'You going out with Shannon tonight?' she asked deliberately.
'Uh, yeah,' he said.
'Well, have fun.' Smiling sweetly, she turned away from him and faced the young woman behind the counter. 'I'd like an application for a part-time job.'
'Sales?' the woman asked.
'Yes.'
The woman withdrew a form from a shelf beneath the counter. 'You can take it home, fill it out, and bring it back when you're ready.' She inserted the form into a square featureless machine that clicked loudly. 'Deadline's a week.'
'Is there an interview . . . ?'
'After your application is reviewed, then you may be invited back for an interview.'
'Thank you.' She smiled at the woman, took the application, and turned to leave. Jake was walking slowly down the center aisle of the electronics department, pretending to look at boom boxes, obviously waiting for her, but she quickly made a detour around the televisions, through the household appliances, and emerged near the checkout stands.
She glanced down at the application in her hand, quickly scanning some of the questions. She'd look good on paper, she knew. Once she filled in some of the biographical info, the clubs she belonged to, her GPA and extracurricular activities, she'd be in. There was no way they'd find someone better.
She felt good, she felt confident, and she decided to come back later, after she'd completed and turned in the application, to do a little shopping. It couldn't hurt to let her future employers know that she shopped here herself.
Besides, she needed some new jeans.
She looked behind her, toward the electronics department, to make sure that Jake was nowhere in sight, then hurried past the checkout stands and through the exit doors to the parking lot outside.
4
'Every department, every aisle, every corner of The Store is equipped with hidden video cameras that are on twenty-four hours a day and record all activity within our boundaries.'
Mr. Lamb walked through the stockroom. No, not walked. _Strode_. His bearing was that of a military man, his gait almost a march, and he moved purposefully past the warehouse shelves filled with crated merchandise toward a white door at the far end. Jake hurried behind him, trying to keep up. He'd heard bad things about The Store from July Bettencourt and some of the other kids who'd tried to get a job here and failed, but so far he'd had no problems.
He'd turned in his application yesterday afternoon, and Mr. Lamb had called him this morning and told him to come in for an interview. The interview had been mercifully short, and now the personnel manager was taking him on a tour of the place and acting as though he'd gotten the job. He didn't know whether he had or hadn't.
And he was afraid to ask.
Mr. Lamb was an intimidating guy.
They reached the white door, Mr. Lamb pulled it open, and the two of them continued down a narrow white hallway that Jake estimated ran parallel to the hardware department, behind the tire wall.
'Here is our monitoring room,' Mr. Lamb said, opening a door and stepping inside.
'Wow,' Jake said.
Mr. Lamb smiled thinly. 'Yes.'
The walls of the room were covered with television screens, each showing a different area of the store. Ten or twelve men, none of whom Jake recognized, were seated in front of individual stations at a control console that wrapped around the room. Each man seemed to be responsible for keeping tabs on what was happening on a bank of six televisions that was three screens tall and two screens wide.
'This is our security team,' Mr. Lamb said. 'Right now, we're utilizing an interim crew from corporate headquarters. They're here to set up shop and assist with training. We hope to have a locally recruited team in place by the end of the month.' He turned toward Jake. 'You're our first recruit.'
He _had_ gotten the job.
Jake licked his lips, nervously cleared his throat. 'I'm still going to school,' he said. 'I can only work part- time.'
'We are well aware of your schedule, Mr. Lindley.' The personnel manager's voice was cold. 'We have three shifts. Yours would be swing -- three in the afternoon until nine at night -- if that is acceptable to you.'
Jake nodded timidly.
'Very well.' Mr. Lamb turned back toward the nearest wall. 'As a security monitor, you will be responsible for observing customers on these video screens here and logging any inappropriate activity so that management can later determine whether it's feasible to prosecute or take other necessary action.' He moved closer and pointed to a series of numbers on a digital readout below one of the screens. 'As you can see, everything is taped. If an incident occurs, you will record the number corresponding to the tape location so that the incident can be easily referenced.'
Jake nodded, not sure if he was supposed to be paying close attention, if this was part of his training, or simply an overview of information that would be repeated when his actual training began.
'Uh, when will I be starting?' he asked.
'When would you like to start?'
'Tomorrow?' he offered.
Mr. Lamb smiled. 'That will be fine. There will be a two-day training session, before you begin monitoring the card department. If you are effective in this assignment, you may eventually move up to' -- he paused dramatically 'the women's fitting rooms.' His smile growing broader, he led the way across the room and pointed to a screen above the head of a young man with a blond crew cut. On the screen, in a closed dressing room, Samantha Davis unbuckled her belt, unbuttoned, unzipped, and pulled down her jeans. The crew cut man turned a knob on the console, and the camera zoomed in on her crotch. Her panties had a hole in them, and through the small tear in the patterned cotton he could see blond pubic hair.
Jake was immediately aroused, and he casually moved his right hand in front of his crotch, surreptitiously trying to push down on his growing erection. He had often imagined what Shannon's sister looked like naked, and here she was in the flesh.
A natural blond.
She adjusted the panties, pulling them tight, clearly outlining the cleft between her legs, before trying on the jeans that she'd brought into the dressing room with her.
He dared not move, for fear that even that slight friction would set him off. He stared up at the screen in wonder. He could sit here and spy on the girls in town as they tried on clothes, see them in their underwear, and get paid for it? This was heaven.
Mr. Lamb grinned, put an uncomfortable arm around Jake's shoulder.
'Sometimes,' he said, 'they don't even wear panties.'
5
Bill stared at his computer screen.
Street had won the chess game.
It took a moment for him to realize what had happened. He hadn't expected this, hadn't been prepared for it, and he was mentally thrown off balance. When his brain finally did assimilate what had occurred, he leaned back in his chair, a shiver passing through him.
It was not an earth-shattering moment. Nothing important had occurred.
Hell, by rights this was something that should have happened a long time ago.
The surprising thing was that it hadn't occurred before now.
But after so many consecutive wins, this loss seemed somehow ominous, and he found himself reading into it an import that perhaps wasn't there.
_Perhaps?_
There was no 'perhaps' about it. There was no larger meaning to the loss of a chess game; there was no significance to it at all.
So why did he feel . . . uneasy?
