The Deeper Game (Taken Hostage by Hunky Bank Robbers Book 3)

by Annika Martin

  “Hello, miss. I just noticed it was you.” He smiled the smile of a man confident of his charms. In some universe, maybe. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “I can’t talk,” I said, all terse and businesslike.

  He didn’t leave.

  My heart pounded. How could he not get it? He was in the scene. Not only in the scene, a highly trained military man and security guy.

  A cop car crawled down the street, slowly.

  “Catch you later,” I said, a pretty direct message. “Okay?”

  He launched into something about the hookup for the front door camera and a rain shield, whatever that was. He wanted to swing by and check out this rain shield. He thought it could short out the whatever thingy, though to give him his due, he used more technical sounding words than that.

  It wasn’t his words that set the cold, cold feeling spreading through me.

  It was me knowing it was him, suddenly. I knew it deep in my bones.

  Manning was the feather guy.

  He seemed to recognize right when I got it. I tried to put up the window, but he shoved a gun muzzle in there. Shit!

  A scratching at the door. He was picking the lock.

  I could practically feel the blood drain from my cheeks.

  With shaking hands, I grabbed the keys, fit them into the ignition, and started the engine. He wouldn’t shoot me—not out here. Before I could throw it into drive, he was sliding into the passenger seat, gun on me, end fat with a silencer.

  I grabbed the phone, thinking to give the abort code.

  “Don’t you dare, bitch.” In a flash, Manning had the phone. But it gave me the opportunity to grab the barrel of his gun. Quickly I got both hands involved, twisting it so that it pointed out the windshield. My arms and hands strained, trying to get the gun. He started forcing it around slowly. I put all my might into not letting him, but he was too strong, too big. I let go when he pointed it back at me.

  “That was stupid. You want me to pull the trigger?” he asked, close to me now, breath stinky and warm.

  “You’d get arrested.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. They might be a lot more interested in what’s happening inside the Prime. If I were to tell them. Who knows? Maybe I’ll say I’m here stopping you.”

  My blood went cold.

  “I’ll say you’re part of the gang,” I said. “And that I’m here to stop you.”

  “Is that your story? Because I’m willing to take that chance. I think they’ll believe an ex-Navy SEAL over the word of a Stockholm Syndrome hostage, but you go ahead and roll those dice.”

  “Thor.”

  “Yes, that was me. He’ll be stuck in traffic right about now. It’ll be at least three hours before he figures this out, but we’ll be gone. And if you do anything fucked up whatsoever, I’m going to have the cops in there so fast—you understand?”

  I glared over his shoulder at the sidewalk. That was all the answer he’d get from me.

  “Hands on the wheel.”

  I complied, mind whirling with fear.

  He grabbed my purse and rummaged through. Going through my purse. Oh, I wanted this guy to die.

  My heart raced as I discarded one idea for vanquishing him after another. He had me hostage in the worst way. He could bring us all down so fast.

  He pulled out a stick of lipstick and handed it to me.

  “You’re going to write a message,” he said. “On the rearview mirror.”

  “What?” I asked, horrified.

  “I can’t take it anymore. I’m sorry,” he dictated. “I’d have you write more, but the space is a bit limited.”

  Just like their first girlfriend, Venus—she’d written that lipstick message on the bathroom mirror just before she went off and killed herself. “I won’t do that to them.”

  “I think you will.”

  “Fuck you,” I hissed, thinking lavishly of the guns strapped up and down my leg.

  “That’s exactly what Venus said.”

  My mouth fell open in shock.

  He made a big mock frown, more a smile-frown. “All this time, the poor tortured gods.”

  My heart pounded. A/V Robert Manning had killed Venus? She hadn’t killed herself after all? My guys had felt responsible for her death. It had nearly broken them—especially Zeus. All those years of guilt over her suicide. I wanted to gouge out this asshole’s eyes for what he’d put my guys through.

