Make that years.
“Three-five.” Thor pressed a finger to his ear. He had ear buds in? Listening to music at a time like this?
“What?” the big green-eyed one asked.
“Nothing. Traffic.”
Aha, on the police scanner. Suddenly I came to my senses—I was missing a couple of major destroy-Hank-Vernon opportunities here.
I caught Thor’s eye. I held up a hand—stop—and put my finger to my lips, then pointed to the listening device, there to catch employee grumbling. We all knew about it, though of course we weren’t supposed to.
“Zeus.” Thor pointed to it.
“Please don’t shoot me,” I warbled in my best fake-scared voice. “Please.” I pointed to a section of bills—fifties. I ripped off the seal, displaying the trackers for them to see, and I pointed to all the bundles that had trackers. They had little red marks and we were supposed to leave them there in case of robbery. I felt like a lady on the shopping channel demonstrating the features of a new product. If they had a shopping channel for badass robbers in zombie masks who named themselves for gods.
Thor and Zeus exchanged glances. I expected them to cast the trackers onto the ground, but green-eyed Zeus pocketed them. Clever. He was getting sexier by the second. I also liked that these guys had named themselves after gods. It demonstrated confidence.
And I had something more to show them.
The Vernons had started investing in gemstones as a hedge against the economy; Hank and his sister had recently acquired a collection of loose diamonds at an auction, and they were supposed to bring them to one of the family-owned branches with safety deposit boxes, but if there was one thing you could count on, it was Hank’s laziness. My gaze fell on the strongbox shoved way back on the floor. Could the stones still be in there?
I hesitated—if I showed them the diamonds out of the blue, the Vernons would know I’d gone out of my way to help the robbers. Yet, I so wanted the robbers to have them. This was the Vernon’s private property; the diamonds wouldn’t be FDIC insured.
I cleared my throat and, imitating a man best I could, I barked. “What else is in here?” The two of them looked at me like I was crazy. I winked. Then, in my regular voice, I said, “What do you mean what else? There’s nothing else!” I knelt and pulled out the strong box, opened it. A mound of velvet bags sat inside. Yes! The diamonds. Still there.
I let out a cry. “Ow! Please! What more do you want? What do you want from me?” Of course they weren’t hurting me, I just wanted it to sound that way for the recording. No doubt I seemed totally crazy, like I had a split personality, one half threatening the other, but hey, you don’t get that many chances to screw the Vernons.
I yanked out one of the bags. Zeus gestured with his gun and I emptied it into my hand, then looked up in mock surprise. Diamonds.
Thor eyed Zeus, then turned to me said, “You show us everything there is to see now or we’ll kill you! Now! Everything!”
I nodded. Thor was into it.
Zeus pocketed the diamonds while Thor yelled at me some more. “What’s in that box? You fuckin’ show me!”
“I don’t want to die,” I said in my most weepy way. I felt like part of the gang.
They grabbed up every last diamond.
Thor stiffened, put his finger to his ear. “Suspicious activity, this address.”
The third robber burst in. “Guy out there dropped a dime.”
“Fuck,” Zeus said.
The three of them looked at me. It was like they’d all gotten the same inspiration at the same time, or a group communication from the mothership.
“We don’t take hostages,” Zeus said.
What? Hostages?
“No choice,” the scary one said.
“Seconded.” Roughly, Thor grabbed my arm.
Hostages? Shit! I tried to think of what happened to hostages in various movies I’ve seen, if they usually got killed or not. Then I remembered—they’re movies. Anyway, I was on their side. Surely they understood that.
“Odin!” Zeus threw a bag to the crazy one, then another.
Odin. Another god.
Thor grabbed my arm and put a gun to my head, and we ran out of the safe and down the back hall; they seemed to know the layout as well as I did.
The gun freaked me out. “You don’t have to be so…you know…”
“Yes I do,” Thor said as we emerged out onto the parking lot.
Odin had something in his hand, like a video game control. He punched a button, and just like that, an earth-shaking boom ripped through the air.
