She nodded. “It’s taken me almost a year to get this far; I don’t want you killing him before I talk to him.” She glanced at Terwilliger, who was getting painfully to his feet. “Who’s this one?”

“Nobody very important,” said Cain.

“Thanks a heap,” muttered the gambler, flexing his leg and wincing in pain. “I think something’s broken.”

“If it was, you wouldn’t be able to move it like that,” said Virtue. “Now stop whining and shut up.”

Terwilliger glared at her, then went back to massaging his knee.

“All right, Mr. Cain,” she said, turning to the bounty hunter. “What now?”

“What do you suggest?”

“Our interests are parallel, but not identical,” she replied. “I don’t care if you kill Santiago, as long as I get my feature—and I assume you don’t begrudge me my feature as long as you get your reward. I don’t see much sense fighting to the death over who gets to extract the information we need.”

He nodded. “Which brings us back to you, Whittaker.”

Socrates smiled. “Nothing has changed, Sebastian. You can’t afford to kill me, and I can’t afford to let Santiago know I’ve betrayed him. So, while you can certainly cause me a great deal of pain, you’re not going to get what you want.”

“It’s a possibility,” admitted Cain. “On the other hand, finding out if you’ve got a breaking point is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”

“Don’t be an ass, Cain,” said Virtue. “There’s an easier way to do this.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” replied Cain.

“We’ll shoot a couple of cc’s of niathol into him and he’ll tell us anything we want to know.”

“Niathol isn’t something that bounty hunters tend to carry around,” Cain said wryly.

“Then isn’t it lucky for you that I came prepared?” she said, unfastening her satchel.

“You expected to have to use it?”

“I anticipated the possibility,” she replied, withdrawing a small package and starting to unwrap it.

“You couldn’t have known I’d be here. How did you plan to get him to hold still for it?”

“The same way I convinced your friend to leave me alone,” she replied, pulling out a small vial that had been wrapped in refrigerated tape. A moment later she had filled a small, sterile syringe with it.

“Well, Whittaker,” said Cain, “are you going to make this easy on yourself, or am I going to have to hold you down?”

“All right, Sebastian,” said Socrates with a sigh. “Skip the drug. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, but I think as long as we have the niathol we won’t bother relying on the eccentricities of your memory. Roll up your sleeve.”