  “They know I’d never write that. They won’t buy it.”

  “That’s not the point I’m trying to make to them. The point, the lesson I have for them, is that they could’ve prevented this if they hadn’t let their emotions get away with them. If only they’d been paying more attention,” he said mockingly. “If only they hadn’t been so focused on vengeance.”

  The horror sunk in deep. That was what they’d say. They’d blame themselves.

  “They let vengeance blind them,” he continued, “even as their precious Isis begged them to pull their heads out of their asses. Vengeance never sleeps. Can’t even take a nap apparently.”

  So he’d wired the truck.

  He pressed the gun against my arm. “Write it. Or do I have to move to plan B?”

  The chess moves between us became preternaturally clear at this point. I’d write the message to buy time and keep him from raising the alarm about my guys inside the bank.

  He’d make me go somewhere with him in his vehicle, leaving the empty SUV with the message in it. And I’d go, just to get us the hell out of the area. Because the alternative was getting my guys busted and probably killed, and we were a pack. We watched out for each other.

  We protected each other with everything.

  And it wasn’t as if I were helpless: I was pretty dramatically armed. But Manning would know that, too. He was smart—obviously smarter than any of us had realized. He had tactics, being a SEAL and all. And insider information.

  But every one of those moves was the lesser of two evils. It was a decision tree I had to follow his way if I loved my guys.

  So I wrote the lipstick note to buy time, hands shaking with anger. I got out of our big tinted-windows Navigator and walked with him a half a block down to his pickup truck, even though getting into a bad guy’s vehicle is the worst thing you can do, odds-wise.

  But he didn’t know me. He’d always looked down on me. He would underestimate me. That was my trump card.

  He made me take the driver’s seat, gun trained at my head. “Drive natural, or you are splat,” he said.

  “A creepy thing that a creepy guy says.”

  He gave me that horrible smile frown.

  A creepy guy with stupid hair, I wanted to say, but I needed to be smart, not antagonistic.

  I pulled out. He hadn’t made me give up my weapons. Was it possible he was such a creep that he couldn’t imagine a little lady besting him? By the time we were about four blocks away, I was really thinking about trying something, but he was watching me too closely.

  “And they don’t need your fucking lessons,” I said.

  “But they do,” Manning said. “I’ve been with them all along. I’m like their sensei. Do you know what a sensei is?”

  “From the context of that sentence, I’d go with A/V loser asshole.”

  The fist across my jaw was sure and swift, and the pain blinded me for a split second. I drove, vision fuzzing with rage. Blood oozed inside my mouth.

  “You mean that’s not what it means?” I asked, refusing to let him think he’d cowed me.

  “A sensei is a wise teacher. I was fighting a private war long before your three masters were.”

  “They’re not my masters,” I bit out.

  “Technically, your masters are excellent at what they do, but I feel their emotional maturity isn’t where it should be.”

  “Their emotional maturity?” He jerked and I stiffened, waiting for a strike that didn’t come, thankfully.

  He laughed, like that was a clever gambit or something. “I see yo
u fancy yourself as something of a teacher, too. Such as you are. Turn here,” he said, indicating an on ramp. We were heading onto the highway east, out of LA. “Your point about vengeance the other day, about an agency not being able to beg for mercy, I felt it was a cogent one.”

  “You have microphones throughout our house?” The idea horrified me.

  He smiled. “Not microphones—your masters would find them in a second. I tweaked the security apparatus in the house to serve as a pickup for the parabolic mikes outside.

  I frowned. “And you framed that guy, Travis.”

  “And Ingvey before him. If it hadn’t been for their lust for that bank, they would’ve seen through it. Odin almost did, but he couldn’t quite let go of his need for vengeance. That’s this lesson, you see. Your masters need to operate from the point of logic, not emotion.”

  Psycho, I thought.

  “I’d say exhibit A of that point is on your arm. Everything with that tattoo is wrong. It’s no wonder he had to tie you.”

