The wrong idea, p.1
The Wrong Idea, page 1
The Wrong Idea
The Bank Robbers book 2
Annika Martin
Copyright © 2013 & 2022 by Annika Martin
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Contents
The Annika Martin newsletter!
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
The Deeper Game sneak peek
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When Isis hooked up with three yummalicious bank robbers, she entered a world of forbidden thrills and wicked spicytimes…as well as hot tubs, sky-high room service bills, and major chances to accessorize with fun wigs during crime sprees.
What was she not expecting? A deep relationship with desperately wounded badasses.
But when the group plans a daring heist during a wild night, she discovers how deep the gang’s feelings have gotten – and how high the stakes can climb.
Do the outlaws have what it takes to evade their enemies…and give each other what they truly need?
One
If somebody had traveled back in time and shown past-me a video where I was checking into a gorgeous hotel in sunny Los Angeles with Thor, my response would’ve been a resounding “No way!”
No way was it possible that future-me would be swanning around in the lap of luxury.
No way would future-me ever get to hang around with somebody who looked like Thor. Even just that—no way.
Because let’s just say handsome didn’t even begin to describe Thor. With his thick blond hair and his athletic physique, my Nordic bandit was molten-lava-level hot. His hotness had the power to melt faces, to topple walls, to change the topology of vast swaths of land.
Just no way.
You couldn’t expand my mind widely enough to encompass such a possibility.
And if you’d informed past-me that yes, it was, in fact, real, and that I’d been whisked out of the monotonous life I’d been trapped in not by one but by three gorgeous, brilliant, kinky bank robbers? That I’d experience unimaginable thrills with them?
It would’ve seemed like a dream.
In many ways, it was a dream.
Unfortunately, dreams have a way of changing on a dime.
And there was definitely trouble brewing in kinky bank robbers paradise—and not the good kind.
“John and Franny Tyler,” Thor said to the woman at the desk, handing over two driver’s licenses. I smiled brightly, hoping she wouldn’t notice anything weird about our very fake documents. We’d gotten them together in a mad rush; we hadn’t expected to be on the run today.
On the upside, my awesome black curly wig matched the picture perfectly, and Thor was very convincing in his backwards baseball cap, just the thing to match the bro look he had going as John Tyler.
But the fakery worked like a charm. The woman handed over our keycards and pointed us to the elevators in an utterly bored way, and I let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding.
Thor turned to me, pretending to fumble with his bag. “Odin just arrived. He’s in the lobby,” he whispered. “See him? Left side by the palm.”
I turned my gaze discreetly to the lobby and spotted Odin. “Mmm,” I said.
Odin was in disguise, too; he wore a flashy velvet track suit, sunglasses, and a large, unfortunate mole on his left cheekbone. I’d helped him pick out the mole just this morning. It had seemed like too much, what with the size of it and the hairs sticking out of it, but Odin was pulling it off. Odin looked good in anything.
He’d come in a different vehicle, of course. We were being all kinds of careful because my guys’ enemies, ZOX, had likely figured out by now that I was more than a passing acquaintance of the gang.
Even worse: they had a photo of me.
We were lying low, trying to figure out our next step.
It was bad that they had this photo of me—really, really bad.
ZOX might use the photo to find out my identity, which would give them a new way to get to my guys—and yes, I was thinking of them as my guys at this point.
The big fear was that ZOX would track down my sisters at the farm and threaten them as a way to gain leverage over us. Or once my guys sent me home—an idea that I hated—ZOX could always go after me, too…if they were to learn my identity.
ZOX would do just about anything for leverage over Zeus, Odin, and Thor.
We had to prevent them from learning who I was.
Thor and I paused at the elevator until Odin caught up to us. I hit the button and the three of us got in and rode up in silence, acting like strangers for the elevator cameras.
Finally, we reached our room. Odin collapsed on the bed.
“Did you get them all?” I asked.
Over the last twenty-four hours, Odin had been hacking into lots of social media accounts belonging to me and other people that I knew, grabbing and subtly altering every photo of me possible, changing my face just enough to confuse the photo recognition software that ZOX was surely using.
“Almost done,” he said. “Family Facebook and Instagram's been handled. The DMV, of course. The picture on the farm website. I hit your grade school and high school photos, and luckily nobody took many pictures of you at the bank. What worries me is the photos we don't know about.”
“Right.” That was the big worry. I set my bags in one of the rooms. We’d gotten a huge suite, as usual, with a sweeping view of red roofs and palm trees, and mountains in the distance. “I’ll keep thinking and adding to the list.”
“Did Zeus make contact yet?” Thor asked.
