The Hostage Bargain Read Online Free PDF

straightening back up to his cool badass self. Maybe that’s what they thought of me—a country bumpkin.
    I walked around to the passenger side. Odin was there. “I think the girlfriend should sit up front,” I said to him through the window.
    Odin smiled a smile that positively glittered with dark designs. “The girlfriend sits where we tell her to sit. That happens to be one of our rules.”
    I got this quivery feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew that he was telling the truth, that they had some sort of rules, and the rules had nothing to do with bank robberies.
    “The rules don’t apply to Melinda,” Zeus said.
    The back door slid open and I got in next to Thor and shut the door. I wanted to hear more about these rules, and frankly, I wanted them to be really dirty.
    “Please,” I said. “Call me Isis.”
    Thor looked surprised at this, and both he and Odin swung their gazes to Zeus, as if to see what he’d do. Zeus just stared ahead grimly. His silence brought a hush down over the van. The man’s silence had power.
    Finally I spoke up. “You all have god names. You said I could be in the gang until the next job. I think I deserve a god name.”
    Thor seemed to pull himself together. “Thank you, Isis. You are awesome. That was awesome.”
    I pulled my dead tooth thing off. Odin handed back the box and I dropped it in. There were other dead tooth disguises in there, plus tattoos, fake scars, and moles. “I can’t believe you go around with a kit like this. Did you send away for it from the back of a comic book?”
    Odin snapped the box lid shut. “Worked, didn’t it?”
    “We’re not out of the woods yet,” Zeus said. “But—” He caught my eyes in the mirror and nodded. “Thank you.”
    The cars in front of us started to move. Soon we cleared the bridge and were clipping along at a highway speed, leaving the police and copters behind.
    Zeus and Odin discussed how the cops had handled the search, all cool about the whole episode. Maybe it was a bandit thing. I put my hand over my chest. “Wow. Phew!” I felt like my insides were vibrating.
    “I know,” Thor said. We exchanged glances, and his blue eyes seemed quite bright. He was still in the white T-shirt and slacks, and when you really looked, he, too, seemed very keyed up. Aroused, even. It was exactly how I felt, like all my sex and danger circuits had crossed.
    “What now?” I said, holding his gaze.
    From the front, Zeus said, “We lay down miles, change license plates and van decal, and then stop for the night.”
    Stop for the night. For some reason my mind went right to Zeus, to that moment in the bank when I touched his glove, handing off the bag, the frisson of shivers.
    “And hit another First City? As a gang?”
    “You’re staying with us through the next job, we didn’t say you could take part in the next job,” Zeus said.
    I sat back, disappointed. It seemed like there should be more, somehow. I wanted there to be more.
    There’s this abandoned ski jump ten minutes from our farm, a creaky wooden thing built in the 1960s. It’s so tall, you can see its dark bones cragging up into the horizon for miles around, beckoning you, daring you with its insane height and rickety thrills.
    When you drive over there and sneak up to it, you find a chain link fence around it and No Trespassing signs all over, but it’s easy enough to break in, easy enough to climb up it with your skis strapped to your back; you just have to take care to avoid the rotten rungs. Adrenaline and excitement build with every step, and then you’re standing on top and there’s nothing like it. You can see for miles round, and then you look down at the impossible downward angle, which tips up at the very end, designed to send you up into the air. Standing up there before you push off is like the edge of ecstasy, like the still point at the tip-top of a rollercoaster, and you know that you’ll go.
    Or more, you know that it will take you. That there