“Happens I do,” he said, carefully. “At least, I do know about things that are this primitive. We had to learn how to look for bombs in our cars, and booby traps people would set up in barricades.”

She glanced at him sideways, but didn’t comment. She didn’t have to; it was all there in her glance. He took a deep breath to calm himself; he’d earned that particular doubtful glance.

“Honest,” he said, with complete truthfulness. “Jennie, I can swear to you that I have never set a bomb in my life, and I only took apart bombs that whites set on Native property. Okay?”

She nodded. “Okay. So, how about if I hold the light and you deal with this one?”

He was still wearing his rubber gloves; she couldn’t possibly have missed that, but she didn’t say anything about it. The bomb was ridiculously simple to take apart, leaving them with a potentially dangerous device, and a “device” that was probably equally dangerous, in another direction entirely.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Now we take this sucker back to my car to store as evidence,” she said. “You carry it; you’ve got the gloves, and if there are any latent prints I don’t want them messed up. I’d let you take it, but since you’re a known activist, if anyone got probable cause to search you and your property—”

“Yeah.” She was right, dammit. “Why not just leave it here for the cops to find?”

She tucked the medicine-pouch inside her jacket and dusted her hands off before answering him. “Because I’m afraid it won’t be here in the morning,” she finally said. “I’m afraid it’s going to mysteriously disappear. It was meant for me. You just happened to fall over it.”

He didn’t quite snort at what he would have considered an outrageous statement a few hours ago. He simply amended it. “You, or anyone else who might have recognized it for what it was. There are supposed to be some O.U. people here, sooner or later. It would really look bad to blow one of them up.”

She held one hand over the lump in her jacket where the medicine-pouch was, and nodded, slowly. “That’s true, and I can’t explain it, but I know it was meant for me. And I would probably have done just what you started to do if you hadn’t gotten there first and sprung the trap. I wasn’t looking for a trap like that.”

He thought about the sudden avarice that had overcome him at the sight of the pouch, and his mouth went dry again. This was getting to be a lot more than he had bargained for.