She paused to toy with her Night Peepers again, as if her next line didn’t come easily. Tick-Tick made a non-commital sympathetic noise, and Wolfboy grunted, which was probably the same thing.

Rico raised her head and stared at me. “Then I remembered how you tracked down the killer in the Danceland murder.”

I remembered it, too. Normal people can take only so much of that. That’s what people like Rico are there for. I wanted to look around the table, at my friends, to see whether they’d known that was coming, whether they’d seen what Rico had meant to do. Oh, lord, I should have understood. She wanted me, but she’d been careful to explain herself to them, to do this in front of them, to put my friends on her side.

“I am not a public utility,” I said.

Rico raised her eyebrows. “I’ll pay the going rate.”

“Then you can make me mayor and the King of Elf-land. I wouldn’t do it for less.”

“Why not?”

I drank off the last of my beer with a ferocious snap. Then I rose and leaned over her, so I could look into her face, and said, “Because I tracked down the Danceland killer.”

I straightened up, smiling like a plastic mask. “I’m gonna get another. Anybody else?”

“Me,” said Tick-Tick. She understood: Have another beer, business as usual, because the matter is closed. Wolfboy shook his head. Rico sat where she was, like a woman prepared to wait.

I picked up the empties and turned. I was two good strides away before Rico raised her voice and said it, like the answer to a question.

“Richard Paul Weineman.”

I took another step. One of the beer bottles slipped out of my fingers and shattered on the floor. I turned around and said, my voice unstrung, “I beg your pardon?” but it was too little, too late.

Rico was leaning back in her chair and staring at the ceiling. The Ticker was alarmed, by my face, I think. Wolfboy looked at me and turned to Rico, lips pulled back in a full-fledged snarl. He didn’t know how it had been done, but someone had just hit a friend of his, and he was ready to fight back.

Rico had even pronounced all three syllables of the last name.

She gestured me back to the booth with a jerk of her head. I came as if on a leash. The sound of breaking glass had stopped the conversations around us; now they started back up. I wondered if anyone but us had caught that name. When I was seated again Rico said, “The Suits have had a file on him for a few years. He’d be, oh, twenty-ish now.”

I watched her lips move. Mine felt like glaciers—cold, slow, and inclined to break around the edges.