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The cashier stands behind a wide counter on the opposite end of the store, a plastic divider separating him from the rest of us. He listens to weird techno pop music, and bops around while he refills the cigarette stand, and two customers mill around in the chips section.
I’m not short anymore, but at five feet four inches, I’m not particularly tall either, so as soon as I walk amid the shelves, I lose sight of the dancing cashier and the chip fiends.
I dig a hand into my pockets and search for coins. Two bucks for a cup of mud, but that mud comes packed with caffeine, and if I dump a packet of sugar into it, it becomes palatable.
I press the coins into the slot at the front, hit my selection, and when the machine grunts and gurgles, I roll onto my aching heels and hum while I wait.
I’m coming off a week of night shift, which means I’m going home as soon as Oz is done peeing, then I’m throwing myself into bed until tomorrow. If I’m lucky, I’ll sleep sixteen hours straight and beat my body clock so I can get back onto dayshift hours. Monday, I start back on days, and a different unlucky soul gets the nightshift and social hour with the idiots that like to congregate at the basketball court late at night.
They say we pick on them and their hangout. I say that no one hangs out at the basketball court at two in the morning, whispering amongst themselves and hiding their friends who are OD’ing, unless they’re up to no good.
“Hands up!” Shouts echo through the store, followed by crashing bags of chips and feminine yelps from the tough guy behind the counter. I spin and unclip my sidearm, but I stay low as things are tossed to the floor — candy bars, phone chargers, bottled water. “Open your register!” His voice is deep. “I want all your cash put into this bag. If you do as you’re told, I’ll leave.”
I creep well below the top shelf toward the guys by the chips. They wear jeans two sizes too big so their underwear hangs out the top, and shirts so long that they’d be an oversized gown for me. One wears cornrows, the other a hat. But they both shake in their shoes and clutch to the chips like they might stop a bullet.
I creep closer and lift a finger to my lips.
Their eyes widen as I move, like they’re screaming for me to stay back. But this is my job. If I cower in the corner, I may as well hand in my badge and revisit the sour-sisters from a lifetime ago to let them beat on me some more.
Blue eyes and a wicked grin flash in my mind, a boy who told me to be brave and to fight back. The same boy that promised he’d find me someday, but he never did. He never could.
I lift my finger to my lips again to quieten the chip-lovers, then I point behind me to get them to move.
The aisles aren’t long — maybe twenty feet from one side of the store to the other — and the shouts and noise at the front counter cover the sound of my boots on the tile floor. I unholster my weapon, but hold it in my left hand. Then I slow at the end of the shelf and peek around.
One man. Mid to late twenties. Midnight black hair and pasty white skin. He’s at least six-and-a-half feet tall, perhaps more, but he’s skinny as a pole and lacks muscle despite his muscle shirt. His lips are cherry red, but his eyes are hidden by gas-station sunglasses. He has what I consider jailhouse tattoos — as in, random small things, pushed together over time, rather than one thought-out piece with the talent of a real artist. Spider webs on his elbow, stars on his forearm. Script beside that, and a date and ‘MOM’ a little below his elbow. A baby’s footprint, a flower. Roses and guns.
Why do these guys always have the same drawings? Do they realize the stereotype?
He waves a black pistol in the cashier’s terrified face and spits as he shouts for the bag to be filled. The cashier, a man I know as Anton, hurriedly yanks the register open. He tosses bills into the black bag, then lifts the entire tray of coins and tosses that in too.
My coffee continues to sputter at the back of the store. The stench of caffeine permeates my senses and makes me yearn for the mud I won’t get to drink, because I’ll have to take care of this, then the paperwork, then I’ll have to explain to the chief why I took a man down when I should have clocked out already. All because Oz drank too much coffee overnight and had to piss.
Anton snatches up cartons of cigarettes from beside the half-filled display and tosses those into the bag, then he tosses phones and phone cards on top of that.
Creeping around the front of the shelves as slowly as I can, knowing my uniform will make my perp panic the second he sees me, I duck lower and thank my gym days for the depth of my squat and the fact I can duck-walk without the burn.
That boy from forever ago mentioned the dimples on my kneecaps, so I never skip leg day.
I catch sight of Oz through the store glass as he walks around the side of the building with an odd grin and a bounce to his step. His hands are held in the space ahead of him, zombie-ish, which is weird, considering everything else that’s going on around me. He doesn’t know what’s happening inside, and when he checks the cruiser and finds it empty, he turns toward the doors and alerts my gunman when the automatic doors whir open.
Uniforms. They get us every damn time.
Oz’s smile remains for a moment while his brain clicks over. The gunman’s eyes widen, then his gun swings around, and I jump up from my crouch. Grabbing the back of his head, and hating the oily sheen his hair instantly leaves on my skin, I slam him forward until his face smacks against the plexiglass, and Oz finally catches the hell on to the situation.
He jumps back into fight stance and whips the gun from his hip, but I pull my guy’s head back and slam it down again until blood explodes against the window, and Anton squeals like a stuffed pig.
“You’re under arrest for aggravated robbery. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney.” When my chip-loving friends dash out the door to freedom, I pull my guy’s head back and slam it into the window once more for good measure. Cartilage crunches under my force and reminds me of those snooty bitches from school. Excessive force? Maybe. But does Oz stop me? Nope. “If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for free. Anything you say right now may be used against you.” I let him go, and sweep his weapon away when he drops to the floor with a deep thud. I reach back for my cuffs and slap them around his skinny wrists as Oz slowly walks forward. “You okay?”
He leans over my guy as though to make certain this just happened. “Uh-huh. You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“He okay?”
I lean around my guy and take note of the shattered nose and a single missing front tooth. I look around the space in front of me. “He might have already been missing that tooth. You’ll have to prove differently.”
Oz chuckles and re-holsters his weapon. “I’m not picking at you, Tate. I walked straight into a bear trap without looking. He pointed his weapon at an officer, and I almost didn’t go home to my family because of it; you’re good to use whatever the fuck force you want to.”
