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called himself Devinder Bashir told her.
    “Yet,” Jane whispered, as an uneasy shock traversed her spine.
    Is this even real? she questioned herself. Or is this a freakish extension of the dream?

    She lunged toward her sleeping brother, impatiently tugging on his shirt. He stirred briefly before starting to turn away, but Jane pulled him back toward her. “Mike! Wake up! Goddamnit! Wake up!”
    Mike grimaced. He unhinged one eye to focus. “What the fuck time is it, Janie?”
    “Six o’clock.”
    “Fuck me. Wake me up at 11:00.”
    Jane grabbed his shoulders with urgency, shaking him. “Mike! Wake the fuck up!”
    Now, he was pissed. Well, as pissed as Mike Perry could be—which was more like what bothered looked like with most people. “What, Janie?”
    “Slap me.”
    “I don’t wanna slap you.”
    “Mike, I’m not kidding. I need you to slap me.” Mike made a weak attempt that resembled brushing a hair off his sister’s face rather than a smack. “Fuck,” Jane mumbled, still feeling outside of her body. “Mike, I mean it, if you don’t slap me hard, I’m cutting off your beer!”
    That got his attention. He landed a good cuff across his sister’s left cheek.
    Jane shook off the sting and let out a satisfied breath. “Okay. I’m not dead.”
    “You’re not dead?” Mike sat up. “Jesus, Janie. If you’re geeked up on meth, at least cut me in on some.”
    “I’m not doing meth, Mike! It interferes with my job description.”
    “Could’ve fooled me, Detective. What time is it again?”
    Jane sensed the unfinished seam of another reality that was still wide open. “Time for a drink.”

2
    After an uneventful night of dreams, Tuesday morning arrived. Jane knocked back a breakfast of three cups of coffee, four cigarettes and a two-day old chocolate donut. As she drove to Denver Headquarters, she could remember every moment of the dream. It still shook her core with the same uneasy shudder. To her knowledge, she’d never had a dream where a complete stranger introduced himself by his full name. Devinder Bashir. How in the hell did her subconscious invent that foreign name? Must have read it on a homicide victim list, she reasoned. Then again, she hadn’t worked a homicide with an East Indian vic or family member in years. Logic, use logic, she urged herself, while she lit a new cigarette off the dying ember of another. It was the booze, she decided. Yeah, that made the whole thing easier to swallow. At 35, her weather-beaten body was getting too old for three-day binges where incoherency was the objective. Drowning out the voices was always the goal, achieving that place of numbness where she could stare into the void and feel nothing. It was taking longer to get to that empty space and, once there, the sweet peace lasted less and less time. All addicts eventually
slammed against this wall. At this point, one either got help or dove deeper into the bottle. Jane figured that she could still swim pretty well, which made the latter option her preferred choice.
    Just past 8:45 A.M, she peeled her 1966 ice blue Mustang into the parking garage on 13th and Cherokee. She finished off her sixth cigarette of the morning, as she walked to the elevator. After a three-day holiday weekend, she wondered how many people who had a pulse last Friday had given up the ghost by Monday night at the hands of another; people who had every good intention of seeing another week of existence, never seeing their sudden demise on the horizon. No sooner did that thought cross her mind when she heard Devinder’s voice clearly. “You’re not dead, yet.”
    “Jane!”
    She spun around. Detective Bruce Miles was walking toward her. He’d worked vice and narcotics for more than 20 years and it showed on his grizzled face. Miles was less than a year from retirement and had started to slow down. Cops called guys like Miles “slugs” or “hairpieces,” insinuating that they were just going through the motion and had lost