The blood had backed away from her face and left her tan gray. “Yes,” she said, a little hoarse. “I think that.”

After four years in Bordertown, one would expect me to have given up being a nice suburban kid. But in this, at least, I’d held onto my roots; the idea that Chrystoble Street Station had not been a safe place to talk about the motorcycle was very hard to accept.

Rico must have seen that. “You were right the first time,” she said. “Why destroy the motorcycle now? Why do anything about it now, as long as someone isn’t looking for it? Unless, that is, you find out someone is looking for it. The only people who could have known that, going by your testimony, were in Chrystoble Street. Unless you told someone else about it, and forgot to mention it.” Her voice was determinedly flat, but I could still hear the hope that lay under the last sentence.

“No. But one of the cops might have said something to somebody.”

“When?”

“Hell, J don’t know. Rico, I can’t see it. I can’t picture any of those guys…”

She waited for me to try to find the words, and when I didn’t, she offered, “… Killing people? It’s the last resort in my job, but I have to be prepared to do it if the last resort comes around. So do they.”

“Not like that. Which of them could do that?”

“Just at a guess, I’d say the one who doped your soup.”

I stared at her.

“Oh, come on. You’re not going to tell me that never occurred to you?”

When I found my voice, I said, “You bet. Every day. My God, of course it didn’t. Where am I supposed to get all this practice at being paranoid?”

“I don’t know, but you’d better start looking.” Then she closed her mouth sharply, and after a moment added, “No, scratch that. You won’t have to. Beyond developing a certain base level of practical street smarts, which is my parting recommendation to you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re off it. You’re out of here. Done. I need to pick your brains about a few more things that happened last night, and then these last couple days can fade like a bad dream.” Just too late she must have recognized the appropriateness of that; she winced.

I was surprised to find that everything inside me seemed to have stopped happening; I had a feeling of suspended time filling my ribcage. “I screwed up,” I said. “I know that. It won’t happen again.”