Evasion by Mark Leslie

child-proof lid was supposed to be removed. The pill bottle seemed to have, much like the false bottom of the tackle box, some special secret way of opening it. Scott fiddled with it for a minute but was unable to decipher the manner by which he could open it.
    Finally, in the bottom was a syringe, a couple of bolts, a pen, a pair of cufflinks, a tie clip, and small pile of lose change, both American and Canadian money; mostly nickels and quarters.  Scott picked up one of the dimes and noticed there were a series of silver rings near them. He fiddled with one of the silver rings, eventually figuring out there was a thin ring he could pop off to reveal the coin was hollow inside.
    “Holy shit, Dad,” Scott said. “What the hell would you need hollow coins for? Passing on information about secret fishing spots?”
    That’s when he heard the front door upstairs open and close, and his father’s voice.
    “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Scott said, scrambling to place all of the objects back into the bottom of the tackle box.  The coins, the pill box, the pistol-shaped object, the watch, the metal box and the hearing aid.  Once they were inside, he carefully put his grandfather’s pictures back on top, then set the false bottom object back in.
    He could hear his father and mother speaking upstairs.
    “Don’t come downstairs,” Scott said. “Don’t come downstairs.” He repeated that as he struggled with the false bottom, trying to get it to properly latch back into place.  It wasn’t working. Nothing he tried seemed to be getting it back into place.
    The sound of a drawer squeaking open and the clinking of cutlery filled the kitchen, familiar sounds of Scott’s mother preparing a meal.
    “I’ll heading downstairs for a minute before dinner,” Scott heard his father, the voice coming from the top of the stairs, announce.
    “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Scott said, trying to guide the tiny ridges along the side that he had to line up with tiny little tongues that further popped in and locked the false bottom section securely into place.  Nothing seemed to be working.
    As he struggled with the false bottom, he could hear his father’s footsteps coming down the stairs.  The one saving grace was that his father walked terribly slowly due to his one bad leg, but the rhythmic two-toned thumb of his one normal shoe, the other built-up heavy Frankenstein monster shoe pattern sounded, to Scott, like the rising anxiety-inspiring beat of tension music in a movie like Jaws or a horror flick where the creature was getting ever closer.
    His father had descended at least a half dozen stairs, before the false bottom settled into the right position and finally clicked into place.
    Scott breathed a sigh of relief as he placed the top section of the tackle box back inside and closed the lid.
    He managed to get himself across the room and over to his father’s toolbox area, pulling out one of the small cabinets holding a miscellaneous selection of tiny nails, screws, and bolts, when his father walked in.
    “What are you up to, chief?” his father asked.  Chief was one of the nicknames he’d regularly called his son when he was a kid. It had started off as Chip , but then it migrated to either Chief or Sport or Boss or Partner . For a while, during Scott’s teen years, he hated whenever his father used those terms. Now, though, that he was a little bit older, hearing his father calling him Chief was somehow comforting – something that seemed of definite importance, particularly now that he’d learned his father was keeping something rather odd from his family.
    “Oh,” Scott said, trying to sound casual. “I just need a sharp object to pop open the hard drive on my laptop.”
    He proceeded to start explaining some of the technology about the problem he’d been having earlier, knowing full well that his father would begin to fade out, stop paying attention to his computer-babble.  Sure, the man had been proud that his son was so