Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, drove out to that warehouse, and asked the front desk to get Tom Rickert down from maintenance, because there is a closet behind the break room that nobody in that building has thought about since 2011.
In 2011 somebody was getting into the vending machines. The company put a little analog camera up in the corner of that break room, the kind with the fat wire, and ran it to a box in the electrical closet.
They caught the fellow in about three weeks and everybody forgot about the camera.
It never came down. The box in that closet has been recording over itself every eleven days for fourteen years, and the only reason I know is that I dust that closet, and I have listened to that little fan hum through two managers, three remodels, and a roof job.
Nobody who came into that building after 2011 knows it exists. It is not on any system, it is not on the network, it is a box with a light on it behind a mop sink.
The money came out of a locker between 1:30 and 2:00. He said so himself, loud, with his hand on my arm.
At 1:30 in the morning I am on the far dock every night of my life, because that is when the compactor cycles and you have to be there for it.
Tom pulled the box out at eight in the morning and we watched eleven days of nothing and then about four minutes of something on a little screen in a closet that smelled like bleach.
What is on it is a kid on second shift with a screwdriver and a locker that has not had a working latch since 2022, which I had written up three times, and which is in the maintenance log under my name with dates.
It also has the floor manager on it, twice, taking cans out of the vending machine with the door key and not paying, which nobody asked about and which I did not point out and which was on the screen all the same.
Tom took the box upstairs himself. I went home.
They called me at two that afternoon. The regional man got on the line and used the word apologize four times in one conversation and asked me what I wanted, and I told him I wanted the latch fixed on locker forty-one, which he did not understand and which is exactly what I wanted.
The kid confessed before anybody showed him anything. Nineteen, a bad month, and he came and found me in the parking lot, and I told him what my own foreman told me in 1997, that a man who says it himself has already done the hardest part.
They gave me my years unbroken and the week’s pay. The contract crew never came in.
The floor manager took a position at another facility before the end of the quarter.
The camera is still up there. The little fan still hums. I dusted that closet twice more before I retired in the spring and I never once told anybody else it was there.