Frank Deluca had managed the Meridian supermarket on Calloway Street for eleven years and in eleven years had developed what he considered to be a finely calibrated sense of when something was wrong.
Shoplifters had a particular gait — not always furtive, sometimes almost aggressively casual, the overcorrection of someone trying too hard to look like they weren’t trying at all. He had caught forty-three shoplifters in eleven years. He kept count because he kept count of everything — inventory, footfall, shrinkage percentages, the small statistics that made a store run the way a store was supposed to run.
He was proud of this. He had built something here, in the fluorescent-lit aisles of this particular Meridian in this particular neighborhood, and pride in a thing built was not nothing.
He had never, in eleven years, been wrong about someone who deserved to be caught.
He would spend a long time examining that sentence afterward.
The dog came in at 2:47 on a Tuesday afternoon.
Frank saw it on the security monitor first — a flash of movement near the pet food aisle, low to the ground, wrong for a person. He was at the monitor before he’d consciously decided to move, and then he saw it clearly: a German Shepherd, moving with the specific purposefulness of an animal that knows exactly where it’s going, had apparently already identified its destination, and had allocated zero processing power to what anyone might think about it.
