He looked at the badge hanging around my neck, memorizing my face and name. “Who’s your supervisor?” I told him. “Does he know about this?”

I shook my head. “It’s never happened before. I’ll make up the time. It’s about thirty minutes. You can take it out of my pay.”

“I’ll leave that to your supervisor,” he said. It went on from there. For all the time he spent standing there lecturing me about not working, neither one of us was working. I could have made up the work in the time he was taking. This is why people hate work. This is why people hate authority. I sat there and let him tell me that I could get fired. You’d think the whole organization was going to collapse because I was thirty minutes late picking up the trash. If it was that precarious of an operation, maybe the whole place should collapse. Of course that wasn’t the point. So he humiliated me for a few more minutes and then allowed me to go back to my job. At least he got me awake, awake with rage for the rest of the day.

I had another night with no luck. I slept more, waking every couple of hours to look at the camera footage. It was the same as looking at a still photograph of an empty street and a quiet house. I had to leave again before anything happened. I was out of sync with whoever was in the house. Froehmer knew the deal; he could get me covered at the warehouse if he wanted. But he didn’t want to. He was going to keep far away from this. I was on my own, and I wasn’t in a hurry. I would wait for my day off and then stay put until something happened.

I know what Frank would have done. He would have run background on the guy, found out where he worked, what his hobbies and habits were, maybe take a look at his phone. He’d have a profile of the target in a couple of hours. Maybe he’d even put a tracking device on his car. I wasn’t going to do any of that. I didn’t want to know who the guy was. I didn’t want to know if he was married, if he had kids, a pet goldfish, nothing. I didn’t want to know anything about him, not even his name. I would sit and wait and follow him and be done with it. I couldn’t think about what Frank would do in my situation, because Frank would never be in this situation.