The Hard Way: Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers 5

by Annika Martin

  Thor turned to me with a grave look. “No more mystical butt-fucking for you two.”

  “Oh my god.” I laughed and whipped a tiny ruffled pillow at him.

  He caught it and whipped it right back.

  I caught it and hit him with it. He flopped back on the bed, laughing, taking me with him. Zeus hit me with a different fussy pillow.

  I grabbed a pillow and whipped it into his face.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Thor said.

  “Oh my god, pillow fight!” I hit Zeus back. Suddenly Odin was in on it, grunting.

  Just then there were steps outside the hall. We all froze. Then the steps receded. We followed them down the stairs.

  “Please, God, let that have been the Texas people,” I said. “Because you know the words ‘pillow fight’ were way loud. And all of us were making noise.”

  Thor snickered and tickled me. “The insurance investigations business has been very good to you, Ms. Jackie Trent.”

  “Fuck off!” I laughed. “Come on!” I pushed him away. “I have to redo my nose now thanks to your shenanigans.” I went to the bathroom and pulled it off and washed and itched my face.

  “We’re going to follow the trail,” Zeus announced when I came back out. “We think Andy Miller’s telling the truth, and we’ll assume your sisters are. What if they are both telling the truth? Is there another way for the cheese to have gotten from the dumpster to the store?”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We finished our cookies and headed out. Margie was downstairs at her desk when we came through. She smiled uncertainly. “How’s the investigation going?”

  “Okay,” I said. “We hit a snag, but we’re regrouping.”

  She was looking at me really strangely. So she’d heard the pillow fight. I was officially the sexually voracious boss. I smiled back wanly.

  “Um…” She glanced over at the cookie station.

  Was she mad about us eating cookies in the room? How would she know?

  “Did…um…” she began.

  “What is it?” Thor asked sweetly.

  “Did one of you leave your clipboard by the guest snack station?”

  Gulp! The dirty cupid activities clipboard!

  Had she looked at it? Of course she fucking looked at it! I didn’t need a mirror to know my face was utterly beet red.

  “Oh, that would be me.” Zeus breezed over and grabbed it, like it was nothing. “We’re heading out to the Piggly Wiggly,” he said.

  I wanted to say we didn’t really do those cupid things, but would that just make it worse? Why would she even believe me?

  Zeus grabbed my hand. I smiled and walked. One foot and then another. Just get out.

  “This is the worst,” I said once we were all buckled up in the rental car. “You know she read it.”

  Zeus backed out of the driveway and headed west.

  Odin grabbed the clipboard and read it. “Well,” he said after a while. “She’ll never look at those cupids the same way again.”

  “It’s not funny!” I turned to Zeus. “You need to tell her that we did not do any of those things! Tell her you were just fucking around. Like you were bored and just writing stuff.”

  “She won’t believe me.”

  “Tell her!”

  “You look beautiful when you’re desperate.”

  “You’re going to tell her,” I said. “What the fuck must she think? And you know she heard ‘pillow fight.’”

  “Insurance investigation is a boring business,” Thor said.

  Odin gazed out the window. “I still feel like people are watching us.”

  “It’s the cupids. The deer. And now Margie,” I said.

  “No. It’s more,” Odin said. “The car back there. The black Saturn. Have we seen it before?”

  “It’s new to me,” Zeus said. “There was one like it before, but it had an air freshener hanging from its windshield.”

  “I think it’s the same car.”

  The jovial atmosphere in the car turned chilly.

  “Nobody could know,” Zeus said.

  “We talked to her sisters, we’ve talked to Andy…”

  Just then the car turned off.

  “Pull over,” Odin said.

  Zeus pulled over. This was some sort of anti-following maneuver, no doubt. We sat there for a while, watching the street.

  “Probably nothing,” Odin said. “Maybe. It’s a feeling.”

  I leaned up and put my chin on his seat back. He looked tired. “You should take a nap later.”

  “I don’t need a fucking-g nap.”

