Free Evasion by Mark Leslie

he was doing it, almost as if he were fourteen and had found his father’s secret stash of Playboys and was filled with an excitement mixed with an intense fear of getting caught.  He laughed at himself for having that reaction, but still, it had been a completely unexpected thing.
    He stared down at the box.  Sure, he had seen it opened before, many time. But never when he wasn’t in the presence of his father.
    He looked down at the tri-sectioned part of the box that folded up and back when the lid opened. It contained about three dozen little inch-wide by inch-long compartments filled with bits of metal, feathers, twigs, ribbons, and other assorted objects. It reminded him a little of his mother’s jewelry box, filled with earrings of all shapes, makes, and sizes.
    He rubbed his chin, realizing, immediately, that it was the same gesture Indiana Jones had used in The Temple of the Lost Arc in that classic scene where he was about to lift the idol off of the temple, before carefully reaching out and lifting off the top compartment.
    On top were a couple of topographic and hydrographic fishing maps folded and layered onto the top of the main compartment.
    Scott carefully lifted them out and placed them beside the tackle box.
    Beneath those maps were two additional compartments with a click-down lid.
    He opened the one on the right and saw that it contained a bunch of larger items, pieces of reels, rods as well as a whistle, a mini flashlight, a bottle of bug-spray, a smelly oil-stained rag, some pencils, a pen, a carpet knife, and a half-used pack of throat lozenges.
    The right side contained more of the same type of items – a mishmash of fishing and toolbox materials.
    Scott frowned, wondering what was bothering him about this set up.
    When he leaned back he realized what it was. Despite the space required for the top compartment and the additional pair of larger compartments underneath, there was still at least two and an half inches unaccounted for in the bottom of the tackle box.
    Carefully removing all of the miscellaneous objects from both of the compartments, he quietly closed the box and lifted it up to look at the bottom and see if, perhaps, the design left some hollow spaces underneath it.  Being empty, the partially plastic and partially metal box should have weighed no more than a couple of pounds. But, instead, it weighed perhaps five or even ten pounds.
    He placed it back down and picked it up again.
    Yeah. Almost ten pounds.
    He tilted it first to the left, then to the right. Something heavy slid around inside, metal clinked on metal.
    “There is something else in there,” Scott said, even more curious now.
    He placed the tackle box back down on the workshop bench, again opened it and pried open the lids of the two interior compartments.  He slid his fingers around the sides, looking for a gap, a line, anything that might indicate how those compartments opened or lifted out.
    Solving this wasn’t all that different than looking at the code in a program and understanding how it operated. Through a simple trial and error series of logical steps, Scott fiddled and played with the compartment.
    After a few minutes, still not having any success, he heard footsteps upstairs.
    “Oh, oh.”
    He rushed over to the door to the workshop and stuck his head around the corner. His father had been at work and his mother was home.  Could his father have returned early?
    He heard the sounds of a door opening, the clattering of cups. More footsteps and the sound of coffee being poured.
    It was his mother getting a coffee from the kitchen. He followed the sounds of her footsteps back into the living room where she was most likely sipping at her coffee and enjoying a paperback romance novel.
    He should have known it wasn’t his father from the sound of footsteps. His father had always walked with a distinct and unique lurch-step, the side effect of a motorcycle accident he’d had when he was a young man. Of course,