Here we are inside the Pig,” Odin said.

“ At the Pig,” I said.

They both snickered.

“Hungry?” Zeus asked.

I groaned. I was still stuffed from dinner. “We have to stop eating those steaks!”

We headed over to the cheese area.

“Fuck,” Zeus sighed.

“What?”

“No cameras.”

“Crap,” I said.

“But they have them up front. I saw them when we talked to Warren. Let’s at least see who came in when. We know somebody walked the cheese in. Somebody walked in with a bagful of cheese and walked out with no cheese. Let’s see if that somebody was Hank.”

We headed back through the silver door and up a small staircase to the offices and computer area. It was quiet, computer screens glowing softly, one with a bouncing Mickey Mouse screensaver .

Odin got down to business accessing the video files.

Zeus and I worked out a time frame. We decided Hank or whoever did it would have had to sneak in the cheese during a twenty-four-hour period between Wednesday morning, when the cheese was tossed, and Thursday morning, when the first purchase of tainted cheese was made, according to the FDA report.

That first purchase was made by Gwen Schuster, who worked at the movie theater up in Dieter’s Corners. I kind of knew her—she had a daughter Candace’s age.

“Bingo.” Odin hit a few buttons, and the screen split into four squares. The top two squares showed views of checkout lanes, and the bottom two squares showed the entrances—one on the west side, one on the east.

“Let’s focus on the entrances and look for just Nancy,” Zeus said.

“Then we look at who came in the half hour before Nancy. If our theory is right, that somebody took them out of the garbage and heated them up or whatever and brought them to the store, then there were only a few toxic cheeses in that case, right? They had to make sure Nancy could find the right one. Either they marked them or set them somewhere.”

“Right, Nancy would need to not buy the wrong cheese,” I said, impressed by all this strategic thinking. It was like a chess game in reverse.

Odin hit the buttons. We watched people going in and out of the store three times as fast as they do in normal life.

“We should take turns,” Odin said after a while. “This’ll take a few hours.” He turned to Zeus. “I could use more dessert. Did I see some chocolate sauce down there?”

Zeus rose. “Don’t mind if I do.”

Odin and I zoned out in front of the most boring TV show ever.