The Law of Averages

Dan stepped out onto the dark streets outside the Pearson. The DVD was tucked into his pocket, and after a moment's consideration, he flicked it into hammerspace with the rest of his valuables. Dan glanced at his surroundings. It was late, the streets were empty. The circumstances were nearly identical to when Bartholomew had stood here.

What had the mad scientist seen?

Dan walked down the sidewalk and stopped roughly in the same spot that Bartholomew had. Then he turned on his heel, and glanced down the street. There were several more tall buildings lining the street, and a dozen businesses besides. An apartment building, some high-rise condominiums, another hotel, a bakery, a post office, a print shop, the dimensional equivalent of a Microcenter, and a handful more that Dan couldn't make out in the dark.

At this time of night, only the hotel and the electronics store were still open. Dan strolled towards the latter purely on a hunch. At this point, he was assuming that it was, indeed, Andros Bartholomew who had hired him to deliver a bunch of half-eaten corpses. Dan still didn't understand why the man had chosen that particular route for vengeance, but he doubted that the mad scientist's motives were comprehensible to anyone sane.

The door to Earls' Electronics Emporium jingled as Dan pushed it open. The inside of the store was impressively designed to look like the guts of a computer. The carpet was a deep green, lined with thousands of circuitry lines that each lead to one of the many shelves dotting the store. Several of the shelves contained black plastic tubs, arrayed in neat rows, seemingly mimicking sticks of RAM. A large fan spun over a section of the store, where everything from Dyson fans to liquid cooling was partitioned away. The customer service desk was a perfectly square chunk of metal with a hollow center, shaped like the inside of a CPU. Dan was honestly pretty impressed by the effort put in. Looking at it from above must be quite a sight.

He approached the help desk, slipping his phone out of his pocket. The employee was a bored teenager with wild blonde hair, tanned skin, and a pronounced slouch. He stood at the center of the CPU desk, one hand in the pocket of his cargo pants, and the other holding his phone. His head was bowed, staring down at the screen as he scrolled past whatever social media site teenagers in Dimension A favored.

Dan rapped his knuckles against the desk, and the young man flinched so hard that his phone flew out of his hands. It clattered against the metallic surface, skidding towards the edge until Dan snatched it up. He passed it back without glancing at the screen—That was a rabbit hole he absolutely did not need to explore—and the younger man shamelessly pocketed it.

"Welcome to E-three," the teenager greeted, looking for all the world like he was in his own bedroom. His slouch dipped even lower, even as he met Dan's eyes. "How c'nuh help ya, boss?"

"Nice place you've got here," Dan commented, glancing around. He squinted at the boy's name tag. "Waylon. Hi there Waylon."

"Hullo."

"You usually work night shifts here, Waylon?" Dan probed.

The teen frowned. "I s'pose."

Dan unlocked his phone and flicked through his photo gallery. Some of his own Southern drawl slipped out as he asked, "Were you working, day o' the attack?"

Waylon peered at Dan with suspicion. "Why you wanna know?"

Dan found the picture. He put his phone down on the desk and spun it around. "This fellow was creeping on a lady friend of mine, day of the attack. Standing outside her window, looking in for almost an hour. Got me a bit worried."

The younger man blinked at Dan, then glanced down at the picture.

"That's bad," he commented.

"That's bad," Dan agreed. "I got him on video doing it, too. I'm thinking I can go to the police with it, but I need a little more than a video. A name, hopefully, or an address. Otherwise they can't do much."

"Ok," Waylon said, peering at the picture with a furrowed brow. "So what?"

"Well," Dan continued, "in the video it looked like he came this way after he left. I was hoping you might recognize him."

"I dunno," Waylon replied. "We get a lot of people in."

Dan glanced pointedly around the empty store. Waylon shrugged, and Dan mentally translated the previous statement into 'I don't pay attention to the people who come in.' This was looking like a bust. It had been a long shot anyway. Bartholomew would have had to be completely insane to come here after busting out of prison, rather than hiding out somewhere safe.

