“This front parlor window. Right side of the upper sash, behind the shutter slat. Narrow cone, street-facing.”
“Battery?”
“Forty-eight hours. We’ll swap it Friday.”
He helped me mount it. He pulled out his phone and walked me through the pairing in under a minute. The feed opened on my screen. It was a low-resolution, narrow angle on a slice of sidewalk and the curb.
“You’ll have it on your phone,” Eamon said. “Farrow, too, if he wants.”
Wiley sat on the couch with his laptop. He hadn’t looked up since he’d opened it. Cabot had taken an armchair and was working through the second laptop.
Eamon shrugged his coat back on. “I’ll be reachable. Reed stays at the door. If anything moves, I’m twenty minutes out.”
“Understood.”
He paused in the foyer. He scanned the surroundings once, nodded at me, and was gone.
The door closed. Reed reset the deadbolt.
I checked the camera feed on my phone. A woman walked by, pushing a stroller with a child in it.
In the kitchen, the kettle was on. Farrow had already set two mugs on the counter.
“Tea or coffee?” he asked when I joined him.
“Coffee.”
“Tracks.”
He brewed instant for both of us. He took his black, the same as me.
“We need to talk about a rotation,” Farrow said.
He turned then and handed me a mug. He was close enough that I could see the small flush at his throat where his collar sat open. I’d been looking at that throat all afternoon.
“The camera buys us the front street,” he said. “It doesn’t buy us sleep coverage. It doesn’t buy us the upstairs hallway when Wiley decides he needs water at two a.m.”
“Reed holds the door.”
“Reed holds the door for fourteen hours, and then what?”
I drank the coffee. It was surprisingly good for instant.
“What are you proposing?” I asked.
“Six on, six off. You and me. One of us awake on the upstairs landing or in the parlor, the other one in bed. We rotate at midnight and again at six. Reed flexes between the door and the kitchen depending on where we are.”
“That gives us five hours of real sleep per block.”
“Ten across the day. Distributed. We can hold that for a week if we have to.”
I drank the coffee. He was right, and we both knew he was right.
“Settled,” I said. “Six and six.”
He didn’t move to leave. Neither did I.
“About earlier—“