Tonight, at The Endless Weekend, ice hockey season was underway, so while watching the money on the bar, keeping my charge receipts in order, and generally trying to pretend that yes, indeed, this was the place where a perpetual party was going on, where every guy was a hunk, every gal a babe, and every conversation sparkled with wit, I worked on through the hours of a game that was interrupted by a bench-clearing fight and then went into overtime. I knew that because part of my training for this job had involved being instructed that it was my responsibility to keep track of the action displayed on the TV screens. People wandering in at the middle of some game would often ask about the score and we were supposed to be able to tell them. I guess it made the bar seem like more than it really was: a destination instead of just a stopping-off point in a journey elsewhere. So, I kept an eye on the hockey game as well as an international soccer match playing on one of the screens. The see-sawing score in the soccer game paid off with a nice tip when a South African fellow (I didn’t even have to ask; I had become an expert at accents) stopped in for a couple of shots and wondered if I knew what was going on. Sure, I said. And I did.

The night manager, who was responsible for this bar along with several others around the airport with different names but owned by the same parent company, came by just after midnight to start checking the receipts and bundling the cash into the safe for collection by an armored car service. Around one A.M., when he was finished and we had helped to clean up, I was free to head back home. I was looking forward to doing nothing much at all until I had to come back to the airport tomorrow night.

The terminal was a sleepy place at this hour of the night. The TSA people were around, of course, drinking thermos coffee and eating sandwiches they had packed at home because the restaurants were all closed—and they couldn’t really afford to buy the overpriced, overpackaged stuff they sell in those places, anyway—and there were always a few cops strolling around with their big dogs that you weren’t supposed to pet. The cops were friendly and I knew most of them by name, just as I knew their dogs, but even as I said hi, I could see the German shepherds watching me as I passed by, sniffing the air.

As I was walking through the terminal, I was stopped by someone else I knew to say hello to, the driver of one of those electric carts that the airlines use to transport disabled passengers. He offered me a lift so I took a slow ride with him, sitting in the seat beside him as the car beeped its way down the long airport corridors lined with lighted panels advertising great places to visit and things you’d want to take with you on your dream journey: fabulously expensive luggage, extravagant jewelry, and sunglasses that cost more than the moon.

I left the airport through a service exit that let me out near the cargo bays used by the food-service companies. There were a couple of refrigerated trucks parked in the bays, but I didn’t see many people around except for a pair of security guards. I showed them my ID badge and they let me continue on my way.

The cargo area led me to a parking lot for the food-service employees; it was almost empty at this time of night, but because it had electric fencing all around, I had to pass through the entry gate, which meant showing my badge to another guard. After that, I was back on a municipal street, though you could hardly call it that: there was a narrow grass verge along the edge of the parking lot and on the other side of the two-lane road that ran past this back end of the airport, a long stretch of tangled marshland. Beyond, there were briny estuaries that freshened with the tides and fed into the deep-water bay. The landscape presented much the same vista as the bus stop where I waited on the first leg of my journey back and forth to work.

The night had turned out to be colder than I expected and I had on the wrong kind of jacket. Shivering, I tried to distract myself by picking out the constellations overhead—the stars Castor and Pollux were easy to spot in Gemini, as was Orion, with the three sisters in his belt, a nebula wielded as a sword and his hunting dogs chasing him through the black sky. From the many nights I had waited here for the bus, I knew how to follow the progress of these starry markers across the seasons as fall turned to winter and then to spring when they disappeared below the horizon until the year changed over again.

When the bus finally came, I found my usual seat in the back and settled in. A while later, as I was nearing my stop, I became aware of a little jingly tune, muffled but clearly audible, that was coming from my shoulder bag. It took a few seconds for me to register what it was, and then I thought. My phone? Really? Who could possibly be calling at this hour of the night?

I pulled out the phone and said hello. In response, a man spoke to me. “Is this Laurie Perzin?” he asked.

“Who are you?” I demanded. I wasn’t going to identify myself until I knew who was on the other end of the line.

“This is Jack Shepherd,” he said. His voice had an impatient, ironic edge to it. And even at this late hour, he sounded full of energy.

Suddenly, the name and the voice fit together. Now, I knew who I was talking to. “Oh,” I said. “Up All Night.” That was the radio show I had called into last night. Jack Shepherd was the host of the program. I was going to ask him how he’d gotten my number, but then I remembered that when I’d initially dialed into the show, a taped message asked me to leave my contact information while I waited to speak to the guest on the radio. I assumed it was to call back in case someone in the call-in queue was disconnected. So that was the answer to that question—but a much more important one was why he was phoning me at all.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I thought you and I could have a chat,” Jack Shepherd said.

“A chat? It’s after one in the morning.”

“Yeah, well, I thought since you were a listener you were probably also a night bird. I mean you called in around this time, so I thought it would be okay to call you. Besides, I had a guest cancel on me, so the first hour of the show tonight is a taped segment, which means I’m not on live for a while and to be honest with you, I’m kind of bored. I was trying to figure out what to do with myself when it occurred to me that the perfect thing would be to call you up. And I’m right about the night bird thing, aren’t I? You don’t sound like I woke you up.”

“You know what?” I told Jack Shepherd. “I’m on a bus right now and it’s not the best place to talk. I should be home in a little while. I’ll call you back then.”

I didn’t give him a chance to try to persuade me to stay on the line—I just clicked off the phone. I couldn’t imagine what Jack Shepherd wanted to talk to me about, but the first thing that came to mind was that he was trying to pull some kind of a scam. Someone I had never met was calling me in the middle of the night, sounding just a little too familiar, I thought, a little too chatty; that seemed pretty suspicious to me, no matter who he was. And who was he, anyway? Some guy filling up the overnight hours by talking to every weirdo with a theory about how the government was concealing the truth about alien abductions or a method for decoding the secret messages hidden in the geometry of the Great Pyramid. I might call him back and I might not, but I wanted to think about it first.

When I got home, I opened another bottle of wine. This one had a laughing frog on the label. (What can I say? I just pulled these things out of the discount bin; I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about who made them.) Outside my window, I heard a truck pull up across the street. Its air brakes heaved a long sigh and then the street was quiet again, except for the occasional thud of a crate hitting the sidewalk. The smugglers were at it again.