Page 8 of The Most Wanted (The Kinky Bank Robbers #4)

Chapter Five

The automotive garage the Don sent us to was a hulking and slightly lopsided building on an endless strip of road ruled by storage facilities, shitty chain restaurants, and scrub plants growing through chain-link fences.

We parked next to a beater tow truck and headed for the door that had office painted in crude red lettering above it. Thor carried the case, which was a kit full of kits, basically.

Los Angeles was a town where appearances could be deceiving, and this place was no exception; the inside was more like a posh club for gents than body-shop reception area.

It had leather seating, a nice rug, a wooden table with coffee services—pretty much everything but a fireplace and a painting of an English hunting scene.

A guy in a one-piece jumper came out, wiping his hands on a rag. “You here for Mr. G’s ‘vette?”

Zeus nodded curtly.

The mechanic grunted and led us into the bowels of the place where bright Crayola-colored tubes hung down from the ceilings into shiny auto bays. The place was super-sophisticated, like Area 51 for really expensive cars.

Zeus took my hand as we walked through.

“Is this a chop shop, too?” I asked.

“What do you think?” Zeus asked, a little grumpy.

I pulled on his arm. “You okay?”

He looked down at me. “Not really. ”

“Are we okay?”

“You and me are,” he said softly. “Always.”

“I need all of us to be okay,” I said.

He didn’t reply.

We ended up at a repair bay on the far end staring at a white Corvette sitting atop a fat silver pole, its nose completely smashed. The Don’s white Corvette.

Zeus let go of my hand. My guys walked all around the car, inspecting it.

“What’s your impression?” Odin said to the guy.

“That Herk’s one stupid motherfucker, that’s what. He’s lucky he still has his balls.”

“No, of the damage,” Odin said. “When you look at this damage, what comes to mind?”

He shrugs. “Shitty motherfucking driver.”

They lowered the car and discussed it some more.

The mechanic narrated his view of the events, showing where the driver scraped up along the side of one highway support pillar, then bounced to a wall and maybe spun.

He ran a finger along the scrapes. “Still a bit of grit in there.” He went over to the corner of the station and returned with a crunched-up white piece, which would have been lots of pieces if it hadn’t been for strands of fiberglass holding the parts together. “This quarter panel took it head-on.”

“Anyone here see the scene of the accident?” Odin asked. “You all towed it out, right?”

“Is that important?”

Odin nodded.

The man texted somebody.

“Any other impressions?” Odin asked.

Silence .

Personally, I was burning to share how shocked I was that Corvettes were basically made of plastic this whole time, but I knew that probably wasn’t what he was going for.

“Like if it seems deliberate?” Odin added.

The man screwed up his face. “Hard to tell. When somebody goes down the boneheaded path, scrapes up against a wall or some such, it gets worse before it gets better as they overcorrect and lose their shit.”

An urban beardsman in greasy overalls wandered up. Odin and Zeus quizzed him about how the car was found, and the man described the scene. He believed the driver had hit a wall, then spun and smashed into a nearby vehicle, then hit the wall again.

They opened up the driver’s side door, then. “Who all has been in here?” Zeus asked.

“Couple of cops,” our guide said.

“What did they do?”

“Shined their light around under the seat and so on. I think they were looking for trash. Didn’t come out with anything.”

“Thanks,” Zeus said. “Ice, get the location of the accident. We’ll go over this interior.”

Thor set the suitcase on the rubberized mat.

I pulled out my fancy P.I. notepad, and then I looked over and caught Zeus smiling at me, and I knew he’d asked me to get the location just so I’d have an excuse to use the fancy notepad.

The urban beardsman showed me the location on his smartphone. I took down the coordinates and nearby streets on my pad and had him send me the photos he’d taken.

When I turned back, my guys were working like a well-oiled machine.

Odin was kneeling just outside the driver’s seat, inspecting it with a magnifying glass while Zeus shone a powerful light over his shoulder.

Thor trained another light on the seat from the passenger side.

The inside was pretty fucked up. The whole dash had been pulled apart, presumably for the stereo, and the seats were cut up.

“Whoever this was really went to town,” I said.

“I’m guessing the stereo and seats were cut out after, but it’s something we’d want to confirm,” Zeus said.

Odin requested a baggie. I went into the case and got one, and I even held it open for him. He made a motion like he was putting something in there with tweezers. “Close it up.”

“You didn’t put anything in!” I said. “Were you just miming?”

He gave me a stern look that went to my gut.

I smiled, and in a low voice I said, “It’s like you’re mimes.”

“Oh dear,” Zeus said, in his we-might-have-to-punish-you-now voice.

“My thoughts exactly,” Odin said. “It was a fucking-g fiber.”

I tipped my head back and forth with just a bit of attitude as my world righted on its axis, with Odin and Zeus collaborating in their stern corrections of me.

If I had to insult them and endure a wicked round of spanking to bring my guys back together, so be it. I would gladly make that sacrifice. I was selfless like that. A total Mother Teresa.

“Mmm,” Odin said, doing his tweezer mime again. But when he lifted it to the light I could see it—a long dark hair.

“Shit,” I said. “Herk’s.”

“Maybe.” Odin lifted his hand into the air like he was calling for quiet, but then Zeus slapped a magnifying glass onto his palm and Odin took a look, then shot a significant glance at Zeus. “If Herk wore a wig.”

“Synthetic?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm,” Odin said.

I brought out another baggie to capture this new evidence. “The don’s going to eat his hat. ”

Zeus twisted his lush, brutish lips the way he sometimes did when he was pondering. “We won’t show him yet.”

“But it’s so obvious—I mean, there’s a wig hair the length and color of Herk’s.”

“But we’re still Herk’s people in his eyes,” Zeus said. “If we want to clear Herk, we’ve got to catch this culprit. We need motive and opportunity. We need this guy on his knees confessing to the Don.”

“That’s a high bar,” I said. “You set a high bar.”

“We certainly do, goddess,” Odin said. “And this is what you call a sweet little fucking-g break.”

“Except there are a zillion wig stores in Southern California, and that’s not counting movie studio prop departments and Halloween pop-up stores,” I reminded him.

“Oh, it’ll be hard,” Zeus said. “A real fuck of a thing.”

Odin took a deep breath. “A fuck of a thing that we will accomplish with blinding fucking-g awesomeness. And then we will come down like a thousand sledgehammers.”

Thor crossed his arms, beaming into the distance. “Gotcha, motherfucker.”

And just then I realized I was seeing something I hadn’t seen in a very long time: my guys up against impossible odds. It was making them pull together. It was making them happy.

I hadn’t believed Zeus when he had claimed he was bored just robbing banks. Should I have believed him? And anyway, better this than trying to rob Fort Knox or something, right?