said it, I knew what he meant.
The man waved the paper vaguely at the ceiling. “Them.”
Five minutes later we were in an aging Ford headed across town. The man, Detective Kelly, hadn’t put on a siren, if he even had one, but he pushed the old tan sedan with the kind of panicked disregard for both traffic and the law usually reserved for an Uber driver at the end of his shift. “You’re from England, huh?” he asked.
“Devonshire,” I replied.
“That in England?”
“It is.”
He, thankfully, stopped looking at me and looked at the road, just in time to wrench the car through an intersection, leaving a lot of horns—and undoubtedly cursing—in his wake. “I can tell. Because, you know, your accent.”
“I’ve been here thirty years,” I replied. “Every time I go home, everyone says I sound like an American.”
He snorted. “Yeah, well, not to me.” He flung the car around a hard right turn and looked back at me again. “And you’re a scientist.”
“Yes.”
“Some kind of expert on aliens?”
“I’m not sure there is such a thing as an expert on aliens,” I said. “But if there is, I’m not one.”
He thought about that for a moment and nodded. “Tech then.”
“Sorry, Detective, but no. To save you more guessing, I’m a paleoichthyologist.”
That earned me a hard stare as the car plowed on with unchecked speed. “What’s that?”
“I’m a specialist in extinct forms of fish. In particular, I specialize in Polyodontids.” Before he could ask, I added, “Paddlefish. I’m a specialist in paddlefish.”
“Paddlefish aren’t extinct.”
“A lot of them are, actually.”
He glanced at me, at the road, at me, then the road again. “Why would they want someone who studies dead fish?” At the word they he leaned forward, glancing up at the sky as if the black triangular ship might have appeared above us without our notice. Which, considering how it had slipped up on Milwaukee, seemed possible. “What can that mean?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said. “But I suspect it means you have the wrong man.”
With his right hand, he dug into the pocket of his black coat, produced the paper he had been waving earlier, and flipped it at me. “The messages came to the station from Washington. NSA . . . I think. Maybe FBI.”
I picked up the wrinkled page, unfolded it, and saw that it did in fact have my name and the location of my office at the top, under what appeared to be some kind of official seal. There was even a black-and-white picture of me, a little grainy, but it explained how Detective Kelly had spotted me coming down the hall. “But it doesn’t make any sense.”
“No. It does not.”
“I don’t even have tenure.”
That earned me another glance as Kelly pulled off the main road into what looked like a residential street. “You know, I’ve never understood what that means.”
“It’s kind of like . . . never mind. Just . . . why me?”
“Maybe you can ask them.”
To my surprise, he didn’t take me to an airport, or a police station, or even to city hall. Instead, he shot down a narrow street, went much too quickly past a sign saying SCHOOL ZONE, then drove right out onto the grass of a football field whose faded stripes were just visible through the winter stubble. Before I could ask where we were going, I saw it. Dead center in the field, where a school logo might have been, was a set of pale gray boxes, a half dozen of them, each about the size of an old pay phone booth.
Kelly stopped the car about twenty feet away from the cluster of upright booths. “Okay,” he said. “There you go.”
I opened the car door, letting cold air swirl in, and slowly put one foot onto the crunchy grass. “Now what?” I asked.
“That, I don’t know,” said the detective. “Check the paper. It says to find you and bring you here.”
I checked. It did. Whatever