Jay felt like sighing in exasperation, but decided to talk instead. He was still on probation, for another month, and this old man had his future in his nicotine-stained hands.

“Tell me, Chief, if Mrs. Tate wasn’t Brian Tate’s mother, would we even be here? I mean, the woman’s pretty old. She’s almost senile.”

“Why do you say that?”

Jay shrugged, snapped another piece of wood in his hands. “C’mon, Chief, the old lady said aliens are landing up here every Saturday night and killing people. I mean, if she was any other old lady in town, I don’t think you’d be here, and me as well.”

The chief leaned back against the tree, his leather gear creaking. “Mrs. Tate may be the mother of the selectmen chairman, but she’s also a taxpayer here, and she filed a complaint with the department-”

“About trespassing Martians?”

“No, about someone trespassing on her land at night.”

“You must’ve helped her write out the complaint.”

“Maybe I did. But she thinks someone’s out here at night, and she says she finds bloodstains on the ground the next day. You’ve got to check it out, even if it does look like you’re wasting your time.”

Jay nodded and reached around for another stick to break into pieces. They were sitting a few yards away from the town’s only police cruiser, which was parked on a dirt turnabout that marked the end of Pomeroy Road. Jay had been with the Crawford Police Department for only four months and he was still trying to get used to the different pace of the job. Five months ago he had been a patrolman in one of the industrial cities near Boston, and had been on that job for five years, until the bad dreams started. Dreams of entering a crackhouse, all by himself. Dreams of doing a motor-vehicle stop in the middle of the city, with no backup. Dreams of responding to a night alarm at a bank, with his radio broken. And in all of the dreams, his weapon hadn’t worked, had fallen to the ground, and the bad men had killed him, over and over again.