Page 35 of The Deeper Game
Odin finished gathering up the phone pieces into the baggie.
“Just a little more time,” Thor said quietly to Matteo. “Let’s see where we are tomorrow with all this.”
So Thor was open to putting the Prime Royale on the back burner. That was a relief.
Chapter Eight
Whatever Zeus had doneto speed up the fingerprint processing had worked, because an hour later, the four of us were speeding down a highway toward Tivendale Heights, a suburb an hour northeast of LA, after a quick stop to change out of our clubbing clothes and get more weaponry.
The lights blurred by and the rain streaked sideways across the windows in spite of the wipers working double time.
They’d gotten a hit on one of the sets of fingerprints—a guy named Ingvey. He had a sexual assault arrest record.
Perfect,Zeus had said.
That was one way to look at it, I guess.
Odin sat in the front next to Zeus, as usual. He was noodling around on his smartphone, digging into Ingvey’s history.
“It’s allfucking-gfoot stuff with this Ingvey,” Odin said.
I had my head on Thor’s shoulder in the back, legs curled sideways. Thor’s face was lit blue by the screen of his iPad. He was emailing back and forth with Mexico, which was never a good sign. I could feel his tension building. I sat up and tucked his hair behind his ear. Thor hadn’t shaved for a while, and the blond scruff on his face made him more exotic in a kind ofScandinavian way, like you could imagine him traipsing through the moonlit snow in badass fur boots.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Lupe, my risky breech, is stressing,” Thor said.
“You can’t leave,” Odin barked from the front.
“I won’t. She has at least three weeks. Unless she goes early. But she won’t,” he added quickly.
Silence in the SUV. It would be bad to leave before the Prime, but in spite of what Odin had said, we all knew Thor needed to do this. Thor tended to unravel when he wasn’t able to be his doctor self. Also, we all felt a special bond with Lupe due to her fugitive status. She was like our adopted sister.
“This makes zerofucking-gsense,” Odin bit out. “Ingvey’s a foot fetishist. What self-respecting foot fetishist would target Isis?”
“Excuseme?” I protested.
“Not that you don’t have attractive feet, Isis, but you’re not what I’d imagine as the object of a foot fetishist.”
“What are you saying?”
Odin twisted around in the front seat to give me one of his smoldering looks. “That you dishonor our gang cloud tattoo with your chipped pink toenail polish.” He turned back to the screen. “Stalking and threatening. It doesn’t feel like the work of a foot fetishist. The feather, the note. The feet, the way such a man operates…” He trailed off, consumed with these psychological variables. “And when you look at what Ingvey has posted on boards,” he added.
“You know a lot about foot fetishists?” I asked.
“I know a lot about every kind of person,” Odin said simply.
“It’s disturbing,” Thor said, not looking up from his tablet. Thor was only half with us. That patient was worrying him.
“Isis has beautiful feet,” Zeus said. “And I am going to tear off his balls for threatening her.”
“You need to calm yourself down,” Odin said.
I caught Zeus’s eyes in the mirror, so full of anguish and rage and energy like a wild god. He looked intense and alone, strapped into the driver’s seat, face pulsing light and dark from the headlights of passing cars, muscular hands dwarfing the steering wheel. I felt like if he wanted to, he could just rip apart the whole vehicle. I recalled the steely feel of his cock at the restaurant. I wondered if he was still hard.
“We don’t know that it’s him,” Odin added. “We’ll figure it out. They take people off investigations they’re too close to for a reason, Zeus. We do it right.”
“Wewilldo it right.” Zeus’s chest rose and fell with force. “Whoever did this will not survive the heat of my goddamn fire.” He was getting himself more and more agitated. “I will rain hell on anybody who even looks at her wrong.”
