George didn’t taste a thing, but whatever this stuff was, it burned a little.
Was this shit worth something? Was even one bag of it worth stealing?
And if he did steal it, what would he do with—
The lights came on.
George whirled around so quickly he stumbled, his ass landing on the cold concrete floor.
“Holy Jesus!” he said when he saw what was standing in the doorway staring at him.
It was a huge walking bug.
It had huge round eyes, maybe two inches across, and an all-black, shiny face. Plus, there was some strange thing sticking out of one side of its face the size and shape of a hockey puck, but black and rubbery, like the face.
It was some kind of monster.
Fuck, no, it wasn’t a monster. It was a man, in a gas mask. Like one of those things you’d see someone wearing in a war movie, or on the news when they were looking after people with the Ebola virus.
George came this close to wetting his pants.
The man in the gas mask said, “What the hell are you doing in here?” But it came out funny because of the mask. Like a bad phone connection.
“Hey!” said George. “God, you just about scared the piss out of me there! What’s with the getup, pal?”
“I asked you what you’re doing in here.”
“Nothing, just, you know, just looking around. God, you sound like Darth Vader.”
The masked man looked at the pile of bags George had uncovered.
“Why did you do that? Why are you looking at that?”
“Just wondered what it was. That’s all. I’m guessing it must be some kind of bad shit if you’re wearing a fucking gas mask. You got another one of those?”
“Who are you? You’re not with the police. You don’t look like you’re from the police.”
“No way, no, I’m no cop.”
“Did someone send you?” The voice sounded creepy through the rubber.
“Nobody sent me, man. I just wandered in. The door, it wasn’t shut. I haven’t taken anything. Don’t call the cops on me. I’m not stealing anything. Just let me out of here. I don’t know what this shit is, but I just put some of it on my tongue. My nuts going to fall off or something?”
The man stared at him.
“Listen, what is this shit? It’s not coke or heroin, right? I mean, if you’re some big-time drug dealer, I am so sorry I wandered in here, and you can be sure I’m not going to say—”
“It’s not drugs,” the man said.
“It’s sure not chlorine. I used to work for a pool company, you know? And I can tell it’s not chlorine.” George was smiling, trying to be as sociable as possible. Like he wanted to be Mask Man’s new best friend. “I mean, if it was chlorine, we could hardly even breathe, right? Sometimes, if I was over a bucket of those pool pucks, when I pulled the lid off, I’d nearly pass out.”
The man said nothing. He just stared at him through the bug eyes.
George started getting to his feet. “I’m just going to take off, if that’s okay with you. You’re not going to call the cops, right? We’re cool there, okay?”
“I’m not going to call the cops,” the man said.
George took two tentative steps toward the door, but the man wasn’t stepping out of the way.
“Just let me go.”
The man reached for a mallet from the croquet set by the door.
“Aw, come on, man. I’m just going to go.”
As he took another step, the man brought the mallet up and swung.
George threw up a defensive arm, but the man managed to connect the end of the mallet with George’s temple. Hard enough that the head broke off the shaft and landed on the garage floor.
George threw his hand to his head. “Fuck!” he shouted.
The man looked at the croquet mallet shaft in his hand, now nothing more than a striped stick with a jagged end.
He hesitated a moment, then drove it into George, just below the rib cage, through his T-shirt and into flesh. The force pushed George up against the wall, where the man kept pushing until he felt the end of the stick hit a hard surface, his breathing hard and raspy through the rubber mask.
Blood gurgled from George’s mouth. He stirred briefly, then slid down the wall to the floor.
The man let the stick slip from his fingers, looked down at the dead man. Stood there. Breathing in, breathing out.
Good thing, he thought, that he had more than half a roll of plastic tarp left.
Thirty-two
“Everybody’s talking about Dad!” Ethan said at the dinner table, too excited to eat. He hadn’t touched the lasagna his grandmother had made. “He, like, jumped into the back of a truck and everything! I wish I’d seen it. I came out a couple of minutes too late, but lots of other kids saw it. I wish you’d waited. I wish you’d waited till I came out before you jumped in the truck.”
“Sorry,” David said to his son.
“This boy that you rescued, is he the son of that woman who came over here the other night?” asked his mother, Arlene. “What’s her name? I can’t think of her name.”
David nodded. “Sam,” he said.
His mother looked puzzled. “Sam?”
“Short for Samantha.”
“Oh, right. Well, I thought she seemed nice at the time, but now, I don’t know. You don’t need to get mixed up with a woman who’s got those kinds of problems.”
“You didn’t even talk to her when she was here the first time, Mom.”
“I saw her out the window and thought she was pretty. But looks aren’t everything, you know. Sounds like you did a very stupid thing. You could have gotten yourself killed.”
Don, who’d been overseeing kitchen reconstruction at their house and had arrived for dinner a few minutes late, had been brought up to speed quickly, and saw things somewhat differently.
“I’m proud of you,” he said, reaching across the table, clamping a hand on his son’s arm and squeezing. “You didn’t just stand by. You did... something.” David’s father seemed to choke on his words, took his hand away, and looked down at his dinner.
“You okay?” Arlene asked him.
“I’m fine.”
“I really didn’t think about it,” David said. “I just did it.”
He’d quickly filled them in on what had happened. Sam Worthington’s former in-laws had distracted her long enough to delay her trip to pick up her son, Carl. She figured they were going to send this Ed guy — whose name turned out to be Ed Noble, if you could believe it — to grab Carl, and she was right. She’d tried calling someone else first, some private detective she knew, but he was too far away. So then she tried David, who, it turned out, was only a mile away from the school when the call came in on his cell.
David drove to within a block of Clinton Public, unable to get any closer because of all the other parents who’d come to pick up their kids, bailed on the car, and ran flat out the rest of the way. He didn’t know what Ed Noble looked like, but he caught a glimpse of Carl getting into a pickup truck, and took off after it.
The police were called, and statements given. The private eye, whose name was Cal Weaver, eventually showed up, too, and told the cops about Ed Noble coming around to the Laundromat in the morning to give Sam a hard time. The cops were still talking to Weaver, and Carl and Sam, who’d run all the way to the school, when David headed home.
He was pretty rattled.
And he hurt, too.
He had bruises on his shoulders from being tossed around in the pickup, and he’d done something to his back. And when he’d kicked that asshole in the face, he’d twisted his knee. He could still walk okay, but damn, did it hurt.
David figured he wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing.
Shortly after coming in the door, he downed as many Tylenols as the label permitted. Ethan was already home, jumping up and down with excitement, demanding details. He’d already told his grandmother that David had foiled a hit man.