The Mall (5 page)

Lara grabbed Owen and pulled him behind her toward the doorway.
 
“C’mon, Owen.
 
We’re leaving.”

“Go on, then!” Charlene
screeched,
her face a reddened mask.
 
“Leave a mess to clean up like you always do.
 
Like you did when my Benjamin died!”

Scooping Cora up in her arms, Lara half carried, half dragged her through the kitchen door and into the exit in the living room, where Owen waited expectantly like a valet holding the door, a single tear streaming down his face.
 
He brushed it away guiltily.

“Mom, I swear I hardly even touched it,” he exclaimed.
 
“I was just playing.”

“
It’s
okay, Owen,” she replied, planting a kiss in the center of the musky mop of his unruly dark hair.
 
“C’mon, let’s go.”

Leading her children outside, she took one last look back before shutting the door on what had been her final option.

In her head, she heard his voice again: “Don’t worry, Gloria!”

And it all came rushing back, in a single vivid flash of memory.

“Easy for you to say.
You don’t have to carry the little booger for nine months.”

He rolled off of her and back over to his side of the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
 
“You think this is a mistake, don’t you?”

She hesitated.
 
Her mind had gone blank, devoid of a diplomatic response.
 
“I’m scared, hon,” she said, hearing her normally confident voice wavering with emotion.

He turned and nuzzled his nose into the tender crook of her neck.
 
She giggled in spite of herself, and impulsively raised her shoulder, clamping his face into a mass of her cascading brown hair.

“Don’t worry, Gloria.”

“Stop calling me that, you shit!”

“Glor-ree-ah!”

“Quiet, you’ll wake Owen.”

“G-L-O-R-I-A.”

Lara cried out and threw herself atop him, straddling his belly.
 
“I oughtta throttle you right here, right now,” she hissed with a gleam in her eye.
 
“No court would convict me.
 
I’ll tell them we were in the throes of lovemaking and the passion just got the better of me and…”

“What? And leave you alone to raise two brats,” Ben chortled.

Her expression turned serious.
 
She dropped a fist down atop his chest a bit harder than she had intended.
 
“Don’t ever joke about that!
 
Ever!”

Ben swallowed and re-connected with her evasive eyes.
 
“I’m sorry, hon!
 
If anything ever happened to me…”

“Stop, you shit!” she exclaimed rolling off and throwing herself to the edge of the mattress in a huff, her back to him.

Ben turned to her, drawing his lips close to her ear until the fine hair wavered before his warm breath.
 
“If anything ever happened to me, kiddo, you’d go on, you’ll live and you’d know that I’ll always love you.
Today, tomorrow, and forever.”

The memory of his breath on her ear—his warm breath—drove a fresh auger of pain into Lara’s gut and she dug the heel of her hand into the corner of her eye to capture the tear before either of her children could see it.

Albert could hear the two punks before he could see them, the sounds of rolling wheels amplified by the unique design of Coney Island Court, the direct center of the Mall.
 
The wide open area displayed a cross-section of all five levels of the enormous complex.
 
At its center, a hundred foot tall, twenty-car Ferris
Wheel
dominated.

The Wheel of Time, as it was called, featured a specially-themed car for every decade.
 
There was a Wild West Car displayed, of course, cowboys and Indians; a Roaring Twenties car, complete with sequins and Tommy guns; and a Swinging Sixties car painted with obnoxious tie-dye flowers.

On one side of the Wheel across from a fountain surrounded by benches, an immobile Bot stood.
 
It was policy to send a Bot to attempt defusing a potential situation before sending security agents.
 
Obviously the Bot had not worked, judging from the darkness of its electronic eye sockets.
 
A Bot was programmed to shut itself down if faced with potential destruction. The sight of the deactivated robot only managed to further anger Albert.

Taking advantage of the bowl-shaped walls of the sunken area, two teenage boys in ragged jeans and t-shirts took turns taunting each other to go as far as possible to the top edge of the railing.

At the moment Albert arrived, one of them hit the railing with the wheels of his board and fell backward back onto the carpeted floor, barely missing the edge of the fountain’s rim.
 
The other laughed as the other rolled on the floor in pain.

“Hey!”

Both boys looked up with disinterested expressions.

“Does this look like a park to you?” Albert barked, standing at the top of the steps leading down into the sunken area.

The two teenage looked at each other with confused eyes as if trying to decipher the foreign language of the adult who had just spoken.

“Well,” Albert snapped.
 
“Don’t just stand there like deer in headlights.
 
Clear out of here!”

“We’re waiting on our parents, dude,” said the one in a white t-shirt that displayed the 1983 concert dates of the band The Police.

“So wait somewhere else.
 
Let’s go!”
 
He gave a clap of his hands and that seemed to wake the two boys up.
 
They snatched up their skateboards and dropped their shoulders in defeat.

