In this tale, maintenance worker Gabe is secretly a thief, while Deborah is a loss prevention manager who stumbles upon Gabe’s hidden storeroom.

This is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies more than either mysteries or horror, and would appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. In each story, a protagonist makes a wish that comes true with fatal results for someone, often the person making the wish. Nothing supernatural, but just how things work out. (Or is it?) The technical details surrounding the fatal (or near-fatal) event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are therefore entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish. The plots draw lightly from cultural beliefs around actions such as pointing at someone with a stick or knife, wishing in front of a mirror, or stepping on a crack.

Gabe was an acquisitive sort, which of course is a nice way to say he was a damned thief. His job as a maintenance team leader at a large hospital gave him ample but sporadic opportunities to “find” items that he could sell online or at flea markets.

Some items were simple and brought him only a few dollars, such as a small roll of wire or a few old brass fittings. Other items, however, like a whole drum of cable, desks, or a complete air-conditioning unit, could yield a few thousand dollars. He liked department or facility relocations or moves because of the opportunities to divert items when people were busy or distracted. He also liked moves because some equipment and furniture was often simply abandoned. When two small pathology labs were merged into a new building space, he managed to acquire seven lab benches, two air filtration units, a 500 lb. uninterruptable power supply, and 70 assorted bits of lab glassware. He also took home a nice triple-beam balance, a small TV, and a metal workbench.

Even more than moves, he liked discovering forgotten storerooms. Every once in a while, he would open a storeroom and discover a small trove of goodies that had probably been forgotten. Sometimes it was just a few boxes of outdated blankets or pillow slips, but even empty rooms still often had unused shelving that he could resell or trade. Quite frequently, older metal shelving would be of more value than a whole room filled with forgotten stuff, and there was a ready market for shelving units. Unlike moves, with forgotten storerooms, there was no schedule ticking, nobody managing anything, and no real oversight.

Deborah Davis was what people used to call “stern.” That meant that she had strong attention to detail, knew if something was cockeyed, and wasn’t afraid to say so in plain and loud terms. Deb had been in the military police for 30 years, and since retirement, she had worked as a loss prevention manager for the local hospital. The job was the result of an embarrassing audit, in which several million dollars’ worth of stores and equipment were not accounted for, had not been correctly depreciated, or were listed as in-use but were actually obsolete or unserviceable. One of the recommendations was to hire a loss control manager, and Deb was one of only three applicants to show up. She knew her stuff, and the CFO liked her plainspoken and forthright way of answering questions. Most of all, she loved the withering look that Deb gave the HR director when he asked something foolish. She hired Deb without seeing the other two candidates.

Deb sometimes collaborated with the facility security department, but mostly she worked on her own to track down missing materials, equipment, or vehicles. She enjoyed the work, was very good at it, and did not mind that there were few paths for advancement. She didn’t particularly wish to “advance,” had no interest in managing people, and was quite satisfied simply to do her current job well. In the military police, she had commanded a department of 20 people, and she was very relieved not to be spending the bulk of her day sorting out other people’s salary and performance woes, fights between staff, and endless complaints about things so trivial that it had made her groan. Working on her own was, in contrast, like a paid hobby.

Of all the missing items at the hospital, half were simple clerical errors that were trivial to solve but pleasing in the ease of closure: items sent to the right facility but wrong department, right department but wrong facility, or never actually left the point of origin. A lab refrigerator worth over a hundred thousand dollars was tracked down to the basement it had never left. After 6 months of just sitting there, an enterprising janitor had started using it to keep his lunch and sodas cool. Half of the remaining unaccounted items were the result of “miscategorization” and had left a point of origin called one thing, but had ended up being used at the destination under a different name. Thus, the item known in the OR as the “Anesthesia Machine” or simply “The Boyles” was on the official record as “Delivery System, Anesthesia.” These errors were also easily and satisfyingly corrected. Half of the remaining items were correctly delivered, were listed under the correct name, but had ended up forgotten in a closet, in a corner, or covered with a cloth or plastic sheet and used as a table. These items had been forgotten because they either broke down and were beyond economical repair, or were simply obsolete and had been superseded by something smaller, faster, and double the price. Often the paperwork was tedious and complicated, and was one of the reasons they had been forgotten in the first place. That left the final unsavory class of unaccounted items: theft.

Of the stolen items, half were “wishful misunderstandings.” Yes, Bob had taken a microscope home for his daughter to use for AP Biology, but he swore that he thought it was surplus and had been written off. Yes, Dave had taken a forklift home and used the motors to power a small pickup truck he had turned into an EV. He argued plaintively that the forklift had been idle for years waiting on spare parts and was just getting in the way. Every case had an embarrassed person who didn’t think they had stolen anything and were relieved when it could be resolved with a stern talking to, recovery of the item, or a payment plan to settle the correctly depreciated value. The remaining class of items were those lost to intentional and unlawful theft.

