I smiled and nodded. Manning always called me miss, and I didn’t much like it. It seemed weird and distancing. In general I didn’t entirely like Manning, but it could be because I felt he didn’t like me, what with all the distancing miss stuff. He was one of those guys who didn’t really take women seriously. There were a lot of guys like that in the criminal crowd.
“Be sorry for the one who left that package,” Odin said. “They are already dead. They are already crying-g.”
Manning screwed up his lips. “You know, there’s something…last time I was here…”
“What?” Thor asked.
“It wasn’t on your premises, but I saw somebody out there…”
Thor and Odin exchanged glances.
“Who?” Odin asked.
Manning squinted. “I don’t know who. It was really nothing. Last week Thursday, when I was out to upgrade the controls on your gate and switch out the boards. Zeus was in the pool, you three were elsewhere. As I was leaving, turning right just out of the gate, I saw somebody walking out of the woods—not up here, but down past the end of the driveway. From the back. Brown hair, Dodgers cap. Maybe medium height.”
“Somebody walking out of the woods down there?” Odin said. “You didn’t see fit to say anything?”
“It was just off the road. I assumed he was taking a piss.”
“And you’re telling us now?”
“Hey—” Manning held up his hands. “Guys take pisses? I would’ve told you if I thought it was any kind of 5-0 or agency. That’s who you’ve always been looking at as far as trouble. That’s who the gates and cameras are for, according to you yourself. I’m not alerting you to every random guy taking a piss down at the road.”
“It’s not his job,” Thor snapped at Odin. “We hire him for surveillance and gates.”
“But you’re thinking about it enough to mention it now,” Odin said.
“It’s one of those things that gets weirder in hindsight,” Manning said. “You know, your subconscious sees it and files it away. Then today when you call about some joker leaving a package, my subconscious says to me, ‘Hey Robert Manning, you remember the guy in a ball cap? Remember that guy?’ And now I’m telling you. But again—” He put his hand on his chest. He really didn’t want to be in trouble with my guys.
“I know,” Thor said. “We don’t mean to get on you.”
I sat there, watching him, not sure what to make of his story. Because, ‘Hey Robert Manning?’ Whose subconscious addresses them by their full name?
“A Dodger’s cap and brown hair,” Odin spat out. “That’s a lot of fucking-g guys in this town.”
“But it rules out a lot of guys,” Manning said. “You take all the guys who might know where you four are hiding out with Isis and narrow it down to brown hair and Dodgers fandom…”
“And then narrow it down to those who are insane enough to threaten Isis,” Odin said.
“Wait—” Thor swore softly under his breath. “Sounds like fucking Bolo.”
“Who’s Bolo?” I asked.
Odin held up a hand. “What else?” he asked Manning. “Anything else? Shirt? Pants?”
Manning shook his head.
“Could it have been Bolo?” Odin barked. “You know him.”
Manning shrugged.
“Who’s Bolo?” I asked.
“No way. How the fuck would Bolo know we’re here?” Thor asked.
Manning showed Thor empty hands. The universal gesture for What do I know?
Odin put a hand on my shoulder. “He’s…we’ll tell you.” He eyed Manning. “You can’t say it was or wasn’t Bolo.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like Bolo’s style. To skulk. But physically,” Manning said. “He made only a slight impression. It could be nothing. But you’ve got eyes everywhere now. Look at this.” He started sliding through screens on the notepad. We watched the camera views click around. “Terrible thing, that package. Blood.” He quickly looked at Odin. “We all set?”
Odin slapped him on the back and they walked off together.
“If it’s Bolo, we can handle it,” Thor said.
“How well do you know A/V Robert Manning?” I asked.
“We know him pretty well,” Thor said. “He’s pulled us out of some hot situations. Looked out for us in the past.” He turned to me. “You’re not thinking…”
“No,” I said. “I don’t like his whole calling me miss stuff. What’s up with that?”
