The security device was Katie’s suggestion, yet the dread belonged entirely to me.
I lingered at my kitchen table at four o’clock in the morning, clutching my phone with both palms as if it might slide right out of my grasp, observing a fuzzy monochrome clip of a figure creeping up my driveway.
He moved slowly. Cautiously. Glancing over his shoulder twice.
Then he knelt beside my pickup, extracted a hose from his jacket, and fed it right into my fuel tank as though he had done it a hundred times before.
I watched him suck on that tubing, spit, and begin drawing fuel into a crimson plastic container. The whole operation took him maybe four minutes. Once the jug was filled, he stood up, screwed the cap back onto my tank nicely so I wouldn’t suspect a thing, and strolled back across the lawn toward his own property.
I recognized that gait. I had witnessed it a thousand times.
