Midnight crash by Tara zlick (ready player one ebook TXT) 📕

/> ‘Yeah, as mates.’
‘Righhht...’
I gave up trying to justify myself.
Then the last person I wanted to see walked, or rather, stalked into the store.
Robert Keppler.


4
..................................
he Video Saloon store wasn’t very popular. It’s big, old and crusty. Movie posters
peeled off the wall and paint flaked off the white ceiling. Everyone in town called it
the “Video Loon” because the “S” and “A” were missing from “Saloon” on the sign
outside. I thought Vince should change the name completely. I mean, we don’t even rent
videos anymore. Should it be called the “DVD Saloon” or “The Movie Saloon” or
something?
It was too big as well, almost four times the size of the other shops on Main Street.
It looked bare and cold when there were no customers, and dark and dreary in winter. The
counter was right at the back of the store and customers were always complaining
because they had to walk all the way down the store to make a return, unlike other rental
stores, where the counter is always at the front door.
Still, at least I had a job. There weren’t many jobs in Rosedale. Not for year ten
secondary school girls, unless you put your name down on the Coles waiting list or didn’t
mind putting up with greasy hands and the smell of fried fat at the Chicken Shack.
I worked with Crass on weekends and an evening or two during the week. Crass
worked at the Video Saloon full-time where he spent most of his day watching the store
TV. My dad would have called him a no-good slacker before my dad actually became a
no-good slacker himself. That’s why I got this job. Anyway, one thing for sure, when I’m
19 I won’t be working in a video store like him. I’ll be out of this town. Live in Rosedale
all my life? That’s not for me. Who’d want to live in a town in the far reaches of the
galaxy? It’s so far away from anything.
Not everyone thinks like I do though. My friend Skye lives in the Bracken Lake
estate just outside of Rosedale and she loves the place. ‘Stacey Fallon, you’re wrong,
Rosedale is so cool,’ she said to me during my last rant about the town as we walked
around the lake that her estate is named after. ‘It has tennis courts, bike paths and it even
has a skating rink.’
....

A skating rink? Whoopee! Awesome! Let’s stay here forever! Anyway, compared
to a hole like Bracken Lake, Rosedale would seem like some bustling metropolis.

The best thing about getting out of Rosedale? I wouldn’t have to put up with
Robert’s total weirdness.

Robert looked tired, like he had just got out of bed. To my relief he ignored me and
went straight to Crass. He gave Crass a DVD disc. Crass walked to the counter and
casually dropped it in front of me. It was the Night Falls disc. Crass had obviously rung
Robert and asked him to return it.

Robert followed Crass to the counter. He looked embarrassed and kept his eyes on
the ground.

‘It’s illegal to burn DVDs mate,’ Crass said to him with the same soft-as-barbedwire
tone as my principal, Huffy Kilpatrick (named because of her habit of huffing at you
before the start of any conversation) used during school assemblies. He handed back the
blank silver disc Robert had accidentally returned to us, which I thought was overly
generous. It was a copy after all. I thought he should have thrown it away. Crass held it
away from Robert’s grasp for a few seconds, as if leaving the disc where we could all see
it magnified the crime.

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Robert, his shoulders hunched and hands in his coat pockets.
‘It was just for my own collection, you know, just so I could watch it again.’

‘Pretty stupid to give back the copy then. Or were you trying to rip us off by
keeping the original?’

‘No! It was a mix up. I’m sorry man, yeah, it was stupid.’

Crass turned to me with a smile. ‘So Stacey, think we should slap a ban on him for
this or what?’

For copying one DVD? When there were hundreds right under our feet in the
basement? I told Crass that it wasn’t a big deal. Robert paid to rent the DVD, that was the
most important thing.

‘Paid?’ laughed Crass. He looked at Robert with a sneer. ‘I’ve always wondered
Robbo, where do you get all the money for your DVDs? You’re unemployed, right?’ Robert nodded his head sullenly. ‘So then, a DVD is six dollars a night and half-price
during the week. You watch a couple of hundred a year. That’s a lot of dosh. You must
be raking it in.’ Robert didn’t answer. ‘Go on, get out of here,’ said Crass. ‘And if you
want to copy DVDs, burn them from Blockbuster. Not from us!’

Robert gave Crass a sharp look, then hurried out of the store with his bouncing,
gaping walk. ‘I don’t know if I’d have said that, Crass,’ I said when he’d gone. ‘He’ll
never come back here again and he’s out best customer.’

