Page 6 of The Most Wanted (The Kinky Bank Robbers #4)

Chapter Four

Don Galvano presided over his old-school mafia family from a deco-style mansion in the Palisades. Zeus pulled our vehicle du jour , a black Range Rover, up to ornate white gates.

“Pearly,” I said.

Odin smirked.

I was sitting sandwiched between Odin and Zeus up front. Thor was in back tapping and clicking his phone.

“It’s good you’re here, goddess,” Odin said. “It will more social, less like gangster shit.”

“Not to mention you promised I’m an equal player in this,” I reminded them all. “Except for instances of clear and present danger.”

It was a promise they might be regretting, but they’d made it, and I didn’t intend to let them forget.

A man came out of a little white watchman box and ambled up to the driver’s side window.

Zeus told him we were friends of Herk’s, and that the Don was expecting us. The guy nodded and instructed us to wait. Then he went back into his wee hut.

“Nice place. What’s Galvano into?” I asked.

“These days he’s mostly extortion and gambling with some extended interests in Vegas,” Zeus said. “A little bit of high-end flesh.”

“Oh, high-end flesh,” I said. “That’s classy.”

Quick as a flash, Zeus had me on his lap, face right close to mine. “You got something to say about my choice of terminology?”

“Sure do,” I snorted, pulse racing.

“Do I need to bend you over my knee?”

Sure might, I thought.

“Oh, Isis,” Odin said sadly, snaking a hand around my belly.

Zeus took my lips in a furiously dominating kiss as the gate opened. He broke off the kiss but kept hold of me on his lap as he drove through. We parked at the end of a line of shiny cars, most of them big and black.

I heard a zipper sound in the back. Here?

But it was Thor’s satchel.

We got out. Zeus threw on a sport jacket and sunglasses. With his short brown hair and muscular grace, he had the look of a billionaire Navy SEAL, which I can tell you was not a bad look at all.

Odin was in black—basic black button-down hanging open over a black T-shirt.

Black jeans. Black hair. Black lush eyelashes.

Black five o’clock shadow. Black smarty-pants eyeglasses, his usual delectability.

Poor Odin always tried so hard to tone down his beautiful male model looks and go for a gruff badass appearance, and it never worked.

He could glue a dead tarantula to his nose, and even then, people would be like, why does that super-hot guy have a dead tarantula glued to his nose ?

Thor took my arm as we walked up the steps. He was Mr. Casual, still in his scrub pants and corduroy shirt.

I always felt so proud, going places with my hot and wonderful guys. And right there I decided the watching thing was stupid. Yeah, I liked thrills, but what more did I need than these three awesome men? I was the luckiest woman on the planet.

Zeus rang the doorbell. I smoothed my skirt and grabbed a mint from my purse. Thor put out his hand so I gave him one, then Zeus and Odin wanted mints, too. Sometimes they were like kids, really.

The door was opened by a giant man with zero body fat, a large weaponry bulge under his jacket, and a shaved head to complete the extra-fierce look. “You’re Herk’s people?” he asked.

“Yup. Here to see the Don.”

The guy nodded and led us through one room and another, each more lavishly bedecked than the last.

We finally arrived in the study where we found the Don, a large man with a big belly, a bald dome of a head, and an expression like he just ate a lemon.

His study was very classic, lined with bookcases that were stuffed with dusty-looking hardcover books. The furniture was all dark wood and leather, and there was even a globe on a stand.

And it was all super-masculine. Even the globe was black—none of that pastel shit for the mafia don! The man liked a fucking black globe!

“Don Galvano.” Zeus held out his hand. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with us. And Herk really appreciates it, too.”

“Yeah, I heard you’re P.I.s now,” the Don said. “I had to see this for myself. The three of you, now the four, you got more heat on you than I ever did.” He gestured back and forth, sweeping us all into his sentence. “What the fuck are you doing with the P.I. shit?”

“We’re investigating this matter with Herk…”

“No, no, no, I don’t give a shit about that.

That’s not why I agreed to meet you. I just gotta ask you what you’re doing.

Considering the kind of heat you have on you, I mean…

” he gestured again. “The kind of heat I have on me, I can pull outta that heat of in a court of law. I’m a legitimate businessman. ”

Of course he didn’t bother with air quotes for legitimate businessman .

Those air quotes were assumed, I guess, and it would be uncool to use them, in the same way it would be dorky if my bank robbers put air quotes around the phrase make a withdrawal when they talked about knocking over a bank.

The underworld version of suspenders and flood pants.

