“…pull power off your unit,” Officer Reyes said. “A lot of it. And from what I can see, you are not the only one.”
He walked me down the hall and explained it slowly, like I was a patient who had just woken up from anesthesia. The little black box was spliced into the wiring behind my bedroom wall. A cable ran from it through the floor and down toward the basement.
In the basement, behind a storage room padlocked by the landlord, the police found three long racks of humming computers mining cryptocurrency. They had been running day and night for over a year, on electricity fed through my meter and the meters of two other tenants.
I thought about my electric bills. They had gone from about ninety dollars a month to more than three hundred and forty. I had blamed my old refrigerator. I had even called the power company twice and been told my usage looked normal for a unit my size.
The man in the video was an electrician the property manager paid in cash. He came in during the day to check the connections because the boxes kept overheating. They had chosen apartments where the tenants slept through the day, because nobody would hear him drilling.
“She still has not noticed” had meant the bills. Nothing more. I had been lying awake terrified that someone was watching me, and all along they were just quietly robbing me.
Then Officer Reyes said the thing that truly scared me. The wire behind my headboard was so hot that the plastic had started to melt. The fire marshal arrived within an hour and shut off power to half the building.
I had been sleeping eight hours a day, every day, eighteen inches from a fire waiting to start.
The police also checked every outlet and smoke detector in my apartment for cameras or microphones. They found nothing. I cried in the hallway with relief, which embarrassed me, because I am a nurse and I do not cry in hallways.
That was how I met Mrs. Ochoa from 4C. She worked the early shift at a bakery on Central Avenue and slept every afternoon too. Her bills had tripled. She handed me a tissue and a still warm bolillo from her bag and told me to eat something.
The landlord, a man named Gordon Trask, was arrested a week later along with his property manager. The power company calculated more than forty thousand dollars in stolen electricity across the three units.
I got back three thousand one hundred dollars. Mrs. Ochoa got back almost four thousand. The third tenant, a young security guard named Marcus, used his refund to pay off his car.
When the checks came, the three of us met in the parking lot at noon, half asleep in our work clothes, and laughed until Marcus had to sit down on the curb.
All of us gave notice the same month. I found a small duplex near the hospital in Albuquerque with a landlord who is seventy-four and still fixes his own leaky faucets. The first thing I did was plug a lamp into the bedroom wall and touch the outlet. Cool as a glass of water.
I still think about how close it came. A wrong recipient on a text message, a landlord careless with his phone, and the only reason I ever learned the truth.
If your electric bill climbs for no reason, do not let anyone tell you it is normal. Ask questions. Ask them twice.
Mrs. Ochoa and I have breakfast together every Sunday now, at the bakery where she works. She brings me the bread. I bring the coffee. We are both still terrible at sleeping during the day.
I am forty-seven. I still work nights. But I sleep soundly now, and when I wake up in the afternoon, the only thing humming in my apartment is the old ceiling fan.