‘Doesn’t mean anything to him. He’s a geek,’ said Crass, dismissing Robert with a
wave. ‘He’s used to people talking crap to him. Anyway, he’ll be back tomorrow. He
likes the staff.’ Crass gave me one of his thin lipped smiles and walked back to the
console games shelf. He could be so obnoxious sometimes. It made me want to thump
him.

I snatched the Night Falls DVD and squeezed the scanner trigger. The movie was
added to the “Returned Rentals” list. If a customer returns a DVD late a warning flashes
onto the screen. You could also press the F7 key and take a look at the customer’s profile:
address, fines, rental history, how much money a customer had spent. Usually I took little
notice of customer profiles.

I saw that Robert’s fines were zero. He usually came in every Saturday afternoon I
worked and as far as I knew he’d never handed in his rentals late. I wondered just how
much money he had actually spent on rentals. It must have been hundreds and hundreds
of dollars. If Robert was unemployed that’d mean he spent most of his money in the
store. Was it possible? I suppose if you don’t have a job, watching movies is one way to
pass the time. Then why didn’t he just download them from the Internet for free?

Feeling slightly self-conscious and sneaky, I pressed the F7 key and then selected
“rental history”. At the top of the screen was a text box which read: TOTAL RENTAL
SPEND FOR YEAR: $34.00.

Thirty-four dollars in ten months? That couldn’t be right. That’d be only eight or
nine rentals, even if he did get them at half price. I downloaded his rental history.
Holding down the cursor I ran through the list of rentals. It was long. I knew it would be.
277 films in the past year, exactly the same number as Crass had told me. He has a good
memory. I scanned through the names: Wolf Creek; Saw IV; Land of the Lost; The
Notebook; Semi-Pro; American Gangster; Wrong Turn; Blade Runner; The Hills Have
Eyes. They weren’t all horrors, that’s for sure. And what was with The Notebook? That
was like a mega weepie film from years back. That was a really weird choice for Robert.

Next to each film on the rental history was the charge for each rental. Nearly every
one of them was listed with the same charge: CREDIT $0.00. A credit meant we’d rented
it out for free. Robert hadn’t paid for hardly any of his movies. Fair enough, he may have
used the odd shop-a-docket voucher or his privilege card to get free rentals, but surely he
had spent more than thirty-four dollars?

Next to the charge was a code for the staff member who completed the transaction.
You had to logon each time you used the computer. That way if you didn’t collect fines
or if you charged the wrong amount or the end-of-day balance didn’t add up, Vince
would have known who stuffed up.

Next to nearly every one of Robert’s recent rentals was Crass’ login name: COL. I
kept scrolling until I saw STA. My login name was only next to a handful of titles. I
always made him pay. I looked at some of the titles under my login name. The last one
was a gory slasher flick. I remember renting it out to him a month ago, because Crass had
gone to lunch and Robert had gone on and on about the director of the film being the best
new director out there. The film had been paid for at half price, as Robert had a Saloon
privilege card – a scheme Vince had tried a couple of years before, but it had never
caught on with customers – that gave you half price on new releases during the week.
Soon enough you could get half-price overnighters any weekday regardless. But Robert
still liked to use his card.

It was weird that Robert rented so many videos but hardly any from me. Always
from Crass. Yet I remember him constantly returning DVDs to me, sometimes up to three
or four on a weekend. I saw him every weekend, yet I’d only ever rented four or five
titles to him. I scrolled back to the top of the list to look at the transactions from earlier in the
year. Again, Crass completed nearly all the transactions until around March. Then I saw
another regular login name – KAT – beside a number of titles. The dates for KAT’s
transaction ended in June. I started in mid-July when I answered an ad in the local paper,
along with nearly every other teenager in town. Again, nearly every rental charge of
KAT’s read: CREDIT $0.00.

KAT? Who was KAT? I thought back to the previous assistants. I never took much
notice of them when I was a customer – which was rare anyway. Topps or Skye seemed
to do all the renting, as I couldn’t afford a movie every week. I remember a guy who
always wore a red baseball cap. I didn’t know his name. And an older girl from school. A
pretty blonde. Was she KAT? And if so, what was her name? Kate? Katrina? I’d ask
Topps. He’d been a regular at the Video Saloon for years.

I was so absorbed I failed to notice a customer standing at the counter. I looked up
to see him politely waiting. He had put his hands on the counter and was staring at a
movie playing on the store TV – an old kid’s super-hero animation film, The Incredibles,
that I still found cool. That was the one really good thing about working at The Video
Saloon. You could