The emergency team left the room first, wheeling a gurney with an elongated shape under a stained sheet. It was a surprisingly long time after that that Rico and Linn came out. Both of them had that absence of expression that took a lot of work to achieve.

“Out of chairs?” Rico asked, when she saw me folded on the floor.

I was angry—and then I wasn’t, just like that. Tick-Tick broke valuables. Rico said things like “Out of chairs?”. It amounted to the same thing. I stood and kicked the cramps out of my legs.

“Want to go home?”

“Yeah.”

We didn’t say anything to each other between Bolt and Sentiment streets. It was a slightly different kind of silence than any of the ones we’d indulged in before. When she stopped in front of my building, I said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“I will.”

I scrambled over the car door and trudged up the steps. Behind me, the Spitfire moved off in what sounded like an almost sedate fashion.

I went upstairs to my apartment, pulled the upholstered chair over in front of the window, and sat down. After a few minutes, I got up, took one of the bottles of beer out of the icebox, and took it back with me to the chair. Then I just sat, and drank until the bottle was empty, and stared blindly at the outdoors until the light was gone.

•

I lunged up out of sleep in the ink-dark room, the bedclothes tangled around me. I was sweating and making odd little noises as I breathed.

“DΘjα vu,” I said, and the sound of my voice in the darkness made me wish I hadn’t.

It was Charlie’s death again. Nobody had told me this would keep happening. This time I didn’t even have a sympathetic cop and a flask of whiskey. I’d dreamed another backwards-and-headfirst dive off the belfry, the street very close and clear. Something rising up off the hot tar roof, leaping at my face. The bright, silent day, with the heat muffling everything. It was cooler on the winding stair up to the belfry, but before that, on the sidewalk, the sun bounced painfully off the paint job on a bike—

It had started earlier. It had rewound further, the replay had started earlier, and there had been a motorcycle at the scene, before Charlie went up the stairs. Not Charlie’s bike, which would have been behind him as he came up the sidewalk. One with a matte-black-tubing chopper frame, and a dark-red teardrop gas tank—that was what the sun had reflected from.

Where was that bike now?