Marcus Thornee had spent 30 years in the trenches of the American legal system. He had started as a public defender in the late '80s fighting for the indigent in courtrooms that smelled of stale coffee and desperation. He had worked his way up through the District Attorney's office, then into private practice where he made a fortune, and finally back to public service as the city legal director. Thorne was a man of precision. He lived his life by the letter of the law.
He was known in City Hall as the architect because he built cases that were structurally unsound to attack. He was patient, he was brilliant, and he suffered fools poorly. On this particular morning, he was dealing with a frustration that had nothing to do with the law. The credit card reader on the gas pump was malfunctioning. It kept displaying a processing message spinning an endless digital wheel while the pump refused to dispense fuel.
Thorne had stepped inside the store five minutes earlier to authorize the pump with the clerk prepaying $50 just to be safe. He had returned to his car, unhooked the nozzle, and waited. And waited. The machine was frozen. Being a busy man, he utilized the downtime to take a conference call regarding a zoning dispute in the historic district.
He stood by his car, hand on his hip, waiting for the technology to catch up with his schedule. Inside the Metro Mart, watching Thorne through a smudged plate glass window was Elias Cobb. Cobb was 55 years old, a man whose life had not gone according to plan. He had been a shift manager at a factory until it closed, then a security guard until he was let go for sleeping on the job, and now for the last three years he was a clerk at a gas station. He was bitter.