“—but I’m not firing you,” Basil finished.

“You’re not?” Amy asked.

“You’re firing me?” Ruth Anne squeaked.

“I’m not firing either of you,” Basil said. “I’ve asked you here because I need your help. I have an extra job for tonight. A side project. And I need you to keep quiet about it.”

Relief flooded Amy’s veins like a drug. In that moment, she would have agreed to anything: climbing Mount Everest, hijacking a plane, running naked across Orsk’s ten-acre parking lot while playing the trombone. She nodded like a happy idiot, right along with Ruth Anne. But even as she did, the part of her brain that wasn’t flooded with endorphins whispered, It’s going to be something weird. It has to be something weird.

“It’s going to be a little weird,” Basil confirmed.

“How weird?” Amy asked.

Basil lowered his voice to action-movie-briefing volume. “We’ve seen a lot of crimes against the store over the past six weeks. Opening shift is finding damaged merchandise every morning. Mirrors, dishes, picture frames, curtains yanked down from the walls. A whole mattress hacked to shreds. And this morning we had … an incident. With a Brooka.”

“Incident?” Ruth Anne asked.

“It was smeared with a substance,” Basil said.

“Poop,” Amy clarified.

“A substance,” Basil repeated.

“That smelled like poop.”

“We’re eleven percent over on breakages, and Pat had to notify Regional. He’s also tasked me to lead an internal investigation.”

Pat was general manager of the entire store and Basil’s direct superior. He once delivered a baby on a Müskk, and he paid out of his own pocket for a karaoke DJ at the Christmas party. No one wanted to disappoint Pat.

“Naturally,” Basil continued, “I don’t want to disappoint him.”

“What about Loss Prevention?” Ruth Anne asked. “Don’t they have cameras?”

“Hundreds,” Basil said. “And I’ve reviewed the footage. But the lights are on a timer and at two o’clock every morning they power down to twilight mode. I’ve decided that’s when the damage must be happening. Between 2 and 7:30 a.m., when the opening shift arrives.”

“But that’s impossible,” Amy said. “No one’s ever here after eleven.”

“Apparently someone is,” Basil said.

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Ruth Anne said, chewing her lip.

“I’m proposing that the three of us work an extra shift. Tonight, from ten to seven. We’ll wait in the break room, and once an hour we’ll do patrols of the store. The Showroom, the Market Floor, and the Self-Service Warehouse. If a vandal is sneaking in and trashing the place, we’ll bust him and call the cops. Problem solved.”

“I can’t do tonight,” Amy said. “I’ve got plans.” This wasn’t exactly true, but she didn’t relish the idea of being awake for twenty-four hours.