Zeus had gone back to my little town in order to protect my sisters from afar, just in case the worst happened—aka if big bad ZOX figured out who I was and went after them.
Things still felt a little weird between Zeus and me. Would things always feel weird between us?
“He called an hour ago,” Odin said. “He’s been all over that place and lurking around your farm. Nothing’s going on. Well, nothing aside from the expected.”
The expected.
I sighed.
The expected was my sisters being frantic about me having been taken away as a hostage last month during a robbery at the bank where I worked—a takeover robbery, as they say in the biz. They’d been worried out of their minds, of course, and in constant contact with law enforcement. They even went on TV to plead for my release.
“How do they seem?” I asked. “Did he say?”
“They’re getting back to work,” Odin said. “The younger one is back in school, and Zeus has been monitoring that.”
“Good,” I said. It was good that she was back. “And nobody suspects him?”
“Zeus is an elite operative who has infiltrated heavily guarded enemy compounds. He can blend into a sleepy little town and keep tabs on some farm girls.”
I nodded. Of course he could do that. I could only imagine how heavily armed he probably was. He’d get my sisters out of there if it ZOX showed up.
But long term? I didn’t know what we’d do.
Thor grabbed a gingerale from the minibar. He twisted off the cap and tossed it across the room into the garbage, making a clean shot of it. These bandits, I’d learned, we're good at everything. It was impressive, but also a little bit sad, because they had to be good at everything. Their survival depended on it.
You can’t slip up when you’re a fugitive. That’s when you die.
“The good news is that I might have a lead on the photo they got,” Odin said. “We’ll finally be able to see how bad this is.”
“A lead on the photo? From who?” Thor asked.
“From Tabby. We’re meeting her tonight,” Odin said.
“Does Tabby actually have a copy of the photo, or just a way to get one?” Thor asked.
“It’s Tabby,” Odin said. “Everything has to be a mystery with fucking-g Tabby.”
I smiled. I loved Odin’s accent, the way he pronounced words like fucking with an extra syllable: fucking-g Tabby.
“Riiiiiight,” Thor said.
“Please let it be a shitty security camera photo,” I said, sinking down onto the bed next to Odin. “Please, please, please, please!”
Odin sat up and slung an arm around my shoulders. “We got this,” he said. “Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”
If the photo ZOX had of me was a good one, we were really in trouble—you can't erase yourself completely from the internet. And if they figured out who I was, what would we ever do? It s not as if we could take my sisters on the run with us. And what about our farm? Our herd of sheep? Our dog?
Hopefully it was a blurry security photo—a photo like that could be as worthless as a child’s crayon drawing.
“Where are we meeting this Tabby?” I asked.
“Guvvey’s,” Odin said. “It’s a kind of a nightclub.”
“Guvvey’s?” I asked.
Odin grinned. “You’ll like Guvvey’s.”
“Or hate it,” Thor said.
Two
We parked in a nondescript downtown parking garage that stood in a cluster of business district high-rises with mostly dark windows.
“Where is this sort-of-a-nightclub?” I asked as we got out. “Nothing around here even looks open.”
“That’s the point,” Thor said. “You’ll see.”
“Sooooo mysterioso!” I said.
We took the parking garage elevator down to a gloomy basement area and headed down a dark hall and through a door to yet another hall to yet another door.
“What the hell?” I exclaimed.
“I know,” Thor snorted.
We came to a large, gray door. Odin knocked and gave a password to a camera. He’d ditched the hairy mole, thankfully, as well as the track suit. As it turned out, this weird nightclub had a fancy dress code. We’d had to buy a gown for me to wear at the hotel boutique, and Odin and Thor wore suits.
The lock clunked open, and we pushed through and continued. Apparently Guvvey’s, being the illegal criminal nightclub it was, had to be shady about everything.
The three of us headed through a dark tunnel, on and on, and then took an elevator up to the 21st floor. We headed to an unmarked door at the end of the hall, or at least I assumed it was a door; I couldn’t be sure, being that it had no doorknob.
“Are you even kidding me right now?” I asked. “This is like a TV show.”
Odin knocked.
A woman with braids and tattoos opened it up and smiled. “Well, well, well, look who’s here.” She ushered us in to a dark foyer where we were forced to give up our phones.
“You have to give up your phones, but not guns?” I asked.
She flicked her gaze toward Odin.
“She’s okay,” Odin said. “First time.”
She gave me a dark look and let us into a space full of dim, colorful lights and low, pulsating music.
“What?” I protested.
Odin snorted. “Give up our guns? You think people like us would dine at a place where we have to give up our guns?” This like it was the most ridiculous thing ever.
