Page 8 of The Hard Way (The Kinky Bank Robbers #5)

Chapter Seven

“What did you call this place on the way over? Was the word you used… elegant ?” he teased. “Because I don’t want to alarm you, but somebody has replaced the bread basket with a basket of wrapped dried things.”

“They always had that.” I gazed around at the dark paneling.

Red stained-glass lights hung from decorative chains.

They’d had those lights back when I was a kid, and I really had thought it was fancy.

I unwrapped my own breadstick and munched on it.

Eating made my nose ruffle area maddeningly itchy.

“Goddess,” Zeus whispered. “I hate to tell you this, but the deer heads on the walls have cobwebs between the antler spikes. Or whatever you call them.”

“Points,” I said dryly .

Odin threw back a scotch. “At least they have top-shelf scotch here.” He caught the waitress’s eye and pointed at his glass.

“Slow down, cowboy,” Zeus said.

Odin gave Zeus a dark look. A back-the-hell-off look. That was bad.

It was Odin’s demons. Fighting with cupids had not improved them.

The day before we’d left Italy, I’d asked Thor why Odin’s demons would get worse during our Italian honeymoon, the first time we were finally able to relax in forever.

No, goddess, it makes perfect sense that this would happen now, Thor had said. When you’re robbing banks and running for your life, there’s no time to think. No time to feel. The demons are pushed down.

I’d asked him whether that meant Odin could never just be relaxed and happy.

Thor didn’t know. He only knew that vacations and peaceful times were the worst times for Odin, the worst time for many people with PTSD.

That had made me feel so sad. And then I’d tried to calm his nightmares, and what had happened? He’d ended up hitting me in his sleep, which had only made him feel more awful.

The waitress delivered his next scotch.

“And let’s munch on a basket of frog legs to start,” Zeus said, putting aside the menu. I winced as the waitress set off. He turned to me. “What?”

“I don’t know. They’ve been on the menu forever, and nobody orders them. They could’ve been in the freezer for decades.”

“Somebody has to order them, or why would they be on the menu?”

“Because this menu hasn’t changed since the 1970s.”

“But the prices had to have changed—”

“Dude. Are you not an elite ex-secret agent?” I pointed at the tiny stickers next to each food item. “They just change the prices. ”

Odin swirled the ice in his glass. He really did look tired. “Do you either of you get the sensation that we’re being watched?”

I cast my eyes around at the few other tables. I wasn’t surprised we were attracting attention; this was a rural Wisconsin supper club, so anyone new would be a novelty. “We are new here.”

“No,” Odin said. “Not just curious citizens. There are eyes on this room. Nothing specific; just a feeling.”

“Damn,” Zeus said. He didn’t like this.

Odin had the best senses, the best intuition of the gang. If Odin felt extra eyes on us, it usually meant there were extra eyes on us.

My gaze rested on the deer head mounted on the wall facing us. There was a moose head on the opposite wall, just to the other side of Odin. Another deer head hung over the rustic gas fireplace at the center of the restaurant.

Zeus was seeing the same thing. “Dude, is it the deer heads?”

Odin scowled darkly at the mounted heads. “I don’t know. It’s fucking-g unnerving the way they stare.”

“They’re staring at the whole room,” I pointed out unhelpfully.

“Seriously, man, could it be that?” Zeus said.

“It could be,” Odin said. “I can’t tell. My radar feels screwed up right now. The baby cherubs and now this.” Odin swirled his ice, watching it sail around in his glass. “In the prison, they would always be watching you.”

Zeus and I both perked up. Odin never talked about his time in prison. His breaking of that silence was either a good sign or a really bad one.

“They had cameras. Always cameras behind Plexiglas. You couldn’t get at them to break them. Those in charge would make you suffer and then watch you after.”

Zeus and I sat there, suspended. Waiting. Would he say more?

“They would whip you sometimes and leave you tied so that the bugs would come. They would keep you in a dark hole and you would lose track of time. The more you tried to track it, the more you would lose track. But the cameras were somehow worse. They would throw you back in your cell, but those cameras…”

I waited, heart breaking. Odin was so strong. It was a hard blow that would’ve broken him.

“The cameras got into your head,” he continued.

“You felt like you couldn’t repair yourself…

or breathe or something. Part of repairing from something painful is having the alone time—the space—to feel that pain, but with the camera you never were alone, and you couldn’t let them see you sweat.

