Shoplifting At Tracy's

Ray Dolan went into Tracy's for batteries. The Northgate Mall is mostly dead now. The fountain is dry, the storefronts are dark, and three quarters of the place has gone quiet. But Tracy's is still there. Tracy's has always been there. Two full floors, warm and golden and immaculate, with the same soft music playing and not a single customer in sight. Just the mannequins. There are a lot of mannequins in Tracy's. One of them is a teenage boy in a flannel shirt, posed mid step with one hand raised and a price tag hanging off his chest. Ray knows that face. It belongs to Johnny Vasquez, fifteen years old, from the little green house up on Delmar Street, who went missing four months ago and never came home. Then Ray hears a voice that is not coming from the mouth. Help me. I am still in here. Johnny took a four dollar keychain on a dare. He knew it was wrong. He has been standing in that store paying for it every second since, and he will be paying for it forever, because something ancient runs Tracy's and it cannot tell the difference between a keychain and a life. Ray Dolan is fifty four years old. He fixes air conditioners. He is a widower who lives alone with a chirping smoke detector, and he is not brave, and he knows it. He goes back in anyway. What he finds inside is fifty years of the missing, a punishment with no proportion, and a question nobody in that store has ever thought to ask. A strange and funny and unsettling story about mercy, about what happens when the righteous are left alone too long with their certainty, and about an ordinary man who walks into the dark carrying nothing but a box knife and the truth. At Tracy's, everything has a price. Even a stick of gum. Especially a stick of gum.