The Most Wanted (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers #4)

by Annika Martin

  Thor’s lips quirked. “We feed her lots of nice things.” I felt my cheeks go flame red, and I kicked him under the table.

  Odin passed Galvano a map of Los Angeles. “We have reason to believe the Corvette crash is linked to the wedding gift you were planning on giving Diego.”

  “He’s not getting it anymore,” Don Galvano said.

  “Right,” Zeus said, stuffing a fry into his mouth. “We suspect that was the desired result of crashing the Corvette, to get you mad at Diego. Somebody didn’t want that territory to get turned over.”

  “Barely anyone knew it would happen,” he said. “Maria, my lawyer, Stan doing the collections.”

  “What about your lawyer and Stan? Would either of them have a problem with it?”

  “No way,” Galvano said. “Stan was going to get a promotion. Lawyer gets paid either way. Maria…she wouldn’t do anything to nix it.”

  Zeus asked him to mark the exact territory. Galvano drew a careful square around the part he’d aimed to give. He took off soon after.

  Zeus pointed at the map. “Can’t help but notice that Handsome Jack’s is in here.”

  “Could be a coincidence,” Thor said. “Handsome Jack is into everything.”

  “But Nico lied about the wedding gift—he specifically wanted us to think there was no gift of territory, or at least that he thought there was none, and Handsome Jack is his alibi,” Zeus said. “These connections mean something. We just don’t see what yet.”

  They formulated a plan. Zeus would speak with Stan and see whether Stan told anybody. I was to return to the room with Thor and Odin and call Maria to see whether she told anybody else. Then we’d head to Handsome Jack’s.

  We paid and left before dessert had arrived. Zeus dropped us off at the hotel while he went to visit Stan. We used our key cards to go in the side door and headed into the stairway, but I stopped them. “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “I need something chocolaty.”

  “We’ll send up.”

  “But all they ever have is fancy cake stuff in room service.” I dug in my purse and found a buck. “My needs are simple. A Kit Kat. I saw one in the machines out…” I pointed at the pool area with a beseeching glance.

  “Fuck if we’re walking through that lobby together,” Odin said.

  “We’ll go out the side,” I said. “Would that be more prudent?”

  Odin sighed.

  “Chocolate and wafers…”

  Odin rolled his eyes. “Come on.” He led us down into the basement through an employees-only door.

  “You couldn’t find a freakier route than this?” I joked. “We could scale down from the roof disguised as tiger snake devil blowtorches.”

  He grabbed my hair, and in a growly voice, he said, “And after you have your dessert, we will consume ours—slowly and thoroughly. Can you guess what our dessert will be?”

  “Umm…my tears of utter pleasure?”

  He tightened his grip on my hair, and a wild thrill shot through me. I was crazy with adrenaline, and suddenly all I could think of was fucking. He yanked again, pulling me up to his face, so that our lips were a hair’s distance from each other. “Close enough.”

  “Okay,” I breathed.

  He pushed me onward on our freakily circuitous route out to the machine by the pool, which was closed. But a hotel pool area was no match for my kinky bank robbers. Odin picked the lock and let me in.

  Thor went with me to the bright, beckoning machine while Odin continued on to the gate that ran along the street. The gate had that plastic-type stuff woven into it to create a sheen of privacy.

  “You want anyth—”

  I didn’t finish the word due to Thor’s hand clapping over my mouth. Odin was speeding toward us, silently and smoothly, gun down at his thigh, and when I angled my eyes up, I saw Thor had his out, pointing upward.

  Odin pointed at me, and then down, which meant stay. I nodded.

  He and Thor headed to the gate and crouched down, watching. I stuffed my buck in my pocket and clutched my purse, making myself small against the wall like they’d taught me.

  Thor came back past me like I wasn’t even there and disappeared back into the hotel. This was full-on secret-agent mode.

  Odin was picking the lock on that side. When he finished, he put a finger to his lips and beckoned me over.

  I snuck over and crouched next to him. He put his lips to my ear and whispered, “The red sedan is ZOX. I made them when one of them stepped out. Watch us take this motherfucker down, baby.”

