Page 25 of The Hard Way (The Kinky Bank Robbers #5)

Finally I pulled away and looked at her some more. “You are more beautiful than ever.”

She looked away, embarrassed.

“I get the newsletter.”

Her face broke into a smile. “Oh my god! I was wondering if you were one of the subscribers. I would look at the list sometimes. ”

“I live for that thing.”

“Can I tell Candace and Kaitlin?”

“I don’t think you should.”

She pursed her lips. She knew I was right. “You know they think people out there are buying that fucking comforter model out of a love of fine sheep products.”

“Tell me how they are.”

Vanessa caught me up on our sisters. Kaitlin had been accepted at Madison, the best college in the UW system.

She’d become Facebook friends with the girls on her dorm floor, and it was a frenzy of excitement, but they weren’t sure whether she could go now.

I told her Kaitlin had to go—we’d buy more comforters, or maybe arrange a scholarship—and we talked about getting Candace back to school.

We talked about everything but the cheese, and Tim Zietlow dying. The fact that Vanessa might do time. I wanted her to go to it first.

“How did you know I was up here?”

“I saw your car.”

“I thought we hid it better.”

“You hid it great, but you can see it through the trees in one spot. It’s where you always used to park to come here, and I got used to spotting it.”

“I didn’t think you knew.”

She looked away. “We knew. We knew you weren’t happy. And I come up here sometimes,” she added.

“You do?”

“Not to ski, don’t worry. Just to channel a little of you when things are hard.

This was always your special place. You would come out here and climb around and ski in the winter, and you would come back so alive and energized, and I need that.

” Her eyes fell to Odin’s hand and then mine. “Hold on—you guys are married?”

I gazed at Odin. “Newly. ”

“And the insurance investigator is a member of your gang.”

“Um…it’s complicated,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

Odin sparkled at me. “It means your sister is very much loved.”

“Oh my god.” Vanessa searched my eyes. I couldn’t tell how much of it she figured out, but then she just beamed at me.

“You always made your own rules.” She turned her eyes to the horizon, then.

She had more to say. I saw it, and Odin did, too.

“That’s why I come here. I need some of your mojo.

What are we going to do? We didn’t put that cheese back in the shipment.

I would never have, and neither would the girls. You know we would never—”

“I know,” I said. “We know you didn’t put that cheese back in the shipment.”

“You do?”

“We’re pretty sure it was Hank Vernon.”

She did a dramatic double-take. “Are you shitting me?”

“No.”

“Hank Vernon? You think he came and took it from our garbage?”

“Basically.”

“Wait…” She narrowed her eyes. “You think Andy told him about the plug thing? Because that’s what we don’t get, why Andy would ever lie. He’s not like that.”

Odin lowered his voice. “We don’t think Andy lied. We’ve come to believe Hank crawled in the window and unplugged the cooler—”

“Oh my god,” Vanessa said hotly. “The high south window?”

“Yeah.”

“And he knew we’d toss the cheese,” she said. “So he waited. But how did he get it on the truck and…”

“He didn’t put it on the truck—he walked it right into the Pig!” I told her about what we’d learned. The tape at the store. Hank and Nancy Zietlow .

“That’s why your…um…other friend asked if Andy would ever go for Nancy Zietlow.”

I nodded.

“Motherfucker,” Vanessa said. “Hank engineered the whole situation. That is so Hank. And he somehow fucked with the cheese…”

“What do you mean?”

“The cheese wasn’t bad, dude! It was perfectly good. I held some back from the garbage and brought it home. We’d been eating it. I didn’t even refrigerate it. The cheese was fine.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been saying. That even warmed cheese—if the cheese started good—”

“Oh, hell, you know that cheese was fine.”

Odin was hanging back, following along. He seemed to be enjoying himself, just watching us.

“We ate a lot of it,” she added.

“I thought that was weird!” I said. “That he’d do that and just happen to get a bad batch.”

“We run a clean shop. Cleaner than ever.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Cleaner than when I was there?”

She grinned. “Did I not say cleaner than ever?”

“She did say that,” Odin said.

Vanessa shot him an appreciative look. It warmed me right to my cockles.

“Did you tell this to the FDA?” I asked her.

“Of course. Do you think they believed me? And now we’re shut down.

And there was this storm last month where some of the southwest facing panels in the barn came down and we don’t have the funds to fix it.

And the rain has been so evil this year.

Andy and I put tarps up, but water’s been getting on the pumps. ”

“You can’t let that happen.”

“That whole side is tarps.” Something came to her. “You know what? I bet you anything Hank’s giving the Millers a loan to buy us out. ”

“I agree.”

“Hank and Nancy Zietlow,” Vanessa said. “Whoa.”

“We have a motel clerk who identified them,” I continued. “We have footage of them at the Pig together the day she bought the cheese that killed Tim Zietlow.”

“He kills Tim Zietlow with our cheese, gets Nancy Zietlow, and then in two years he calls in the Millers’ loan the way he called in the loan for Mom and Dad. And he gets twice the farm.”

“Not if we can help it,” Odin said, and I think even Vanessa keyed into the threat in his voice. And she one hundred percent loved it, just like I did.

“You have all this proof now, so…” She raised her eyebrows, hopefully, expectantly. I so badly wanted it to be that easy, my heart nearly burst.

“It’s not enough,” Odin grumbled. “All circumstantial. Nothing we have ties Hank to the cheese.”

“Except we know now that he had to directly infect it,” I said.

“That’s something.” I looked over at Vanessa.

“This was helpful. Let’s think this through.

I’m Hank. I want to get rid of Tim Zietlow and crash the farm, all in one fell swoop.

