Before venturing further, I need to state for the record that this is a work of fiction and that any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. Also, all characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18. --Royce Houton
Chapter Four
The same 2002 Nissan Sentra with the sun-dulled gold paint had been perched at various points up and down Moss Avenue on the other side of my street for at least a week now.
Most everybody within five or six houses either side of mine on both sides of the street was someone I knew, having lived there the better part of twenty years. I'd gotten even more attentive to goings-on in the neighborhood since the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 made my home pretty much my primary office for months on end. Even with
COVID finally on the wane, owning my own small crisis communications business allowed me to venture into my office in a suburban business park just a couple of days a week, and then mostly for client or staff meetings and seldom for the full eight hours.
I'd paid pretty close attention for quite a while and I had never seen the car before the previous Tuesday. It was odd that the car seemed to park in front of a different house every day, even though on-street parking in front of any house was uncontested in our subdivision. Generally, visitors here will park in the host's driveway or at least in front of the host's house each time. So this wasn't anyone's guest.
It was also strange that the car had DeSoto County, Mississippi, plates. DeSoto County was just across the state line, less than two miles to the south, which made me wonder why someone from that nearby would need to be parked in front of various addresses on our street each day. Rarely sometimes, a person would be sitting in the car, but most of the time, it appeared empty.
"Hey Easton, I think we might have a private dick snooping around outside my house. You know how I could confirm it?" I asked my lawyer in a phone call from my front porch, staring at the gold Nissan beater now parked squarely in front of Kim's house.
"What makes you think that?" he asked. I explained the strange car lurking around at strange hours and gave him the make, model and tag number. "That is odd," Easton said. "I got a few boys I help out from time to time with the Mississippi Highway Patrol. Let me see if they can tell me anything."
I didn't tell him that the gumshoe could be staking out my neighbor, whom I had recently discovered was waiting for her divorce to Roger's worthless ass to become final. No sense complicating that picture just yet. And besides, there was nothing to really report but a couple of wild jacking-and-jilling sessions a very safe distance apart.
I hadn't seen Kim in a couple of days, and my dick twitched every time I remembered our last encounter. The pandemic had wreaked holy hell on the nursing corps at hospitals across the country, and Kim's was no exception. While her specialty, delivery-room obstetrics, had not seen the death and worked the hellish conditions and the burnout the floor nurses endured, her unit was down by about one-fifth from its full complement of nurses, and there were days when twelve-, sixteen-, even eighteen-hour days were possible when more than one OB nurse was out sick, vacationing or exposed to COVID. And, as she had complained for years, babies tend to arrive in waves.
It was sitting on my deck watching Netflix on my iPad just a little after nine at night when I saw the lights of Kim's Lexus wheel into her semi-circular front drive and heard her kill her engine and lock her doors. She had left for work before I looked out my window for the first time at eight that morning, meaning she had just worked 'round-the-clock at a minimum.
