Inventory

Ryan Pressley, 18, was on his way to Harvard in the fall, and was a legend in his own strange way, in his small North Carolina town, where he happened to go to WalMart on a day that a number of various criminals happened to converge on the place. He was actually somewhat of a criminal himself, in that he was a hacker in his free time; he had broken into a number of stores' computer systems; changed their ordering patterns; wreaked havoc with their inventories. At one local retail chain he'd ordered three cases of condoms, then went into the store, and asked the manager with a smirk if he had any condoms around. He was addicted to that feeling, of knowing more than even the manager about the inventory of a store. He considered WalMart the king of the inventory control business; he'd hacked all the way through its system, from the national headquarters right into his local store, but got trapped there; he had a way of sneaking through passwords, but he couldn't get into the local store's inventory system. In frustration he decided to go to WalMart in person on this particular day. He didn't count on running into a young woman, Anna-Marie, who looked at him with a deep kind of look. All of a sudden he felt like he'd have to explain why he needed a condom, and of course, he couldn't. With unusual luck, though, she promised she'd check the store's inventory. He'd have to follow her, though, while she went into the back to find a computer, and maybe somebody who knew what they were doing. As she turned around he got a lump in his throat and thought maybe he'd follow her just about anywhere. There goes Harvard, he thought. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea.

In the back room, Ivan and Sergei Petrov were running one of their usual scams. Sergei had the thermostat taken apart; he had wires coming out of the wall at different angles, with tools spread out on the floor, including one of those electrical meters that tells you if any juice is coming through a wire. He was wearing a uniform, but it was kind of ill-fitting, and it didn't say Sergei on it, it said Roger. He had to remind himself to answer to the name Roger, in case anyone read the label on his uniform. His brother Ivan was on the phone, calling one of those toll numbers; they would charge WalMart, when the month was over, but WalMart would just pay it, being a large company, and not knowing what the charge was for, and he and his scamming cousins would collect some of the money, and be richer for the experience, if only now they could play their parts well, act like the call was necessary, and had something to do with a broken thermostat. The good thing about the thermostat was, whenever you said that there was a broken one, people tended to believe you, since nobody is ever happy with the temperature in a room, especially in North Carolina. The bad thing about it was, not every room had one, so sometimes, they would get all dressed up, try to run their scam, and not find a room that had both a phone and a thermostat, or maybe, not find a thermostat at all. So that, if they had to give their story to the manager before they were able to borrow the phone, sometimes they got sidetracked.

On this day their scam was working quite well; in fact, it was working so well that they were tempted to drag it out a little, and that might have been their undoing. Ivan was yapping away, in Russian, about Putin, to his cousin, except that every time he needed to say "Putin," he'd say the Russian word for "thermostat," which sounded a lot like the English "thermostat" anyway, and made the whole conversation sound like it was about a thermostat-fixing emergency. But even this was only when there were other people around, in the employees' room of the WalMart; the rest of the time he went on and on about sexual exploits that Sergei knew for a fact weren't true. Half the time everything he said was merely for Sergei's entertainment, as Sergei sat there, near him, and pulled out thermostat wires in such a configuration that it looked like the thermostat was undergoing serious internal surgery. Sergei would chuckle at the ridiculousness of it all. If only his cousins back in Russia could see him now!

They became quite serious when the manager came in; Ivan's discussion became focused on an actual thermostat, as if there actually was one broken, although still probably only Sergei, and the cousin on the other end of the line, actually knew what he was saying. Sergei focused carefully on the bent wires in front of him. The manager, Albert Bond, was a nervous kind of guy, didn't really believe the two Russian guys, even though probably the main office did send them over to fix the thermostat; it was a believable enough story, he thought, but something about it wasn't right. What was bothering Albert Bond, though, was that he really needed to use the phone to call his bookie, because he had a gambling deal going, and was intently interested in how it worked out, whether the Tar Heels had won or lost. Gambling was still illegal in North Carolina, so he tried to make these calls in private, but this was sometimes difficult, and impossible today with these yahoos around; he wished he had brought his cell phone, but he'd left it with his daughter.

In an agitated huff he set about pretending to read the newspaper on the employees' room table, but he kept an eye on the two Russian guys, one taking apart the thermostat, and the other one talking away, in Russian, on the phone. Their uniforms bothered him. He, Albert Bond, had actually worked for a uniform supply outfit for a while, one of those places that just couldn't compete with big-time operators like WalMart, but the result of that experience was that he knew, somehow, that if these guys really worked for the heating supply people, their uniforms would fit better. A close study of this Roger guy, for example, convinced him that his name was probably not Roger, and he very likely wasn't even a heating supply guy. He became convinced, correctly as it turned out, that this was some kind of scam, and he slowly came to a boil, thinking he was being taken for a fool.

But Anna-Marie and Ryan Pressley approached him, and asked him an inventory question regarding the next supply truck with ribbed condoms on it. For some reason it was necessary for the customer, Pressley, to find out when this truck would arrive, and how many of these condom packages would be on it. He looked at the customer, Pressley, and wondered what on earth this young man would do with a whole box of condoms; he looked like he'd spent the last three months next to a computer. As it happened, Albert Bond was dead right about that, also. It was an awkward exchange, because the man was obviously attracted to Anna Marie, but was very inept socially; at the same time, Anna Marie was very flirtatious, in her shy, kind of demure way; she obviously liked the guy, yet the conversation was about these condoms. And the Russians kind of backed off; the one on the phone was quieter, as if he were listening more, to the guy on the other end; he kept saying "seriose-na, seriose-na," which had to be Russian for "You're serious!" or "Seriously!"