  It took me just a few minutes to get it. “You watch, too.”

  I took his sneer as a yes.

  My lip where he’d hit me felt huge and swollen as I drove on with tense perfection, scrambling to think. Rush hour traffic was light for once. Like a horrible miracle that I didn’t want. “You’re sick.”

  “I’m just glad I don’t have A/V stuff up in the hills where they took you the other night, though I heard them planning it. That sounded like some fucked-up shit. I find it disgusting when you masturbate to that cartoon porn. You’re as deviant as they are.”

  My face filled with heat. I so wanted him to die!

  He directed me back onto a surface street after a while. I drove farther and farther out, past familiar strip malls full of familiar chain stores and then past unfamiliar strip malls full of familiar chain stores.

  I wondered if they’d discovered the note yet. Of course they wouldn’t have; it would take them a long time to pull apart that bank. Two more hours at least, probably three or four. It was possible Thor would get back and find it first. My heart hurt, thinking of how distraught and enraged they’d feel. How helpless. I had to find a way to survive this. To get back to them.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Drive.”

  I heard somewhere, I think it was on the Internet, that you should crash a vehicle when you had somebody making you drive someplace, that the driver’s side airbag would save you. But then again, it was on the Internet. I wasn’t going to bank everything on something I thought I’d read online.

  “If they really cared about you, they would’ve called off the job,” he said.

  Okay, maybe I would crash the truck.

  We drove past a lamppost with a massive, solid-looking base that would’ve been a good candidate. At the last moment, I couldn’t do it. It turns out that crashing a vehicle isn’t the easiest thing to make yourself do.

  “I heard Odin and Zeus talking about how uncomfortable they were that Sleazy Travis didn’t confess,” Manning continued. “At least their instincts are spot on. Too bad they didn’t heed them. The call of vengeance was just a little too compelling. They’ll never make that mistake again after today, and that is my lesson for them.” He crossed his legs, like we were having this casual and pleasant chat. “They discussed it a ton when you weren’t around. Deep down, they really weren’t sure it was Travis—I could tell. Zeus didn’t tell you this, but he kept having the instinct that they were missing something, and that they should maybe investigate further, but eventually he decided it was just his enjoyment of investigation speaking. He was a federale back in the day, but of course, you know that. Even investigators lie to themselves. Love is blind, as they say. Tell me, Isis,” Manning continued, modulating his voice a few octaves upwards for extra creepiness, “do you want them to love you?”

  “They already do.”

  “Do they? I’m not so sure.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, all cool. “You’re just the fucking A/V guy. You’re a camera and tape recorder, but you’re not really there. I feel their love.”

  “I don’t know about that, considering they’d rather be sitting in heating ducts and stealing things that don’t belong to them than protecting you.”

  I sniffed, like he was so beneath everything, but if both Zeus and Odin had been having serious ongoing doubts about Sleazy Travis being the feather guy, how could they have continued with the robbery?

  “We both know what they really love.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  He smiled.

  I frowned at the road. They were willing to die for each other, and sure, they were willing to die for me, but Manning had a point. Vengeance was underneath it all. The foundation of everything. My eyes heated with tears.

  “Poor Isis,” he said in his creepy tone. “Your robbers have only one true love.”

  “Jealous?”

  He looked smug.

  Jealous? It was a sad retort. I was starting to feel like I was in third grade, desperate for a zinger but only coming up with stuff like, No, YOU’RE stupid.

  I tried not to lose hope, but I had to face facts: I was alone now, and I needed to do something. Driving into a post was foolish, but I had the feeling that at the end of this drive I might long desperately for one foolish option as opposed to, say, an insanely foolish one, or five suicidal ones.

  We were going beyond the suburbs and onto the exurbs, now. I gazed at the signs, ignoring the feeling of him monitoring my expression. I hated it, and I hated him.