Flames blazed from a car in the parking lot.
Another explosion came from the other side of the lot. Flashes. Smoke gushed into the air from all directions.
“Hey!” I said. “Be careful—that bank’s full of innocent people!”
“Nobody’s getting hurt,” Thor said, dragging me along. “It’s called fireworks.”
Under the cover of smoke, we headed into the alley, toward a white van with Romano’s Catering emblazoned on the side, or at least I think it said Romano’s Catering. You could barely see shit. Somebody slid a door open. Thor pulled me into the back seat.
Eyes shut! Now!” Thor commanded.
I complied. Doors were slammed and we were off. I heard a sound like ripping fabric.
“I’m going to blindfold you. We can’t have you seeing our faces, or we’ll have to kill you.”
“Shit,” I said. “Okay.” I told myself this was getting serious, but it still felt thrilling. I assumed that Odin and Zeus were up front; no doubt they’d taken off their masks. Definitely less conspicuous to drive from the scene of a robbery sans mask.
The sound of sirens. I braced as the van turned.
“It’s okay,” Thor reassured me, knotting the cloth at the back of my head without getting any of my hair caught, a skill that impressed me. For somebody who didn’t typically take hostages, he was pretty handy with a blindfold. “None of us wants to kill anyone,” he said. “So let’s stay strangers. We’ll let you off once we know we won’t need you, got it?”
“Got it.”
“Hands.”
I put out my hands and he bound them up with efficient movements…for a bandit unused to hostage taking. The sirens grew louder, cranking the air of tension inside the van. Where were we?
“Fuck,” somebody said.
Were the sirens coming for us?
The sirens passed.
“Okay, then,” Thor mumbled.
Whichever robber was driving—Zeus or Odin—he was driving sanely, which pleased me. I figured the biggest danger would come in with a high-speed chase at this point.
Romano’s was an actual restaurant a few towns over, but I doubted these guys were from Romano’s. They were smarter than that.
Train crossing bells. I felt the van slow. Low voices up front. I could feel the rumble through the seat.
“Are we held up by a train?” I asked loudly.
A door creaked open. What was happening? Had somebody bailed from the van?
“Because if we are,” I continued, “there’s a bridge you can take.”
“You think we’re idiots?” Odin barked—I could tell it was him, because Zeus had a deep voice, and Thor was right next to me. Also, Odin had just a whiff of an accent. “I think we know the logistics of the area,” Odin added.
“Just trying to be helpful.”
“Don’t be,” Odin said. “We are awesome at this, and we don’t need your fucking input.” Odin’s accent involved saying the ‘g’ just a little bit too hard, so that it sounded like your fucking g-input.
A door slammed and we squealed out—a U-turn from the feel of it.
Softly, Thor said, “Somebody needed to get rid of those trackers.”
“Oh,” I said. So they’d thrown them into a boxcar.
We continued on, saying nothing.
“I want you to know something,” I announced. “I won’t be any trouble. My main mission
in life is to screw the owner of that bank. And I’m not talking sex. Even if I saw your faces, which I swear I haven’t, I would never tell. I want you to get away.”
“Can you shut her up?” Odin said, and started up a hushed conversation with Zeus in the front.
“Fine,” I whispered, feeling annoyed, nervous, and excited all at once.
“Don’t worry about him,” Thor said to me. “We’ll find a place to let you out and you’ll have fifteen minutes of fame.” I felt the seat depress next to me—Thor, sliding closer. He lowered his voice to a hushed, sexy tone. “We have to find the right sort of place, though. There’s an art to every part of this.” I liked his familiar tone. Like he was confiding in me.
I nodded. I couldn’t see their faces, but I was starting to differentiate them by personality as well as voice. Thor was smart and easy to get on with, and we seemed to be on a certain wavelength; he was the one who’d immediately understood why I was talking in different voices in the safe and played along. Zeus was the big silent green-eyed robber who oozed masculine hotness. Odin was the bad boy techie, and he had that accent and a high opinion of their smarts. The three of them seemed sane and even kind of cool, yet excitingly dangerous, being that they were bank robbers. I rather liked the combination.
