“No.” Then I changed my mind. “My mom was a nurse. She went back to it after—after my father left her. Us. She was second shift ER staff. Things were pretty grisly for us, and I still associate the whole thing with hospitals.”

I didn’t sound very coherent, even to me, but Rico nodded. “Money problems?”

It would have been easier to say yes, but that wasn’t, I discovered, what I wanted to say. I struggled with it for a moment, and shrugged, and looked out the door, since there wasn’t anything to see out the window except the wall across the alley.

She said, “Kids always blame themselves when their parents get divorced.”

I was startled enough to stare at her. Her expression was bland, but I think she made a mental note.

“Okay, let’s get some work done,” Rico said, and pulled a notebook out of her inside jacket pocket. “Before the medical professionals decide you’ve had enough social life.” She let her pen hover over a clean sheet and looked at me.

I drew a long breath, by way of organizing some brain cells, and began by summarizing the director’s-cut version of the dream, as I’d had it the night before. I explained why I had gone to Christoble Street with the new information instead of finding her, and she shook her head.

“Should have woke me up.”

“Fine. If it ever comes up again, I’ll remember that.”

“What time was all this?”

“Ye gods, I wasn’t really—wait, when I got to the station, it was pretty close to four a.m.”

“Which side of four?”

“Maybe ten, fifteen minutes short?”

“Okay. Keep going.”

I tried to do it in order: talking to Saquash, being interrupted by Vic’s entrance (Rico nodded and muttered, “Vickie, God’s Gift to Third Shift”), Hawthorn’s entrance, telling Hawthorn about the dream and the bike, eating, waiting for authorization, falling asleep, Hawthorn sending me home…

“You fell asleep?” Rico repeated, a textbook example of skepticism.

“It wasn’t something I’d been doing much of, until then.”

“Didn’t they think to wake you up?”

“They tried, I guess. I don’t know if Hawthorn ever got his authorization, come to think of it.”

Rico shook her head, and said, “Go on.”

So I explained, or tried to explain, why I thought at the time it would be a good idea to track the bike down myself. Rico didn’t make all the faces Tick-Tick would have; she just wrote things down.

“Time,” she prompted again.

“Um. Just before dawn. What’s the legal definition of dawn, anyway? The sky was getting light. Call it somewhere around six.”