Page 28 of The Hard Way (The Kinky Bank Robbers #5)

Chapter Twenty-Two

The guys had taken my secret ski slope parking space. I had Thor park in the second most hidden spot, the one Vanessa had taken, and we headed in, crashing through the underbrush until we came to the fence around the clearing and the giant ski jump.

“This is where you used to go?” Thor asked.

“It seemed more modern back then.”

“It was only two years ago!”

“I know. Everything seems weirdly more shabby and rickety now that I’ve been places like Beverly Hills.”

He looked the thing up and down, all the boards half off and the extra ones nailed haphazardly here and there. “I don’t think Beverly Hills is what’s making this thing look rickety.”

I pointed up at the platform. “There they are.” Two figures were visible—Odin and Zeus. The lump on the platform was probably Jeremy. “If they let him drop, it’ll look like a suicide,” I observed.

“They’re not going to let him drop,” Thor said. “They need him to think they might, though. ”

We climbed the fence and headed to the jump. I grabbed a board and started up. Thor followed.

I was surprised Thor so blithely followed after me, but then I realized he’d know that Odin and Zeus would’ve checked it out. My guys trusted each other like that, almost like they were each others’ eyes and ears.

Voices became audible as we got near the platform. Zeus’s head became visible first. He smiled at me. Then I saw Odin crouching next to him, over a man I presumed was Jeremy Zern.

Jeremy had a scrubby brown beard, a close-shaved head, and puppy dog eyes, and he wore a lime-green windbreaker. He was holding onto a vertical support with bound hands; his feet were bound, too. “Hey! Help me!” Jeremy said.

Zeus grabbed my hand and pulled me up. He said nothing, just nodded. Don’t talk , that meant.

“You want to be an accessory to murder?” Jeremy continued. “Because if you don’t do anything—”

Odin slapped the top of Jeremy’s head. “Shut it.”

“What’s going on here?” Thor demanded, coming up right after me. “The fuck?”

“They want me to turn myself in for something I didn’t do,” Jeremy said. “I’m not turning myself in for something I didn’t do!” This outburst had the flavor of something he’d repeated over and over.

Deny deny deny. The usual criminal move.

Jeremy gripped the vertical support more tightly and looked down.

Frightened of heights? Maybe that’s why they wanted him up here.

I couldn’t begin to guess how they could’ve figured out Jeremy was frightened of heights.

The very powers of divination that made Zeus and Odin such amazing sexual partners made them the kinds of enemies you didn’t want to have.

“Help me,” Jeremy said to me, thinking his chances were best with the resident female .

“She’s not going to help you,” Odin said, all low and rumbly. “She’s cold as they come.”

I suppressed a smile. Odin knew how I enjoyed being made out to be a badass. He shot a sly glance at me. I wanted to kiss him so bad.

Thor looked from Odin to Zeus and back to Odin. “Let’s try being reasonable here. There has to be something…”

Zeus toed Jeremy’s foot, which made Jeremy cling harder to that pole. “Jeremy here complained about the exertion of coming up here. I know a way for him not to have to deal with the stairs on the way down. How about that?”

Jeremy turned his puppy dog eyes to Thor. “I didn’t do it. They said they’d shove me off if I didn’t go turn myself in. But I wasn’t anywhere near that place.”

“Your prints match the crime scene,” Zeus said. “Are you suddenly a university researcher?”

“Mmm.” Thor crouched on the other side of him, getting closer to his level. “I appreciate your dilemma.”

“It’s not a dilemma if I didn’t do anything.”

I didn’t think that was technically correct, but I kept it zipped.

“Here’s the problem,” Thor began in his empathizing tone, like he was so concerned about this grave problem that they shared. “We know that you did the break-in. And soon the cops will.”

“I didn’t !”

Thor winced and looked all around. It was the type of wince he’d sometimes give me during a sexual punishment. You were bad, Isis. You know we have to spank you now—there’s just no way to avoid it!

There would be no awesome spanking for Jeremy Zern, though.

Thor contemplated the distant trees. “You don’t want to go down for murder. I get that. It’s a serious crime. You don’t have priors, but we’re talking about murder here…”

Jeremy kept up the plea. “I’m telling you— ”

Thor held up a hand. “You shouldn’t have to go down, but there’s only one way you don’t.”

Jeremy regarded him warily. Thor pulled out his wallet and extracted a card. “I’ll send this guy to your home—”

“My home?”

“This guy’s a lawyer. He’ll negotiate you turning yourself in—in exchange for immunity and turning in the man who’s really behind this crime. This guy can get you a deal.”

Jeremy eyed the card like it might bite his fingers. “I can’t afford a lawyer.”

“It’s paid for.”

There was a long silence where he just kept his eye on the card. A pair of crows flew overhead, cawing. “Why do you care?”

“You’re not asking the questions here!” Zeus barked.

Still, Jeremy persisted. “Who are you?”

“We’re either your best friends or your worst enemies,” Odin said.

Again Thor winced. His sympathetic wince.

“It really is all you have. It’s that, or we go to the cops and let them know how they can match the prints they have.

And then you’ll be arrested. And you’ll have no chance at immunity, and you know who will have a better lawyer than you?

” He let the question hang there for a bit.

“Hank Vernon will have a better lawyer than you. He may even manage to pin the entire murder on you.”

“He’d be f ucking-g stupid not to,” Odin said.

“It’s what I’d do,” Thor said. “Confessing is the only play you have left to make at this point. That’s why you have to get out ahead of this thing.

” I loved Thor in this role: the friendly, dangerous powerbroker.

“Can you imagine how eager the police would be to learn who is behind the sickening all of those people? Killing Tim Zietlow? We know Hank hired you to do the break-in, but how could you have known Hank had murder in mind?”

Jeremy said nothing, but you could practically hear the wheels in his mind spinning .

“There’s something else,” Thor began in his confiding voice. “Did you know Hank was having an affair with the dead man’s wife?”

“You shitting me?”

“No,” Thor said. “You need to move on this. You need to tell them how he hired you to steal that pathogen. How you handed it off to him. They’ll make that deal with you to get Hank. You know they will. What do you think?” He held out the card.

“I’m tied up,” Jeremy said.

“You want it?”

A beat, then, “Okay.”

Thor tucked the card into the zipped pocket of Jeremy’s windbreaker.

I suppose that was the plan—bringing Jeremy to this place and giving him two really terrible options—turn himself in or die. And then Thor, the hot, dangerous good cop, arrives with a third option that they meant for him to take all along.

“You only have six hours to do this thing,” Thor said.

“Six hours or we tell the cops and they’ll match your prints.

And if you run, we’ll know.” Again the wince.

“And we’ll find you. And we’ll kill you.

In fact, I’ll personally fucking kill you.

And if we hear you’ve told anybody about this conversation?

” He brought his face near to Jeremy’s. “I’ll kill you even slower. ”

I could see in Jeremy’s eyes that he heard this. Not only heard it, but recognized it as the truth. Like some universal bad guy communication passed between them. Bad guy ESP.

Message sent and received.