Frank finished his scan of the target and I handed him a coffee. We watched the house. Lights came on. The sun came up. Lights went off. My coffee was long gone. I fidgeted like a kid without a gun sitting in a deer stand. Something was wrong with me. I was tired, that was it. I closed my eyes and went to sleep for twenty minutes. Frank would watch. I wouldn’t miss anything anyway. I had time. I opened my eyes. Frank was still watching the house.

“What do you want to do?” he said without looking at me.

“When?”

“When we get back home.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said, knowing he had.

“Maybe we could go somewhere.”

“You like hotel living.”

“I could use a break,” Frank said. “You?”

“Sure. Where would we go?”

“I’ve got a place in mind,” Frank said and didn’t say anything more.

“Some place with water,” I said.

“I know a place.”

I could wait. It’s what I do. If you think about it, most of your time is spent waiting. Waiting for work to end, waiting for the day to end, waiting for a train, a plane, a taxi, a bus, waiting to get home, waiting for somebody else to get home, waiting to eat, waiting to go to bed, waiting for someone to say what you want to hear. We spend all our time waiting for one thing to stop and waiting for something else to start. Maybe you’re waiting for me to get to the point. The point is, as Frank liked to remind me, there is no such thing as waiting. Not really. Not if you do it right. Waiting is nothing more than preparation. And as someone else has said, success is nothing more than opportunity plus preparation. And being prepared means being ready when opportunity arrives. Or leaves, in our case. We watch the house; we know the house; and then wait for everybody to leave. As far as we were concerned, that was the job. What we took wasn’t ours anyway. We did that for Froehmer. The rest we did for us. I wasn’t tired anymore. I was ready. I sent Froehmer a message and he sent back the details of what he wanted.

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