Thor frowned. “It wouldn’t be him. Christ, if it’s him…”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said. “It seems a way to keep me at arm’s length. I would never call my friend’s significant other mister. ‘Sorry to hear that, mister.’“
“He’s always been an ally,” Thor said. “We considered pulling him in on a job once.”
I nodded. That was the highest level of trust, pulling a guy in on a job.
Odin was back.
“Are you one hundred percent on Manning?” Thor asked him.
“Manning?“ Odin asked.
“She got a weird hit off him,” Thor said.
“Not weird, just…I’m jumpy,” I said. “I’m going to freak out about everybody who isn’t you.”
Odin grabbed a suitcase out of the closet. Or, I thought it was a suitcase until he opened it up to reveal weapons, silencers, rope, a drill, and some other hardware. “You two stay here. I’m going to shake the trees for Bolo. See if I can figure out where he lives and pay him a little visit. I’ll get Zeus at five and we’ll regroup.”
“What if it’s not Bolo?” I asked.
“Then he has nothing to worry about. We need to handle this. Thor, get on Bolo’s social media. Isis, keep working on the feather.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s pigeon,” I said, trying not to think about how a drill might figure into paying Bolo a visit.
“Are you one hundred percent sure?” Odin asked.
“No, but seriously? The feather? I don’t need busywork.”
“Are you a trained fucking-g agent? Do you have some fucking-g knowledge we don’t have? Some knowledge that the feather is unimportant?”
“More of a hunch,” I said.
“You will work on the feather,” Odin snapped. “I want to know the species without a doubt. Take it to the university if you must.” Odin left with the case, and Thor and I got ice teas and sat out on the porch, ready to continue our tasks.
“What’s the deal with Bolo?” I asked him. “Who is he?”
Thor put his feet up on the railing. “He’s a guy around the scene. He somehow knew—I don’t know who from or how—that you like to be watched. You know…” Watched while fucking, he meant.
“What, he knew this? How would he know such a thing?”
“Not from any of us. Zeus thinks…” he paused here, “well, we have had some semi-public sex, if you recall. That involved one of us watching. It’s one of the risks that…”
“That makes it fun,” I said, finishing his sentence for him. But he was right. There had been a few episodes of that. Car sex. Public park in the middle of the night sex. Sex in the storage basement at Guvvey’s, the gangster restaurant. Yes, they knew I liked the danger of getting caught, and they knew I liked one of my guys watching. But not some random guy.
“We would never knowingly let other guys watch. Messing around with Matteo today, that’s one thing…”
“I know,” I said.
“There’s also the fact that the four of us are a romantic unit. Some guys don’t respect that. A guy like Bolo, he’d never go up to a man in a traditional couple and ask, ‘Hey, can I watch you fuck your woman?’ But it’s known that we’re a foursome. So people make assumptions. It could be simple as that.”
I nodded. “Even the Gigis had some shit to say about me liking manwiches.”
Thor snorted. “You love manwiches.”
“Only with you guys.”
“Never with anyone else, baby. Ever.” Thor looked hard into
my eyes and reached for my hand. “This thing is as real as it gets.”
This happy feeling of warmth came over me, and I smiled. Being with my guys felt like being held in the most wonderful way, like being surrounded by an invisible cocoon of love and support from the fiercest and most amazing men on the planet. Even if I was out somewhere alone, I felt held like that. I sometimes couldn’t believe how lucky I was.
Thor squeezed my hand. “Anyway, Zeus told Bolo to fuck off, and Bolo got a little creepy about it.”
“Creepy how?”
Thor just shook his head.
“I want to know,” I said. “Don’t infantilize me. We’re partners.”
Thor let go of my hand and watched a squirrel run up one of the tall trees in front of the porch. “Demeaning. Dehumanizing toward you. As if it shouldn’t matter what you want, or what we want. Like it’s just a porn thing, what we’ve got going. It was almost as if Bolo thought he had a right to you. As though we had a duty to share you. That was Zeus’s impression. He would’ve put Bolo in the hospital if Odin hadn’t been there to break it up.”
“He attacked him?”
