residential pockets featuring gravel roads, chained dogs, and cars on blocks. Maryann liked to think, as she exited her car every morning, that it was her surroundings that sucked what little energy she had right out of her the moment she felt the parking lot beneath her feet.
The door swished open as she approached and the welcoming smell of freshly baked bread, a signature of the grocery chain, greeted her—even roused her for the few precious seconds that her walk took her through the bakery. The seafood department by which she also passed produced the opposite effect, and by the time she pushed through the employee-only door to get to her office, she’d returned to her morning funk. And today’s funk was supplemented by what CJ had said to her at dinner last night. She’d been livid then; now she was more worried than anything. She’d had a good thing going here for a long while, but maybe she’d become too brazen about it. Maybe it was time to scale back.
“Hey, boss,” the new kid, Mario, said as she passed. He was directing a pallet of cereal boxes toward the front of the store, and he was new enough not to have learned that no one spoke to Maryann before she finished her coffee. He’d learn once she lit into him, which would likely happen soon—either when she was grumpier than was the case today, or when she had more energy with which to focus whatever level of ire she possessed. As it was, Mario’s employment had begun, and had remained, in a no-man’s land where neither her anger nor physical resources presupposed the arrival of her inner enfant terrible.
Maryann knew the rest of her employees had a pool going, and that whoever owned the day during which she finally lost it would stand to win a great deal of money. She also knew that it was this wicked entrepreneurialism that kept any of them from warning poor Mario about the dangerous game he was playing.
This thought cheered her as she approached her office— almost enough that she might have rewarded Mario with a smile had he not already directed his pallet of Captain Crunch through the double doors.
Her office was another contributor to her bad humor—the principal reason being that it was located as near to the loading dock as was possible without her having to sit on a forklift. Her store was one of the oldest in the Wegman family, built long before uniform branch design became the norm. Consequently, hers was one of the only stores in which the general manager’s office was not up front near the customer service center, with its bright lighting, constant temperature, and the hum of shoppers, scanners, and price checks. Instead she was relegated to a small, cold hole in the bowels of the store, where the music of heavy machinery and the random spasms of the climate control system serenaded her.
She’d certainly tried to find accommodation elsewhere in the store, but despite her best efforts her office was in the only workable place, and all of her requests over the last five years for the funds to build out another room had fallen on deaf ears.
It was one of the reasons she harbored little guilt about the backdoor money. If her regional manager could force her to work in these conditions, then he could stand to see some of the store’s profit redirected to what she referred to as her “equity account.”
Approaching her office, she ran through her mental delivery ledger to recall who was delivering today—whose overpriced stock she would sign off on so that she could make her mortgage payment. It never occurred to her that just a few steps ago she’d been thinking about slowing down. She thought the money crops today would be ice cream and seafood.
She noticed the light in her office was on, which angered her because it meant someone had been in here. Before she made it three more steps, she had a list of who that might have been and what they would have wanted, as well as what their punishment would be for violating the sanctity of her modest personal space. In fact, she was so well into her plans for retribution that it took a few seconds before she noticed the three people waiting for her in the office.
What unsettled her more than anything weren’t the two men in dark suits who leaned against her desk, but the severe-looking woman