Later in the afternoon, Sancho’s Silver Spoon was almost empty. Word had spread throughout Arroyo Grande that two of the cooks, both violent ex-cons, had gotten themselves locked up following a monstrous gang fight out behind the restaurant. In some accounts, there was gunplay, or a knife fight, or a bludgeoning implement. Most of the accounts involved a lot more blood than was strictly necessary. There was also some discussion that the last cook left standing was seriously ill and probably contagious. As such, the only customers in the place were a couple of long-haul truckers who took up most of the counter, and a family of four occupying a booth with an unobstructed view of their sporty little Subaru station wagon, overloaded with camping gear. Although the open sign was already turned off before the daylight dinner rush could commence, Dr. Kent Vickers quietly seated himself, disgruntled at the lack of available serving staff.
Lisa reluctantly continued taking tables, even though Hitch quit hourly for the past two days. She came from the kitchen looking spent with a collection of ballpoint pens tucked into her bun and her uniform blouse a Jackson Pollock of spattered condiment stains. She warmed when she spotted Mr. Mai Tai coming in the front door. “Oh, it’s just you guys.” She strolled over to the hostess stand, pulled a couple of menus from underneath, and handed them to the Tiggers. “Have a seat wherever you like. I’ll be with you in just a minute.” She smiled weakly. As chipper as she tried to seem, Lisa had a stack of receipts in her hand and another spilling out of her apron pockets. It had been a long day, and she was ready to go home.
Preferring to arrive early to an engagement, Dr. Vickers had chosen a large round booth in the front corner of the restaurant. While choosing such a public table did nothing to conceal their meeting, Dr. Vickers preferred not to raise people’s suspicions by crowding into the corner of an empty restaurant like common criminals. Also, he did not particularly want to sit too close to Chief Martinez or any of his colleagues. He didn’t want to dine with them at all, point of fact, but he was eager to discuss how they might go about finding the missing artifact. With their resources involved, now that the chief had mobilized the men in conspicuously casual black to scour the town, he felt they should have the object back soon.
The sergeant and an awkward man in a bad suit accompanied Chief Martinez. Dr. Vickers rose to shake the chief’s hand and reluctantly shook Sgt. O’Connor’s hand as well. The gangly-looking newcomer did not immediately offer his hand to shake, or his name, but slid into the booth and opened his briefcase surreptitiously, angling it away from them all. Dr. Vickers’s mustache bristled slightly when he caught the newcomer’s musky scent, which reminded him of a locker room.
Dr. Vickers made it clear that he had been waiting for a few minutes, and he seemed somewhat disgruntled by that fact, as well. He had unrolled his silverware bundle and polished it clean, laying it flat on a pair of fresh napkins. Likewise, his red plastic water cup rested on a folded napkin which served as a coaster to prevent leaving a wet ring on the slightly syrup-sticky Formica tabletop. He took his seat again, forcing O’Connor to nudge the ripely scented Mr. Paulson further into the booth and consequently, closer to Dr. Vickers. Martinez followed them into the booth, sliding everyone down slightly yet again.
Within a few moments, Lisa swung by with a few glasses of water and the same look of worsening exhaustion. She set their rolled silverware down and eyed the science teacher suspiciously.
“Having a rough one tonight, then?” O’Connor asked.
The blonde sighed deeply but forced a smile. “Still short two cooks, so we’re running a sort of limited menu, right now.”
“Cheese omelets for dinner?”
“Goddess bless, no.” She flipped open one of the menus and scanned through it for a reference. “But if I were you gentlemen, I might stick to burgers and fries. Soup’s good, too.” Her smile faded. “Just try to keep it simple, okay?”
O’Connor winked at her, but she seemed too exhausted to reciprocate.
“Thanks for your patience, guys. We’re doing our best.”
Vickers bristled. “Entirely unprofessional, in my opinion,” he complained.
O’Connor shrugged. “Still beats the vending machine in the hotel lobby.”
Vickers adjusted his place setting one last time and moved his water cup a fraction of an inch. “Under the circumstances, I am relieved to see that you didn’t bring the entire platoon with you, Chief Martinez.” He meant to imply the Smith and Johnson family reunion. “They seem a bit excessive in my opinion, but I do appreciate how seriously you are taking this situation.”
