Page 58 of The Best Trick

Which, to be fair, had happened.

“To what do I owe the honor?” he asked.

“Have you ever heard of Wilson Brockmeier?” Zeus asked, getting right down to business.

Stan the Man leaned back on the front of his desk with a strange grin on his face. “The name does sound familiar,” he said, crossing his ankles.

“How familiar?” Zeus asked.

“I don't like to kiss and tell,” he said, looking at me a little too long. “Generally.”

Zeus rose from his seat and stood in front of me, cutting off Stan's sightline. “How about you tell it anyway,” he said. “We're not asking you anything we can't get from the customers out there.”

“Then why not ask them?” Stan said.

“Because we’re asking you. If you weren’t interested in talking to us, you shouldn’t have invited us back and wasted our time,” Zeus said, words laced with threat.

Stan regarded us for a long time, weighing Zeus’s words. “Yeah, Wilson Brockmeier came in. Placed bets. Fights, mostly. I wish he’d never darkened that door; I can tell you that. Nothing I can do about it now.”

“How much has he got outstanding with you?” Zeus asked.

Stan made a strange face. “You really don't know, do you?” he asked. “But then again, not a lot of people know.”

“Know what?” Odin barked.

“What he was up to,” Stan said.

“You mean the appraisals?” I asked.

Stan snorted. “No, beyond that. I'm talking about something far more interesting, in fact. You could see why he'd want to keep it quiet of course.”

Odin stood now. “You gonna fill us in at some point here?”

“I'd be happy to,” Stan said. “I actually have some very interesting fucking information about Wilson if that sort of thing might be useful to you.”

“We’ll make it worth your while,” Odin said. “If it's good information that we can't get elsewhere, we'dmorethan make it worth your while.” Odin pulled out a wad of bills.

“Oh no, that's not what I had in mind,” Stan said. “I was thinking about a little taste.” Here he jerked his chin at me. “A round with this one.”

I gasped.

My guys stiffened. The temperature in the room dropped by about thirty degrees.

Uh-oh.

Odin’s voice came out ominously low. “Whatdid you just say?”

“You boys can watch or not, Stan the Man isn’t picky,” Stan continued, oblivious to my guys’ outrage, oblivious to the very real danger he was now in with his sexual ask. “I just need to get a taste…maybe a little poke—”

Zeus was a blur of motion, surging up to grab Stan’s shirt front and pin him up to the wall. Whatever was left of Stan the Man’s sentence became unintelligible chortling-choking.

Probably for the best.

“What the fuck did you just say?” Odin demanded again.

Stan attempted words without success, also probably for the best. The way Zeus held him, by his shirt’s front and collar, Stan’s feet were barely touching the ground. He was like one of those cartoons where the person is suspended in midair with their legs still running.

“What did you just say?” Thor demanded, not that any of us wanted it repeated, and it most definitely wouldn’t have behooved Stan, who was doing more chortle-choking.

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