  “I don’t mean that this following thing was bullshit. I mean, we count on your spidey sense, and did you get any sleep under that giant cupid face in your room?”

  He said nothing, which meant no. No sleep.

  “I could sit with you and read.”

  “It’s not happening,” he said. “I won’t sleep with you there. I won’t hurt you again.”

  “You can’t hurt me if I’m awake and sitting in the chair by the bed.”

  He shook his head. It was frustrating.

  “I’m really glad we have somebody answering the phone for us,” Thor said, changing the subject. “Margie might really might call.”

  “She’s not going to fucking-g call,” Odin said. “Her first thought would not be, ‘These people aren’t who they say they are.’ Her first thought would be, ‘I can’t wait to tell my friends about this. Who knew insurance investigators were such sexual heathens? A female boss using her underlings for her every dark pleasure.’”

  I groaned.

  Chapter 7

  “What kind of name is Piggly Wiggly?” Odin asked as we headed through the automatic doors.

  “Good question,” I said, though I kind of didn’t care. Being back in this place conjured up so many memories of shopping with my parents and sisters. Even the smell was unique—a crisp, slightly fruity pastry aroma.

  We went to the front, and Odin talked to the store manager, using his best American accent. My guys joked around and fucked around so much, it was so easy to forget who they were—stealthy, dangerous, lethal agents. Totally in control of this situation. He explained that we were doing this for our report. “Verifying the chain of custody,” he said. “Very routine, very boring. We just need to verify your system.”

  The manager was a nice guy named Warren. He made the call to his superior, and then he actually placed a call to the Allied office number from our card to ensure we were who we were. “Company policy,” he said.

  We all nodded knowingly, though I don’t think any of us expected the grocer to be so security conscious. He strolled off, talking to our friend from Guvvey’s, who was hopefully sounding like a man at an insurance investigations contractor. Odin had put up a quick website too—would he check that out, as well?

  Eventually he came back. “Looks like you’re cleared.” He smiled and led us down the produce aisle. The store décor hadn’t changed from when I was a kid. The banner over the leafy greens section said Fresh from the farm! and deeper in I caught sight of the dippy Piping hot! banner over the bakery section. My sisters and I used to laugh about that one because they didn’t actually have a bakery at Piggly Wiggly and none of the stuff was ever piping hot.

  Now the old signs just made me happy.

  The manager pushed through a silver door at the corner of the store and led us back into a shipping area full of crates and pallets, all arranged around two truck bays. He went to the wall and pulled an iPad from a metal holder. The iPad was encased in a thick acrylic frame with a loop on the corner that had a chain coming off it, attached to the wall. They really didn’t want that iPad walking off.

  “This is the back end of the system. Deliveries come in here, and we enter the SKU. They connect to the checkout. Well, you know how it works.”

  “Looks good,” Thor said. “Can we see the records for this shipment of cheese?”

  “Sure.” He slid his finger around the dirt
y screen and pulled it up. It was a lot of numbers on a spreadsheet. “Here’s the SKU going in the back and the SKU out the front. It reads forty-three minirounds in the store, but that’s not accurate anymore—we pulled them, and the lab people took them.”

  Thor looked really interested just then. I noticed something pass between him and Zeus. “They took them from your display case? Out on the store floor?”

  “Yeah. We had all the Sunny Sisters inventory out in the case. It’s a nice label and a local cheese. We like to support the sisters.”

  “But the FDA took fifty rounds out of here,” Odin said. “And your system says only forty-three rounds were in stock. That’s a seven-cheese discrepancy.”

  Warren frowned. “They took everything on hand. Probably a promo set of sampler cheeses got mixed in. The sisters give out a certain amount for sampling and such. The important thing is that we tracked everything that went out the door.” He pulled up a new screen, a spreadsheet of some kind. “This is the detail of what walked out the door. In the week after the delivery, we sold ten units via credit card and two units with cash, and we contacted each and every one of those purchasers as soon as the recall hit. Not soon enough.”

