Six people stepped out of the three vehicles. Plain clothes. Dark jackets. Professional posture, the kind that comes from doing the same careful thing a thousand times.
Victoria moved toward them at once, her heels quick on the concrete. "Officers."
Nobody acknowledged the title. A tall woman in a navy jacket walked straight past her toward Marcus, her eyes already sweeping the forecourt — the brick, the window, the customers, the cameras. Another agent, a man with a graying beard, went to the broken window and crouched to look at the brick without touching it. A third positioned himself near the pumps, where the recording customers stood.
Victoria pointed at Marcus. "That's him."
Still nobody responded. The tall woman reached Marcus, stopped two feet away, and looked him over the way a professional checks a colleague after something bad — quick, thorough, no wasted motion.
"Sir," she said. Her voice was crisp. "Are you okay?"
"Yes."
"Anyone inside injured?"
"No."
She glanced toward the shattered window, then back at him. "We secured the surveillance archive remotely as soon as the glass sensor triggered."
Victoria's expression changed. "Surveillance archive?"
Marcus nodded once. "Good."
Another agent came up and spoke quietly to the tall woman. Victoria watched the exchange with growing confusion, her gaze darting from the dark SUVs to the unmarked sedan with its government plates, to the earpiece in the tall woman's ear, to the holstered sidearm just visible beneath the gray-bearded man's windbreaker.
"What is this?" she said. "Who are you people?"
Nobody answered her. The tall woman was already moving toward the store entrance, and Victoria, recovering her momentum, stepped into her path.
"That woman inside," Victoria said, pointing through the broken window at Dana. "She's trespassing too. I want her out here."
Dana Whitmore stood behind the counter in her black polo, the employee badge clipped to her shirt, and did not move. Her eyes stayed on Marcus. Waiting.
"Ma'am," the tall woman said, "step back from the entrance."
"You need to come outside," Victoria called to Dana, raising her voice over the agent's. "I said come outside. This is an HOA enforcement matter and you are on property under association review."
Dana remained still. She had been given her instructions for this exact situation weeks ago, in a quiet room with no windows, and the instructions had been simple: do not engage, do not explain, wait for Marcus. She had rehearsed it the way she rehearsed everything — Dana did nothing halfway — and now she stood behind the counter with glass at her feet and her face composed, and Marcus felt a brief, fierce pride in her that he would never say out loud.
It took a particular kind of arrogance to order a stranger out of a building at the volume Victoria was using, in front of six federal agents, twenty minutes after throwing a brick through the window of that building. Marcus had seen arrogance in many forms. This one was almost pure. It did not bend around facts. It simply continued, like a river around a rock, certain the rock would eventually give way.
Marcus moved sideways, placing himself between Victoria and the doorway without approaching her. "No," he said.
Victoria glared at him. "You don't get to stop me."
"I absolutely get to stop you from entering my business after you threw a brick through the window."
"This isn't your business." She turned to the tall woman. "Are you going to let him obstruct an HOA president?"
The tall woman looked at Victoria for the first time, really looked at her, and said nothing at all. The silence did more work than any answer could have. Victoria's mouth opened, then closed. In the distance, one of the agents was speaking quietly into his sleeve, and another had taken out a small camera and begun photographing the brick from three angles without touching it — evidence protocol, running like a quiet machine underneath all the shouting.
"Stay where you are, ma'am," the tall woman said finally, and turned back to Marcus. "Local units are two minutes out."
Out on Dalton Avenue, in the distance, Marcus could hear the first faint wail of a siren. Victoria heard it too, and her shoulders dropped with visible relief. She smoothed her pantsuit and lifted her chin, finding familiar ground again.
"There," she said, pointing toward the road. "Local police."
Marcus nodded. "Yes."
"Good." Her voice steadied. "They can sort this out."
"They will," Marcus said.
Behind him, the store alarm finally began to wind down, its pulsing slowing into silence, and in the sudden quiet Marcus could hear the glass sensor's small confirmation chirp from the window frame — the sound of a system that had done exactly what it was built to do.