Sirens in the distance. “Oh, no!” I said.
“It’s fine,” Zeus said. I imagined him there in the front, his green eyes and solid presence, utterly in control of everything.
Thor said, “Why don’t you tell me why you hate your boss so much.”
I rested my head back on the seat, trying to think where to start.
“That bad, huh?” Thor said.
“If it wasn’t for Hank Vernon, my parents would still be around,” I said.
The hush in the car was palpable.
“I’m sorry,” Thor said softly.
“It’s been five years,” I said. “I’m…” getting used to it wasn’t quite right. More like struggling to live with it. “I’m okay.”
I told them about how the whole thing started, with the Vernons’ quest to take our farm, run us off the land, and lease it to a company that mined frack sand, which was way more lucrative than the mortgage their bank held. I told them about how amazing my mom and dad had been, standing so strong against the Vernons. Like scruffy warriors, my folks. That farm had been their life.
I took a breath. “Right after I graduated from high school, we had a fire in one of the barns and missed some payments, and that let Hank Vernon change the mortgage terms. He doubled the payments. We got so behind, we were in so much debt.”
I told the guys about them leaving for a two-month gig on a fishing boat in Alaska. The money from it would get us caught up. Lambing season had ended, and my three younger sisters and I were old enough to run the place over summer.
I swallowed, remembering the last time I saw my mom and dad. “Two weeks in, the boat went over. They were killed.”
“I’m sorry,” Thor said.
“Thanks,” I said. Such a small word for how much I missed them. “There was a bit of insurance money that let us catch up, but…”
“Your parents were gone.”
“Right,” I whispered.
“And you stayed.”
“I had to keep it going.”
Back before all that, my plan had been to leave Wisconsin to start my life—I had this whole round-the-world bungee jumping and rock climbing trek dreamed up. I was going to pick up odd jobs along the way and maybe finish college somewhere with mountains, or at least near a ski jump. But after that, it was all about keeping the farm. Not letting the Vernons win. I usually tried not to think of the life I’d planned before the boat accident. The secret truth is that I’d always hated the plodding predictability of farm life.
Thor said, “Bungee jumping is pretty dangerous, you know.”
“So are guns.”
Thor laughed softly. “So you managed to keep it. Good for you.”
I nodded. “We expanded our cheese making operations, and started making these awesome wool comforters that we sell online.”
“Maybe I’ll buy one,” he said.
“Oh, please do. May I suggest the organic Paris Hilton Deluxe comforter?”
“Yeah?”
I snorted. “I’m just kidding. That one costs twenty thousand dollars. It’s kind of a pie-in-the-sky product that we made to cheer ourselves up. Like, Hey, maybe Paris would buy it. Our normal comforters are a few hundred bucks. They’re very well made.”
“Hey, you exchanging phone numbers back there?” Odin grated. “Can it.”
I smiled, picturing nights sitting around the kitchen table with my sisters, freaking out over the latest vet bill or whatever. Times like those, one of us would say, ‘It’s okay because Paris Hilton will be buying these comforters for every room in her house soon, including one for her dog. Isn’t that great?’ It was our favorite inside sister joke.
“So why the hell are you working at his bank?” Thor whispered, interrupting my thoughts. “If you hate him so much?”
“Buying time. There’s a balloon payment coming up that we’ll never be able to handle. Hank said it could be delayed if I worked at the bank. But, you know—wink wink—we’re talking extracurricular duties. Which I’ve avoided because, let’s just say, no way.”
“I’m glad we hit his bank,” Thor said.
“Oh, me, too. It’s the best thing ever. Did you notice how nobody pulled the silent alarm? Everyone there hates him.”
“Wouldn’t’ve worked anyway,” Odin said from the front. “We took it out.”
“Would you say that’s true of all FCNs?” Zeus asked. “Wanting to bring down that owner?”
