Free High Noon at Hot Topic by Christine Pope

HIGH NOON AT HOT TOPIC
     
     
    Christine Pope
     
     
     
     
    I knew he was trouble the second he walked
into the store.
    Oh, not your usual sort of trouble — not the
sticky-fingered tween who thinks she can smuggle out a bottle of
nail polish and a couple of statement buttons with no one noticing.
Not the privileged princesses from the hills who just loved to take
a buttload of clothes into the dressing room and leave them all
there for the “staff” to pick up. And not even the wannabes in long
black coats that my friend Joanna and I referred to as the
“knee-hilists” (usually pronounced in a fake German accent similar
to the one employed by the would-be kidnappers in The Big
Lebowski ).
    Anyway, I was used to the hipsterish flotsam
and jetsam that floated in and out of the store. This guy didn’t
match any of the types who tended to haunt the place.
    For one thing, he wore a long brown coat and
a brown fedora. Now, it was cold enough outside that the coat
itself made some sense, especially for wimpy SoCal natives who
thought anything below 70 degrees was freezing. However, no one who
knew what they were doing would be caught dead wearing brown inside
a Hot Topic. Black was the color of choice, with maybe a variation
into dark gray and army green, or some red and even hot pink (in a
purely ironic sense, of course) thrown into the mix.
    The fact that he was male and at least in his
early thirties just clinched his complete fish-out-of-water status.
Sure, we got some guys; they usually gravitated toward the vintage
band T-shirts. And while we tended to skew younger, we did get some
women in the store who were probably flirting with thirty. Since I
had less than eighteen months to go before I hit the big three-O, I
wasn’t about to pass judgment. At least those thirty-something
women weren’t working in tween poser-punk hell.
    So, taken one at a time, the stranger’s
oddball traits weren’t that strange. Taken together? They set off
pretty 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, my
backup wasn’t Joanna, who I pretty much trusted to handle anything
short of the zombie apocalypse. No, that day I was stuck with
Martine, who looked great as a model for the store’s wares but who
wouldn’t recognize a shoplifter if they paraded past wearing an
outfit composed entirely of price tags.
    “Get the register,” I murmured to her. She
was in the middle of refolding a stack of striped stockings and
looked up at me with a deer-in-the-headlights gaze made even more
Bambi-esque by her thick eyeliner and fake lashes.
    “The what?”
    “Register,” I hissed. “ Now .”
    Those lashes fluttered like moths around a
street light, but at least she had enough brains to recognize the
authority granted me as assistant manager and abandoned her sock
sorting for the cash register. Good thing sales were slow that day;
Martine couldn’t be trusted to make change. Luckily the
predominance of plastic these days saved her ass most of the
time.
    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’t
see 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’d
paused in front of a rack of “vintage” band T-shirts, but he wasn’t
fooling me; I saw the collar of a white button-down shirt peeking
past the heavy overcoat.
    He turned. Cool blue-gray eyes scanned me
briefly, then paused on my name tag before he redirected his
attention to the ranks of bogus shirts, where Led Zeppelin mingled
incongruously with the Clash and the Sex Pistols.
    The dismissal was obvious, but I stood