Annoyed, he decided he wasn't going to sleep anyway. He took the secret door that exited behind the magazine stand across the sacred square, where the Castle faced the temple. Abruptly, he paused. He'd forgotten his force shield. He hesitated, swore an oath, then decided to continue on anyway. There were lots of tourists around, and none of the individuals or species looked dangerous – not that the King of the Galactic Empire knew what some species looked like when they were annoyed.
Approaching from the other direction, a birdlike Gu strutted steadily, looking innocent. "Lightly," she thought, tucking the bomb under her arm. "Mustn't alarm the natives." She walked casually across the plaza, moving among the Pthutt, towards the Temple of Temples, Holy of Holies, religious and political center of the south arm of the Galaxy.
Even then, all might have been well, but several of the Empire security staff, alerted by some spies, were checking out all the Gu in the city. Spotting one, they cut across the crowds toward it.
Neither the Gu nor the security staff noticed the King nearby when the Gu, finding herself cut off, touched the detonator.
Less than three days later, the superluminal ether was full of messages, including one to the third planet of a small star out towards the edge of the galaxy.
****
Kitchener, Ontario
A house in one of the older parts of town, close to the river.
Three Days before Button Day
Clyde Books took the rifle out of the hot-water tank. The tank hadn’t been used for anything else for years, the water in the Kitchener house being heated by a couple of demand units near the taps. So the old tank was a good place for an unregistered rifle, really big scope and all.
He set the rifle onto the kitchen table, then began dismantling it, while he waited for the information he needed.
He took it apart, piece by piece, then checked each piece, taking special care with the scope. Once it was apart, he put on a blindfold, and shuffled the forty-three pieces around with a ladle. Some pieces, he pushed onto the floor.
Still blindfolded, he reassembled the weapon, crawling on his hands and knees to get those pieces that had fallen onto the floor. When he was done, he felt his way to the window and opened it. Resting the stock on a chair back, he pointed the rifle out the window, then pushed up the blindfold. The rifle was aimed at a window four houses away, across the street.
Satisfied, he went to the ammunition storage, also in the old water heater. He paused for a minute, then decided twenty-five rounds of the long shells would be more than enough. Actually, he figured he’d need no more than a couple in any situation. “One round; one kill” was still the sniper’s motto, however unreal it was in most situations.
He loaded all of the rifle except the stock into a packsack. Then he got a wooden cane from the wall. It came apart to provide a hiding spot for the long rifle barrel. That done, he paused, and sighed, then returned the rifle and ammunition to their original hiding places.
Scowling, he loaded his real weapons, a taser and a cattle prod, into his leather jacket. Perhaps the next two days would be good for hunting, even without a gun.
Clyde picked up his pad. The pictures had been delivered, as promised. He printed them off, in color, with the caption, “possibly under alien control,” at the top of the paper. Little things like that never hurt. Now to choose a target.
There were twelve guys and a girl in the pictures. He scanned the names, but they meant nothing to him. The only target within easy driving range was a dude named Casey Szczedziwoj, from Kitchener. But Clyde had little faith in the hunter group, so he felt reluctant to chase this one down right away.
He also, to his surprise, got a message from Darkh. Someone had left Darkh a tip about two guys, apparently brothers, Bill and Bob Daniels; who were listed as living on Ward's Island, one of the islands in Toronto Harbour. The brothers intrigued Books; maybe he could get a two for one. Anyway, he'd enjoy the trip to the island. Within the hour his white Buick was on the 401, bound for Toronto, listening to the radio.
Clyde hadn’t ever caught, or even seen, a true alien, and in fact only two had ever been seen. One crawled out of a guy being tasered in Boise, Idaho. The fellow hadn’t done anything wrong, and the tasering was a mistake, but the cop who made the mistake saw a luminescent creature like a slug the size of a big submarine sandwich ooze out from the victim and onto the pavement. Instinctively, the cop had plugged the thing with six shots from his police-issue gun, separating it into several pieces with a lot of pavement bits stuck in for good. The cop was still trembling when the pieces of the thing seemed to soak into the roadway and disappear.
