She grinned. “He was a double-dyed, thoroughgoing, ratfink louse. But he was the only thoroughgoing ratfink louse in my romantic history, which suggests that, unlike some people, I do not repeat my mistakes.”

“Not yet, anyway.”

Wolfboy sniggered and covered his eyes with one hand.

She ignored us both. “You realize, don’t you, that your love life has a certain nightmarish quality? That where other people have affairs, you have imbroglios?”

I held my beer bottle in front of me like a crucifix. “Down, girl. No more about my love life before dinner.”

“Okay. Let’s try your social life instead.” It was a new voice, and familiar. I turned quickly.

Anyplace with laws ends up having something like police eventually. Bordertown had some laws. Sunny Rico was something like a cop.

In a town where everyone dyed their hair, hers was uncompromisingly natural: light brown and showing a little silver over the ears, short on top and around her face and curving over her collar in back. Her tan was better than mine. I didn’t know the color of her eyes, and couldn’t see them now; silver Night Peepers wrapped across them. Her loose trousers and looser jacket were tweedy gray linen with a fleck of red. Very nice, and only a little conservative for the neighborhood’s catholic tastes. She had a red Eldritch Steel T-shirt underneath. Both her hands were in her pants pockets.

“Detective Rico,” Tick-Tick said, in the tone she uses when several drunk Pack members are blocking her way to the bar.

“Tick-Tick,” Rico nodded in greeting. “Lobo. Orient. How do. Mind if I sit?”

I kept my face empty. “We have no minds.”

“That’s what Dancer tells me.” She hooked a chair with her foot and pulled it up to the end of the booth.

Tricky, to remind us that she was a friend of Dancer’s. They’d run in a B-town gang together once, before Dancer grew up and opened a nightclub and Sunny Rico grew up to fight crime. And there you have a yardstick for maturity in Bordertown, I suppose. I asked, “What brings you south of civilization?” She wanted a favor, of course; that was what the reminder about her and Dancer had been for.

She studied us. “Social life. You know Bonnie Prince Charlie?”

Wolfboy nodded, and the Ticker said, “Somewhat.” Rico looked back to me.

“Yeah.”

“He died yesterday.”

It held us frozen for a moment, like the glare of a camera flash. “Violently, I suppose?” Tick-Tick said. Rico nodded, and her eyes came back once more to me.