The Hostage Bargain (22 page)

“Please don’t,” I said, feeling despondent.

“Hey,” he kissed my cheek. “You’re okay.”

But I so wasn’t. Neither of us was.

“I have a confession,” he said then.

“What?”

“It’s a big one, so get ready.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We didn’t really take our names from gods.”

“Huh?”

“Well, not really. They’re from comic books.”

I closed my eyes, smiling in the darkness as tears streamed from my eyes. “That is so…” Cute, I wanted to say, but it’s not a thing you say to a man at a moment like this.
Oh my badass Peter Pans
, I thought.

“I’m glad we got one of your comforters bought,” he said. “I hope they don’t lose the farm.”

“Me, too,” I said. “The other comforters were up with a longer lead time. I think they’re getting lots of orders. I hope they’re okay.”

“I bet they keep the farm. Your farm sounds nice. I can’t believe you know how to make cheese and woolen goods and things. Were your folks hippies?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“It would be richly satisfying to make those things.”

“Says the bank robber.”

“It would be. And I wasn’t always one. We weren’t always robbers.”

“What were you?”

“On the nothing chance we survive this, I shouldn’t tell you.” Zeus toyed with my hair.

I waited, hoping he’d say at least something.

“Screw it—I’ll be vague,” he said.

“I’m good with the vague version.”

“We were…we’re supposed to be dead, basically.”

“Were you all in the military?”

“Let’s just say we were in intelligence,” he said. “Odin and I were, not Thor. Thor was a doctor. He was overseas, working for an NGO—that’s a non-governmental organization. Thor saw something he shouldn’t have and he pursued it, cracked open a massive can of worms. I’m not going to say where, but it was very huge, very damaging. Odin was sent to kill him. Odin smelled a rat and didn’t do the job right away, and then I was sent to kill Thor and Odin both.”

“Assassins.”

“It’s one of the things we are. Anyway, when I got there, I could see why Odin had hesitated. A few hours later another guy was sent to kill all three of us.”

“What happened to him?”

“Thor killed him. The guy had Odin and me down, and he didn’t think Thor had it in him. Thor was up against a wall, this nerdy, gangly doctor. Young. This was years ago, Ice. We were all young. And the next thing we knew, Thor came out of nowhere and blew the man’s head off. It fucked Thor up—you could see it in the moment, the horror in his eyes as he looked at the guy, lying there at his feet, half his head gone. And the three of us, we were suddenly dead men together. It was literally us against the world. We went to Paris and got guest worker identities, and then went underground. We spent a few years in Rabat, in Morocco, where Odin’s from. We got by. And we have help. Certain friends in intelligence. But the things we know made it so we always had guys on our trail, looking to rub us out. We got good at knocking off banks as a ready source of cash. Turns out it takes a lot of cash to live under the radar. Odin’s a very talented techie and psy-ops pro. I’ve got strategy. Thor has nerve. It made sense to come back to the states.”

“You can’t make a bargain? Where your secret goes public on your death? As an insurance policy so they won’t kill you?”

“That stuff only works in the movies. Isis, look around the world. Look at all the shit people refuse to believe or that they know and forget. It’s better for them to have us dead and spin it. And none of us have close family or friends. That’s something that makes us both more vulnerable, but also less vulnerable. But we have each other. That’s our family.”

I rested my head on the metal wall, wondering what that felt like.

“You’ve been calming to Thor,” Zeus added.

“You really don’t think we can get out of this box, do you?”

“There’s always a chance,” Zeus said.

“Are you trying to build my hopes?”

“Yup.”

I smiled in the darkness—that’s how he’d answered the day of the robbery, when I was about to try to bluff the cops.

I said, “It reverses the effect if I know that’s what you’re trying to do.”

“I have an idea.” Zeus drew a finger down the side of my face. “Imagine being under a waterfall right now. You breathe in the sweet cool air, and cool water runs over you. And into your mouth.” He drew two fingers down the side of my hair. “Cool and sweet.”

“Can I have a giant glass of lemonade, too?”

“While you’re under the waterfall?”

“I’d like that very much, Zeus.”

“You always want to have your cake and eat it too, Ice.”

“Well?”