Martinez, taking the comment as a snide reference to Mr. Mai Tai and the scarecrow, quietly wished that he hadn’t brought anyone with him for what had turned out to be a well-publicized black ops balloon chase. With the exception of Levy and McGoohan, this was the whole platoon, and given the other investigating organization’s significant staff, he could desperately use both Levy and McGoohan, if only to hover around and look busy. “Yes, well,” the chief nodded, confirming or denying nothing with regards to the other investigators, “I thought we might keep this as intimate as possible.” Hoping to impress Mr. Paulson with the personal touch, having his finger on the pulse of an active investigation, the chief continued, “We’re just glad you called us first.”
O’Connor sat quietly as the chief apologized his way through the unprofessionalism and Mr. Paulson’s presence as well. He let the chief play chummy with this substitute science teacher, but outside the professional slap and tickle of some insubstantial circumstantial evidence, this guy wasn’t really offering them much to investigate. Lacking the actual saucer, all that TIG had to go on was the images, a few dirt samples, and the doctor’s childhood account of the original incident. Vickers hadn’t actually taken the time to go up and look at the damn thing before he called them in. Sensing that the chief was placating the doctor, O’Connor decided that it was his turn to play bad cop.
He pulled the manila folder from his satchel and set it before him on the table, displaying the Top-Secret label unabashedly. Having taken only a few moments in transit to review the file, he hadn’t bothered to look at statistics, images, dates or timestamps, but rather, highlighted sections that he found particularly funny in the transcribed events. “Let’s get back to your initial contact with the object,” O’Connor bluntly interrupted. “You said here that the object glowed blue, and I quote: ‘like when my brother lit his fart on fire that one time’.” O’Connor set the file on the table, open in front of him. Dr. Vickers could clearly see the highlighted sections. “Exactly what hue of blue would you say that is?”
Stolen novel; please report.
“Knock it off, Sergeant.” The chief wasn’t eager to watch a pissing contest.
O’Connor set the lead-lined soil sample satchel on the table. It was small enough that it resembled a fanny pack, but it weighed as much as a canned ham. He unzipped the top flap and withdrew one of the small vials, holding it between thumb and forefinger, inspecting it with the eye of a geologist, despite the fact that he definitely wasn’t one of those, either. “I mean, I would like to be impressed with the LIDAR images, what’s not to say that you doctored those up somehow?”
Dr. Vickers sat up straighter, as if he had ever been accused of slouching. “Excuse me?”
O’Connor set the sample in the center of the table and shrugged. “I mean, it seems to me that a guy running a little alien museum at the edge of town would stand to make a few bucks with a confirmed alien sighting in the area.” O’Connor reached into his field kit duffel and dragged out the handheld Geiger counter, trailing the little corded cylindrical sensor. He thumbed the power switch on the little box. A few LEDs blinked and the analog needle hopped briefly until it clicked a steady baseline. Leaning back in the booth, he pushed the little saltshaker-shaped sensor at the collected soil sample, eliciting a brief crackle from the box and a needle hop like a wave cresting. “My question is, where’d you get the radioactive gravel?” He held the button on the sensor, waving it back and forth near the glass vial, listening to the loud crackle crest and trough with each pass.
Vickers’s face changed colors very slowly, from a slight blush to fully flushed as his jaw set up. Offended by the open display of the gravel as well as the loud feedback of the Geiger counter, he was just as shocked as he was appalled. Besides himself, the members of the Terrestrial Investigations Group had been the only other people to know where the object would be located. They very well might have snuck up overnight and airlifted the object off the side of the hill under the cover of the rainstorm. The meeting, these strange idiots with the chief, even the couple dozen casual black ops soldiers were all some sort of bureaucratic theater. “If you’ve just come here to discredit me and cover this whole thing up, don’t even bother.” Dr. Vickers’s mustache bristled as he stiffened his jaw and flatly growled: “I’ll go public.”
Martinez, deciding that the meeting was going sideways faster than he had hoped, knit his fingers on the table in front of him. Unreliable eyewitness though he may be, he was obviously convinced that both the LIDAR images and radioactive gravel was proof of something. Even the hole in the ground was proof of something. There was no doubt at all that there was in fact, something. The problem was, where the hell was it? “Look, Dr. Vickers, nobody is questioning its existence anymore. Now it’s just a matter of locating it.”
