The fat man walked to his store that morning in a very good mood, and when he pulled the doors open he froze in place exactly as Shawn had warned him he might.
The shelves were bare. Not emptied — cleaned. The store had been ransacked down to the boards.
"Who did it?" he screamed into the street. "Where are my goods?"
Shawn watched his torment from his hiding place and enjoyed every second of it.
"Who did this? Who the hell stole the goods?"
A crowd began to collect at the doors. Was it all taken in one night? Maybe the owner set it up himself. Somebody said they had seen a black shadow near here yesterday evening. Did someone really carry all of it out?
It seems our hero had no intention of using his abilities for anything but the satisfaction of his own petty grievances. He was standing at the back of the crowd, and he was holding a bag of chips.
It was time, he decided, to add a little fire — to give the fat man some extra stimulation. So he said it loudly, on purpose, and he said it deliciously, so that everybody would turn around.
It worked.
The fat man remembered, all at once, a young man asking whether he was afraid to sleep at night, whether he worried about his goods.
"Where did the bastard get those chips?" he roared. "He robbed me! He robbed me and he has the nerve to show his face here!"
Now that the fat man had everyone's attention, Shawn's plan went into action.
"The boss shouldn't be resorting to physical violence," Shawn said to the crowd, mildly. "And let's not forget that only yesterday he put his hands on me for no reason at all." He left out whose afternoon had been spent needling whom. "Does the boss have any evidence? Talking nonsense without evidence can have consequences. But let's get back to business. The boss's shop really is clean. Not one crumb left in it." He held out the bag. "Maybe he'd like to finish the rest of these?"
"The bastard cursed me yesterday!" the fat man screamed. "Today all my goods are gone! If it wasn't him who stole them, then who?"
"Chips are sold on every corner," Shawn said. "Since when does his shop have exclusive rights to them?" He raised his voice for the crowd. "If the boss doesn't believe me, let him search my house. If he finds even one thing from his store, I'll return it all tenfold. But if he finds nothing — then the backup generator is mine."
The fat man agreed to those conditions in front of forty witnesses.
He rushed off towards Shawn's building at a dead run, shouting his own arithmetic as he went: best case, he found the goods; worst case, he gave up a generator. It was not only Shawn and the fat man who went into that house. The whole crowd came in behind them, and everyone began to admire Shawn's wealth without ever guessing where the money had come from.
The fat man searched. He searched the cupboards, the cold room, the storage cabinets, behind the panels. He found nothing, because there was nothing to find; every crate of it was folded away somewhere that no hand could reach.
"Has the boss looked enough?" Shawn asked. "Or shall I fetch him a crowbar, so he can check under the floorboards as well?"
"There's no need for that." The fat man was already moving for the door.
But debts must be paid. Shawn caught him by the arm on the threshold.
"Not so fast. What about the generator the boss promised? There are witnesses. The boss isn't going to go back on his own words, is he?"
"What generator?" The fat man's face had gone the colour of raw dough. "That's enough already. There's no need to go that far."
"When the boss was accusing me in front of the whole street," Shawn said, "I didn't notice him letting it go."
The fat man shook with rage, and around him the crowd began to chatter, because they had all heard him make the wager and they were all watching him try to swallow his own words back down. Shameless. Absolutely shameless. He had no choice in the end but to surrender.
"The little bastard will get what he deserves," he said, and swung at Shawn one more time, and could not touch him with that either, and gave up.
"They'd better hurry," Shawn said pleasantly, to nobody. "When the temperature shoots up again, nobody will be able to go outside at all."
A little later, his phone rang, and his girlfriend was shouting on the other end of it.