The Ticker slammed the tailpipe upward. There was a curse from Walt, and a clatter; the knife fell half-in, half-out of the door. Tick-Tick kicked it out onto the sidewalk with her foot and used her assault weapon to lever the door open. It must have banged into Walt’s nose, because he was clutching it when the door finally swung all the way open. He was wearing grease-stained jeans and no shirt. He didn’t have a tan.

“Walt,” said Tick-Tick, smiling, “you know Orient, don’t you?”

His face went blank and white as restaurant china.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry to barge in on you like this.”

“The wrench?” Tick-Tick reminded him.

A patch of pink appeared on the skin under each of his eyes. “Uh. Oh, has it got, um, blue paint on the end of the grip?”

“Yes,” said the Ticker, smiling. “Exactly the color of my bike, in fact.”

“Oh. Hey, I thought that was Chillie Billie’s wrench, Tick-Tick. Honest. I’ll, uh…” He’d already backed his way out of the door; the rest of the sentence was lost somewhere inside the building as he disappeared. Then he reappeared with a torque wrench and another “Honest,” even more desperate than the last.

As soon as Tick-Tick laid hands on the wrench, the nudging, pulling feeling in me stopped. A little tension went out of my shoulders that I hadn’t known was there.

“Thank you, Walt. I do hope it works as well as it used to.”

Walt nodded as if the back of his head wasn’t very firmly attached and he had to be careful. Then he shut the door.

As I climbed into the sidecar, I said, “Weren’t you a little hard on him? The knife aside, I mean.”

“I don’t like thieves.”

“Wasn’t being caught at it enough humiliation?”

She turned to me, surprised. “You don’t know about Walt Felkin, then?”

I shook my head.

“He’s an under-lieutenant in the Pack. He’s admitted to that spot of arson at the Dancing Ferret, and bragged about beating up shopkeepers in Dragontown. No one can be brought to make a claim against him, though. The Bloods have sworn to make fiddle strings of his guts at the first opportunity. He’s an oily little Nazi.”

The Ticker sounded very much unlike herself, and it was a few minutes and several blocks before I said, “But he caved in as soon as he knew I was with you. And you knew he would. You could have told him I was there as soon as he opened the door.”

We travelled even more blocks. Her helmet kept me from seeing her expression, but her jaw was stiff. We were growling down Ho Street (the technology was on, just then) when she finally said, “You’re right. I wanted to frighten him. I think I rather hoped for an opportunity to hit him. That was inexcusable.”