I've Googled this, but haven't be able to find an answer or didn't have the right phrase to find it.

When you're writing time in a story, what sort of formatting is grammatically correct? For example, I'm having a character give the timeline of a crime. He says 2 AM to begin with, which is fine, but after that he's going to drop the 'AM', because you don't tend to keep saying it when you're talking. So how do I write time after that? Would it be -

"I got the call around 3." (which looks weird)
or
"I got the call around three." (Which looks more like a number than a time.)

If it were in description, I'd keep the AM, but in dialogue it just sounds repetitive.

I've posted this to grammargeeks too, but I don't know how active it is. Anyone have a better grammar question community?

Completely off-topic: donutsweeper found me a Canadian spellchecker for my Firefox and it's awesome! When I turned it on, Googled suddenly became a word (the US one had it underlined) and it didn't try to correct 'dialogue' (the US always wants it to be 'dialog'). Yay!