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Barry is scrolling through Wikipedia at the front counter when a man in a dollar store Batman mask and a ragged hoodie slams the front door of his bookstore open, yanking a pistol out of his pants pocket as he does so.
Sighing, he closes his laptop and tucks it in the reinforced cabinet under the counter, where it will be safe from anything short of a tactical nuclear explosion at ground zero. It’s apparently one of those days.
“Empty the register, or else!” the masked man shouts, pointing his gun in Barry’s direction. “Make it quick!”
Barry obligingly opens the register, trips the silent alarm under the counter with the toe of his shoe, palms the entire contents of the change drawer- all $3.45 of it- and lets the coins clink onto the counter. “Here you go.”
“…That’s it?” the robber asks, a note of desperation beginning to creep into his voice. “Really? Do you really think I’m that stupid?”
“…Better question, why are you trying to rob a bookstore at 9:30 in the morning?” Barry can’t help but ask. “I mean, I sympathize with your clear financial hardships, but I’m not quite sure why you thought I’d have anything more than loose change. We haven’t had any sales yet.”
“Don’t sass me, kid!” the robber snarls, raising his gun. “Give the the rest of the money, or else it’s going towards your hospital bills!”
Barry levels a flat stare at the robber. “One, I’m 69. Two, I already gave you everything in the register. Three, I’m not going to be the one paying hospital bills if this turns into a fight.”
The guy snarls something that gets drowned out by the sharp crack of a gunshot. Barry holds himself perfectly still and suppresses the urge to flinch as the bullet buries itself in his chest, momentarily poking a few holes in two of his lungs in the process.
(Better him than the wall- the building is much less resilient and drywall repair isn’t cheap. Plus, collateral damage from overpenetration is a real risk in a cheaply constructed two-story building.)
“…You do realize that bullets can punch through walls and hit people on the other side, right?” Barry asks, idly plunging a hand into his chest and plucking the bullet out from where it had lodged into the bone of his left sixth rib. “Like, there’s a 24-hour daycare on the other side of that wall. You could have hurt someone!”
The robber abruptly pales, gaze darting between the rapidly sealing hole in Barry’s chest and the viscera-slick bullet pinned between Barry’s bloodstained fingers. “What…what are you?!”
Well, he’s a speedster, a child of the Speed Force shelled in the guise of humanity for idiosyncratic individual reasons. The cops think he’s just a metahuman, though, and he will have to talk to them later, so it’s best if he doesn’t say much to this guy.
“I don’t really feel like explaining my whole life story to a guy who thought robbing a bookstore in the wee hours of the morning was a good idea.” Barry snatches the gun out of the robber’s hands, flicks on the safety and sets it down behind the counter. “Cops will probably show up as soon as they’re done with the real emergencies. If you’re gone before they get here and leave me and my shop alone from here on out, I’ll let you go.”
The robber promptly scrambles towards the door of Barry’s shop. In the process, he knocks over a few stacks of books and steps on them, leaving muddy bootprints on the covers.
Barry doesn’t wait a moment longer before he snatches the robber up by the collar of his hoodie and yanks him into the air. “Alright, that’s it. I cannot believe you people. I literally just told you to leave my shop alone, and the first thing you do is put your muddy bootprints on the merchandise. You better hope those books are still in salable condition or I’m billing you for twice the sale price of every book that needs replacement. In body parts, if necessary.”
The robber nods frantically. Barry drops him, and watches him much-more-carefully scramble out of the building without stepping on anything.
Really, the most annoying part of this entire debacle is that he needs to wash his hands and change his shirt. He really should start keeping a spare change of clothes in the shop.
(Thankfully for the robber, the books they stepped on are all fine with just a quick wipe-down with a soft cloth to remove the mud from their covers, so Barry didn’t even have to hunt them down to request payment.)