So I unspooled the entire saga: the disappearing fuel, Dave’s findings, the meticulous logs adding up to nothing. She listened without a single interruption, which qualifies as a minor miracle for Katie.
Upon finishing, she responded with quiet gravity, “Someone is stealing your gas, Grandpa.”
“I’m certain of it now. Trucks don’t lose fuel while parked. Someone visits nightly. We’re going to catch them.”
Her use of the word “we”—as though she planned to drive over and join me hiding in the bushes—warmed my chest in a way I hadn’t felt in ages.
She ordered the hardware that very night. It arrived two days later packed in a compact parcel, and Katie guided me through the installation via speakerphone, exercising saintly patience while I fumbled with my spectacles and cursed tiny mounting screws.
“See the alignment notch, Grandpa? Match it with the— no, reverse angle. There you go, perfect.”
We pointed the lens directly at the driveway, framing the truck.
“Now we wait,” she instructed. “Review the footage every morning. And Grandpa?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t march out there in the middle of the night to confront anyone yourself. Promise me. Whoever is responsible, we handle this smartly.”
“I promise,” I replied.
And I meant it. Mostly.
The initial two nights yielded nothing. Morning reviews displayed merely an empty drive, a stray feline passing by at three in the morning, and tree branches swaying in the breeze.
On the third night, we captured our man at the hose.
Now, I must explain about Clark, because a total stranger pilfering my gas would be one thing—desperation or addiction makes a certain kind of sense. But Clark was neither a stranger nor desperate.
Clark moved in next door roughly six years back alongside his wife Denise and their two kids. He’s around forty-five, holding down a lucrative corporate sales job, sporting a luxury wristwatch, driving a late-model SUV, and whisking the family off to Florida every winter. They aren’t wealthy elite, but financial hardship is foreign to them.
Clark’s flaw isn’t poverty; Clark is profoundly, shamelessly cheap. The kind of miserliness detached from bank balances and rooted entirely in character.
I had learned this lesson through bitter experience.