  “Thanks,” Thor said. “This is all we need. Very routine.” They shook hands, and we were out of there.

  “Fuckers were selling the sampling cheeses?” I said once we were out in the breezy parking lot. “Motherfuckers. Those sampling cheeses were for sampling, not for selling out of the case.”

  “So your sisters give a certain amount of rounds for sampling?” Odin asked.

  “Yeah, we’d provide extras for sampling with every shipment. They were separate. They wouldn’t go on the inventory.”

  “For giving out to customers,” Odin clarified.

  “Yeah, for giving out to the customers. Not for the store to just sell out of the case. Fucker. Can you go back and punch Warren?”

  “Did you assume that the store always sampled the promo cheeses?” Zeus asked. “Before this, I mean? Are you surprised to learn they would take the cheeses earmarked as samples and put them into the case?”

  “Yeah! It’s in both our interests to run samples. People like the samples. It draws them to the store and it warms them to our brand.” I felt this pang of sadness. Our brand. “My sisters’ brand, I mean.”

  “What if they did use the sample cheeses the way they should’ve? You assume they did. It’s what they’re for. Right?” Zeus said.

  “Yeah, it’s idiotic not to.”

  “So maybe those extras weren’t sampler cheeses.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “So the inventory is wrong?”

  “Wait,” Thor cut in. “If there’s one thing a computer knows how to do, it’s count. Their system logged what went in that back door and what walked out the front. We have seven extras. We have an explanation for the extras—sample rounds that got thrown into the case.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “So, maybe those are samplers, sure. But what if they aren’t? What if the store used the samplers like they should’ve? What would be an alternate explanation—not delivered by Andy and not samplers? How else could extra cheeses have materialized in the case?”

  I suddenly saw what he was getting at. “Somebody could just put them in.”

  “Exactly. What if somebody took those cheeses out of the dumpster before the garbage truck took them away and brought them to the store and slipped them in?”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “They were already packaged, right? They were priced with that barcode. They were the same lot as the good ones. You could slip a piece of cheese into the case, and it would just sell like any others.”

  “Oh my god. Yeah.”

  We swung into the car, Odin and Zeus in front, Thor and me in back.

  “Drive,” Odin said to Zeus suddenly.

  “What?”

  “We’re being watched.”

  Zeus put the vehicle into gear and backed out. I could see my guys scanning the surroundings without appearing to. Zeus turned right onto the main drag, then took the first left. “What do you see now?”

  “Just keep going,” Odin growled. “Straight.”

  “What was it?”

  “A feeling,” Odin said.

  Zeus nodded in his noncommittal way. “Got it.”

  I knew that nod and that got it. It said, I hear you, and I’m going along with you, but I don’t exactly see your point of view, but it’s too much energy to argue. Yeah, I knew the nod well.

  Odin did, too. “Don’t give me that,” he growled. “I felt eyes on us.”

  “You’ve been feeling eyes on us this whole time.”

  “And usually I’m right.”

  “Usually you have more than three hours of sleep over the span of three days,” Zeus said.

  “I got more than three hours of sleep in three days,” Odin said.

  “How much more?” Zeus barked. “Dude, you’ve been off. This small-town shit and that whole thing with Isis has you jacked.”

  “Just because I’m jacked doesn’t mean I can’t feel our fucking-g surroundings. Feel eyes on us.”

  “Deer and cupid eyes,” Zeus said.

  I stiffened. Were they getting into a fight?

  “Better safe than sorry,” Thor said, ever the peacemaker. “I’m not seeing anybody back there. But you know what? I bet we were being watched. In that grocery store lot? They have to be nervous about their own liability.”

  “What if they’re the ones who fucked up the cheese?” Zeus asked. “It could have gone bad in their store. But then again, that’s too much of a coincidence…”

  “Yeah, and keep in mind,” I said, “if you start with well-made cheese from a clean operation, just letting it warm doesn’t guarantee there will be bacteria multiplying to those kinds of levels. Even Andy said so. I’m telling you. That’s the weird thing about this entire case.”

