Page 25 of The Most Wanted (The Kinky Bank Robbers #4)

Chapter Sixteen

Odin pulled Denko into the back with him, giving him all kinds of not-fucking-around orders like Fingers laced on top of your head! and Don’t you fucking-g move a muscle. He promised to fucking-g end him in some painful and colorful ways.

Thor got out and waved me around into the driver’s seat.

I scurried across and slid in. Thor went over to Denko’s car. He flicked out a switchblade, blond hair swinging, and bent over, ruthlessly jabbing the thing into the tire.

I was used to seeing Zeus and Odin be destructive, but there was something particularly exquisite about Thor, with his beautiful teen-idol looks, playing the gutter dog.

He straightened up and beelined back, eyeing me steadily.

And maybe I was an irrevocably depraved person by this point, especially considering that Odin had the most dangerous individual possible right there in the back seat, but I was looking at Thor thinking, We are so going to fuck tonight .

Thor slammed into the passenger seat. “Go, go, go!”

I peeled out in first, beating the thing a little, then quickly shifted to second. Growing up on a farm, you start driving a stick shift early and often. My driving freed up Odin and Thor to concentrate on Denko.

“Keep straight. Ten blocks,” Thor said calmly, holding his silver Sig where Denko could see it, letting it rest all casual and badass in a way that might increase his hotness, were a person depraved in that way. “Then turn on Suncrest.”

I glanced in the rearview, taking a good look at the agent who had been following my guys for so long, part of the organization that was responsible for so much of their misery. Our misery.

He had a salt-and-pepper crew cut, a pleasant diamond-shaped face, and nice eyes, which he currently held in a kind of movie-star-style squint, though I was guessing he was more doing that out of pain than out of any attempt to look like Brad Pitt.

A cut on his lip bled into the gray scruff of his chin. He was maybe forty.

“You don’t get to look at her—not even in a mirror,” Odin said.

Denko cast his gaze downward.

“I’m going to take your phone and the rest of your weapons,” Odin said. “If you try to stop me, one of us will shoot you in the head, and then we’ll take your stuff. A lot easier, but we don’t want your brains all over the car, and certainly not on Isis’s pretty hair. I mean, can you blame us?”

Denko glanced darkly at the seat in front of him, but said nothing about my pretty hair.

Odin got busy taking things from the man’s pockets and elsewhere. I couldn’t see much, and it was probably a good thing. I needed to concentrate on the road. Five blocks to the turn.

A stolen car and a hostage. We had a hostage.

Odin scrolled through Denko’s phone. “This is one way to solve mysteries. Just put out the word that we’re on the case and see who fucking turns us in to ZOX.”

“You won’t get anything off of there,” Denko said.

Odin opened the window and threw it out. “Will I get anything out of you?”

“Will you?” Denko asked. “It’s one of your specialties, Rashad.”

I stiffened. Rashad ? That was Odin’s name? I’d never known his name.

When they first took me hostage, my guys didn’t tell me their names, not wanting to put me in additional danger.

And then the weeks turned into months, and I made the choice never to ask.

It was a gesture of faith in our life, in our future.

I’d wanted to know about their pasts, but I was more interested in our future than the demons of their past.

And here one was, in the back seat of the car.

Rashad. I rolled his name around in my mind. It was a beautiful name. I wanted to tell him that, but not in front of Agent Denko.

“You could get a mother to give up her own baby,” Denko continued, “isn’t that what they always said?”

“You really want to be talking to me like that?” I glanced back in time to see Odin’s hand tightening around Denko’s neck. “Do you? ”

“Do you still have the nightmares?” Denko’s voice was getting strained. “Do you think you’ll really get something out of me?”

I blinked at the road, feeling like my own air was getting choked off.

He won’t kill him, I told myself. My guys weren’t killers.

Except for the stalker I’d had a few months back. And they’d killed as agents. They’d kill to protect me. To protect each other.

Denko’s voice became a high, strained whisper. “You really think you could?”

The next thing I heard was Denko sucking in a huge gulp of air, and then coughing. “Probably not,” Odin said.

“I’m flattered, Rashad.”

I concentrated on my driving, ignoring the tension in the car.

“Do you know what the most painful bone to have broken in the body is?” Odin asked him.

“I don’t,” Denko said.

“Use my name again and you’ll find out.”

