The Last Wire

I'd been watching her for three weeks when the **orange** envelope appeared on her doorstep. Hand-delivered. No return address. She picked it up with those long, graceful fingers I'd memorized through my telephoto lens, and something in my chest tightened. Not exactly professional for a corporate **spy**, but then again, I hadn't exactly been myself lately.

The agency called us **zombie** investigators – dead inside, moving through other people's lives, eating their secrets, leaving nothing but residue. I'd stopped caring years ago. Until Sarah.

Her apartment building was old-school. Still ran on coaxial **cable**, no fiber. Easy access for a man with my particular skillset. I'd spliced into her line two weeks ago, listening to her phone conversations, her late-night crying jags, her voice mail messages from someone named Michael who kept promising to "fix things."

I knew how she took her coffee. I knew she sang show tunes in the shower. I knew she dyed her **hair** that particular shade of auburn herself, in the bathroom sink, because I'd found the empty box in her trash during a pretext entry. There was something unbearably intimate about knowing these things, something that went beyond surveillance and crossed into violation.

The orange envelope contained photographs. Someone else was watching her too. I could see them through her window: her with Michael, her with someone else, her withdrawing money from an ATM. Blackmail material.

I should have reported it to my handler. This was my job: observe, document, report. Instead, I found myself at her door at 11 PM, quoting fictitious building codes about cable maintenance.

She opened it with those sad, intelligent eyes. "You're the one from across the street, aren't you?"

I froze. She knew. She'd known all along.

"Michael hired you, didn't he?" She stepped aside, an invitation I shouldn't have accepted. "He thinks I'm sleeping with my boss. I'm not. But he can't afford the divorce, so he needs proof."

I crossed the threshold into a life I'd been secretly inhabiting. The photographs she handed me were different from mine: long-lens shots of me, watching her. Someone else was playing the game.

"You're not the only one," she said. "And I'm not the only target."

We sat on her sofa and compared notes like seasoned professionals, two zombies who'd somehow found each other in the dark. Her hand found mine, and for the first time in years, something in my dead heart began to beat again.

"What now?" I asked.

She squeezed my fingers. "Now we find out who's sending the orange envelopes."