The Gas Thief
The camera was Katie’s idea, but the fear was all mine.
I sat at my kitchen table at four in the morning, holding my phone with both hands like it might slip away from me, watching a grainy black-and-white video of a man creeping up my driveway.
He moved slow. Careful. He looked back over his shoulder twice.
Then he knelt down beside my truck, pulled a hose out of his jacket, and fed it into my gas tank like he’d done it a hundred times before.
Because he had.
I watched him suck on that hose, spit, and start filling a red plastic can. The whole thing took him maybe four minutes. When the can was full, he stood up, screwed the cap back on my tank nice and neat so I wouldn’t notice, and walked back across the lawn to his own house.
I knew that walk. I’d seen it a thousand times.
It was Clark.
My neighbor.
I put the phone down and just sat there in the dark. My coffee had gone cold. My hands were shaking, and I told myself it was the cold, but it wasn’t.
I’m seventy years old. I’ve buried my wife. I’ve buried both my parents and most of my friends. I’ve had my heart broken more times than I can count, and I thought by now nothing could surprise me.
I was wrong.
Let me back up, because you need to understand a few things first.
My name is Frank. I live alone in a small house at the end of Maple Court, a quiet little street in a quiet little suburb where nothing ever happens. Or at least that’s what I used to think.
My wife Ellen and I bought this house forty-one years ago. We raised our son here. We fought here and made up here and grew old here. She passed three years ago, in the spring, and the house has felt too big ever since. I keep the thermostat where she liked it. I still sleep on my side of the bed. Some habits don’t die just because the person does.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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