I was in such a good mood that I didn’t even mind my unplanned return to undercover work. It had taken several shifts on the roach coach for me to fall into a comfortable rhythm, and more important, for the regulars to become chummy with me. They stopped in clumps and hung around for several minutes to laugh, bitch, and talk about their upcoming workdays. I’d identified three civilians who were on Ashton’s persons of interest list, but all seemed like ordinary hard-working tax-paying citizens to me and none, according to the fluoroscope, were packing heat. Why they’d been identified as POIs made no sense to me, but as instructed, I completed my daily reports and e-mailed them from the onboard laptop computer. In addition to keeping a vehicle traffic count and gleaning intelligence information during five-minute chunks of conversation, I became a master with the grill—using the egg molds—and customers started ordering breakfast biscuits. Just for kicks, I ran a two-for-one special and discovered a direct correlation between free food and the number of bills in my tip jar.