“Yes. A tall, icy, cool glass of lemonade to drink under the waterfall. In the cool air.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” I rested my head on his shoulder. The heat felt oppressive, like it was pulsing in waves.

He tapped my cheek. “No sleeping.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Yes you were.”

“Why not sleep?” I said. “Won’t it be better?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never cooked like this. But I want you to stay,” he said.

I snuggled close to him. “I want to stay.”

I woke up to blinding light and a dull pain in my arm. I squinted. Dark shapes came into view. My eyeballs felt like gravel was in them.

A voice: “Hey, Ice! Isis!” Odin.

I groaned, turned, dimly aware of something falling off my forehead. A wet rag? Somebody put it back.

I grabbed at my arm, felt some kind of tubing in me.

“Leave it.” Thor’s voice. A hand clamped onto my wrist. “It’s an IV. You need to get hydrated. Can you see me?” I felt the bed next to me tip. Everything looked red. A finger was in my eye, lifting my eyelid. A bright light flashed into one eye. The same on my other eye.

“Uh!” I batted his hand away.

“Reaction time a little slow.”

“Where am I?”

“Motel. Not quite up to our usual standards, but bandits can’t be choosers.”

“Zeus?”

“Fine. We’re all fine, Ice. We’re safe.”

“For now,” Odin said.

I came around, slowly over the next few hours. We were indeed in a motel, and Zeus was in the other bed.

“Thor says another two hours and your organs would’ve shut down,” Odin said.

“That’s nice,” I said.

The next day was a blur of watching TV and being forced to drink a lot of unpleasant concoctions. Thor and Odin had both been captured, it turned out. But the car they’d been put into was rammed—a drunk running a light, of all things. It was a stroke of dumb luck, which Odin had managed to expertly exploit. He killed all but one of their captors, and Thor took over the wheel and sped from the scene of the accident. Odin had made the man tell where we were. They wouldn’t say how. I didn’t want to know.

We motel hopped over the next two days and landed in San Francisco on the third day. The big money from the robberies was lost, but we still had the diamonds, which Thor fenced downtown. After that, my bandits and I took up residence in one of the best hotels in the city. Another suite with another hot tub.

I felt well enough to eat a normal room service meal that night, though I was still a little weak. Zeus acted 100%, but I suspected he wasn’t quite there yet, either. Thor had instructed both Zeus and me to stay away from alcohol for the next few days, as well as the exertion of sex.

And hot tubs.

Of course that didn’t stop Odin and Thor from gleefully taking a long soak after dinner that night.

Zeus and I pulled the couch near the edge of the hot tub and lounged there together, watching our comrades boil themselves, or at least that’s what it seemed like to me after what I’d been through. As usual, we wore the hotel’s insignia robes. Lounging around all decadent in hotel insignia robes was one of the gang’s traditions, I was realizing. One of the things I’d miss when I had to leave.

“Don’t stay in there too long,” I warned.

Odin snorted. The back of his head was on the edge of the marble surround; the rest of him floated free.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever want to go in a hot tub again,” I said to Zeus.

“I’ve got something better.” Zeus patted his lap. “Give me your feet.”

I turned sideways on the couch and put my feet up on his lap. He attacked my toes, rubbing and massaging them. “Ohhhh,” I said.

“Give it time,” Thor said. He hoisted himself out of the water and toweled off. Then he put on his robe, grabbed his scotch, shoved me nearer to Zeus, and sat on the other side of me.

“Hey,” I said.

“You’ll like hot tubs again someday,” Thor said.

Odin swam up to the side nearest us and set his chin on the marble edge. The silence was awkward because I probably wouldn’t have many more hot tubbing opportunities. I was almost recovered, and the unsavory release-of-me-blindfolded-in-a-truck-stop plan had not exactly been called off, though of course it had been delayed by our stint in the hot box.

“We need to talk to you about something,” Odin said. “We have some bad news and some good news, Isis.”

I looked over at Zeus, who raised his brows. “Is that why you’re rubbing my feet?”

Zeus made a fake hurt frown, a kind of pout.

Odin got out now, skin glistening wet. He went over and wrapped a towel around his waist and put on his glasses. Then he grabbed the bottle of scotch and swigged.

Something big was up.

