Page 71 of The Best Trick

Maybe they were good actors, but their confusion seemed genuine.

Odin stalked over and grabbed their phones from the coffee table in front of them. “Do I get your passwords the easy way or the hard way?”

Thor frowned. Zeus tipped his head at us. “You two. Search the place.”

Thor and I went to work, heading first down the stairs into the basement. No dog visible.

“You think they seemed surprised?” Thor asked, opening a closet that turned out to be full of old windows.

“They seemed surprised to me,” I said. “But hey, everybody’s an actor out here, huh?”

We came to a padlocked storage room. Thor backed up and kicked it open with a big manly bang. Just a bunch of old furniture. Thor turned around, eyeing me. He knew I loved when he acted badass.

“Mm-hmm, Thor!” I said.

He came to me and smoothed a hand over my hair. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m sad that you’re feeling so bad,” I whispered, inches from his lips.

“I’ll be fine.” Thor turned away, continuing our search. We headed back up the stairs, up to the upper level, checking every room.

Thor kicked open another locked door. A bedroom door.

“You are definitely running a surplus in the hotness bank account,” I said, trying to lighten his mood.

“Don't you worry, I'll be cashing in,” he said.

We got back to the living room to find Odin and Zeus looking bored. They didn’t even have their guns out anymore.

“It's not them,” Odin said, sounding pissed off.

“What were you doing up there?” Harold demanded.

“It’s not them?” Thor asked Odin, ignoring Harold.

“They've been blackmailing Wilson,” Odin said. “They know where the money is. Getting Wilson sprung is the last thing they want. They want to keep the money and never see Wilson again.”

I sighed.

“You can't come in here and detain us and go around wrecking things,” Harold said. “You've broken at least five laws, just in the space of these last fifteen minutes.”

“We could break some more,” Zeus said. “Right now. Whaddya think? Should we go for it? Get creative?”

“We can get prettyfucking-gcreative,” Odin said.

“You’re gonna be sorry,” Harold said.

“And wewillbe calling the police,” Clarice warned, though I highly doubted it, since Clarice and Harold were being totally shady in their own way.

“Oh, you do that,” I said, trying to sound like a badass. “We laugh in the face of the police.”

Odin grinned at me. He liked when I talked tough—almost as much as I did.

I put my hands on my hips. “We will totally enjoy laughing in their faces,” I added.

* * *

We stoppedfor lunch at an outdoor place near Venice Beach. The clock was ticking down, and we still didn’t have any good leads. Nobody seemed to want to spring Wilson badly enough to kidnap a dog. Nobody seemed to want to spring Wilson at all.

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