I sighed and followed Eammon to a smaller room off the main larger one. Eammon sat at a desk that had clearly been made for him, owing to the size, and he pointed to the chair across from him. “I have an idea for how to get you out of Crash’s debt, in a reasonable manner. It will cover the true cost of the daggers and sheath, so as to not offend him, without overpaying him.”

My eyebrows went up. “Really?”

He nodded. “We were approached last week by a client who thinks he’s being stalked. We did a cursory look into it, and there’s no evidence anything is stalking him. He’s a bit paranoid.”

I leaned back in the chair. “He needs a babysitter from nothing?”

Eammon nodded. “We were going to turn him away, but if you take it, it’ll technically be your first bounty. It won’t be a big payout, so you’d only need to give Crash far less than a bigger bounty.” He smiled and again that twinkle was there.

“You’re a bit of a sneaky leprechaun.” I smiled and shook a finger at him. But I could use the money. Maybe I could even go to the auction for Gran’s house. Maybe . . .

Shoot, it was a dream, but sometimes dreams were what kept you going through the mud and the rain. “Okay, I’ll take the job. When does it start?”

“You’d go now, work for him for four days, $500 a day, that’s two grand.” Eammon slid a paper across to me with a name and address on it.

I skimmed it quickly. “Eric Pine. He’s way out in the boonies. Wait, is that the Eric I met last week?”

Eammon grimaced. “Yes. He prefers the quiet. He’s a half-man and completely out to lunch. He’s had us watching him off and on for the last . . . well, I guess nearly a year. But there is no one there. Nothing.”

Like Sarge, then, a werewolf. I could handle that. “You’re sure that he’s just being paranoid?”

“Absolutely,” Eammon said. “We’ve bodyguarded for him before, but there are other jobs coming through that are frankly worth more.”

My cut with the Hollows was a 70/30 split. That would leave me with fourteen hundred for the four days, and only another hundred and forty for Crash. That didn’t seem right, but for the moment I held back mentioning that Eammon was being rather stingy. The turquoise knife was priced at five thousand. If I’d negotiated, I bet I could have gotten it for four thousand at the highest. Really, I should have paid seven to eight thousand for the pair. I swallowed hard, knowing already that I wouldn’t let Eammon dictate how much I would pay Crash for the knives.