“What?” I demanded, but I sort of knew. I was going back. Soon. They’d always said that the longer I stayed away, the more suspicious it would look for me.

Zeus squeezed my big toe. “Melinda has to die.”

“Excuse me?” It was weird, hearing him say my real name. The
die
part—that part just didn’t compute.

Odin stood in front of us, watching my face. He had his robe on now, too.

“What?” I said. I thought maybe they were joking around. I didn’t for a second imagine that they’d kill me.

Odin grabbed my knees and pushed up my legs and settled onto the couch between Zeus and me, letting my legs flop back so that now my legs went over his lap and my feet were on Zeus’s lap, and I was lying back against Thor’s shoulders. Odin tucked the sides of my robes back around to cover my legs. I wished I could have a picture of the four of us like that, snuggled in our posh robes on the posh couch.

“
Melinda
dies,” Zeus said. “Not Isis.”

It took me a while to comprehend this. “You mean,
pretend
I died? The hostage you took?”

Odin nodded. “Right now, the guys from our old intelligence outfit, they don’t connect us with the Baylortown First City job. But they saw you, from when they stowed you in the shipping container with Zeus. If we send you back, these guys will recognize you from that and put us all together from the robbery. Which isn’t a major problem, except they’ll see we didn’t kill you, that you’re
something
to us. That
we’re
something to you. I mean, you went out on a limb for Zeus. The point is, once they make those links—and they will—you won’t be safe. Your sisters won’t be safe.”

I listened in stunned silence as they outlined their plan. They proposed to hack into my dentist’s computer records and pass them to a CIA contact who would modify the X-rays of a burnt corpse to match them. The CIA had just gotten one in—a burnt female corpse that is. She had been set on fire in the middle of the desert.

“Let my sisters think I’m a burnt corpse? I don’t know if I can do that.”

Zeus shut his eyes and mumbled silently—swearing under his breath, from the looks of it.

I looked over my shoulder at Thor, who regarded me wistfully.

Odin focused darkly on something out the window. It was here I knew. There
wasn’t
a choice. I was in the same position as Venus. Worse, really. Venus would’ve just gone down for a robbery. I could get my sisters slaughtered. “Oh,” I said.

Zeus said. “We are so sorry. As you can imagine, taking your choices away was not what we intended.

“I know it wasn’t,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” Zeus said.

We all watched the hot tub, the little current on the watery surface of the hot tub created by the jets below.

“I want to stay,” I said. “You know I do. I just don’t want my sisters to think I’m dead.”

Nobody said anything. The hot tub surface swirled on.

Thor draped an arm over my shoulder.

I felt a little seasick. “I can’t do that. You guys,” I said, “A burnt corpse? Put them through that? There has to be another way.”

Odin looked stormy. He swigged the bottle.

Zeus said, “At this point, it’s worse for your sisters if you go back. You want that kind of trouble for them?”

I couldn’t believe it. Staying with the guys. It’s what I’d wanted, but not like this. And not forever.

“Could I keep buying the Paris Hilton quilts?” I asked. “And leaving little messages? It would give them hope. Especially if I said a lot of stuff about Paris Hilton’s dog. We were always really focused on her dog. They would know it was me and they’d be cool about it.”

Zeus exchanged glances with Odin. “No guarantees,” Zeus said. “We’d have to proceed very carefully, and
know
your sisters were being cool.”

“They would be,” I said.

“We would allow it if we all agreed.” Odin arranged my bathrobe lapels to be equal.

“Then I stay,” I said.

I caught Zeus’s eye. He waited, watching. He didn’t trust it.

“Have I not been saying all this time that I want to stay?”

“Saying you want to stay and being forced to stay are two different things,” Zeus said.

“Nobody wants to be told they can never go home again,” I said. They knew better than anybody.

“You’ll miss them,” Thor said.

“You’ll help me,” I said. “We’ll all help each other.”

“We will,” Zeus said. “We’ll help each other through this.” And right there I realized something: that I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of his affection. I’d been there all along, in a way.

Odin broke the spell. “It’s natural to want to stay, of course. After a couple days with us, what woman wouldn’t want choose this? We live in the most luxury. We give the most
fucking-g
pleasure.”