The woman at pump two adjusted her grip on the phone to make sure she had both of them in frame.
Vivian reached into her bag and produced her own phone with the smooth, practiced motion of a woman dialing a number she had dialed before. She put it to her ear. Her sunglasses stayed on. She was still looking at Darius when dispatch answered, and her voice changed, becoming smaller, breathier, frightened in a way it had not been thirty seconds earlier when she was holding a brick.
"Yes, I need police at the gas station on Harrison Boulevard, the West Ridge Fuel. There is a suspicious man here who has broken into the station."
Darius said nothing. He had learned a very long time ago that the most useful thing a person could do with a lie was let it finish being told.
"No," Vivian said to the dispatcher. "No injuries. But he is aggressive."
"I am standing on the other side of a broken window," Darius said mildly.
"He refuses to identify himself," she said.
"You never asked."
"He is refusing to leave the property."
"It is my property."
She turned half away from him, the way people do when they want a conversation to become private in public. "No weapons that I can see," she said. "But I cannot be sure what he has inside the station."
Darius raised his voice just enough to carry, not to her, but past her, to the small black dome of the exterior camera mounted above the door, the one with the unblinking red eye.
"Why are you introducing weapons into this call?" he asked. "There are no weapons. There is a brick, and you are the one who brought it."
"He is escalating," Vivian told dispatch, with satisfaction. "He is becoming confrontational. Please hurry."
Darius stepped backward, slowly, both hands visible, the portfolio loose at his side, until he stood squarely beneath the camera's field of view. He set his feet. He let his shoulders settle. Anyone reviewing the footage later would see a man in a suit standing perfectly still in a field of broken glass, doing nothing at all.
"I'm standing still," he said, for the recording.
Vivian lowered the phone. Dispatch had presumably told her that help was coming, and the news seemed to restore her. She looked past Darius into the station, and her attention landed on the young woman behind the counter, who had still not managed to move.
"You," Vivian said. "Out. Now. This business is closed and you are trespassing with him."
The employee looked at Darius.
"Another trespasser," Vivian said, and started forward, picking her way toward the door with her bag clutched against her side, glass crunching under the soles of her shoes. "Do not make this worse for yourself. Come out of there."
Darius moved.
He did not move fast, and he did not move far. He simply crossed the last two steps to the doorway and stood in it, filling it the way a man fills a doorway when he has decided the doorway is a line. The portfolio stayed at his side. His other hand stayed open and visible and empty.
"No," he said.
"Excuse me?"
"You are not coming inside."
"You do not get to stop me," she said. "This is an official action. I am securing a property that falls under the neighborhood commercial covenant until the authorities get here."
"I absolutely get to stop you from entering my business after you threw a brick through the window."
The alarm pulsed on. Somewhere out on Harrison Boulevard a horn sounded, flowing past the corner as if nothing at all had happened. The man at pump four had straightened up and was filming now too, from behind his truck door. The woman at pump two had never stopped.
Vivian Hartley stared at the man in her way. For the first time since the glass broke, something crossed her face that was not certainty. It was the irritation of a woman whose instructions had always, eventually, been followed, discovering an exception.
"This station has been vacant for eleven months," she said, as if reciting from a document. "It was vacant when the estate listed it, it is subject to review, and you appeared out of nowhere with paperwork nobody in this community has verified. I have sent you notice after notice. You have ignored every one of them."
"I have answered every one of them," Darius said. "Through my attorney. In one sentence each. Would you like to hear the sentence?"
"I would like you to step aside."
"Then we both want things."
She regrouped the way she always regrouped, by reaching for the file in her head. "Signage," she said. "Dumpster screening. Lighting temperature. Hours of operation. Fuel delivery scheduling. I have raised every one of these through proper channels and you have hidden behind a lawyer instead of engaging with this community like a neighbor."