“But your kind of heat,” he continued. “I mean, if your people catch up with you, that’s not going to be resolved in a court of law. That shit is going to be resolved in the belly of a tanker, if you catch my meaning. Why would you risk these kinds of investigations?”

“Never mind about us,” Odin said.

Practically right at the same time, Zeus said, “We’ll worry about our own safety.”

“No, wait,” I said. “Investigating a crime is way safer than a bank robbery.”

Galvano snorted. “Think it through.”

“Can we get back to business?” Odin said. “We’re here on Herk’s behalf.”

“No, I want to hear what the Don has to say,” I said.

“Who can hurt you?” the Don asked.

I was thinking the police, but mostly ZOX, the covert agency Zeus and Odin were once in. They were eternally after us. Especially the agent assigned to our case, Agent Denko.

“The feds, right?” the Don said.

“They can only hurt us if they can find us,” I say.

The Don raised his brows.

Riiiiight . Somebody could help ZOX find us.

“Nobody’s going to fuck with us,” Odin said.

“Could I hurt you?” the Don asked.

“You wouldn’t,” Zeus said.

“Give me a reason to hurt you, I might. When you were only hitting banks, nobody in our community had a problem with you. I’d go as far as to say you had empathy and respect from every corner, poking a stick into the man’s eye like you do.”

I nodded, knowing it was true. Nothing says fuck you to the man like a big, loud takeover-style bank robbery in broad daylight.

“Everybody loves seeing you guys ripping off banks. But let’s pretend for a moment that asshole Herk isn’t the one who crashed my car.

I know it was him, but let’s pretend it wasn’t.

That means somebody else did it. That means some guy out there knows you’re taking all your skills you developed over all those years of doing whatever covert shit you were doing and you’re pointing all those skills at him.

You’re coming for him. Suddenly, you got yourself an enemy inside the community, and you don’t know who the fuck he is. But he knows who you are.”

“Oh my god,” I said. I hadn’t thought of that.

Zeus shook his head. “It’s fine, Ice.”

Odin glowered.

“What better way to save themselves than drop a dime to the feds? Let ‘em know the God Pack is back in L.A. and even where you’d be.”

“Nobody would do that, goddess,” Thor said softly, “because they know they’d die.”

“You so sure about that?” Galvano asked. “Nobody thinks they’re going to get caught—not even by you. You’re successful bank takeover guys. Why hang out a fucking shingle like this when you have all the money in the world?”

“Because we are awesome investigators who spit in the faces of our enemies,” Odin said.

“And nobody tells us what to do or stops us from helping our friends,” Thor added. “We believe Herk, and we’re going to prove he’s innocent.”

And I believed that for Thor and Odin, these were the reasons. Defiance. Excellence. Righting wrongs .

But for Zeus, it was something more.

I turned to him and waited for him to explain why it was so important to him to start the agency, even in the face of danger.

“A man does what he does,” Zeus answered simply.

A man does what he does?

The Don held up his hand, sensing this was all he’d get. “Okay. Fine.”

But it wasn’t enough for me, and I couldn’t help but think about what the Gigis, a gang of female jewel thieves, had said in the bathroom one time—that my guys were on a death sprint that would end with them crashing and burning.

“Now can we get to Herk’s matter here?” Zeus said.

“Herk? The piece of shit who took my car for a joyride and won’t own up to it?” Don Galvano waved the air, waving an imaginary Herk aside.

I felt so angry on Herk’s behalf. I knew he wouldn’t have come to us if he wasn’t innocent.

“It’s only for Maria’s sake he’s not lying in a ditch with his balls cut off,” the Don said.

Inwardly I winced.

Zeus said, “We’d love to take a look at that footage you have.”

“So you can torque up some excuse why it’s not him? The footage shows him clear as day driving my car. He thought he could take it for a joyride while we were across the pond, and he wouldn’t fess up once he wrecked it.”

“You think your future son-in-law would hire somebody as awesome as us if he did it?”

“Maybe he’s hired you to effect his cover-up,” the Don said. “To twist around the scenario?—”

“We don’t do cover-ups,” Zeus growled, moving toward Galvano. “And if you think just because Herk’s paying us that we’re his bitches, you’re wrong. And if you think cover-ups are our business, we’ve got a major fucking problem between us.”

Odin slapped his hand onto Zeus’s shoulder, urging restraint, but he looked like he wanted to kill the Don himself. “We were trained as fucking-g investigators. We will not be manipulated. We will not be bought.”