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up? I was kinda drunk.”
    “Yeah, we talked about it, but that was before I started doing the math.”
    “How much is it gonna cost?”
    “I don’t know,” Duncan said, pacing into the adjacent room and back.
    “Other than a boat and a guide, what do we need?”
    “That’s just the start.”
    He outlined what he’d been thinking the expedition would require and was mildly amused as Boyd’s jaw dropped slightly.
    “You really think we need guards?”
    “I don’t know. It’s one of those things that if you need them you want to have them. I suppose we could arm ourselves.”
    Boyd squirmed uneasily in his chair.
    “I don’t like guns.”
    “Neither do I,” Duncan said absently.
    “Maybe the professor could be our guide,” Boyd suggested. “He’s been there; he knows the area.”
    “We could ask him, but before we do that, I should talk to Steph and the others. We need to find out how much they can afford to contribute.”
    Boyd thought better of telling Duncan that he was tapped out, though he had several thousand dollars in a savings account. If necessary, he could use some of it to cover his expenses, but he was thinking that Duncan would pay his way from his grant funding. After all, he was Duncan’s assistant, and that had to count for something. Or so he had assumed.
    “Cody, if you don’t mind, would you arrange a meeting this afternoon with everyone from our group?”
    “Sure. We gonna meet here?”
    “No!” Duncan nearly shouted. “Not here.”
    “Okay, okay,” Boyd said sheepishly. “But why not?”
    “The place stinks, haven’t you noticed?”
    “I thought I smelled something yesterday, but I can’t smell anything now.”
    “Maybe the stale beer smell has dulled your senses. No, it’s worse. I think something died in one of the walls, like a big rat or something. Anyway, it would be better to do it somewhere else, like a bar or a cafe that sells alcohol.”
    “You want to loosen their tongues?”
    “Just their wallets.”

12
    Stephanie Rankin earned her undergraduate degree in bioscience at Columbia and had just completed her master’s in entomology from Penn State. At twenty-four, she planned to start her doctoral program in the fall at Michigan State. Friends described her as ambitious and persistent with a gift for sarcasm. She stood five-feet-three and had the build of an athlete. She had a smile that lit up her face, which she thought was too narrow. Her daddy was a well-compensated corporate counsel and was happy to support her academic endeavors despite the dearth of opportunity for the kind of entomology that she wanted to do. Her father had set up a trust fund for her, which would kick in when she turned twenty-five. Her plan was to continue to live off her dad while growing her trust fund so that one day she could do the kind of entomology she wanted to do without having to beg for funding like Duncan. Her only problem with Duncan was that he insisted that she address him as Dr. Duncan rather than by his first name the way that Boyd did. She understood what the pecking order was about, but it still annoyed her as if she were a second-class citizen.
    But she never let her opinions and feelings get in the way of her career. She recognized that few students got the opportunity to do field work in the Amazon basin. The Brazilian rainforest with its two and one-half million insect species was the holy grail of entomology. Just as lieutenants seek combat assignments, entomology students seek field work in the Amazon. Rankin agreed to pay her own expenses, but her dad would have paid whatever it took.
    Johnson was a different case. He grew up too close to the wrong side of the tracks, literally. The house was a block from a regional rail route that carried freight between Detroit and Chicago, throughout the day and much of the night. He got out of the neighborhood when Ohio University offered an academic scholarship and had not returned to his parents’ home since, not