  My heart pounded.

  A car slid up from the far corner. “That’s Thor,” he whispered. “You stay crouched until we signal, and then you get the fuck into the driver’s seat. You drive.”

  I nodded.

  Thor had made his usual muscle-car selection—a souped-up Mustang with a blower in front. It was a car made for speed, a car made for chases, a car made for getting laid by hot girls in the most cherished fantasies of teenaged boys. My heart melted a little.

  I swallowed as Odin slipped through the now-open gate door, moving fluidly across the street and then up along a row of parked cars and up to the ZOX car.

  Was that Agent Denko in there? It was too dark out to see inside his car.

  Odin slammed his gun into the window, breaking it. I could see movement in there as Odin pulled the door open. A chaos of hands.

  In a flash Odin was hauling the man out.

  Agent Denko.

  Thor zoomed up, got out, and ran around to help Odin.

  My blood raced. I’d never seen Agent Denko in person, but his image was burned into my mind from my guys constantly showing me photos of him—they wanted me to be able to recognize him if I ever saw him. We even had a few photos of him up on our refrigerator.

  And here he was. Agent Denko of ZOX.

  Maybe it was because I’d stared at his picture so often, but he seemed mythical, somehow. Larger than life.

  Like looking at Mickey Mouse stuff and then you go to Disney World and actually meet Mickey Mouse, and suddenly you’re face to face with this actual giant mouse with a massive smiling face and three-fingered hands.

  Except Denko was way more frightening.

  Odin pulled Denko into the back with him, giving him all kinds of not-fucking-around orders like Fingers laced on top of your head! and Don’t you fucking-g move a muscle. He promised to fucking-g end him in some painful and colorful ways.

  Thor got out and waved me around into the driver’s seat.

  I scurried across and slid in. Thor went over to Denko’s car. He flicked out a switchblade, blond hair swinging, and bent over, ruthlessly jabbing the thing into the tire.

  I was used to seeing Zeus and Odin be destructive, but there was something particularly exquisite about Thor, with his beautiful teen-idol looks, playing the gutter dog. He straightened up and beelined back, eyeing me steadily. And maybe I was an irrevocably depraved person by this point, especially considering that Odin had the most dangerous individual possible right there in the back seat, but I was looking at Thor thinking, We are so going to fuck tonight.

  Thor slammed into the passenger seat. “Go, go, go!”

  I peeled out in first, beating the thing a little, then quickly shifted to second. Growing up on a farm, you start driving a stick shift early and often. My driving freed up Odin and Thor to concentrate on Denko.

  “Keep straight. Ten blocks,” Thor said calmly, holding his silver Sig where Denko could see it, letting it rest all casual and badass in a way that might increase his hotness, were a person depraved in that way. “Then turn on Suncrest.”

  I glanced in the rearview, taking a good look at the agent who had been following my guys for so long, part of the organization that was responsible for so much of their misery. Our misery.

  He had a salt-and-pepper crew cut, a pleasant diamond-shaped face, and nice eyes, which he currently held in a kind of movie-star-style squint, though I was guessing he was more doing th
at out of pain than out of any attempt to look like Brad Pitt. A cut on his lip bled into the gray scruff of his chin. He was maybe forty.

  “You don’t get to look at her—not even in a mirror,” Odin said.

  Denko cast his gaze downward.

  “I’m going to take your phone and the rest of your weapons,” Odin said. “If you try to stop me, one of us will shoot you in the head, and then we’ll take your stuff. A lot easier, but we don’t want your brains all over the car, and certainly not on Isis’s pretty hair. I mean, can you blame us?”

  Denko glanced darkly at the seat in front of him, but said nothing about my pretty hair.

  Odin got busy taking things from the man’s pockets and elsewhere. I couldn’t see much, and it was probably a good thing. I needed to concentrate on the road. Five blocks to the turn.

  A stolen car and a hostage. We had a hostage.

  Odin scrolled through Denko’s phone. “This is one way to solve mysteries. Just put out the word that we’re on the case and see who fucking turns us in to ZOX.”

