Too Much Money

He offered me eleven years of normal salvage income to find one house. He said it like the number was nothing. That was the first thing wrong, because nobody pays eleven years for a flooded house, the houses are all flooded, they are not worth eleven months. The second thing wrong was the photograph. It showed an ordinary terraced house in a district I knew, the Maren Hill blocks, nothing special, and he wanted me to find that exact house and retrieve, he said, whatever is in the basement. Not a named object. Whatever is there. I have done this long enough to know that a client who cannot name the object either does not know what they left, which is grief, or knows exactly what they left and will not say it, which is something else. The man in the grey coat did not look like grief. I told him the Maren Hill blocks were unstable and the dive was dangerous and the price reflected that. He did not haggle. He just nodded, like danger was a line item he had already approved.