By Aza Smith

Agent Sunday balanced two coffee cups on a box of donuts before turning the knob to Apartment 118’s door. Morgan left Apartment 120, his shoes in his hands and tie draped over his shoulders. Sunday shook his head and walked in as Morgan made the walk of shame. 

Agent Sunday found his partner, Agent Saturday, staring at one of the screens in the room like a zombie. It displayed Jesse Dunbar, 120’s occupant, dressed in black underwear and a T-shirt two sizes too large. She leaned against the kitchen counter, waiting for her coffee maker to finish.

“She woke up at 8:12 a.m. and put on her bra before her panties,” said Saturday.

“Oh yeah? Guess that means she’s onto us,” said Sunday sarcastically.

He realized he said the wrong thing when his partner broke eye contact with the screen and gave him a look of terror.

“You think so? She usually puts her panties on before her bra, but this time was different. She actually might be onto us!”

“Or you told Morgan to be rough with her last night, and now her girls are tender.” Sunday took a bite out of a chocolate glaze. “You didn’t have to feed him tips the whole time. Or watch the two of them go at it like a creep.”

“Agent Morgan is a master of enhanced interrogation, not seduction. I had to make sure he didn’t blow our cover.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s his lack of foreplay that’ll do it. It could be the two dozen operatives you keep sending in to scope out her office.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Or the half-dozen cameras we keep in the hallway. Or the two dozen flying drones you have tailing her everywhere she goes.”

“I’m not having this argument with you again,” said Saturday. 

He stood up and surveyed one of the walls in the apartment. It was covered floor-to-ceiling in photographs of Jesse taken from traffic cameras, security cameras, drones, and the cameras in her phone, laptop, and workplace computer. There were strands of red string connecting these pictures to receipts, bills, coupons, and pamphlets they fished out of her garbage. There were also sticky notes with phrases like “Hoboken Bombing” on a picture of Jesse standing in line at the grocery store, and “Possible Counterfeiting Front?” with a picture of Jesse walking into a laundromat.

“It’s all connected. We have all the pieces. We just don’t know it yet,” said Saturday, sipping his morning drink without so much as blinking.

“Saturday, we’ve been at this for three months and we haven’t found anything. You have to face facts: this was all a waste of time,” said Sunday with a huff.

His paranoid partner had already tuned him out, overtaken by the orgy of evidence of his own making.

“We’ve wasted department funds on three apartments in the building and over eighty bugs. We’ve bugged all of her lamps, her makeup, her shampoo bottle, her pillows, her wallet, her cell phone, the back of her fridge, every vending machine in the car dealership she works at, and we even had to bribe her dentist to install one in one of her teeth. You know what we learned?”

Sunday picked up a thick binder and opened it to the first page.

“She has a weakness for cinnamon rolls and can’t abide the taste of matcha. She doesn’t read for recreation, but she is a pretty talented skim reader, so she was assigned to filter emails twice a week at work because of it. She has a thing for men with facial hair, her last boyfriend was a hipster in his mid-thirties whom she met at Berkeley while she was getting her associate degree in finance. She favors Estelle over Beyonce, soft rock to jazz, and her favorite movie is Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

“Estelle to Beyonce. Diabolical,” muttered Saturday.

Sunday dropped the binder on the table with a thud, the rest of page one unread.

“Admit it. We’ve got nothing.”

“Head Agent Black Friday believes in me. He said this investigation could save a lot of lives down the line.”

“Head Agent Black Friday thinks the Soviet Union dissolving was faked by the KGB!” yelled Sunday. “Jesse Dunbar is perfectly innocent and I want you to admit it!”

“No, she’s not! She’s guilty of something!”

“You’re guilty of stalking an innocent woman, and you’ve made me and forty other agents into accomplices!”

“We’re doing this for America!”

There was a knock at the door. Saturday ran over to it, his back against the wood with his fingers grazing the gun in his holster. He grabbed the knob and opened it.

It was Jesse. Still half-dressed, her bed head tied back, carrying a cardboard box with both arms.

“Hello…random citizen,” said Saturday. Sunday resisted the urge to facepalm. 

Jesse reached into the box and picked up what looked like an aspirin, blinking red conspicuously. It was the tracker Saturday and Sunday gave to Morgan to plant on her last night.

“I found this in my cervical cup this morning,” said Jesse. 

She dropped the device back into the box. The box was filled with other gadgets, devices, and doohickeys that blinked the same hue. It was every bug, mini-camera, and microphone they’d hid in her apartment. Sunday glanced at the screens on the table and saw that the cameras were offline.

Jesse shoved the box into Saturday’s arms.

“You two should keep it down. The walls are thin. Also, the landlady wanted me to ask you to take those down.” She pointed to the security cameras they installed in the hallway. “Thanks.”

She slammed the door.

Saturday looked down at the box, and then at Sunday.

“So she is onto us!”

Sunday gave in to the urge and smacked himself in the face.