Frames sat alone in the front seat of an unmarked Malibu. He was on temporary part-time loan from Violent Crime to the Narcotic Investigations Team. His car was parked in a residential section of Roseland, on the opposite side of the street and a few doors from a lime-green stucco rented by Lucia Cervantes. The narcotics team wanted surveillance on Cervantes, known to be the girlfriend of a street dealer named Jorge Lopez. A week ago, Lopez was identified as the supplier for a thirty-eight-year-old user who suffered a fatal overdose. After the OD, Lopez disappeared. One of the team’s snitches said Lopez might show up to visit Cervantes.

In four days, Frames had seen Cervantes three times—twice when she emerged to drive to Safeway for groceries, and once when she watered the dying roses along the front fence. She was a small woman with straight, black hair who wore, on all three occasions, tight-fitting spandex workout suits. Watering the flowers, Cervantes stood in one spot for five minutes, smoking a cigarette and aiming the spray at the top of the plants. Halfway into it, Frames fought the urge to climb out of his car, walk down the street, and tell her what his grandmother had drummed into his head: water the plant base, not the blossoms.

On this latest shift, Frames passed the time by making a mental list of everything that hadn’t changed since he arrived: no one in or out of the house, no lights on, window shades unmoved, no sound from inside the house, roses dead as the day before.

“What do you suppose she does all day?” a voice asked in his ear. Wiggins.

The other half of the surveillance team—Wiggins and Buckley—sat in a Ford parked across from Cervantes’s driveway. Connected by wireless mikes, the three men had begun the surveillance observing a strict no-chatter policy. Wiggins ended the policy on the first day.

“TV,” Buckley said. “Most people watch TV.”

“All day? How do you watch TV all day?”

“Look on the roof. She’s got the Dish. 190 channels. Other night, I turned mine on, and there was a soccer game from Albania.”

“So you’re saying she’s inside there right now watching Albanian soccer?”

Buckley sighed. “No. That was an example. Are you familiar with normal conversation?”

“You know what I’d like right now?” Wiggins asked.

“Really? We’re going to do this again?”

“One of those ham croissants from that place downtown. Don’t tell me you couldn’t eat one right now?”

“Sure,” Buckley said. “We’ll have it delivered to the car. What could go wrong?”

“How about, you, Steve-O? You hungry?”

“No,” Frames said. “And remember how I asked you not to call me that?”