The taser victim, later known as "Case One," had recovered and had no intention of suing anybody. Rather, he had nothing but thanks for being freed from what he described as years of control. Nobody believed him, of course, except the cop, who had then founded an online association called “Alien Hunters International.”
In the following years the organization had acquired a membership of at least five hundred people, of whom, at best, a dozen might be both serious and sane at the same time. A lot of odd-acting people had been tasered without results in the next decade, but the apparent discovery of another alien had given everybody hope. As with the first, an electric shock had caused the alien rider to leave its host body, at least for a moment.
Mind you there was an ongoing discussion on the web as to whether this second one was a hoax or not. But still, many believed.
In any case, the online discussion groups had decided that it took more than acting odd to arouse suspicion. Two important clues had come from Case One. The fellow involved had abruptly started acting strangely, had avoided people who knew him well, and had some undefined source of enough money to live a simple but adequate life. And, of course, there were the diamonds.
This was Clyde’s nineteenth foray in three years, and he was realistic enough to know that the odds were against him. But what the heck, it gave him something to do on a weekend, and who knows, maybe one of the people in the picture did, in fact, harbour an alien.
He parked his car by the waterfront and walked onto the ferry.
A couple of hours later, having located "Hatches' Corner," the house the brothers lived in, and having determined no one was home there, he left Toronto. He'd got the impression of a close-knit community, and hadn't wanted to draw too much attention to himself.
It was not a problem; he thought of himself as a leopard, not a lion. He would take his time and pounce when the time for pouncing was right. In the meantime, he decided to check out the Szczedziwoj lead instead, just in case.
****
Downtown Brighton, Ontario
At the hardware store, ten in the morning.
Three days before Button Day
Diggin' up bones'" Jagger Stone said.
"What?" She seemed puzzled, looking briefly around to see if it really was her he had spoken to.
"'Diggin' up bones'" he repeated. "'Exhumin' up things that were better left alone.'" Several people in the hardware store took a quick peek, memorizing her face in the instant way that small-town people do.
As if to make a barrier, she held the long-handled shovel awkwardly in front of her with one hand, stuffing her change and receipt into a small brown purse with the other. She was a small woman, with black hair and dark brown eyes. He guessed her age to be in the mid-forties. Maybe some native blood.
"Darn," the policeman adjusted his hat. "Doesn't anyone listen to Randy Travis any more?" Getting no further response, he added, "The country singer, you know." He smiled his biggest smile.
"Oh." She didn't quite return the smile, and edged out of the store. Behind her, the three customers returned to picking out rakes and nails and sets of tulip bulbs.
It was September in the south of Ontario and the clouds had moved out, leaving bright sunshine. The streets still hissed, wetly, from the night before, as cars edged down the street. A dog wandered loose, blocking traffic for a
minute, then a small girl ran out and grabbed it by the collar. Two locals stood on the steps of the small brick post office and talked. The town's most obvious local, the blond dreadlocked Shaman Shaman, sat on the post office steps with a notebook and looked for people to talk to. Jag watched the woman cross the street and load the shovel into the back of a green Jeep Cherokee.
Jag glanced around the hardware store. The earthy and pungent smell of the onions improved the smell of the place, he thought. Most of the year the store smelled of oils and mouse baits. A man in a baseball cap – another stranger to town – was inspecting mousetraps. Or pretending to, Jag thought. Something in Jag's deep memory was triggered by the careful way the man moved. He sighed – in his life he'd learned to be suspicious a little too much.
Jag turned to the clerk. "A nice-lookin' woman, Shawn. And not a tourist." He looked outside again, where the Jeep had been. An old Ford was trying to get into the parking spot, and not doing well. "You want to know why?"
Shawn rolled his eyes and packed a tin of Riesling wine mix into a plastic bag. Most people in Brighton pretended to mind each other's business, of course. At seventeen, Shawn probably thought adult business wasn't worth caring about.