Denko sniffed. “You don’t like me using your name? We know all of your names. Except Isis. But we’re close. We’ll get it, Isis. You think we won’t? You think whoever you’re protecting is safe?—”

Crack.

I didn’t need to glance back to know the man was out cold.

“Take a right up here,” Thor said, glancing between me and the back seat.

“Damn,” I said, taking the turn.

“You’re okay,” Odin said, texting somebody—Zeus, probably. “We’re all okay.”

“Go all the way up to that light,” Thor said. “The motel’s just beyond that strip mall.” He twisted back to Odin. “What do you think?”

Denko groaned. Rousing .

“Good enough,” Odin said. They discussed what do to with the car.

“Mero Inn,” Denko said. “A little below your standards, isn’t it?”

Thor ignored him. “Pull in here.”

I heard another grunt from the back. I glanced back to see Denko gagged and blindfolded. Odin was texting. Who was he texting at a time like this? Just then Thor’s phone pinged. Thor pulled it out, then showed it to me.

WE’RE BUGGED, MAYBE TRACKED.

I nodded to show I understood. Thor took off his shoes and his belt and pointed at my shoes and my purse. I handed them over. He passed the stuff back to Odin.

When I looked back next, Odin was holding up my purse strap for us to see—there was a small metal doodad right above the buckle.

“Let’s get a room,” Odin said. “We’ll wait for Zeus here.

” He got out and shut the door a few times—to represent the group of us getting out?

—and then walked across the parking lot to a dumpster and threw the strap in.

He got back in and stabbed a finger at the road… and it wasn’t the road he was mad at.

It was bad that my purse had been listening to every conversation.

Very bad.

When had ZOX gotten to my purse? I thought of all the times we’d gone out to eat.

Sometimes I put my purse under my seat. Could they have gotten it one of those times?

I thought about the breakfast place we’d gone to before meeting Herk.

We’d sat at the counter. Some guy had leaned in to grab the ketchup and jostled my purse.

Enough that I’d looked inside after to ensure my wallet and phone were still there.

Shit .

Could they have been listening all that time?

I drove us out of there. Thor put his finger to his lips and wrote another text, this one for me to read— we’re going to the Gigis’. Could be other transmitters.

The Gigis lived in a blue bungalow in Echo Park.

The street was dark, but their home was instantly lit with floodlights the second I turned in.

I’d only been there twice, but both times had been memorable events.

One was Angel’s thirtieth birthday bash, a kind of crazy girls-only party.

The other was a holiday-card-making party where we personalized a lot of the cards for the various mobsters and thieves in our set.

It was thoughtful of them—when you’re a criminal with no known address, you aren’t getting any holiday cards.

Thor made a finger looping signal for me to pull around the back and park.

Odin stayed in the car with our prisoner while Thor and I headed up to the back door together. Macy emerged in sleek pants and sleek strappy top, almost like a yoga outfit. She had a wand in her hand and a dark look on her face.

So they’d texted ahead.

She motioned for me to hold out my arms. I complied, and she waved it all over my body, and then she did Thor and the bag part of my purse.

“You’re clean.” She spoke in low tones. “This baby would’ve sounded off on any kind of transmitter or GPS, and I don’t care if it’s ZOX-issue or what.”

“Would it get something subdermal?”

She cast a dark gaze at the car, clearly not loving that we had a hostage.

“He’s blindfolded,” Thor said. “He doesn’t know where he is.”

“And what if he has a subdermal?”

“Don’t worry,” Thor said, “we’ll get him out of here.”

Macy handed him the wand. “I’m not involved.

You lay him out and do him just for metal.

” She showed Thor the settings on the thing.

“Hold it an inch above. Get the covering surface to line up.” She demonstrated on me, then handed it over with a shake of her head.

“And keep that motherfucker blindfolded.”

Macy and I watched Thor head back to the car. She shook her head and snorted as Odin and Thor pulled Agent Denko out and laid him down. “And here I thought the takeover robberies were the ultimate death wish.”

“We’ll be okay.”

She raised one eyebrow. “You think? Why, because your guys are so high-performance, so high-functioning? The f ucking-g most badass fucking-g robbers?” she said, mimicking Odin. “Shit.”

Jenny came out just then. “Hey Ice,” she said sleepily. “What’s up?”

“Oh, just the God Pack deciding to drive one of their most dangerous and high-value hostages to our place.”

Jenny widened her eyes at me—a look of surprise, but a little bit of an impressed look, like, this is soooo badass .

