Page 85 of The Hard Way

“Mmm.” Thor crouched on the other side of him, getting closer to his level. “I appreciate your dilemma.”

“It’s not a dilemma if I didn’tdoanything.”

I didn’t think that was technically correct, but I kept it zipped.

“Here’s the problem,” Thor began in his empathizing tone, like he was so concerned about this grave problem that they shared. “We know that you did the break-in. And soon the cops will.”

“Ididn’t!”

Thor winced and looked all around. It was the type of wince he’d sometimes give me during a sexual punishment.You were bad, Isis. You know we have to spank you now—there’s just no way to avoid it!

There would be no awesome spanking for Jeremy Zern, though.

Thor contemplated the distant trees.“You don’t want to go down for murder. I get that. It’s a serious fucking crime. You don’t have priors, but we’re talking about murder here…”

Jeremy kept up the plea. “I’m telling you—”

Thor held up a hand. “You shouldn’t have to go down, but there’s only one way you don’t.”

Jeremy regarded him warily. Thor pulled out his wallet and extracted a card. “I’ll send this guy to your home—”

“My home?”

“This guy’s a lawyer. He’ll negotiate you turning yourself in—in exchange for immunity and turning in the man who’s really behind this crime. This guy can get you a deal.”

Jeremy eyed the card like it might bite his fingers. “I can’t afford a lawyer.”

“It’s paid for.”

There was a long silence where he just kept his eye on the card. A pair of crows flew overhead, cawing. “Why do you care?”

“You’re not asking the questions here!” Zeus barked.

Still, Jeremy persisted. “Who are you?”

“We’re either your best friends or your worst enemies,” Odin said.

Again Thor winced. His sympathetic wince. “It really is all you have. It’s that, or we go to the cops and let them know how they can match the prints they have. And then you’ll be arrested. And you’ll have no chance at immunity, and you know who will have a better lawyer than you?” He let the question hang there for a bit. “Hank Vernon will have a better lawyer than you. He may even manage to pin the entire murder on you.”

“He’d be fucking-gstupid not to,” Odin said.

“It’s what I’d do,” Thor said. “Confessing is the only play you have left to make at this point. That’s why you have to get out ahead of this thing.” I loved Thor in this role: the friendly, dangerous powerbroker. “Can you imagine how eager the police would be to learn who is behind the sickening all of those people? Killing Tim Zietlow? We know Hank hired you to do the break-in, but how could you have known Hank had murder in mind?”

Jeremy said nothing, but you could practically hear the wheels in his mind spinning.

“There’s something else,” Thor began in his confiding voice. “Did you know Hank was having an affair with the dead man’s wife?”

“You shitting me?”

“No,” Thor said. “You need to move on this. You need to tell them how he hired you to steal that pathogen. How you handed it off to him. They’ll make that deal with you to get Hank. You know they will. What do you think?” He held out the card.

“I’m tied up,” Jeremy said.

“You want it?”

A beat, then, “Okay.”

Thor tucked the card into the zipped pocket of Jeremy’s windbreaker.

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