The heavy steel barrels of four pneumatic price-tagger guns hovered six inches from Julian Vance’s chest, hissing with four hundred pounds of nitrogen pressure.
Behind their lead-lined hoods, the four Loss-Prevention Enforcers stood motionless on the loading dock, their gloved trigger fingers curled around the steel trip-levers. Each barbed orange triangular tag in the revolving brass magazines was primed to punch through canvas, cotton, and flesh, tattooing the word SHOPLIFTER directly into the chest of anyone who defied the private threshold.
Julian didn’t back away. He didn’t drop his hands. His sutured left palm, snug beneath its sterile white dressing, rested against the cold steel push-bar of Mobile Register Annex #04-B.
A corporate enforcer thinks an audit begins with violence, Julian’s inner voice whispered. A Senior Clerk knows an audit begins with proper illumination.
“Shoot him!” Roger Locke screamed from behind the lead-lined enforcers, his manicured fingers clutching the ballot box of contaminated banknotes like a shield. “Tag the bastard!
Tag him and write him up as unregistered meat!”
Julian reached into his canvas lineman satchel with his right hand. He didn’t draw a pistol or an iron pry-bar.
He brought out a heavy, machined-aluminum flashlight fitted with a dark, violet-black quartz lens: a three-hundred-and-sixty-five-nanometer ultraviolet forensic inspection torch, certified by the National Cash Register Bureau of Shift Standards.