I smiled uncertainly, like, thanks?

Macy nodded at the car. “Give these boys some duct tape. Not the pink stuff. And no prints. Use gloves and pull off the top layer first, for fuck’s sake.”

“Got it.” Jenny headed in.

“He’s under control,” I said.

“Really? ‘Cause you know what I’m seeing when I look at this scene? It’s like those guys who put up ramps and jump their car over a whole lot of other cars, and your guys with their bank takeovers, they can jump ten fucking cars, all lined up in a row—just barely, but they can do it, and it’s super-ballsy and yeah, everyone’s impressed.

But this whole investigations bit? This here is car number eleven. ”

I thought about how happy they’d been, chasing those clues. Helping Herk. Defying all good sense. A fuck-you to the world. Was that why Zeus had wanted to do the P.I. business so bad? Just to push it?

“Well, you always have a place here,” she said. “Unless you drag some federal agent-turned-hostage along. You want to do that, you ca find another pajama party.”

“We’re good.”

We watched them truss the agent up under the watchful eyes of Jenny, who was pointing out places they needed more duct tape.

“He knows all their real names,” I added. “I kind of hate that he knows them and the way he uses them, sort of like weapons.”

“Enemies. What’re you going to do?”

I thought about what Denko had said about Odin having nightmares.

It made me realize Odin never actually slept through the night in my bed.

Was that because of nightmares? And how could I not know a thing like that?

Should I have pushed for their names? Their histories? “I didn’t even know their names.”

“Don’t let this guy fuck you up,” she said. “He’s got nothing a little duct tape over the mouth won’t fix.”

Macy, as it turned out, really was on her way to yoga—midnight yoga. Because apparently the Gigis had to be endlessly fabulous in every possible way.

Thor had come up to where we were, and he jokingly offered to drop her off. “You could squeeze in next to our guest, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

She gave him the kind of long, dirty look that only she could pull off.

He got serious after that and asked her to let Noel James know that my purse had been listening to every conversation I’d had over the past few days. “It’s probably nothing—ZOX wants nothing to do with police investigations—but they should be aware.”

We headed off to a new hotel, still with me driving, all the better to free up my men for holding guns on Agent Denko. Even with his duct-tape bindings, gag, and blindfold, they stayed hyperalert.

“Can you think of any time you were separated from your purse?” Thor asked.

“Remember when we stopped for breakfast before meeting Herk?” I said. I reminded them of the guy who’d come up to grab ketchup. We’d all marked him.

“Goddamn,” Odin said. “That’s what he was up to.”

“So they’ve had ears since then,” Odin said.

“What the fuck,” Thor grumbled.

Odin had me take a completely bonkers route to the next hotel, a sort of curlicue of turning this way and that, presumably so Denko couldn’t estimate the distance and direction. I pulled up in front of an Asian-themed hotel on Hill Street.

“You two do the check-in,” Odin said softly. “First floor, end if possible.”

We went in for the second time that night as the young married couple. We wrote down a fictitious car and license plate, and luckily the desk clerk wasn’t in the mood to confirm that.

I stopped Thor outside the lobby entrance. Just us two, out in the night, full of adrenaline. Even the stars in the sky above seemed brighter and wilder somehow. “What are you going to do with him? Are you gonna…”

I didn’t say kill .

I didn’t need to.

“Only if we have to,” Thor said. “I mean, if it’s a matter of us or him, that’s one thing, but I don’t think it’ll come to that. Part of our point to these fuckers is that we’re not the killers that they are.”

“Because of what you saw way back when,” I said.

“Yeah, and you don’t know about that. You shouldn’t even know that much.”

“I want to know. I’m in this with you. I should know. It’s not because I don’t care that I don’t ask.”

“I know, baby.”

“So we keep him as a hostage?”

“As long as we need him. Then we’ll pack him off somewhere. Maybe in the back of a freighter going to Omaha or something. Or put him in an abandoned building and call in his location once we’re safe elsewhere.”

“Safe elsewhere…like in Jerba?”

Thor furrowed his brow. “You think a little setback like this will send us to a boring vacation paradise? Please.”

Playfully, I hauled off to hit him and he caught my arm and kissed me, a deep, hard kiss that had all the excitement of the night built into it.

And oh my god, I shouldn’t have been horny, but I was.

A few minutes later, the three of us were in the hotel room, all of us sitting on one queen bed with Denko bound up on the other.