“But there’s probably not a whole lot of career advancement for vampires there,” he said.

“Does anyone working the night shift at Speedy Mart have a lot of opportunities for career advancement? Although with vampires it would literally be a dead-end job.” I chuckled. I really shouldn’t laugh at my own jokes so much. “Right, we have Chuck from Nevada. Hi, Chuck.”

“Hey, Kitty! How you doing?” He was brash, a real talker. This ought to be good.

“I’m doing just great,” I said, the standard line. “Where in Nevada are you?”

“Area 51.”

Deadpan, I said, “Really?”

“Okay, yeah, I’m from a little town about thirty miles up the freeway from Las Vegas. Near Area 51. And you want to talk about weird stuff going on with Speedy Mart, I’ve got a story for you.”

“Lay it on me.”

“UFOs.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Okay, now you’re just making crap up.”

“No, seriously, we get sightings all the time. We’re one of the stops on the Southwest UFO tour. The Speedy Mart parking lot is one of the best places to see them. UFO hunters park out there with their lawn chairs and binoculars looking for them. It’s, like, UFO central!”

“If you say so, but like I always say, there’s weird and then there’s weird. But I suppose a data point’s a data point. Thanks for calling.” I didn’t have to tell him I wasn’t actually going to mark that location on my map. We’d call it an outlier. A real far-out outlier.

I continued. “The real question here is: why Speedy Mart? Is it a coincidence? Does the supernatural really have some kind of strange affinity for this specific convenience store chain over any other? Or is it a conspiracy? Is there a guiding hand behind these stories? A dangerous hand? I’m not sure it’s possible to answer any of these questions, which is always the trouble with this sort of thing, isn’t it? It turns out the Speedy Mart chain is a privately owned company, which makes its records harder to get at.