If the Smiths and Johnsons had found the artifact, they would have burned the remaining evidence to ash and whisked the artifact out in a flat black panel van. Martinez had “sanitized” enough weather balloon crash sites to know the protocols at least. The very fact that the Smiths and Johnsons were still roaming freely around Arroyo Grande, sampling soft serve frozen yogurt and touring the model train museum, would seem to indicate that they were just as lost. They had the LIDAR images, probably trash bags full of contaminated gravel, and the cold case files, but that must be about it. TIG had Dr. Kent Vickers, at least, but that wasn’t turning out to be much of an advantage. “What we need to do is to find that damn—” he glanced around, realizing that he was still sitting in a diner, “—thing.”
Both O’Connor and Dr. Vickers exchanged glances, realizing that there wasn’t much left to argue about. They were all there for the same reason, and if the doctor wasn’t faking the whole thing, and he didn’t seem to be, then they were all up a crick until the object was located.
Mr. Paulson, apparently finished with his work in the briefcase, picked up the handheld Geiger counter and began to investigate it, turning it over in his hands, inspecting various components. O’Connor resisted the urge to slap his hands away.
In addition to smelling bad, the sergeant was of the opinion that Mr. Paulson was just generally annoying and didn’t much like sharing the case with him. Consciously suppressing the urge to wrestle his Geiger counter out of Mr. Paulson’s grubby hands, O’Connor watched a rusty red pickup truck pull into the Silver Spoon parking lot. The skinny second tow truck driver was at the wheel with his little junkie girlfriend riding shotgun. They rolled slowly through the lot, probably trying to avoid suspicion. He wondered how it was that the sheriff hadn’t picked them up already and put them into rehab of some sort. They were both so young.
Mr. Paulson thumbed the power switch on the Geiger console, listening to the steady rhythmic click of the tethered sensor on the Formica tabletop while he watched the needle bounce. He chuckled in his usual manner, somehow childlike as he played with O’Connor’s toy. He picked up the sensor and waved it near the center sauce rack, chuckling again when the needle bounced as he swept past the saltshaker. He thoroughly checked the ketchup, the mustard, and the little tray of individual jelly packets, disappointed that none of the other condiments were the least bit radioactive.
The waitress swung by the booth, digging in her pockets as Mr. Paulson started scanning O’Connor’s fingers. The Sergeant swatted at Mr. Paulson’s scanner as the blonde rifled through the last few checks, looking for their table number in the stack. “I don’t want to rush you guys, but we’re short staffed and probably shutting it down early tonight, so I’m just gonna leave this right there.” She slid the handwritten check under the ketchup bottle, bending ever so slightly at the waist as she did so, just to make sure that she had their attention. “And Mai Tai, sweetie, I got you guys the friends and family discount for dinner, on account of your patience with breakfast the past couple of days. Usually we aren’t so busy.”
Mr. Paulson scanned O’Connor’s arm and the Geiger counter crackled excitedly. Again, the sergeant swatted him away. O’Connor leaned back in the booth ever so slightly, puffing out his chest as casually as he could. “Oh, Lisa, you didn’t have to do that.” Paulson scanned the sergeant’s elbow again, eliciting another crackle. O’Connor grabbed the entire apparatus out of the auditor’s hands, flipped it off, and stuffed it into his field kit with some finality.
“Hon, I owe you one. I never did get to thank you for your generosity the other morning.” She gave his bicep a healthy squeeze and smiled appreciatively. “Maybe stop by the Starlight later? First round is on me.”
O’Connor nodded a little too enthusiastically while self-consciously rubbing his apparently radioactive elbow. “Save me a pineapple slice,” he called, quietly regretting his first night and the subsequent fruity cocktail related notoriety that he now reluctantly enjoyed.
The mention of the sergeant’s generosity the other morning was not missed by either Chief Martinez or Mr. Paulson, who happened to be auditing the TIG organization, officially. Chief Martinez watched as the auditor withdrew his yellow legal pad from the briefcase and, still slightly disgruntled at the seizure of the Geiger counter, scribbled some notes onto the page.