“Let’s just say Zeus corrected him in his thinking. We thought that was that.”
“You should have told me,” I said. “Does this sort of thing happen a lot?”
“Only the one time,” Thor said.
“So you think it’s him?”
“It seems likely.”
“Is he… What’s his background?” I asked. Meaning criminal background.
“Zeus went into his records. He’s been in for auto theft. He’s a car guy. Odin says car guys are more likely to be sexually predatory, though. It’s not on his record, but it doesn’t mean it’s not in his background. Criminal records tend to reflect less than eight percent of a person’s actual crime.”
“How do you get a survey like that? Did somebody at Guvvey’s do it?”
“Something like that.”
“Maybe we have to stop doing public stuff,” I said.
The squirrel perched on a tree branch in a kind of waiting mode. The Pacific Ocean sparkled in tiny bright blue patches through the branches.
“Not like we ever start out meaning to do public stuff,” he said.
“We could stop groping each other in public places,” I suggested.
Thor looked at me like I was crazy.
I smiled.
“Whoever left the package,” he said, “they’ll be made an example of.”
“What does made an example of mean?” I asked.
“Whatever Zeus and Odin decide,” Thor said. “They’ll find this guy.”
“Maybe it’s a sign,” I said. “Your hideout’s been here for a while. People are getting to know us.”
“Are you on the Jerba thing again?” he asked.
“There’s a bad apple in the barrel,” I said.
“And we’ll find it and take it out.” Thor patted his lap. “Put your feet up here.”
“I don’t feel like fucking,” I said.
Thor gave me a mock angry look.
“I don’t.”
“Do you not feel like getting your feet rubbed?”
“Yes,” I said. “Wait, no.” I put up my feet. “Whatever answer gets a foot rub.” He started squishing the balls of my feet. I groaned. “Uhhhhh.” The man knew his bones.
Ten minutes and two jelly feet later, I was scanning through diagrams of feathers.
“Crap,” he said, tapping his iPad.
“What?” I asked.
“One of the midwives I back up in Santa Rosa. A risky breach baby delivery.” He started typing. “It would be fine for her to have the baby at home if it wasn’t a breach and if she didn’t have so many health complications.”
“Can’t she go to the clinic?”
“She won’t. Trouble with the law,” he mumbled, typing on an email, presumably. “The midwives have been trying to turn the baby, but it’s a no go. I want to help her.” He tapped one last time and sat back. “I feel like she’s family—an outlaw sister. But I was hoping this would be better news.”
“How long until labor?”
“We’ve got three weeks, maybe four. I’m going down there after the Prime. I’ve stashed oxygen and a new monitor with them.”
Thor was so much calmer and way less reckless now that he was making a difference for people. His volunteer work in the clinic meant the world to him.
“Progress on the feather?”
“I’m stumped. It doesn’t match anything online. I mean, it sort of does, but the afterfeather part isn’t quite a pigeon.”
“Looks like we’re taking a trip to the university.”
“Oh, come on. I know you’re keeping me busy so that I don’t worry.”
He stood. “Everything’s important.”
An hour later we were standing in the cool basement of a large university building asking directions to the ornithology lab from a young woman with a short afro and a tie-dyed shirt.
“There isn’t an ornithology lab,” she informed us.
“How about an ornithology grad student?” I asked.
“We’re paying cash for an ID on a feather,” Thor said.
The woman tilted her head quizzically. “How much?”
“How about three hundred?” Thor asked.
She paused in a way that suggested that was either a very good price or a very bad price. “Yeah, you can get an ID for that,” she said finally.
Good price, then.
She led us to a hallway lined with doors, eventually stopping at one that was covered with cartoons that looked like they were cut out of a newspaper. Most of them were about mountain lions.
“He’s a panther guy,” she explained, “but he knows birds. You have to know birds as a panther guy because panthers eat birds.”
Thor seemed amused by that.
The door was opened by a wiry, outdoorsy looking kid who appeared to be no older than sixteen. “What’s the blood on this?” he asked, examining the feather through the baggie.
