Page 24 of The Deeper Game
He stood. “Everything’s important.”
An hour later, we were standing in the cool basement of a large university building asking directions to the ornithology lab from a young woman with a short afro and a tie-dyed shirt.
“There isn’t an ornithology lab,” she informed us.
“How about an ornithology grad student?” I asked.
“We’re paying cash for an ID on a feather,” Thor said.
The woman tilted her head quizzically. “How much?”
“How about three hundred?” Thor asked.
She paused in a way that suggested that was either a very good price or a very bad price. “Yeah, you can get an ID for that,” she said finally.
Good price, then.
She led us to a hallway lined with doors, eventually stopping at one that was covered with cartoons that looked like they were cut out of a newspaper. Most of them were about mountain lions.
“He’s a panther guy,” she explained, “but he knows birds. You have to know birds as a panther guy because panthers eat birds.”
Thor seemed amused by that.
The door was opened by a wiry, outdoorsy looking kid who appeared to be no older than sixteen. “What’s the blood on this?” he asked, examining the feather through the baggie.
“We’re running it. Pig’s blood, we think,” Thor explained. “It was left as a prank, so to speak.”
The guy put the feather under a microscope. “Huh. Not…entirely common.”
“I need everything interesting you can tell me about it.” Thor pulled out a wad of twenties and shelled out $300 to the pantherguy and another bunch of money to the woman who found him for us.
“This is really generous,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You need your answer in a hurry or something?” the panther guy asked. “I’ll have to run a very specific round of tests on this one. How does seventy-two hours sound?”
“Can you give it to us in the next forty-eight hours?” He slapped a few more bills onto the table.
The panther guy smiled. Nothing like doing business with bank robbers.
Chapter Six
There wasno sign of Zeus or Odin when we got home. But on the upside, no creepy package on the front step.
“Pull out your piece,” Thor said as we stepped out of the car. The guys liked to call their guns ‘pieces.’
I pulled my silver pistol from my purse. Thor had his Sig pointed down by his leg.
“From now on, we clear the place all around. We clear every room before anything else. No surprises. You know how to do this.”
“Yup.” We’d been training.
We headed around through the shrubbery and scrub trees that grew on the rocky terrain around the house, a one-story rambler that was two-stories in the back due to the hill.
We crept past the lower patio, the sunken hot tub, the rustic outdoor shower.
The fierce wind streamed through Thor’s bright blond hair and his gun flashed in the sunshine. He looked like a Viking Rambo.
I followed him, feeling like a mountain goat on high heels, silver revolver at the ready. I’m sure we made quite the picture.Luckily, the foliage was thick enough that our neighbors couldn’t see us unless they were really scrutinizing.
