He was holding a yellow clip folder filled with commercial return slips. Vance glanced once toward the glass front entrance, once toward the tool corral, and then stepped into the opening behind the contractor counter. He did not ask Geller a question. He did not glance toward the lumber yard. Vance dropped the yellow folder squarely over Geller’s brown wallet, pressed his left palm downward, and pulled the papers back toward his chest.
When the yellow folder lifted, the green laminate counter was bare.
The movement was practiced, smooth, and deliberately shielded by his torso. Vance tucked the yellow folder under his left arm, his left hand remaining cupped underneath the stiff cardstock, and walked directly toward aisle seven—the exact route Arthur Bell took to reach the front registers.
My breath rattled in my throat. I reached for the front USB port on the DVR chassis. We kept two thumb drives in the drawer beside the barcode scanner for weekly inventory balance sheets. I pulled the black plastic drive from the plastic cup, jammed the metal connector into the front jack, and clicked the export tab with the pointer.
The dialogue box popped up on the monitor: ARCHIVE EXPORT: CAM-09 / TIME: 17:35:00 - 17:41:00 / TARGET: REMOVABLE DISK E:.
The progress bar began to crawl across the bottom of the window: 12%... 24%...
"David."
I flinched, my hand dropping instinctively over the glowing screen.
Cynthia, the head cashier who had worked the evening shift since the store opened nine years ago, was standing at the end of the customer service desk. Her glasses hung from a beaded chain around her neck, and her arms were crossed over her maroon work smock. She looked down at the cabinet door I had left propped open, then down at the blue light blinking furiously on the hard drive face.
"He's bringing Miller over right now," Cynthia said under her breath. Her voice was flat, but her fingers were tapping an anxious, irregular cadence against her elbow. "Vance is telling him Arthur tried to ditch it under the register belt."
"Cynthia, look at this," I whispered, shifting slightly to the left so she could see the monitor angle.
She leaned down, squinting at the miniature playback window just as the clip looped back to Vance sliding the yellow folder across the counter. Her eyes widened behind her spectacles, her mouth opening slightly. She didn't gasp. She had worked under Vance for eighteen months; she knew he skimmed damaged-box write-offs and docked fifteen minutes from anyone who clocked in forty seconds past eight. But watching the general manager actively lift a customer's payroll off a desk was something else entirely.
"Sweet Lord," she murmured, glancing back over her shoulder toward the register lane. "David, Vance holds the store manager keycard. If he catches you downloading internal server footage without an audit code, he’ll fire you on the spot for corporate system tampering. It’s in the handbook."
"He can fire me," I said, watching the green bar hit 78%. "Arthur’s got two combat tours and an honorable discharge on his wall. He lives on twelve hundred dollars a month. If Miller takes him out of here in cuffs, he spends the weekend in county holding because he can't post a two-hundred-dollar bond. You think Vance is going to let him come back and clear his name on Monday?"
Cynthia didn't answer right away. She looked past me, out toward register four.
Deputy Miller had stopped three feet from Arthur. He had his thumbs hooked into the front of his utility belt, listening while Vance spoke with quick, sharp gestures. Vance was tapping his own chest, then pointing at Arthur’s unbuttoned jacket, his face twisted into an expression of theatrical civic grief. Walter Geller was standing between them, shaking his head, looking down at his wallet and then at Arthur’s torn pocket, the contradiction clearly gnawing at him.
"Walter knows the math doesn't work," Cynthia whispered. "He's measured enough joists to know five inches doesn't slide into four. But Miller won't argue with Vance. Vance gives the deputies free coffee and ten percent off power tools."
The monitor clicked softly. A small gray box appeared: EXPORT COMPLETE. SAFE TO REMOVE HARDWARE.