I should have given it some thought. But I hadn’t. Back when I was in the PI business I paid people by the hour. Usually about $30, billed them out at $50. An eight-hour day was $240, a forty-hour week was $1,200. A lot of it was just watching and waiting so there were lots of ten-hour days and longer. Most of the guys were ex-cops or moonlighting cops. For them it was money on top of their base money. That had been a long time ago. Normal thinking would be that it should be much more now, but American life wasn’t running that way. The rising tide had only been lifting the yachts, the rest had been left in the mudflats of the Great Stagnation, and as best as I could tell, people were as likely to be making less as they were to be making more. On that scale, $2,000, maybe $2,500. On the other hand, we’d started with $7,000 for a single night. This was a ten-day job. Seventy thousand dollars sounded insanely high. However, assuming that I could name her as my associate, or as part of LIFE, Inc.’s investigation section, or just put her on my expense account, and presuming Elizabeth came through, it wasn’t my money. I offered what I considered to be an extremely good number. “Fifteen thousand dollars.”

“That’s not a lot,” Allison said.

I said, “I thought it was.”

“Tuition at Bard is $51,000, and with books and all the extras, like a place to live and eating, it’s a lot more.”

“I thought you were a scholarship student.”

“I am. But I also have student loans. What if I want to go to grad school? Or law school. Or med school.”

“You’re not going to pay for your whole life with ten days’ work, most of which is a luxury holiday.”

“Let me ask you something first. Are we going to kill this guy?”

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking. A lot. We killed Owen Cohen.”

“That was self-defense.”

“At dinner, with your Austrian friends, Franz and Lukas, I found out you killed several people here. Three, four, five, something like that.”

“There was a girl. About your age…”

“I know. I understand,” she said, meaning acceptance of what was. “But it started me thinking. About what I did. I killed Mick McMunchun.”

“It was an accident.”

“Sure. It was. But it wasn’t. You trying to shield me from thinking I killed him, I appreciate that. I think you are really doing that to be protective, because that’s sort of who you are. But here’s what I think, I think it was what everyone wanted.”

“No. That’s not…”