  “Almost there,” he said as we passed a sign for Holden Corners.

  The breath went out of me.

  Holden quarry—that’s where Venus’s body had been found. That’s where they thought she’d been from.

  He smiled at my reaction. “The good news is that they are able to learn the lessons I offer them. They learned the lesson of Venus. To refrain from compromising their excellence in service of their libido. She almost got them caught on the Keustonville job some years back. I knew then that I had to act. To show them not everyone has their strength.” He pointed. “Turn here.”

  I turned onto a street where the streetlights rose up out of fat concrete bases; it was here I decided to go for foolish. I was part of a takeover bank robbery gang. I could do it. At a yellow light I gunned the engine and jerked the wheel, aiming the nearest lamp base. It was like a slow motion dream, watching us careen toward it. I could feel Manning’s shock as he grabbed the wheel, trying to wrest control, but I had two hands and he had just one. The other had a gun.

  Suddenly he hit me in the chin with it, a shattering pain that so stunned me that I lost my edge—just enough for him to take control of the wheel and avoid the crash. Stars dazzled around in front of my eyes.

  We were back on the road.

  I let up off the gas. The truck slowed. Cars behind us honked. I was done driving right.

  He pressed his gun to my belly. “You wanna drive shot? Is that what you want?”

  I thought about it. Would he really do it? Something needed to interrupt this madness.

  “My plan still works with you bleeding out. You think I can’t shoot you and take over? It’s not my favorite option, but I’ll do it.”

  I sped back up and drove with relative normalcy. This guy would shoot. My chin throbbed even more than my lip.

  “Kudos, however,” he said. “Few people can actually commit to a deliberate crash like you did—it goes against their self-preservation. Most people can’t bring themselves to do it.”

  And here I thought it was creepy when people knew too many facts about Smurf dolls.

  “But if you do it again,” he continued, “I will shoot you. If you move either of your hands from the steering wheel, that’s an instant shot, too. You understand? And FYI, I know what you’re packing, Isis.”

  Crap.

  Ten minutes later he was directing me into the quarry parking lot. Seven at night. Deserted. “Stop here,
but keep your hands on the wheel. I have no aversion to shooting you and throwing your body off the cliff. It’s not like they’re really going to think you killed yourself. Your death here is more for the sake of symmetry than verisimilitude.” He paused, seeming proud of his smart-sounding sentence.

  It made me want to gouge out his eyes.

  He made me put the truck in park and directed me to knit my fingers on top of my head, at which point he patted his creep hands up and down my legs, efficiently and clinically removing the weapons from my thigh and ankle holsters. I was glad he didn’t touch me in a sexual manner, but it also showed what a fucking pro he was. Manning wasn’t somebody who could be distracted in that way, even if I had the stomach for it, which I didn’t.

  “What do you think they’re doing now?” he asked, taking my last gun out of my ankle holster, my mini nine. “What do you think?”

  “I think they’re coming after me,” I said.

  “What do you really think?”

  I pictured them ravishing the safety deposit boxes. Enjoying the riches. Filling bags. Thor would be nearing the Mexican border. “I think they’re coming to tear you the fuck apart.” It was more a wish than a possibility, but I wished it like crazy.

  “They don’t know you’re gone yet, that’s what I think. I have alerts set up for when they get into that SUV. Don’t you wish you could hear them when they discover the message you wrote?”

  “No.”

  He grinned. “I do. And I’ll get my wish because it’ll be recorded. They’ll want to rip me apart. You can console yourself with that. They’ll get a real vengeance hit off that. They’ll drive here pretty fucking fast. I’d let you stick around to listen to them discover your message and what they say on the drive, but I don’t like to cut things that close. Suffice to say it’ll be entertaining. Nothing like the grand finale, though. Don’t you wish you could be a fly on the stone when they discover your body in the quarry right where Venus’s body was?”

  I looked away, chin and lip both throbbing like crazy. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction.