High Noon at Hot Topic, Christine Pope [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

High Noon at Hot Topic

By ChristinePope

Copyright © 2011 Christine Pope

Smashwords Edition

This story appeared in a slightly differentformat in Issue No. 8 of Astonishing AdventuresMagazine.

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HIGH NOON AT HOT TOPIC

Christine Pope

I knew he was trouble the second he walkedinto the store.

Oh, not your usual sort of trouble — not thesticky-fingered tween who thinks she can smuggle out a bottle ofnail polish and a couple of statement buttons with no one noticing.Not the privileged princesses from the hills who just loved to takea buttload of clothes into the dressing room and leave them allthere for the “staff” to pick up. And not even the wannabes in longblack coats that my friend Joanna and I referred to as the“knee-hilists” (usually pronounced in a fake German accent similarto the one employed by the would-be kidnappers in The BigLebowski).

Anyway, I was used to the hipsterish flotsamand jetsam that floated in and out of the store. This guy didn’tmatch any of the types who tended to haunt the place.

For one thing, he wore a long brown coat anda brown fedora. Now, it was cold enough outside that the coatitself made some sense, especially for wimpy SoCal natives whothought anything below 70 degrees was freezing. However, no one whoknew what they were doing would be caught dead wearing brown insidea Hot Topic. Black was the color of choice, with maybe a variationinto dark gray and army green, or some red and even hot pink (in apurely ironic sense, of course) thrown into the mix.

The fact that he was male and at least in hisearly thirties just clinched his complete fish-out-of-water status.Sure, we got some guys; they usually gravitated toward the vintageband T-shirts. And while we tended to skew younger, we did get somewomen in the store who were probably flirting with thirty. Since Ihad less than eighteen months to go before I hit the big three-O, Iwasn’t about to pass judgment. At least those thirty-somethingwomen weren’t working in tween poser-punk hell.

So, taken one at a time, the stranger’soddball traits weren’t that strange. Taken together? They set offpretty much every internal alarm I had.

I sidled out from behind the counter,adjusting my name tag so he couldn’t possible miss the “Kara”emblazoned on it. Tuesdays were pretty dead, especially at midday,and I only had one other staff member as backup. Unfortunately, mybackup wasn’t Joanna, who I pretty much trusted to handle anythingshort of the zombie apocalypse. No, that day I was stuck withMartine, who looked great as a model for the store’s wares but whowouldn’t recognize a shoplifter if they paraded past wearing anoutfit composed entirely of price tags.

“Get the register,” I murmured to her. Shewas in the middle of refolding a stack of striped stockings andlooked up at me with a deer-in-the-headlights gaze made even moreBambi-esque by her thick eyeliner and fake lashes.

“The what?”

“Register,” I hissed. “Now.”

Those lashes fluttered like moths around astreet light, but at least she had enough brains to recognize theauthority granted me as assistant manager and abandoned her socksorting for the cash register. Good thing sales were slow that day;Martine couldn’t be trusted to make change. Luckily thepredominance of plastic these days saved her ass most of thetime.

Once more into the breach, I thought,not for the first time marveling at how my degree in English lit.had propelled me into an exciting career in retail. Still, I didn’tsee any way to avoid talking to the man in the brown coat and hat.I had to make sure he was at least mostly harmless.

“Can I help you?” I asked the stranger. He’dpaused in front of a rack of “vintage” band T-shirts, but he wasn’tfooling me; I saw the collar of a white button-down shirt peekingpast the heavy overcoat.

He turned. Cool blue-gray eyes scanned mebriefly, then paused on my name tag before he redirected hisattention to the ranks of bogus shirts, where Led Zeppelin mingledincongruously with the Clash and the Sex Pistols.

The dismissal was obvious, but I stood myground. My internal alarms were still going off, and they’d beenright enough times over the years that I wasn’t about to ignorethem now. “Our shirts run a bit small, so you might need alarge.”

“It’s not for me.”

Just a hint of an accent. I couldn’t placeit. East Coast? Definitely not from Southern California, though. “Agift?” I persisted.

Then he did turn toward me, a smile hintingat the corners of his mouth. Damn. I hated it when customers whowere actually cute came into the store — it didn’t seemprofessional to flirt with them, but considering how cramped mysocial life was, I’d stepped over the line a time or two. Oh, well.What Corporate didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. And the alarm bellshad been quieted a bit by that smile. He didn’t look like apedophile or a shoplifter.

“For my nephew,” he said.

Somehow I got the feeling that the nephew waspurely mythical, but I knew better than to push it. “So is he moreof a classic rock type, or is he into punk or goth or — ”

I let my words trail off because I could tellhe wasn’t listening. He’d gone alert, like a hunting animalscenting its prey.

I swiveled slightly to see what he wasstaring at. And then I realized the Trio had entered the store.

Even after working at this particular branchfor more than a year, I still didn’t know their names. They alwayspaid cash. No ersatz T-shirts for them, either. They bought thehigher-priced Lip Service and Morbid Threads clothes, along withsome cosmetics. No jewelry or any other accessories. Oh, thatdidn’t mean they went without. But (as far as my untrained eyescould tell) they wore the real stuff. The red stones on theirfingers and at their necks glittered