Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and walked into the credit union across Linden Avenue at nine o’clock when they unlocked the doors.
Not the plant. The credit union.
Because that branch has a camera on the northeast corner of the building that points at their own drive-thru lane, and past the drive-thru lane, across two lanes of Linden, is our employee entrance and the smoking pad beside it, lit up like a stage by a light I have personally replaced four times.
I have watched that camera watch us for nine years.
The branch manager is a man named Terry Boughner. His father Wendell ran the number two press at our plant for thirty-one years and I trained Wendell’s replacement and I carried Wendell’s casket in 2017.
Terry pulled Tuesday night for me himself, in a back room, with the blinds shut, and he did not ask me one question about why.
Two-fifty-one in the morning. A man comes out our employee door, crosses the pad, and stands at the fence at the edge of the lot for about ninety seconds with his hands doing something at his waist. Then he walks back in.
Two-fifty-three, a car that does not belong to anybody on our payroll pulls off the berm on the far side of that fence, headlights off, and pulls away.
Sixty dollars does not walk out through a guard shack. It goes through a chain-link fence into somebody’s hand.
I’d seen it from the mezzanine window while I was emptying the sand urn. I knew exactly what I was looking at and I knew exactly who it was, and I also knew that a fifty-eight-year-old janitor’s word against a floor manager’s cousin was worth about what you’d expect, so I kept it and I waited for a morning when somebody else could see it too.
Terry burned it to a drive and wrote the timestamps on a bank envelope and walked it over to our plant manager himself at ten-fifteen, because he said a janitor carrying it in looked like a man defending himself and a bank manager carrying it in looked like evidence.
On that envelope, under the timestamps, he wrote something that was not about any of it:
“My dad said this man was the only one in that building who ever called him by his first name. Whatever you do with this, do it right.”
They read the timestamps out at the Thursday shift meeting. Nobody read the envelope out loud; the plant manager handed it to me privately afterward, and I have it in a drawer at home.
Nobody went out in cuffs. The money came back. The floor manager is at another plant and his cousin is not welcome on the property.
They gave me my keys and asked what they could do, and I told them to put our own camera on that fence line, which they did in June.
Twenty-eight years of nights. Everybody’s watching something. The trick is knowing who’s been watching you back, and going to see them in a good shirt.