The Weight of Watching
Rain came down in fine needles that night, the kind that didn't so much fall as hang in the air, turning every streetlamp into a smear of amber. I sat in my car on Delancey Street with the engine off and the windows fogged at the edges, camera resting on my knee, and I watched a man named Marcus Webb through a long lens as he counted money in an apartment he thought no one could see into.
This was the part of the job I'd long since stopped feeling anything about. Webb was cheating his business partner, and his business partner was paying me an obscene amount to prove it. I'd been on him for six days—his coffee order, the mistress on Bleecker, the safe behind the bad Rothko print. My hands knew the motions before my mind engaged: focus, frame, shutter, log the time. I did it the way another man might tie his shoes. There was no thrill in it anymore, only the clean, quiet satisfaction of precision. I had built my entire life around precision. It was the one thing that never betrayed me.
I got the shot I needed at 8:47 p.m.—Webb sliding banded stacks of hundreds into a gym bag, laughing at something on the television. I should have started the engine right then. I should have…