"Well shit," Dan said, scratching the back of his head. "Thanks for your time, I guess."

"Sure."

Dan stepped back, then paused. He cocked his head. "Say, y'all don't sell surveillance equipment, do you?"

"Cameras and shi— stuff?" Waylon clarified.

"Yeah. And whatever else you'd need to set it all up."

"Sure," the teen replied. "What'choo looking fer?"

Dan tried to recall what he'd seen. They were all just wires and cameras to him. "I don't really know. Anyone bought that kinda thing recently?"

The employee shrugged his shoulders apathetically. Fuck's sake.

One last try. He glanced around the store. No manager, no other people. This was really the person they'd left in charge of the store's graveyard shift? Screw it, then.

"Mind if I look at your security tapes?" It couldn't hurt to ask.

Waylon stared at him in confusion. "What fer?"

That wasn't a no.

"I want to see if that stalker came in, or even just walked past the window. It'd really help." The cameras seemed to cover a fairly wide arc. If Bartholomew strolled past they should have caught it.

Waylon seemed to swell up with indignation. "Only s'posed to help customers," he insisted, planting his fists on either side of his waist. "You ain't buyin', you leavin'."

Dan frowned. He reached for the first thing that came to mind. "I'll buy a security camera, but first I need to check the quality." He jutted his chin at the store's security cameras. "Two birds, one stone."

Waylon seemed to sluggishly mull it over. The boy didn't seem slow, so much as profoundly disengaged. After a long minute of contemplation, he shrugged.

"Sure. But you gotta buy somethin' afterwards."

Huh.

Dan blinked.

Well then.

Waylon led him into the small backroom where they kept the security footage. It was little more than a closet with a desk and a computer in it. A single, unoccupied chair was planted beside the desk. It looked... weathered.

Dan glanced around the tiny room. "So it's just you at night? No security guard or... anyone?"

"Well, there's Burl," Waylon offered. "He's the security guard."

Dan glanced at Waylon, then at the empty chair. "Uh huh?"

The young teen stared at Dan, slowly chewing on something that he'd fished out of his pocket. He swallowed, paused, then blinked.

"Oh, wait," he said, in the tone of a man having an epiphany. "Burl quit."

"Is that so?" Dan asked, his skin beginning to crawl. There was something seriously wrong, here. He mentally 'loaded' a ball bearing, letting it accelerate through the void of t-space.

"Yar," Waylon's head bobbed up and down like a fishing lure. "Quit after that big ol' gang war. Musta' spooked him or sommit."

"You don't know?" Dan asked, morbidly fascinated by the person in front of him.

Waylon's face scrunched up in thought. He seemed to struggle to remember for several seconds, before his entire body went slack. He shrugged.

Dan took a slow step away from him. "I'm just gonna queue up the tape, if you don't mind."

Waylon shrugged again, and casually slouched against the door frame.

Dan glanced at the security recordings. It was a fairly intuitive system, almost identical to the Pearson's. It was a work of minutes to find the correct day. Dan remembered the time stamp from Margaret's footage, and quickly fast forwarded to it. The video showed Waylon flitting about the store, rearranging displays and putting out product. In the corner of the store, on a thick stool, a hefty fellow in a security outfit lounged with a newspaper. The time stamp ticked upwards. Ten seconds until Bartholomew left the Pearson.

The video skipped. The screen flickered, and went black. The time stamp vanished. Dan stared at the empty screen. He clicked the rewind button, and it started right back up. Playing it forward again, produced the same result. Empty, blank, nothingness. Gone.

Someone had deleted the footage for the rest of the day.

Dan glanced back at Waylon, who had returned to his phone. He compared the laconic, lackadaisical teen in front of him, to the energetic, engaged one on screen. He looked at the security guard, his unconcerned attitude, despite the day's violence, preserved forever on video. The security guard who had apparently up and quit the next day out of fear? Dan's 'fucky' senses were tingling.

He pulled out his phone, and called Cornelius.