This final group was more of a challenge. The perpetrators deliberately hid evidence, created diversions, or got nasty. Deb was very well acquainted with this species, and knew how to sniff them out, track them down, and with the police or security to assist, slap the cuffs on them. There was a very particular pleasure in this process, and the sneakier they tried to be, and the more they tried to lay a false trail, the more eagerly Deb hunted them. After the first such case, and the guy who was stealing scrubs from the laundry was nabbed, word got around about this new relentless sheriff in town, and Gabe took note. He got a new sense of urgency to make a few more good hauls and then move to new pastures.

Over the months, Deb made steady progress in finding unaccounted items, solving the “wishful misunderstandings,” and rooting out a few more pilferers. With that clutter gone, she could lift the lid on the evidence that pointed to a large number of items that had simply vanished. She sifted through statements by people whose incomplete recollections spoke of things that may have been left behind in a move, or half-remembered store rooms, or items they had left in unattended offices or passageways. She followed this path because of the things they did remember, like the glassware left behind during a move that had vanished by the time they got around to going back for it. From accounts of things that were known to have disappeared, she pieced together a pattern and started opening storerooms that people recalled used to have things and which may have held the missing items. Most of those storerooms were completely empty—not empty in the sense of bare shelves, but rather no shelves at all. Those that were now in service came with grumbles that shelving had to be purchased before the stores could be moved in. Someone, she reflected to herself, was stripping places bare.

Gabe kept a logbook and had a trick. After scouting a storage area, he logged it, put an unobtrusive seal on the door, and then visited it again several weeks later. If the seal was still in place, he knew that nobody had visited it. After one or two more negative visits, Gabe scheduled it to be harvested. His next target was a basement storeroom that his inventory from scouting said contained two old floor polishers, rolls of carpeting, plumbing parts, and a very nice mechanical snake for unblocking drains. He started planning the retrieval and disposal: what truck he would need, how long it might take to load, and where he would store the haul until it was sold. For each line item, he planned the method of sale and the estimated profit.

On the day of retrieval, he took several containers to the storeroom with a forklift and got to work that evening. The basement area was not frequently used, but to avoid any unwanted attention, he closed the storeroom door behind him, and taped it from the inside to avoid light shining through while he worked.

By midnight, Gabe had cleared four shelving units and had three left to go. It was sweaty work, but he could picture the money adding up with each item removed from a shelf and each shelf dismantled and stacked. In one corner, the dismantled units lay in neat groups of pillars, shelves, and hardware. Climbing to the top of the step ladder, he could just reach the first of several five-gallon bottles of drain cleaner that had been sitting on the top shelf in the dark for 5 years. Like several other items, they had become somewhat stuck to the shelf, and he had to tug on the plastic handles to get them free, almost rocking the stepladder, as he stretched and levered the first bottle free. The second bottle also needed some persuasion to break free. Gabe braced himself against the shelving for the third bottle and gave it a solid yank. The plastic had become brittle with age, and the effects of the chemicals on the container had compromised it enough that Gabe’s sudden tug tore it open in a giant grin. Five gallons of drain cleaner fluid immediately gushed across the shelf. Before he could react, Gabe’s head and chest were caught in a wave of cleaner fluid. For an instant, he was just befuddled, grimacing at the intense taste of pickles in his mouth, but then the acid bit through the top layer of skin, and he was engulfed in an inferno of searing pain. Shrieking, and wiping at his face with his bare hands, oblivious to anything else, Gabe over balanced on the stepladder and hit the concrete floor like a bag of cement. The side of his head landed on a pile of shelving pillars, and he was knocked out cold.

When Gabe came to, he didn’t notice the acid, or the strips of skin falling from his face and chest, or even the sticky mess of blood and hair on the right side of his head. Instead, he felt immense joy welling up inside him and a sense that he was being raised to a new level of existence. A strong scent of flowers filled the room, and kneeling awkwardly in blissful wonderment, he reached out at an iridescent purple blossom unfolding in front of him and revealing God. Stretching out at the birds that orbited the divine being, Gabe’s hands made little picking motions, and he smiled, now comprehending his place in the universe and his link to God.

It was 3 days before Deb’s investigation led her to the storeroom. There she discovered Gabe’s decomposing body, still in a slouched squatting position, where a mere 12 feet below the ED, a brain herniation and temporal lobe bleed had permanently retrieved his life.