The heavy glass doors slid shut behind Arthur Ellis, the billionaire CEO of Green Valley Pharmacy. The arrogant manager, Vance, staggered back, dropping his clipboard.
“Mr. Ellis!” Vance stammered, his face chalk-white. “I—we were just removing a vagrant!”
Margaret’s trembling hands instantly steadied. Her hunched, frail posture vanished. Standing tall, she locked eyes with Vance, radiating lethal authority. She picked up the white pill bottle and tossed it onto the counter. It popped open.
It was completely empty.
“Vagrant?” Margaret’s voice cracked like a whip. “I founded this company. And for three months, our board has wondered why this specific branch suffered a forty-percent drop in senior prescriptions.”
Vance began to sweat profusely. “Ma’am, I—”
“Quiet,” she snapped. “You’ve been manually overriding our automatic senior discounts. You force vulnerable patients to pay inflated prices, deny them their medication when they can’t afford it, and skim the excess cash from the registers.”
Desperate and cornered, Vance pointed a shaking finger at the young cashier. “It’s a lie! Noah rang you up! He’s the one stealing!”
Noah didn’t flinch. Instead, he calmly pulled a silver flash drive from beneath the register keyboard and tossed it to Arthur.
“Actually, I’m corporate loss prevention,” Noah smiled, his green uniform suddenly looking like the disguise it was. “I’ve been building a case on you for a month. When I swiped my personal card today, it finalized the trap—capturing the exact digital timestamp of your illegal price surge.”
Arthur stepped aside, allowing two waiting police officers to enter from the rain.
Margaret leaned across the counter, staring into Vance’s terrified eyes.
“You told me if I couldn’t pay, I had to leave,” she whispered, cold and unyielding. “Well, Vance. You can’t pay your way out of this. Get out of my store.”