“Not as much as the branches Hank Vernon visits. They have 132 branches across the Midwest, dude. Vernon can’t terrorize them all. Hey, you know what would be awesome?” I fumbled for Thor’s arm and clutched it. “If you gave me one of those diamonds. That could go a long way toward helping us protect the farm. I could pay the entire balloon with one of those!”
Thor laughed softly. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s so funny? I showed you where they were. I could have it cut up and fenced or whatever. Isn’t that what you guys’ll do?”
“But the difference is that you would never get away with it, and we will,” Thor said.
“Oh, you will.” I let go of his arm. “I won’t, but the big, bad, god-named robbers will.”
“That’s right,” he said. “’Cause we’ve got skills, baby.”
I smiled. “You’ve got skillz.”
“Amazing skills,” Thor said. “Like you’ve never seen.”
Something went tight in my belly. I was finding this Thor sexy and I didn’t even know what he looked like. Maybe that was part of it—the unknown. I said, “And you’re unable to impart these skills?”
Thor lowered his voice to a silky rumble. “We don’t impart them to just anybody.”
“Because your skills are so very god-like?”
He shifted next to me. “Very,” he whispered.
My face went red. “And you would never deign to impart them to the likes of me?” Was I flirting with this guy?
Yes!
“And why would we do that?” he breathed into my ear. “Why would we ever, ever do such a thing? What would persuade us?”
I can guarantee the subject was no longer diamonds. “Perhaps because you are benevolent gods,” I said.
“Well, we can be benevolent, it’s true. Benevolent beyond your wildest dreams. But we can also become quite wrathful.”
Heat speared through my core.
Somebody in the front cleared his throat. Warningly.
Thor seemed to straighten up. Were Zeus and Odin the bosses of him?
Anyway, I straightened up, too. Because, hello, I was blindfolded and flirting with one of the robbers who’d taken me hostage.
Thor asked me more questions. It was so easy to talk with him, and soon I found myself descri
bing the book of humorous essays I was writing, ironically entitled “Adventures in Sheep Farming,” about life on a sheep farm. Someday I wanted to have real adventures and write about them, but it didn’t seem quite the thing to divulge at the moment. “Maybe ‘Adventures in Sheep Farming’ will be a best-seller and save the farm,” I joked. “You never know.”
“Your boss won’t be foreclosing on your fucking-g farm today,” Odin snarled from up front, somewhat threateningly. I liked it, because his threatening attitude seemed aimed at Hank.
“Why not?”
“That would look pretty fucking-g bad in the media, don’t you think?” Odin said. “You get kidnapped from this guy’s bank, and he decides to yank the family farm? You’ll be able to milk this for at least a few weeks.”
I sat up and leaned forward toward Odin. “You’re right.”
“Fuck.” Thor yanked me back and scootched me down. “Stay low or I’ll put you on the floor.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, feeling happy and hopeful for the farm. I could milk this hostage thing!
In a matter of minutes, these three had accomplished what I’d been dreaming of doing for years: they’d royally messed with Hank Vernon and derailed the foreclosure.
“Or what if I stayed gone after you released me?” I said. “Get a job in nowheresville and make them sweat. As long as I’m gone, the farm would be safe.”
“Yeah,” Odin said sarcastically. “You’d be picked up in about two seconds.”
“Well, I guess once you let me go, you don’t really have a say,” I said. “Maybe I’ll try to stay hidden.”
“Don’t play games.” Thor’s voice sounded soft, but rumbly, somehow. A silky kind of gravelly. “This shit’s not as easy as it looks. You’ve been cool, so that’s the advice I’m giving you. Staying out of jail is worth more than money or a farm. We’ll dump you somewhere, and you just play your hand straight.”
It was here I got my new idea. “Okay, this might sound like a radical notion,” I said, “but, how about if I tag along with you guys?”
A mean bark of laughter came from up front. Odin.
“No way,” Thor said. “It’s just…no way.”
“I could be the wheel man. I’m a freaking amazing driver. Let me stay your hostage.”
Make Me: Twelve Tales of Dark Desire Page 203