“Yet we gave up our phones. You can’t make a call, but it’s okay to go on a shooting spree?”
“It’s a privacy thing,” Thor said. “And to be fair, you can get in a lot of trouble starting a shooting spree.”
“Though the windows are Plexiglas,” Odin added. Like that would be my concern—that the windows wouldn’t shatter in the case of free-for-all of gunfire.
Inside, the place was all posh and glam and arty in an ultra-mod way, with blue globe lights and red seating; apparently the LA criminal element had just as much of a thing for interior design as the LA hotel element did. People sat around low tables; others gathered at the bar. And instead of wallpaper, the walls were plastered floor to ceiling with photographic murals of lions and tigers killing antelopes and rabbits and other prey, images straight off the nature channel, except they were strangely colorized—in pastels, of all things.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Odin demanded.
“This art,” I said. “That’s what’s funny.”
Thor scowled. He didn’t think it was funny.
“Come on, it’s funny,” I said. “Baby boys like blue trains on their wallpaper, girls get Barbie princess stuff, and wow, you and your crime-happy friends get mammoth, surreal images of predators sinking their teeth into the necks of their helpless prey? And that’s not funny?”
“I see it as more Darwinistic than funny,” Odin said.
“Darwinistic.” Thor spat the word. It seemed to bother him, this wallpaper depicting survival of the fittest, a culture of might making right. It made sense, being that he was a doctor by training. He would’ve taken that doctor’s oath to do no harm. In the world of the jungle, Thor would be the one saving the antelope. And really, I would try to save the antelope, too. They seemed sweet and a little bit Bambi-ish, even.
“We’re a Darwinistic crowd, baby,” Odin said, just as a squat but highly muscular, highly tattoo-covered man approached us, laughing.
“No way,” the man said, slapping hands with Thor and then Odin. “You boys better have taken the tunnels.”
Odin grinned. “We took the tunnels, my friend.”
The man tipped up his head by way of answer and led us across the place.
“What does he mean? Isn’t everyone supposed to take the tunnels?” I asked Thor.
“He’s razzing us because we have so much heat on us,” Thor answered.
As we moved across the room, I noticed how heads turned as we went. The people at the bar watched us. Groups at tables watched us. Even some of the people swaying in the corner to the strange techno music craned their necks around as we passed. It was a strange feeling, to be notorious among the notorious. What’s more, everyone was in suits and dresses. The place was a mix of America’s sexiest, heavily armed men and women along with lots of menacing and strangely photographic people, also heavily armed, with a few Fellini film extras thrown in.
I tried to act all cool, like I belonged, but I was an antelope—I couldn’t get that out of my mind now. Sure, I was an antelope who liked to run up close to the lions and have some big fun, but still. Antelope here.
At least Thor was in the antelope camp with me. He would save me if I got bitten.
We were seated at a couch in front of a coffee table that glowed faintly. Everything here was soft with light and color.
A squat woman in a tuxedo walked up with a bottle of scotch. “You fuckers. Still alive. Nice to see you.” Thor turned and struck up a conversation with her.
Personally, I was still riveted by the troubling wallpaper. It came to me that Zeus and Odin had once been lions protecting antelopes, but then ZOX, the agency they had dedicated their lives to, turned on them, betrayed them.
That’s why they were so into robbing banks—it was their way of bringing it to the government agency that wanted them dead because of atrocities they’d witnessed.
They knew too much.
“There she is—over there with the bright white hair.” Odin nodded his head at a sturdy-looking woman at the end of the bar with a dyed platinum buzzcut. “She’s got her fingers into most of the security cameras in Los Angeles. She’s kind of a middleperson, matching buyers and sellers.”
Tabby turned toward us right then, as if she sensed our attention. She grabbed her drink and sauntered over, taking the empty seat. “Tabby,” she said, holding out her hand.
I shook it. “Isis,” I said.
“Got yourself a god name,” she said.
I smiled proudly—I couldn’t help it. “Yup.”
“You can talk in front of her,” Odin said, and I sat up a little bit straighter. I felt so lucky, being part of this amazing gang, if only for a little while. “You have the image?”
“Do I have the image?” Tabby asked, like that was outrageous. “It’s not so simple as that. What I have is a nervous seller. He works for the company that helps run AV at the fairgrounds.”
“How much?” Odin asked.
Tabby shook her head. “Here’s what you need to understand—the guy’s seriously nervous. The men that grabbed the footage and the image you want to see, they have a lot of juice. He didn’t even want me to tell you about him, that’s how nervous he is. He’ll be mad if you approach him. He’ll know it was me who tipped you off, and he might not play ball with me anymore. Which cuts off some of my network.”