  “You won’t get anything off of there,” Denko said.

  Odin opened the window and threw it out. “Will I get anything out of you?”

  “Will you?” Denko asked. “It’s one of your specialties, Rashad.”

  I stiffened. Rashad? That was Odin’s name? I’d never known his name.

  When they first took me hostage, my guys didn’t tell me their names, not wanting to put me in additional danger. And then the weeks turned into months, and I made the choice never to ask. It was a gesture of faith in our life, in our future. I’d wanted to know about their pasts, but I wanted our life to be a haven from the demons of those pasts.

  And here one was, in the back seat of the car.

  Rashad. I rolled his name around in my mind. It was a beautiful name. I wanted to tell him that, but not in front of Agent Denko.

  “You could get a mother to give up her own baby,” Denko continued, “isn’t that what they always said?”

  “You really want to be talking to me like that?” I glanced back in time to see Odin’s hand tightening around Denko’s neck. “Do you?”

  “Do you still have the nightmares?” Denko’s voice was getting strained. “Do you think you’ll really get something out of me?”

  I blinked at the road, feeling like my own air was getting choked off.

  He won’t kill him, I told myself. My guys weren’t killers.

  Except for the stalker I’d had a few months back. And they’d killed as agents. They’d kill to protect me. To protect each other.

  Denko’s voice became a high, strained whisper. “You really think you could?”

  The next thing I heard was Denko sucking in a huge gulp of air, and then coughing. “Probably not,” Odin said.

  “I’m flattered, Rashad.”

  I concentrated on my driving, ignoring the tension in the car.

  “Do you know what the most painful bone to have broken in the body is?” Odin asked him.

  “I don’t,” Denko said.

  “Use my name again and you’ll find out.”

  Denko sniffed. “You don’t like me using your name? We know all of your names. Except Isis. But we’re close. We’ll get it, Isis. You think we won’t? You think whoever you’re protecting is safe—”

  Crack.

  I didn’t need to glance back to know the man was out cold.

  “Take a right up here,” Thor said, glancing between me and the back seat.

  “Fuck,” I said, taking the turn.

  “You’re okay,” Odin said, texting somebody—Zeus, probably. “We’re all okay.”

  “Go all the way up to that light,” Thor said. “The motel’s just beyond that strip mall.” He twisted back to Odin. “What do you think?”

  Denko groaned. Rousing.

  “Good enough,” Odin said. They discussed what do to with the car.

  “Mero Inn,” Denko said. “A little below your standards, isn’t it?”

  Thor ignored him. “Pull in here.”

  I heard another grunt from the back. I glanced back to see Denko gagged and blindfolded. Odin was texting. Who was he texting at a time like this? Just then Thor’s phone pinged. Thor pulled it out, then showed it to me.

  WE’RE BUGGED, MAYBE TRACKED.

  I nodded to show I understood. Thor took off his shoes and his belt and pointed at my shoes and my purse. I handed them over. He passed the stuff back to Odin.

  When I looked back next, Odin was holding up my purse strap for us to see—there was a small metal doodad right above the buckle.

  “Let’s get a room,” Odin said. “We’ll wait for Zeus here.” He got out and shut the door a few times—to represent the group of us getting out?—and then walked across the parking lot to a dumpster and threw the strap in. He got back in and stabbed a finger at the road…and it wasn’t the road he was mad at.

  It was bad that my purse had been listening to every conversation.

  Very bad.

  When had ZOX gotten to my purse? I thought of all the times we’d gone out to eat. Sometimes I put my purse under my seat. Could they have gotten it one of those times? I thought about the breakfast place we’d gone to before meeting Diego. We’d sat at the counter. Some guy had leaned in to grab the ketchup and jostled my purse. Enough that I’d looked inside after to ensure my wallet and phone were still there.

  Shit.

  Could they have been listening all that time?

  I drove us out of there. Thor put his finger to his lips and wrote another text, this one for me to read—we’re going to the Gigis’. Could be other transmitters.

