“Nice he has choices,” Charlie muttered, stepping off the narrow path so Jack could lead the way.

“The Chinese place on the corner of 9th and 8th sometimes feeds him and so does the diner on 13th. If there’s something on at the stadium, he’ll dumpster dive and the stadium Brownies know they’re to save stuff for him.”

“There’s Brownies at the Saddledome?”

“It’s a prime holding.” Jack paused at the edge of the parking lot and Charlie moved up beside him. “There he is.”

Toque holding his hair in place, hands shoved deep into the pockets of an oversized trench coat, Dan shuffled along the graveled path that led to Fort Calgary.

“He knows you,” Charlie began, and stopped when a plain black sedan drove into the lot and parked as close to Dan as possible. The man and woman who got out might as well have had police stamped on their foreheads. Carefully looking at nothing in particular, Charlie whistled an eavesdropping charm at them.

“What does the FBI want with this guy anyway?” the driver asked, circling around to join his partner.

She twitched her collar into place. “Why would I know if you don’t?”

He shrugged. “You might have heard something.”

“If I knew more, I’d have told you while we were driving over here to pick up the crazy person who’s going to stink up the backseat of our car.”

“He’s not going to go quietly either. There’s going to be yelling and he’ll piss himself and then there’ll be more yelling. We should wait until that school group gets in their bus and goes; I don’t want to traumatize the kids.”

“Is Dan an American?” Charlie asked Jack as both cops smiled and nodded at the gaggle of preteens leaving the Fort. The kids collectively rolled their eyes.

“Don’t know.” Jack glared across the parking lot. “You think they’re after him because he was going on about the world ending?”

“I think it’s more likely YouTube dredged Dan’s past and something nasty floated up.”

“If he’s like Auntie Catherine . . .”

“If he was female, clean, and significantly less hairy,” Charlie muttered.

“If he sees the future, like Auntie Catherine,” Jack specified, “he could have escaped the American government. One of their experiments where they’re trying to make super soldiers with psionic powers.”

“One of?”

“And before you say it’s all comic books,” he continued ignoring her question, “why does it keep coming up? Books, movies, comics, TV . . . You know what they say where I come from?” He folded his arms. “Where there’s smoke, there’s lunch.”