Page 94 of The Best Trick

“We'll see,” Odin said.

“We’ll see?” I complained. “Pull-ease!”

We found Zeus and Thor playing lawn darts in the backyard.

Zeus’s eyes were wide as saucers as Doris bounded up. “Where did she come from?”

“Doris!” Thor said, petting her scruff.

I pulled the tackle bag from my purse and handed it to Odin, who held it up like a prize. “She missed her games,” he said. “Poor baby.”

Zeus’s green eyes went wide as saucers. “Is that…”

“The tackle bag? Why, yes, my friend,” Odin said.

Thor stood. “The bag.”

“If you have to pee, you’d better pee now,” I said, because I felt half crazy—from relief or happiness or shock or I don’t know what.

“It’s the evidence,” Thor added.

“You didn't,” Zeus said to Odin.

“What?” Odin grinned. “I didn’t train Doris to be our inside asset? Why, actually, yes, I did.”

“How did you think this up?” Thor asked.

“A guess that I made about Denko.” Odin knelt down to pet Doris. “The more we dealt with Denko around this, the more it came to me that we weren’t the only ones who valued the tackle bag of evidence.”

“It was Denko’s insurance policy,” Thor guessed.

“Exactly,” Odin said. “He was holding onto it this whole time, but he didn’t want us to know that, and who can blame him? I wouldn’t want us to know it, either.”

“We’d wouldn’t stop until we had it,” Zeus said.

Odin said, “I think he panicked when Doris was stolen, and then when we found her, he changed his mind about giving this thing up. Maybe he never intended to hand it over.”

“He knew we'd never hurt Doris,” I said.

“Right,” Odin said. “I think that the night he wanted to meet us, I think it really was a trap. I think he told his colleagues that he'd invented some bullshit evidence that we were after. But I always felt like it existed—the idea of this tackle bag had the ring of truth. I also felt pretty sure that he wouldn’t keep it around his home, but rather somewhere offsite, somewhere he could get at easily. There are probably instructions of some sort that it gets released to somebody upon his death—that's the kind of insurance policy he would need in an organization like ZOX.”

“Of course,” Zeus said. “Swimming with the sharks.”

Odin nodded. “Denko’s careful. The kind of guy who might move it from time to time. And what else do we know about him? He’s the kind of guy to take Doris wherever he goes.”

“So that’s why you taught her to escape from a locked car,” Thor said.

“With her nose,” Odin said, grinning. “Open the door, grab the bag, find me.”

“You are diabolical!” I said. “In the best way!”

The group of us headed inside. After feeding Doris something delicious, we emptied the tackle bag onto the table. There were thumb drives in little baggies, a couple of SIM cards, a small digital recorder, and a short cardboard tube that had a lot of papers folded and rolled up inside that turned out to be copies of emails.

Thor flattened them out on the table and we all crowded around, reading. The language was cagey. There were lots of vague terms and code names, but it was dated back from the time where the whole thing had begun. It didn't mean a lot, but Odin thought it would after we went through the rest of the evidence.

Zeus held up a small recording device. He hit play and we heard two male voices discussing the need to get rid of loose ends. They were hatching some sort of a plan. Something was going down in upstate New York.

“This would have been five years back when we were in Ithaca, before your time, Ice,” Thor said. “Remember that attack?”

---