With one car burning from Becky’s arrow, and the other gutted by Jack, there was little to do but stop the running driver and either break into the house quickly or leave quickly. It was a nice enough neighborhood that someone was bound to report the disturbance, and if the cars really did represent Inco security staff their biomonitors would be screaming for help about now.

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Meanwhile, Al was waiting for his poutine and enjoying a beer, even if it had the awkward name of Moosehead.

The talk around him seemed to be a mix of discussion of various ice hockey teams and the upcoming change in the weather — it wasn’t always easy to tell who was talking about what. “Icing” surely was about the weather, and “Short-handed” about the hockey, right?

When his poutine finally did come the waitress apologized “Sorry we are slow, the owner took off mid-morning to help trap some para-critter, so we’re short handed. At least the pay should put him in a good mood, if they catch it. That and some warmer weather should at least get him over his anger at that blown Icing call last night. The Rangers must have bribed the refs again!”

Maybe the ‘icing’ discussion wasn’t about the weather after all?

The waitress’s comments started another round of discussion of ice hockey, then people seemed to move back to the weather, this time to something Al had at least heard of, the snowbank sculptures. “Sounds like it should be a good amount of snow, and warm enough to pack. We shouldn’t need to wet it to make the sculpture.” “You must be happy about that, your lot are short-handed from what I heard?” “We’ll be fine, you just make sure that the nose doesn’t fall off dragon this time! Hopefully the others will finally be back from their stint in the lab by Sunday, but we’ve got enough as long as we don’t do a lot of piling up for extra height.

Had the other “short-handed” talk even been about the hockey game?