Linwood Barclay - Far From True

On top of that, it was a nice enough house. So there might be good stuff that had been tucked in the garage that was worth taking.

The thing was, most of the crap he took, he threw away. Tossed into a Dumpster. Threw into the river. He’d kept some tools one time, and that gun (which he had dropped into a storm drain after getting back from the drive-in) was a nice score. Found it, and a box of bullets, in the drawer of a workbench. But it was the act of taking it that gave him the thrill. Getting in, getting out.

It was a high .

He decided to come at his latest target from the back. Just as streetlights were coming on, he walked down a narrow alley between two houses, reached their back property line, then hopped a fence that was shrouded with trees and bushes, and landed by the back wall of the garage.

Bonus. There was a window on that wall. That meant four possible ways inside. He peered through the heavily grimed glass, but it was almost totally dark in there.

He came along the side of the garage, right up to the corner, where he could get a look at the house. No one in the backyard, and only one light on in the house that he could see, in the kitchen.

The light didn’t worry him. He could get into this garage without being seen. Standing at the side door, he turned the knob. It was locked.

But hang on.

The door had not been pulled tight into the frame. So while the knob couldn’t be turned, when George gave the door a nudge, it moved.

Bingo.

Quickly, he opened the door, stepped in, and eased it shut behind him, nearly knocking over an old croquet set off to the side.

There was no car in here, and there wouldn’t have been room for one. Most of the garage was being used for storage. Using his phone for light, he could see the opposite wall was lined with metal shelving. There was a lot of the usual junk you’d expect to find. Gardening supplies, partially filled paint cans, small rolls of scrap carpet. On the floor, white plastic lawn furniture weathered with leaf stains. A case of beer bottles. Garbage cans.

On one shelf, half a dozen small wire-cage traps. A funneled entry at one end that would allow an animal to crawl inside, but which would be nearly impossible to crawl back out of without getting jabbed by the wire. The kind of thing, George thought, you might catch rats in.

Or squirrels.

And what the hell was that on the top shelf? Looked like an arm and a leg. A closer look revealed that they were a couple of limbs from mannequins.

But the most curious thing was the blue tarp spread over a large mound of something, in the middle of the garage floor. The surface of the tarp was bumpy and irregular.

Topsoil, maybe?

The pile was about five feet across, about two feet high. Four bricks held down the corners of the tarp. George kicked one away, reached down and threw the tarp back, and took a look.

The fuck?

At first, he thought it was drugs. Oversized bags — dozens, if not hundreds — of the stuff. More than he could count, that was for sure. Could it be a pile of cocaine or heroin or some shit like that? Weren’t they both white? When you saw bags of it on TV, it was usually white.

But when you saw drugs like that on The Wire or The Shield or any of those other cop shows, weren’t they packaged up the size of bricks? And wouldn’t one briefcase full be enough to buy a small country?

These bags were much larger, like sacks. Industrial grade, semiopaque plastic. They reminded George of the large bags pool chemicals came in. He’d once spent a summer working for a pool maintenance company. But the stuff in this pile here did not give off any whiff of chlorine.

So what was it? It looked a lot like salt.

That was some huge load of salt for someone to keep in the garage. Even in the winter, you wouldn’t need that much to melt the ice on your driveway. This was enough to keep the entire New York Thruway from freezing over.

He knelt down, unwound the twist tie on the top of the bag, and opened it. Didn’t smell a thing. He reached into the bag, touched his finger to the stuff, thinking it would stick like powder, but it was more like crystal. A couple of tiny granules stuck to his finger, and he put it to his tongue.

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.