It was a shaft-driven bike, which was surprising; chain drives are cheaper, and easier to fix, which means they’re more common in Bordertown. The Ticker could have given me a rough idea of the engine size just by looking. Lacking her presence, I guessed 750 cc or larger. I couldn’t tell how recently it had been driven, but the engine wasn’t hot right then; there was no telltale ticking from cooling metal. There was what looked like a custom security cable running from the ignition, under the gas tank, and connected to something in the high weeds along the pavement’s edge.

Unfortunately, there was no monogram on the seat upholstery, no tag that read, “If lost, please return to,” and no way to tell if the bike belonged in Walt Felkin’s back lot. It was not, in other words, as easy as I’d hoped.

That was Rico’s problem, I acknowledged irritably. I pulled the cigarette out of my breast pocket and lit it while I thought. Rico would have to push past Felkin’s front door manners (I tried to imagine her using a piece of tailpipe, and couldn’t; possibly I didn’t know her well enough) and ask him lots of questions about illegal things. And Walt, from what I knew, would close up as if he’d been welded shut. The Ticker had been confident that the mere naming of me would get her wrench out of him, but that was different. We were Townies, after our own. We weren’t cops.

So. I crouched in the long, dew-wet grass behind the building next door, stared at Walt Felkin’s painted-over windows, smoked my herbal tig, and let my stupid idea hatch. Maybe I was even less awake than I thought I was. Still, it seemed good then, and better the more I looked at it: Walt knew who I was. A Soho fixture, a friend of Tick-Tick’s, an adamant neutral in the choosing of sides that went on among gangs and races in the territory south of Ho street. I began to compose my line of innocent enquiry. I didn’t stub out my cigarette in the dirt and rise up out of the undergrowth until it was nicely polished.

Walt’s front door was actually at the corner of the structure, recessed a little under a projection just big enough to keep the weather off while one fumbled for the key. One would have to, every time; there was a lock, but no doorknob. The door faced the wrong way for morning sunlight, but the current owner didn’t strike me as the sort to have noticed. Though it was still barely dawn, the difference in the light between the back of the building and the front was enough to make the porch seem dark. I knocked with enough enthusiasm to wake someone up, which I knew I was doing.