This didn't seem to bother the burly constable. Maybe a lot of people rolled their eyes at him. Maybe Shawn rolled his eyes at everybody. It was part of a cop's job to lecture teenagers. It was part of a cop's job to have teenage eyes rolled at him.
There were, Jag suddenly thought, too many teenagers in this country. They seemed to have a burning need to defy authority. Their parents, first, and by extension, teachers, society and cops. Especially cops, it seemed to Jag. There ought to be a law limiting their numbers. For a moment he wondered what a tour in Afghanistan would have done to them, but quickly decided it might have made them into worse grown-ups.
Maybe some day there would be a chemical that eliminated teenagerhood, Jag hoped. Inject the little suckers at puberty, and they'd become instant responsible adults. No drinking parties on the local beaches at night, no spray-painted slogans on the high-school brickwork, no midnight car chases.
Especially car chases. The cop shuddered at that. At least, in this rural area, no kids tried to run cops down. No kids got shot by panicked men in blue. He looked down the street. Ethnically almost all the same, he thought. A shortage of angry minority groups. Except for visiting women buying shovels.
"Well, you've gotta ask yourself," Jag scooped the bag of wine mix into his huge arms, "why she's buying a shovel here." He looked around. "You're charging more than Canadian Tire in Trenton, and they're charging more than the Home Depot in Belleville, so no tourist is going to stop in Brighton to buy a shovel. And if she had moved in, I'd know it."
"Probably visiting a relative." Shawn looked around for someone, anyone, he could help buy something.
"Could be. Could be. We've got enough retired people here, and more from Toronto every year. And they've gotta have nieces and daughters to dig up the peonies, all right." A few locals lined up and waited silently behind the cop.
"Then again," the cop laughed, "maybe she'll be burying her old mother tonight by the full moon." The trouble with Jag's laugh was that it tended to make you acutely uncomfortable. Like he'd a good idea what you did when you were sixteen and there wasn't a hope of hiding it any more.
Jag looked at the ceiling. "You get a short-handled shovel for peonies, Shawn. Long-handled shovels are for deep holes." He gave the teen a knowing look. "This woman is either digging deep holes, or she doesn't know her shovels."
Shawn watched Jag put his purchase into the unmarked white Chev. The cop then walked over to Shawn's car and inspected it. He knelt by the front wheel, and came up with a pinch of sand. He looked up right through the plate glass window and winked at Shawn. Shawn tried not to think of last night and JoAnne Petrie down at Barcovan Beach road.
Brighton is not a big town. A small block of shops and a post office made up the core. Past a few big old houses you came to the Becker's convenience store, and, opposite it, the Brewer's Retail, where local people got their beer. Watching television and drinking beer constituted the primary entertainment in the town. It had been years since the movie theater had closed. Every year the highways got better. Every year the downtown of Brighton got smaller.
Next to the beer store was the town's small park. At one end, senior citizens lawn-bowled in summer. Near the main street, the town council had erected a fountain in hope of improving the park's appearance. It was made of fieldstones and looked like a primary school science-fair volcano, except larger. Somewhere, somehow, someone surely planned to bulldoze it once the town council was gone and the designer, a local veteran, had died.
The downtown itself contained some fifty buildings, most of them made of classic brick. You could still see the brick, if you looked up. The bottom level of each building was glass and aluminum. It had looked like modernization in the fifties; now it just looked like any other small town. Every couple of years, one of the stores would close, to be replaced by a shop selling ever cheaper goods, or by a craft shop with a name like "The Needle and I," destined for an equally short stay.
A few blocks away, the district high school dominated a few acres of land. To the north of the core, the district OPP office sat half way up the hill, on the road out of town.
There was a steady stream of traffic through the downtown, but only a few people on the sidewalk. It could have been any of a hundred small towns in Ontario.
The retired people helped the local economy. They sold their old homes in Toronto and moved to Brighton to live at a slower pace, to walk to the downtown stores in the good weather, to sit in the coffee shop for a half hour in the afternoon and brag about the lower property taxes. You could see them most days, sipping slowly on a coke, or poking at a plate of chips, reluctant to go back to lonely rooms on too-quiet streets.