“We’re running it. Pig’s blood, we think,” Thor explained. “It was left as a prank, so to speak.”
The guy put the feather under a microscope. “Huh. Not…entirely common.”
“I need everything interesting you can tell me about it.” Thor pulled out a wad of twenties and shelled out $300 to the panther guy and another bunch of money to the woman who found him for us.
“This is really generous,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You need your answer in a hurry or something?” the panther guy asked. “I’ll have to run a very specific round of tests on this one. How does seventy-two hours sound?”
“Can you give it to us in the next forty-eight hours?” He slapped a few more bills onto the table.
The panther guy smiled. Nothing like doing business with bank robbers.
CHAPTER FIVE
There was no sign of Zeus or Odin when we got home. But on the upside, no package on the front step.
“Pull out your piece,” Thor said as we stepped out of the car. The guys liked to call their guns pieces.
I pulled my silver pistol from my purse; Thor had his Sig pointed down by his leg.
“From now on, we clear the place all around,” he said, “and clear every room before anything else. No surprises. You know how to do this.”
“Yup.” We’d been training.
Together we headed around the outside of the place, through all the shrubbery and scrub trees that grew on the rocky terrain around the house, a one-story rambler that was two-stories in the back due to the hill. We crept around the tiles of the lower patio, around the sunken hot tub, which was covered at the moment, and past the rustic outdoor shower.
The wind blew fiercely, shifting Thor’s bright blond hair all to one side as the sun flashed against the intense dark of his gun. Between him looking like a Viking Rambo and me with my silver revolver and platinum hair, creeping after him like a mountain goat on high heels, I’m sur
e we made quite the picture. Luckily, the foliage was thick enough that our neighbors couldn’t see us unless they were really scrutinizing.
We slid in the back patio door and went from room to room, always with our backs to a wall and guns out, ensuring each was empty.
By the time we’d cleared the farthest bedroom, we heard a crash up front.
I stiffened.
Another crash. Like something breaking.
Thor and I exchanged glances.
“Should we sneak out the back way?” I asked.
He frowned. “The God Pack doesn’t run,” he said. “Steady and smart,” he said. “Come on. You take low, I’ll take high.”
This meant that we’d appear in a doorway when he gave the signal, me crouched, him standing, both our guns pointing in.
We crept into the side hall. My pulse raced as another crash sounded. Somebody was trashing the place! I caught Thor’s blue gaze. His jaw was set, and he held the gun pointed upward in front of his face. He wasn’t an agent by training like Odin and Zeus, but a life of vicious takeover robberies tends to give a guy certain skills, let’s just say.
We reached the entrance and he nodded. We spun in. I crouched and pointed just in time to see Odin, arms crossed, watching Zeus hurl a vase at the fireplace.
It exploded into a shower of shards.
“Christ!” Thor stood.
“We’re home, honey,” Odin said.
Zeus spun around, green eyes shining as though he were possessed. He still had his blue HVAC contractor jumpsuit on, but even a bulky one-piece couldn’t hide the angry flex of his muscles. “Somebody has the gall to fucking threaten her? Some motherfucker threatens her?”
“Oh, they’ll wish they hadn’t soon enough,” Thor said. “Any location on Bolo?” he asked, wincing as Zeus drove a fist through the wall.
Odin looked on grimly. “No location on Bolo. Yet.”
Thor grunted and holstered his Sig, and I slipped my gun back in my purse, feeling a little freaked out about Zeus, who pulled his fist from the wall and punched again. Why weren’t they stopping him?
Suddenly he swung his gaze to me. “Baby!” Zeus stomped over to me and wrapped me in his strong arms. He smelled like sawdust, motor oil, and man, I hugged him back, pressed against his massive chest, feeling the rapid rise and fall of his breath. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he rasped, kissing my hair. “I didn’t mean it.” He pressed gentle hands onto my cheeks and looked into my eyes. “You okay?”
The Deeper Game (Taken Hostage by Hunky Bank Robbers Book 3) Page 5