  The Gigis lived in a blue bungalow in Echo Park. The street was dark, but their home was instantly lit with floodlights the second I turned in. I’d only been there twice, but both times had been memorable events. One was Brown Gigi’s thirtieth birthday bash, a kind of crazy girls-only party. The other was a holiday-card-making party where we personalized a lot of the cards for the various mobsters and thieves in our set. It was thoughtful of them—when you’re a criminal with no known address, you aren’t getting any holiday cards.

  Thor made a finger looping signal for me to pull around the back and park.

  Odin stayed in the car with our prisoner while Thor and I headed up to the back door together. Black Gigi emerged in sleek pants and sleek strappy top, almost like a yoga outfit. She had a wand in her hand and a dark look on her face.

  So they’d texted ahead.

  She motioned for me to hold out my arms. I complied, and she waved it all over my body, and then she did Thor and the bag part of my purse.

  “You’re clean.” She spoke in low tones. “This baby would’ve sounded off on any kind of transmitter or GPS, and I don’t care if it’s ZOX-issue or what.”

  “Would it get something subdermal?”

  She cast a dark gaze at the car, clearly not loving that we had a hostage.

  “He’s blindfolded,” Thor said. “He doesn’t know where he is.”

  “And what if he has a subdermal?”

  “Don’t worry,” Thor said, “we’ll get him out of here.”

  Black Gigi handed him the wand. “I’m not involved. You lay him out and do him just for metal.” She showed Thor the settings on the thing. “Hold it an inch above. Get the covering surface to line up.” She demonstrated on me, then handed it over with a shake of her head. “And keep that motherfucker blindfolded.”

  Black Gigi and I watched Thor head back to the car. She shook her head and snorted as Odin and Thor pulled Agent Denko out and laid him down. “And here I thought the takeover robberies were the ultimate death wish.”

  “We’ll be okay.”

  She raised one eyebrow. “You think? Why, because your guys are so high-performance, so high-functioning? The fucking-g most badass fucking-g robbers?” she said, mimicking Odin. “Shit.”

  White Gigi came out just then. “Hey Ice,” she said sleepily. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, ju
st the God Pack deciding to drive one of their most dangerous and high-value hostages to our place.”

  White Gigi widened her eyes at me—a look of surprise, but a little bit of an impressed look, like, this is soooo badass. I smiled uncertainly, like, thanks?

  Black Gigi nodded at the car. “Give these boys some duct tape. Not the pink stuff. And no prints. Use gloves and pull off the top layer first, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Got it.” White Gigi headed in.

  “He’s under control,” I said.

  “Really? ‘Cause you know what I’m seeing when I look at this scene? It’s like those guys who put up ramps and jump their car over a whole lot of other cars, and your guys with their bank takeovers, they can jump ten fucking cars, all lined up in a row—just barely, but they can do it, and it’s super-ballsy and yeah, everyone’s impressed. But this whole investigations bit? This here is car number eleven.”

  I thought about how happy they’d been, chasing those clues. Helping Diego. Defying all good sense. A fuck-you to the world. Was that why Zeus had wanted to do the P.I. business so bad? Just to push it?

  “Well, you always have a place here,” she said. “Unless you drag some federal agent-turned-hostage along. You want to do that, you find another pajama party.”

  “We’re cool.”

  We watched them truss the agent up under the watchful eyes of White Gigi, who was pointing out places they needed more duct tape.

  “He knows all their real names,” I added. “I kind of hate that he knows them and the way he uses them, sort of like weapons.”

  “Enemies. What’re you going to do?”

  I thought about what Denko had said about Odin having nightmares. It made me realize Odin never actually slept through the night in my bed. Was that because of nightmares? And how could I not know a thing like that? Should I have pushed for their names? Their histories? “I didn’t even know their names.”

  “Don’t let this guy fuck you up,” she said. “He’s got nothing a little duct tape over the mouth won’t fix.”

  Black Gigi, as it turned out, really was on her way to yoga—midnight yoga. Because apparently the Gigis had to be endlessly cool in every possible way.

  Thor had come up to where we were, and he jokingly offered to drop her off. “You could squeeze in next to our guest, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”