He sat back on his haunches. Destroying the house wouldn’t change the fact that Lambry had just disappeared. But it would remove evidence that, he might not have disappeared of his own volition. It would leave a mystery surrounding Lambry, but unless there was a woman or some other relative who cared a lot, it should be a mystery without interest to the cops. The guy was gone, his house burned up, but no one at his place of employment would be looking for him. Except Stafford, maybe, but so what? And if Stafford did uncover the auction scam, the missing Lambry might become the suspect. Perfect.
He cleaned up after himself, wiping down anything he might have touched in the house, closed the kitchen window, and took a sniff. He wasn’t sure he could smell the gas, but he knew propane was heavier than air and would gather along the floor before filling the room. He let himself out the kitchen door and pulled it as shut as it would go, wiping the door handle with the dishrag. He turned to leave and plunged right through the rotten floorboards, pitching forward onto his stomach, his knees bent awkwardly. His head hit something hard and he saw stars for a moment.
He tried to right himself, but his right foot was stuck, jammed by something under the porch. He tried to get his left foot back onto the porch for leverage, but the boards continued to disintegrate, leaving him nothing to grab. His right knee hurt like hell every time he tried to move. He swore and pulled again on his right foot, but it was jammed tight; it felt like maybe his foot was stuck in a cinder block.
This is fucking ridiculous, he thought as he began to perspire. He tried turning around in the hole, balancing on his hands, but it didn’t quite work. The distance from the porch to the ground underneath was about six inches more than he could effectively reach. He was stuck, and everything he tried to use for leverage crumbled under his hands. And then he smelled the propane.
Oh, shit, he thought. The propane. A faint whiff was coming through the partially closed door. He imagined he could hear the opened coupling hissing in the kitchen. How fast would that stuff leak out? How long before it got to the pilot light in the alcove? He struggled hard then, but all he did was to break off more rotten wood and get his foot jammed even tighter. There was a broom parked next to the kitchen door. He grabbed that, tried to pry his foot out, but succeeded only in pinching the hell out of it. He laid the broom down across the opening and tried to lever himself bodily up out of the hole. That almost worked, until the broom handle cracked and then broke under his weight. He was stuck, and there was definitely propane in the air.
He tried the opposite tack, beating at the edges of the hole, breaking off rotten wood to enlarge it. Finally he had it big enough that he could bend down partially and feel around by his stuck foot. His hand encountered a thick, sticky spiderweb, conjuring up visions of black widows about to bite his fingers, which he pulled the hell out of there.
But he had felt the cinder block, and his right foot was jammed hard into one of the holes. It felt like there was space under the cinder block, but it was cemented into some kind of structure under there. He looked around the yard to see if anyone was coming, but there were only shadowy piles of junk looking back.
Somewhere nearby a dog had begun to bark.
The propane, he kept thinking. It won’t happen right away, but I have got to get out of here. Then he had an idea. Instead of pulling, he tried pushing, jamming his foot as hard as he could downward, forcing it through the hole. After a minute or so of grunting effort, he felt his foot go all the way through, the edge of the block skinning his shin.
Now there was no way around it: He had to put his hands back down there.
He reached down, hit the webs again and shook them off, and then got his fingers under the block and onto his shoe, which he pried off his foot With that, he was able to extract his foot, stand on the cinder block, and lever himself out of the hole in the porch. He sprawled on his belly and crawled to the steps, where he was able to roll over, get up, and hop down to the solid ground of the backyard.
He glanced back at the warped back door, behind which the kitchen was tilling with explosive gas. He thought about retrieving his shoe, said to hell with it, and hopped across the yard to his truck, hoping and praying he still had time to get out of there before the house went up.
Once in the truck, he was careful to make no noise when he pulled the driver’s door shut. How much tune? he wondered. And will it burn or explode? Probably explode in the kitchen, and then the rest of the place will go up. How much time — minutes? Seconds? He tried to think if there was anything else he should have done. Had he left anything behind? He was more frightened now than he had been going in.
Finally, he started up the track and made a creeping U turn at the end of the street, keeping the engine as quiet as he could so as to not wake anyone up. He then drove back by the house, afraid to look right at it in case it blew up. He concentrated on just getting up the deserted street and away from there. He saw no signs of life in any of the darkened houses as he made his way out of the neighborhood.
When he reached the state road, almost a mile from Lambry’s house, he pulled over onto the parking apron of a closed gas station. He backed the truck up against the building to make it look as if it was just parked there for the night. He watched the dark horizon in the direction of Lambry’s house and waited. He wondered if the thing would let go before gas. filled the whole house, with that pilot light right there in the kitchen. Jesus, he’d get a lot more than just a house fire if the whole thing filled up with gas first. Then he worried that it might not work at all. Shit! Had he closed that window? He couldn’t remember. He could remember only the feel of those spiderwebs.
When a car came past, he slumped down in the seat to avoid being seen.
After another half hour or so, he was starting to panic. Suppose it didn’t work? Suppose the cops went there, found the hole, found his shoe? Christ! He looked at his watch; it was now two-fifteen in the morning. He began to wonder if he should go back. But how could he do that, when he knew there was propane accumulating in there? And then there was a sudden orange glare through the distant trees, followed by a powerful thump. A very powerful thump, considering he was at least a mile away. Damn, just how big had that explosion been?
He started up the truck and pulled back out on the state road, pointing toward Atlanta, driving awkwardly with just a sock on his right foot. He could see a red glare in his rearview mirror. That had to be a big fire.
He hoped like hell that none of the surrounding houses had been damaged.
The good news was that if the explosion had been big enough, the arson squad would have nothing to work with. But then he worried again. What had he missed? And what kind of monster was he turning into?
9
Col. Tom Franklin, commanding officer of the Anniston Army Weapons Depot, smelled of scotch when he arrived at the headquarters building.
He had been driven over by his wife. The Franklins had been hosting a dinner party at their quarters, but it had ended when the call from the CDO came in at eleven p.m. The colonel was still in his civilian clothes when he arrived, circumspectly carrying a mug of coffee with him. He went directly to his own office, accompanied by the CDO. The two enlisted people from the control office were told to wait hi the duty office while the colonel listened patiently to the CDO’s report. The colonel had been mildly disturbed at being called out hi the middle of his party, and he was a bit embarrassed to show up with whiskey on his breath, but he was not drunk, and after he heard the lieutenant’s report, he was very damned glad he’d been called.