“Beer, please.” I got a look in her icebox as she opened it. It had lots more things in it than mine, and none of them seemed to have green stuff growing on them. She popped the tops on the beers and set one in front of me. It didn’t have a label. I took a swallow. “That’s familiar.”

“Huh. My neighbor down the street makes it, but not for sale. I wonder where you had it. It’s a nice summer hammock beer. Not very fizzy, either.”

“A little heavy on the hops.” Then I remembered. “I had this at Chrystoble Street! This is the same stuff Hawthorn brought out from the back room.”

“That accounts for it—I take extras down to the station house, sometimes. Now, are you going to tell me what all the excitement’s about?”

I told her about yesterday’s adventures. I gave her a good-sized sampling of the reactions we’d gotten to our questions, which made her wince, but she motioned me to go on. I told her what Camphire had overheard from Tiamat, and I told her about my conversation with Tiamat, and our subsequent meeting with Tiamat’s friends.

“Oh, good,” Rico said at last. “Drug-crazed elf wannabes with a gun, with bullets. The town thick with paranoid-bigot rumors. And Linn sick in bed.”

“In bed, is he? Whatever he’s come down with, he’s given it to Tick-Tick.”

She frowned. “When did he have a chance to give it to Tick-Tick?”

Time to decide if I was going to give Linn away to his partner. I decided not. “He came ‘round to her place yesterday to grill me about the bomb, but the Ticker says she probably caught it from him the day before, at the hospital.”

Rico continued to frown, and stare at me. Her jaw moved, as if she were absently probing a tooth with her tongue. “That seems odd. Doesn’t it?”

“Does it?”

“Have you ever seen an elf with a head cold?”

“No,” I said, after a little consideration. “But you learn something new every day.”

“I’ve never seen one. And forty-eight hours is pretty quick incubation, I think, for respiratory bugs. If it’s that easy for elves to catch a cold, we ought to have seen an example of it before this.”

“It must be a real beaut, anyway—Tick-Tick’s never sick.”

She shook her head. “This bothers me. You saw Linn yesterday?”

“Yeah. He seemed tired, and he had a hell of a cough, but he said it was overwork and the smoke at the bomb site.”

“But of course, that’s not what it was after all.” Rico raked her fingers through her hair, across the top where it was shortest. She was sitting in a patch of sun from the kitchen window, and the light sparkled back from the occasional white hair amid the brown ones.

“How old are you?” I asked suddenly.