6
THE WIND KICKED up, suddenly sweeping cold rain under the overhanging branches and into the open shed. The spider had disappeared, back inside its home. Walt hunched out into the rain and sprinted across the lawn toward the garage, rounding the corner into the carport, suddenly anxious to be in out of the weather and to crank up the space heater. His shirt was soaked. He reached for the door latch, but then stopped and jerked his hand away.
The garage doors were shut, like he’d left them, but the padlock was gone. He always left it hanging in the hasp, whether it was locked or not. And that’s where he’d left it when he’d gone into the house for lunch; he was certain of it. He thought about last night, the noise that had woken him up. Suddenly it was clear to him: someone had come in, found the place locked up, and left again. Then today they’d come back, probably cased the house, waiting for him to go inside before making their move. They were bold sons-of-bitches, he had to give them that.
He listened for the scrape of shoe soles on the concrete floor inside, for the sound of paper rustling or boxes being shifted. All was silent; he could even hear the sound of the wind-up clock ticking on the workbench. He looked around for wet footprints, but there were none—which meant nothing, what with the rain and all. He reached for the latch, took a step backward, and pulled the door open slowly, keeping behind it, out of the way.
The door at the rear of the garage stood open to the rain. They’d gone out the back. Walt strode past piled-up cartons, a couple of which had been dumped out, their contents scattered on the concrete floor along with crumpled Chinese newspaper and clumps of excelsior. He looked around hurriedly. The stuff on the desk hadn’t been touched—his cassette player, the Toshiba laptop. A twenty-dollar bill and a couple of singles lay on the blotter, in plain sight, money left over from a trip down to the stationers. The burglar hadn’t touched any of it.
Warily, he held onto the doorknob and looked out into the backyard, half expecting to find someone crouched along the wall or sprinting across the wet lawn. But the yard was empty, the rain coming down steadily now. He picked up a claw hammer from the bench top and went out into the weather, angling across to where he could see past the corner of the new storage shed but keeping well away from it so he couldn’t be jumped. Nobody. Nothing. Probably they’d gone out fast through the back door when they’d heard him coming around the side of the garage, and had climbed straight over the redwood fence.
He walked back across to the fence, and, sure enough, there were blades of grass on the rain-soaked middle rail. Someone had climbed over after walking across the wet grass. He pulled himself up onto the rail and looked over into the neighbor’s backyard, but it was empty. There were two more houses beyond that, and from what he could see their yards were empty, too. Noontime traffic moved along Cambridge Street a half block down. He could see a couple of people hunched beneath the acrylic roof of a bus-stop shelter on the opposite side of the distant street.
On impulse he went back inside the garage and shut and locked the back door. He grabbed the padlock from where it lay on the counter and came out again through the front, sliding the padlock into the ring on the hasp and locking it. It occurred to him that the lock could be dusted for prints, but he saw at once that the idea was ludicrous. It didn’t even look as if the thief had stolen anything, although he couldn’t be sure without looking around a little at the stuff on the floor, maybe checking it against an invoice.
He rolled down the back window of his old Suburban and yanked out his umbrella, then hurried toward the corner. If the burglar had cut through the backyards, then the fences would have slowed him down. Probably it was a kid, looking for an easy score. But then why leave the radio and the cash? He looked hard along the sides of the houses, which were thick with shrubbery, wondering suddenly what he would do if he saw a pair of shoes beneath a bush.
But he didn’t see any. Aside from a couple of cats on front porches, there wasn’t a living soul out and about. He might have been the last man in the world. There was a rumble of thunder again, closer now, and rain poured down, dripping like a curtain from the rim of his umbrella. He tilted it into the wind, keeping the water out of his face and finally reaching the corner, where the gutter was flooded with water surging toward the storm drain. A bus pulled in across the street, blocking his view of the bus stop, which was empty of people when the bus pulled out again, maybe carrying his burglar.
Abruptly he decided to give it up. All he was getting for his trouble was wet shoes. He turned around, starting to head back up the sidewalk, when he saw a man round the distant corner, coming along down the sidewalk from the east. Walt changed directions, walking toward the man, who could easily be the burglar. Perhaps he had gone over the back fence of one of the houses behind Walt’s own and made his way out to the street that way. The man didn’t hesitate, but sloped along through the rain with his hands in the pockets of his coat.