Twenty minutes before the brick, West Ridge Fuel was having the kind of afternoon Darius Whitfield had pictured when he bought it.
A delivery truck was idling by the ice machine. A teenager with a learner's permit was arguing gently with the air pump. Inside, the coffee machine hissed, the cooler cases hummed, and the young woman on shift was restocking the drink rack by the front window, setting the bottles in neat, soldierly rows. Darius stood in the office doorway with a delivery invoice in his hand, reading it twice out of habit, thinking about a slow toilet in the men's room and whether the new sign lighting was going to draw another letter from the association.
"You want me to call the plumber your dad used?" the young woman asked, not looking up.
"My dad would have fixed it with a coat hanger and strong language," Darius said. "Call the plumber."
"That's what I figured you'd say." She straightened a row of orange sodas. "You know she drove past twice this morning."
Darius did not ask who she was. There was only one she in West Ridge who did drive-bys of a gas station.
"Twice is a slow day for her," he said.
He was still holding the invoice when the brick came through the front window of West Ridge Fuel at twenty past two on a bright afternoon, and it did not come quietly.
Vivian Hartley had carried it across the parking lot in both hands, the way a person carries something they have already decided about. It was a landscaping brick, red, heavy, and she threw it with her whole shoulder. The plate glass took it dead center. For one suspended fraction of a second the window held, webbed white around the impact, and then it gave way all at once and exploded inward in a glittering sheet.
Glass covered the tile. Glass covered the counter mats, the lottery display, the rack of bottled drinks by the door, the very rack that had been so carefully restocked not three minutes earlier, which rocked once, twice, and toppled sideways with a crash of plastic and fizzing soda. The alarm began to pulse, a hard electronic heartbeat that filled the station and spilled out across the forecourt. At pump four, a man filling a pickup truck dropped to a crouch behind his open door.
"Lady!" he shouted. "What are you doing? Lady!"
At pump two, a woman in a gray sedan did the opposite of ducking. She lifted her phone and recorded.
"Oh, I have got this," she said, to nobody, to everybody, to posterity. "I have absolutely got this."
Darius Whitfield came out of the office doorway with his portfolio in one hand and stopped where the glass ended.
He was forty-two years old, dressed like an attorney: charcoal suit, white shirt, dark tie, polished shoes, a silver watch, and a slim leather portfolio that nobody ever asked him about. He looked at the hole in his window. He looked at the brick, which had come to rest against the drink rack in a drift of broken bottles. Then he looked at the woman standing outside on the concrete with her hands still raised from the throw, as if the pose proved something.
She was in her late fifties, platinum-blonde bob cut sharp at the jaw, pearl earrings, oversized black sunglasses, and a salmon-pink tailored pantsuit.
"He broke in!" she shouted, for the benefit of the forecourt, the phone at pump two, and the sky in general. "He has no right to be here!"
Darius stepped over a fallen sign and stopped at a careful distance from the glass.
"You just threw that," he said.
"He broke in," she said again, louder, as if volume were a form of evidence. "This station is closed. It has been closed. He is trespassing in a closed business."
"You threw a brick through my window."
"I did what was necessary."
"That is a sentence people usually save for after the police arrive."
Behind the counter, the young woman on shift had not moved. She stood in her black polo with her employee badge clipped at her collar, one hand still resting on the register keys. Her eyes went from the window to Darius to the woman outside, and back to the window.
Vivian Hartley pointed at him through the space where the glass had been. Her finger did not shake. Nothing about her shook. She had the bearing of a woman who had chaired a thousand meetings and had never once lost a vote she intended to win.
"You clearly have no idea who I am," she said.
"I know exactly who you are."
"I am the HOA President of West Ridge."
"I heard you the first six times."