Albert Bond, while he wanted to take the phone and smash the Russian guy over the head with it, set about to help Anna-Marie with the inventory question. He would have to call up the item on the store inventory database, but this wouldn't be difficult, if they walked over to a station where it could be accessed. Because he was boiling over about the guys with the ill-fitting uniforms, he considered finding a way to call the police, or dealing with that in some way, but he remembered the store rule: customers first. It would be good to get this geeky, Adam's appled kid out of here before he did that.

Around this time Aaron Howard came into the store. Howard was a small-time crook; a shoplifter, pickpocket, credit-card fraud kind of guy, operated out of his van, and often slept in it, but had a fence in Atlanta who would buy whatever he could steal, and he often started off his days lifting just about anything he could get his hands on. Actually he considered WalMart as the ultimate challenge, as they were harder to steal from, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of their goods were small things, like tomatoes and toothpaste. They had detectives in almost every aisle, cameras everywhere, and, as good as Aaron Howard was at finding the cameras and hiding his hands from them, he was never quite sure that he'd seen every camera, or that any given person in front of him wasn't a store detective. He was up to the challenge though; he steeled himself. He wasn't coming out of this store empty-handed. The first thing he passed was a rack full of the new Harry Potter book; these sold at about twenty dollars a piece; one was dangling off of a lower shelf, and he grabbed that one and opened it up. He didn't really notice this, but a small piece of paper fell out of it, and into his hand; he folded it up a little as he thumbed through the pages, but held onto it. He wanted the book; he needed an escape, a fantasy. But it was a large book, too difficult to slip into his pants or his shirt, even if nobody was looking. He palmed it, thumbed through it a little, but eventually put it back down on the shelf, this time in better order, right up with the other books. He had to use the bathroom, and he was in luck; on the way there, there was a small crowd of people near the entrance to the employee's area, and he bumped up against someone in an ill-fitting uniform, maybe an electrician or something, in the crowd of people. It was all very natural, the guy didn't suspect a thing, and he lifted his wallet, and found a valid credit card in it, as he used the bathroom. One never knew about this stuff, but he figured, he had to use it quickly, before it was noticed; he made a plan, and walked out purposely.

Back at the Harry Potter rack a man looked furiously for the book with the note in it; by arrangement, it was to be one on a certain lower shelf, dangling off the edge. There was no book that fit that description. He was part of a drug ring; a pilot had flown in from the Caribbean, low, beneath the radar, and into the interior of North Carolina, where drugs could be dropped, about thirty miles from this store, in the woods, by a lookout where the ranger had been bought off and had lots of acreage of mountain woods as leeway. The drugs had been picked up according to schedule; the note pertained to where they were to be exchanged from there. This WalMart, and the Harry Potter rack in particular, played an important role in this exchange, but the details of what happened on this day didn't become clear until much later, and Aaron Howard, who had the note in his hand, imploring the reader to use the back end of the McDonald's parking lot this time, didn't quite know what to make of it, when he finally read it. The shipment of drugs never made it to its intended destination, but that was due to a number of other factors besides the interruption of Aaron Howard, and the palming of the note that gave directions to the smugglers.

Back at the inventory station, Albert Bond became suspicious of the geeky Ryan Pressley, and young Anna-Marie, who had now spent so much time away from her post, and he pretended to need a minute while he went to a phone and called the police on the two Russians, who he could still see lingering in the doorway near the bathroom and the employees' room. He could see that Pressley became nervous because of his phone call, but Pressley was nervous anyway; Bond had missed calling his bookie, and when he did call, he found that he had lost a couple of thousand on the Tar Heels, and this made him quite agitated and angry.

Pressley, however, was not worried about the police. He was innocent, after all; he had not gotten what he had wanted, which was the password to the inventory system, but then, he had not committed a crime either. He was entirely taken with the young girl, and now knew that her name was Anna-Marie. He had pretty much given up on the condoms, and on the scam itself, as it was an enormous waste of time, given the fact that he was going to Harvard anyway, on scholarship, in the fall, and didn't want to risk any of that. Anna-Marie, however, was a different story. He felt that if he walked away, he'd never return; he'd never see her again, and he couldn't bear that. He proposed to her, right on the spot. She accepted. They were in the hardware aisle, looking into each other's eyes, when the police walked in; they didn't even notice. Albert Bond stopped worrying about Anna-Marie, and watched how the police handled the two Russian guys, one of whom, Sergei, didn't have an ID. As it turned out, Aaron Howard had used Sergei's credit card to buy a stereo and a Harry Potter book, and it caused Sergei all manner of trouble, because both brothers spent the weekend in jail, unable to call or cancel the credit cards, unable to straighten out the mess, or explain why they'd spent so long on the phone, calling a toll number for no reason except to make money. After that experience they both pleaded humility and repentance, and vowed to go straight, never pulling scams again, but only Sergei actually did; Ivan was caught doing a similar scam less than two months later in a larger city, not too far away.

The town was scandalized by the major drug bust, in the back of McDonald's parking lot, but that happened, really, because of another coincidence which is not part of this story. The wedding of Ryan Pressley and Anna-Marie, later in the summer, was a big event also, and even Albert Bond was invited, and attended, saying proudly that he was there when they met, and in fact when they were engaged. He treated Anna-Marie like a niece, showered her with gifts, was gracious when it came time for her to leave her job. No problem, he said, things happen, and you have to do what your heart tells you.

August 15, 2007