I do this whole unplugging thing, because I know you’ll toss the cheese.

But I need to be sure the cheese is actually contaminated.

What do I do? I need to get salmonella to smear on it and then I wrap it back up.

Because I don’t see him capable of growing salmonella. ”

“Hell no,” Vanessa said.

“Is it that difficult?” Odin asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “you really have to work at it.”

“But the university,” Vanessa said. “The universities order it from a lab to do experiments with. I learned that during this whole mess—I was reading up on it, and there are only two labs in the country that supply strains of salmonella for experiments, and they’ll only send it two-day air to researchers at universities. ”

“So we look for Hank’s university connections,” I say.

“No,” Odin said. “A man like Hank isn’t going to ask some researcher buddy for a deadly toxin and have the buddy find out Hank’s lover’s husband is dead from that exact toxin. No. He’s more careful than that.”

I thought about Odin at the Cobblestone. The way he wanted to look in Hank’s eyes. Odin was using that information, that knowledge now.

“We’re looking for a break-in,” he continued. “And it wouldn’t be a break-in at the local university. Too obvious, too easy…”

Vanessa hung on Odin’s words. She seemed as enchanted with him as I was. It made me feel happy for her to meet and appreciate him.

“It would be a lab in another county, somewhere outside of the range of this outbreak. Outside of your distribution range,” Odin said. “Somewhere where nobody thinks to connect the dots. It still doesn’t give us Hank…”

“It’s a lead, though!” I called Thor and left a message about what we’d discussed. If they were still at Hank’s place, maybe they could look for something…I don’t know what. I wasn’t one of the superspies in the equation.

“We’re going to get you out of this,” I said to Vanessa as soon as I hung up.

“What are you going to do?”

“Investigate the fuck out of it,” I said.

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“We’ll fucking-g work it out another way,” Odin said.

Vanessa turned to me. “Come back. Come be alive. We won’t tell. It would mean so much.” To Kaitlin and Candace, she meant.

“It’s dangerous,” I said. “They’ve already gone through my death once.”

Vanessa looked ashen. “What does that mean? You’re in that much danger? You think you’ll die…”

“Over my dead body,” Odin growled.

She took this in. “But those people who are your enemies…you worry about them. ”

“A lot,” I said. “And I’m not willing to saddle those two with any kind of knowledge that puts them in their sights. You shouldn’t even know.”

“Fuck that,” Vanessa said.

“We have to go,” Odin said. “I don’t like you out here without your disguise.”

“You have a disguise?”

“You don’t even want to know.”

“I like your bright hair,” she said. “God, look at you.”

Odin was moving toward the steps. “We need to…”

“I know.” I straightened Vanessa’s jacket. “Come on.”

We headed down, Odin first, Vanessa next and me last. We started making our way back to the car. Odin went first. That was better. We definitely couldn’t risk anybody being out here and especially not anybody recognizing me.

“Give me your phone,” I said.

She handed it over. “Code’s one-two-three-four.”

Odin snorted from ahead.

“You should change it. The girls don’t ever answer this, do they?”

“Not unless I ask them to.”

I called it on my phone and punched in a fake name. “This’ll be me. It’s a burner, so I won’t have it forever.”

“Wait, am I going to see you again? What’s the plan?”

“The plan is to solve the shit out of this. We have to work fast, though.” I thought about Odin, how he felt like we were being watched.

How he’d promised me twenty-four hours of not going dark on Hank.

“It’s likely Hank knows somebody’s looking into him.

And we’re really far. We can’t let him know how far. Okay?”

“You solve it, and you leave? I can’t not see you again.”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to come home with me. At least see the farm. See what we’ve done. See the herd. See Petey.”

“I want to, but…” I wanted all that so badly, I could barely fo rm a coherent sentence. Odin turned and walked backwards, eyeing me. He felt how deeply I wanted that.

“I can’t never see you again,” Vanessa said.

“We’re going to handle this problem, and we’ll see.”

“Melinda—”

I hooked an arm in hers. “I’d better not see you parked in a stupid place.”

She struck a tear from her cheek. “No, but I probably parked you in.”

In fact she had. I squeezed her tightly, telling myself it couldn’t be the last time I saw her—it just couldn’t.

She got into her car, and Odin and I watched her drive off. He wrapped his arms around me from behind. We were silent for a while, there in the whispering wind.

“Will I ever see her again?” I asked.

“I can’t answer that.”

“We have a lead, though. That’s something.”

He kissed the top of my head. “That’s something.”

We were silent for a bit longer. I had to lose her again, but maybe we could save her.

“Good thing you held off on the whole bloodbath thingy. Nothing worse than a whole bloodbath for nothing.” It was a stupid joke. Nothing felt funny.

“I won’t lie to you, Ice,” he said after a bit. “I very badly want to punish him. It’s gotten into my blood.”

“It’s what you want to do to Mahfoud . He’s not Mahfoud.”

“Your parents died because of what Hank did. He should feel guilty for what he did, but instead he keeps going at your family. He won’t stop. That girl could go to jail. You know she still could.”

“We won’t let that happen,” I said.

He didn’t respond. Because things didn’t always work out. Bad people did sometimes get away with bad things.

Right there, some little part of me suddenly opened to Odin killing Hank. I forced the possibility out of my mind, but I couldn’t unthink it. Killing Hank after making him confess would solve a lot of problems, including saving my sister.

“She’s awesome,” Odin said.

“I know. I’m so glad you got to meet her.” I listened to the wind, imagining I could still hear her car, needing to hold onto some scrap of her. Needing for that not to have been goodbye.