  “Exactly,” Thor said. “A hell of a lot of food-poisoning bacteria have to be present to make a person ill.”

  “What are you saying?” Zeus said. “So if we eat a little it’s okay?”

  “Dude, you have no idea,” I said. “You probably eat it all the time.”

  Thor snorted. “A lot of the eggs and meat and even peanut butter you eat already has salmonella in it, but it’s such a small quantity, it can’t do anything. It’s the amount that kills you.”

  I slid my gaze to Thor. With his being a doctor and my being from a farm, we sometimes nerded out on genetics and food safety facts. I said, “The point of refrigerating foods below 40 degrees isn’t about killing bacteria, it’s about keeping them from multiplying to toxic levels if they actually are present. That’s why Andy assumes my sisters hesitated about tossing that much cheese. It was probably fine. Even after sitting in the warm cooler and then the garbage, the odds are still low that it would sicken somebody.”

  Zeus turned onto the two-lane highway that would take us out of Baylortown.

  Odin was glued to his phone. After a bit, he said, “Let me ask this: Who benefits from this outbreak? Let’s say the cheese was pulled from the dumpster and snuck into the store. Somebody wanted an outbreak. I’m sitting here thinking, two categories of people benefitted from what happened. One, the Millers, because they’d have the chance to buy your land. And two, a competitor.”

  “The artisan sheep cheese business is not that competitive,” I said. “And anyone in the cheese business knows that pulling cheese out of the garbage and selling it isn’t a guarantee that it’s bad.”

  “Who’s the other?” Thor asked.

  Odin swiped his phone screen. “Anybody who hated Tim Zietlow, this man who died.” He swiped again. “Zietlow was business partners with Rhonda Broom. She has the option to buy his business upon his death, which she’s doing, according to this article.”

  “Wait, Rhonda Broom?”

  “You know her?”

  “She was a year ahead of me in high school. Rhonda
Broom ended up running a business with Tim Zietlow?”

  “Co-owning. Is that surprising?”

  “Well, we all knew she’d go somewhere. Kind of shy. But smart. Good at math, too. I guess I always thought she’d leave. She was popular—and pretty. The prettiest girl in our school.”

  “Nobody’s prettier than you,” Zeus growled.

  I smiled. “Be serious. And I bet she’s even prettier now. I guess I could see her stepping up. She didn’t really know me. She was more like a luminary who was one grade ahead.”

  “Does she know Andy Miller?” Zeus asked.

  “Dude, everyone knows Andy Miller. Did she sleep with him? Fuck yeah. Andy’s a man whore.”

  “They have an office in town,” Zeus said. “Let’s go see her.” He did a U-turn, and we headed back.

  * * *

  B&Z Kitchen Makeovers, the kitchen design and remodeling firm owned by Tim Zietlow and Rhonda Broom, occupied a dusty little storefront next to a yoga studio a block down from the hardware store.

  The golden bell attached to the inside of the door dinged loudly as we walked in.

  The four of us went up to the front counter. Beyond it was a carpeted area with two of those old-timey slanted tables that architects used to use for drawing on and a few chairs, all surrounded by metal shelving full of wallpaper samples and plumbing parts. The walls that didn’t have shelving were adorned with giant kitchen photos.

  Rhonda came out from the back. She was still pretty, with long brown hair and dimples, and I suddenly wished I didn’t look so dumpy and mannish. I liked feeling at least somewhat attractive around pretty girls.

  “Hi,” she said, coming to the other side of the counter, clicking her pen in her hand, dimples blossoming. “Can I help you?” She wore a wedding ring, and I was burning with curiosity about who she’d married. I wished I could ask my sisters.

  Zeus, holding the notorious clipboard, explained our fake mission. “The insurance firm involved with the Sunny Sisters farm contracted with us to do an extensive independent verification of all the facts of the outbreak,” he said. It was kind of funny how much mileage we were getting out of this verification stuff. “This was Tim Zietlow’s place of work?”