As they started up the steps past Albert, the taller one in a black t-shirt displaying ZZ Top’s “Eliminator,” a cherry red 1933 Ford Coupe, gave him a squinty-eyed look through the long dirty hair that fell across his eyes.

His hand dropped to the Faze-Wand at his hip, the only weapon he had at his disposal. Because of insurance issues, no security agent was allowed to carry a lethal weapon such as a gun.
 
Albert always thought they should.
 
After all, weren’t they law officers in the strictest sense, defending the rules of Mall management?

“How about giving us a few inches of room here, ton of fun?” the punk mumbled under his breath.

For a moment, Albert thought he might have mistaken what he had just heard, but then he immediately regained his senses.
 
Of course, this child was disrespectful and filled with smug self-satisfied confidence.
 
It was just another symptom of a youth-worshipping culture leaving children on their own to raise themselves, while their parents were busy buying hi-fi stereo systems and sports cars in a futile attempt to stay young themselves.

“Say that again, you piece of shit,” Albert growled between clenched teeth, his anger surfacing like a predator catching the scent of blood.

The taller one glanced at Albert’s hand on the Faze-Wand and flipped his long almost feminine hair back out of his eyes.
 
“Try and touch me with that.
 
See what happens.”

Albert exploded forward, grabbing the kid’s collar in both his fists.
 
In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to smash the punk’s nose back through his skull.

Suddenly, someone had a grip on his arms from behind, firmly yanking him back.
 
Albert whipped around and saw that fellow security guard Vernon Willowby had intervened.

“What the hell are you doing, Al?” Vernon hissed.

The other teenager grabbed his bolder companion and was hauling him away, but he wasn’t quite finished making his scene.
 
He slapped the other’s hands away and threw his bony chest out through his baggy black t-shirt.
 
“I oughtta sue you and this fucking mall, you fat ass tool!”

His buddy grabbed him again and this time he didn’t let him go.

Albert watched the two kids as they disappeared into the crowd, Vernon studying him with an alarmed frown on his face.
 
“Goddamit, Al.
 
What’s gotten into you?”

“Zit-faced, snot,” Albert growled.
 
“Did you hear what he said to me?”

“Look, I don’t care what he said,” Vernon barked, giving the other a hard look.
 
“You can’t treat a customer that way.
 
The last thing this place needs is another lawsuit.”

It was well documented that a little old lady from DFW named Dolores Ritter had slipped and fell in a soda puddle before a service Bot could get to it.
 
Ms Ritter had retained a personal injury attorney to get reimbursed for a one-time emergency room visit and ended up netting a cool two million dollars for a twisted ankle.
 
She had claimed punitive damages.
 
Pain and suffering.

Of course, any business the size of the Mall had minor accidents every day, most of which were settled out of court, usually with a discount coupon or gift card, but since the Ritter case had been publicized there had been a rash of bogus slip and fall claims, which the insurance company was fond of calling “copy-coots,” in deference to the average age of the claimants. Ninety-nine percent of these were dismissed with a simple meeting in which the surveillance video of the proposed “accident” was presented to the client, many of them captured with the aid of Bots equipped with video capabilities.

Security had been told directly that they couldn’t afford another Dolores Ritter and that protecting the customers was really secondary to their main duty:

Protect the Mall.

“Don’t ever engage a customer physically.
 
Period,” Vernon continued.
 
“You have an
issue,
you let the
real
cops handle it.
 
That’s why they pay them the big bucks.”

“You ever wonder just what we’re supposed to be doing here,” Albert posed, slapping the Faze-Wand at his belt.
 
“I mean they give us these Tinker Bell wands but then they tell us not to use them.”

“You oughtta know by now, Al.
 
We’re just a deterrent.
 
A false front.
 
Y’know, like ‘Beware of dog,’ or ‘High Voltage.’
 
That’s us.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Albert grumbled.
 
“Makes me feel like a little cog in a big machine.”

“Hey, just be grateful they don’t expect us to enforce.
 
You know how much of our lives we’d have to spend in a courtroom testifying in frivolous lawsuits if we did?”

“The way I figure it, I just saved the Mall another lawsuit by putting a stop to it,” Albert protested in way of defense, though he couldn’t care less about the preservation of the pocketbooks of the Mall investors.
 
He had only wanted to put the punk in his place.
 
For a moment, his anger had been palpably real, like a red hot flash of a lover’s lust, though the fervor had already started to drain out of him and he found himself a little confused about why he had overreacted.
 
“Guess I’m just a little edgy or something.”
 
His hand drifted down into his pocket like a dropped ball compelled by gravity.

“Don’t worry, my friend,” Vernon quipped, giving him a gentle slap on his arm.
 
“They’re nothing but children, hanging out ‘
cause
they got tired of whacking off to their momma’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs.”