And, of course, there were the regional services like the police headquarters and Ministry of Agriculture building. Most of the police cars were out cruising the 401 expressway to the north of the town, but Jag's territory normally covered the downtown, the cottages by the shores, and over to Gosport, on Presqu'ile bay.
Across the tracks and past the old swamp, Jag's car rolled quietly into Gosport. It pulled up in front of Grant's Mini- Shop and the cop got out. He bought a diet Pepsi and a bag of chips, smiled at the Grant girl behind the counter, and got back into the car.
Slowly, he toured the community. He drove some of the back streets at random, then ate the chips by the water. He walked to the motel and dropped the empty bag into the garbage can beside the front door. "Mornin,' Chuck!" he called to the middle- aged man cleaning the steps. Then he drove back out over the tracks, several small children and a German shepherd watching him silently.
Gosport caused more trouble than any other place except the park. It was a collection of sixty-odd houses, a small variety store, and one cinder-block motel/marina. In earlier days, Gosport had been a center of fishing and smuggling. Cigarettes and bottles of cheap American liquor still came in on a regular basis, now that the Ontario government had outlawed their perch-fishing nets.
Gosport was poor, no doubt. If you were poor, you drifted into the place, and drank beer on the rotting dock, and fished for pike in the bay. But it wasn't the poverty. It was the attitude. Authority was suspect. The police chased your cars and the government took your fishing nets. Half the place was on welfare and it showed in the attitudes of the teens.
Jag had wanted to buy a house there when he had come from Toronto. The chief talked him out of it. "They'll slash your tires, eh. How many sets of tires can you replace before you shoot somebody?"
That was a low cut. Jag didn't want to discuss the shooting in Toronto. But he gave up the idea of moving into Gosport, and settled into a house on a hill overlooking the town.
After Gosport, the cop decided to do a loop of the lakeshore area, starting with the cottages by the park. If you had asked hi
m, he'd have said, with that smile of his, that he was "just patrolling the town, like they pay me to."
He spotted her car just outside the park, beside one of a group of old cottages. The cottage faced a gravel beach that curved in from the lake. The Jeep was pulled just far enough off the dirt laneway to be out of the way, but not enough to be in danger of getting stuck in the sand. She was not in the Jeep.
Jag edged his car up a bit and spotted her by the lake, standing on the gravel beach, looking out across the water. She had, Jag noticed, a set of binoculars. He reached for his own set.
Close up, she looked cold. There was a chill wind off Lake Ontario and whitecaps on Popham Bay, and her long black hair tumbled and twirled. She was wearing only a dark blue sweater for warmth, and a faded pair of jeans. A good-looking woman, the cop decided, again.
As he focused his binoculars the radio snapped on and off, with the dispatcher's voice and that of various cops on the highways. A minor accident out towards Colborne, an abandoned car on the 401 not far from the McDonalds service center. The usual shit, he thought. In between, he could hear the steady grating of the gravel beach and the call of seagulls.
He followed the line of her sight. She was looking across the water towards High Bluff Island. A small flock of various water birds bobbed offshore, but too far away to tell what they were. Not, he decided, a good place for birdwatchers. There were many places far better, in the park itself.
After a moment, she picked up a stone and skipped it into the cold waves. It bounced twice and disappeared. She knelt to examine the round beach stones or some flotsam of interest.
He called the license plate in, and the dispatcher had it back in less than a minute, the radio crackling a bit. Laura Singer. New Hamburg, Ontario. One parking ticket this year, paid, but still on the computer. Should be in a green Jeep Cherokee.
Carefully Jag turned around in the Patel's cottage lane, and drove the mile back into town. Traffic was light; the tourists left with the summer. It seemed a shame to Jag; in spring, the park was famous for mosquitoes, in July and August the place was crowded. September was best.
Like any good cop, he knew every donut shop, donut by donut. Tim Horton's had opened another franchise here the year before. They were, he thought, spreading like a plague. But they did make reasonably good coffee and he wanted a few minutes to think.