They turned you inside out, those cameras. ”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It made you very…” Odin swirled his ice on and on, staring into his glass. “Exterior,” he finally said. “It would make you externally referented. Not in a good way. It was harmful.” He lifted his eyes to meet the eyes of the deer head. “Very, very harmful.”

“We need to go at this Andy Miller and get the fuck out of town,” Zeus said, alarmed.

I nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking.” Though deep down, we were both thinking, get Odin out of town .

We ate more saltines. My gaze drifted to the booth nearest the hearth area.

“What’s there?” Zeus asked.

“Nothing.”

“You keep looking at it.”

“That was Dad’s favorite place for our family to sit.”

“Oh,” Zeus said, hushed and reverent.

Odin touched my hair. “Do you want to move there, goddess? So that we can sit there? Or do you want to move away? So we can’t look at the booth anymore?”

“No, I like being able to look at it. Remembering when our family was together. We would come here for really special occasions—not just birthdays, but graduation. That sort of thing. We would get the surf ’n’ turf. And you know what we wouldn’t get? ”

Zeus held up his hands in mock surrender.

“We stopped coming here once the bank put the squeeze on the farm,” I said.

“First National…” Odin turned his gaze to Zeus. “As long as we’re in the neighborhood, maybe we should make a cash withdrawal. What do you think?”

I spit out my wine. “Excuse me?” I knew that tone.

He wasn’t talking about the normal kind of cash withdrawal, the kind you made with IDs and withdrawal slips and a fun vacuum tube canister. He was talking about the kind you made with masks and Uzis, the kind where the cash was delivered by a tearful teller opening the drawer.

Odin gave me his most sparkling evil smile.

“Odin,” Zeus growled.

“It will be beautiful. We fucking-g shoot out the windows. We trash the place. We take all the money. The same bank robbed twice. That jackal Hank Vernon will look like a fool.”

“Well,” I said. “When you put it that way…”

“We never rob the same bank twice,” Zeus said. “It’s a rule.”

Odin sniffed. That’s what he thought of rules. He looked over at me. “Hank Vernon is the reason your family isn’t sitting there now. He hasn’t paid enough.”

I gazed back at the empty booth. Odin was right—Hank Vernon, owner of First City National Bank of Baylortown, was the reason my parents died.

Hank and his family had been trying to take our land for years in order to mine it for fracking sand.

Seven years ago my parents missed some payments because of a fire in one of the sheep barns, and Hank Vernon took advantage of the crisis to make the mortgage payments impossible for them to meet.

Out of desperation, my parents left me in charge of the sheep farm and headed out for a two-month gig on a fishing boat in Alaska.

Their boat went over, and they died.

I had only just graduated from high school at the time. Hank and his family tried even harder to take the farm away from us after that. Eventually I’d taken a second job as a teller/object of Hank’s sexual harassment at Hank’s bank. It wasn’t going well. But then the bank robbery happened.

My sisters had paid off the mortgage thanks to our secret donations, but Hank would be the first in line to buy the farm if they were ever forced to sell.

And no, Hank and his family hadn’t paid nearly enough.

“You’re thinking it, goddess.”

“We should concentrate on the positive. Saving Vanessa,” I said.

“I could gut him like a pig,” Odin added.

“Nobody’s gutting anybody like a pig,” Zeus said.

Odin wasn’t listening. He was looking up at that deer head, pulse banging in his throat like a bongo.

I hated that he was in pain. I hated that he wasn’t sleeping.

I hated that I’d made sleeping even harder for him.

I hated that there were cupids and deer heads staring at him everywhere he went around here.

I set my hand on his forearm, and he closed his eyes. My touch had always soothed him.

“Don’t forget, if it wasn’t for Hank, we wouldn’t be together,” I pointed out. “I would never have worked at his bank, and I would never have hated him enough to want to help you guys rob him.”

“So we should give him a ribbon instead?” Odin growled.

Maybe around his neck, I thought, but I didn’t say anything, because Odin was in a state. He really wanted to do something drastic. He drained his drink and headed off to the bathroom.

“He really wants to knock over that bank,” I said once Odin was out of earshot.

“He doesn’t give a shit about the bank,” Zeus said. “What Odin wants is to save you. To make you stop hurting.”

“He’s doing it already. You guys all are. Us here working on the case. ”

Zeus unwrapped a breadstick. “Did Odin ever tell you how he got out of that prison?”

“No.”