Thy Neighbor by Norah Vincent Page B

intrusion. But I stuck to it nonetheless because, like I said before, even all those years after Mom and Dad’s deaths, it was still the only thing on offer that was louder than the voices in my head, and I needed it.
    I rigged the Katzes the way I rigged everyone after Dave and, ironically enough, under the fiscal auspices of Dave as well. He paid for most of my equipment, unknowingly, of course, but uninquisitively, too, so I can’t really feel that bad about fleecing him.
    Turns out that liquidity and the good sense (or density, I can’t decide which) not to ask questions are possibly Tubbo’s only two virtues, and I made efficient use of both. He’s the silent partner behind my network.
    But he doesn’t ever miss a few thou here and there, so who’s stealing? Hell, he forks it over willingly, practically foists it on me, because he feels soooo sorry for me, the inert, emotional pygmy of his childhood acquaintance who’s, yep, broke again.
    He says he’s come to love me like a brother. Brothers in death till death, he calls us.
    Fucking ’tard.
    The technology has evolved a lot since I placed my first Trojan horses at Dave’s, so the cameras I have at Dorris’s place are the size of ballpoint pens, and the mics are even smaller.
    For the install I hired an underworld techie I met through my drug contact Jazmin. You remember her? The dumb cunt who can’t even spell her own pseudonym but who gets me the pills that can tame me? Yeah, her.
    Anyway, this guy Damian does stash-house surveillance for Jazmin’s kingpin connection, and he’ll do spy cam plants for anyone else who can afford it. His day job is doing service calls for the local cable and satellite TV company, so he can get access to pretty much anyone’s house without arousing suspicion, and he’s willing to rig whatever you want while he’s there.
    That’s how I’ve done all my rig-ups in the past seven years, and that’s why I say it’d be pretty damn unlikely that anyone would locate my equipment. This guy’s a pro. Precision stealth motherfucker. He could just about slip a camera into your molar while he was Frenching you, and you’d be none the wiser. He’s that good.
    I doubt
I
could even find my own equipment.
    Dorris the porous hasn’t got a chance.
    The woman really is the bimbo to beat all bimbos.
    She’s good-looking, I’ll grant, in an Anne Bancroft in
The Graduate
kind of way, but she’s not blessed with the sultry voice. She’s a Trotsky, no mistaking, and a trophy wife of a certain tarnished class raised up by a subspecialist’s income to sit in the catbird seat. She was maybe one step above someone you’d have found at Jack Gordon’s with her thong in a tree, except she married well.
    And she does have a body, true enough, albeit one with a sell-by date that’s coming up fast. She’s forty-two or -threeish by now if she’s a day, and not taking the best care of her skin.
    She slathers herself with baby oil and cooks herself into a prune on her back patio every afternoon between Easter and Halloween, or any other time it’s even vaguely warm enough to bare her nipples to the elements.
    Like I said, the lady isn’t a big fan of clothing when she’s at home.
    And
that
no one needs cameras to see. Every horny kid in the neighborhood has peeked through her hedges on a dare and lathered himself blind at the sight of those dugs.
    And why not, I guess.
    As Dorris herself likes to say, “If you got it, show it.”
    And she means it in more ways than one, because much the same could be said for her temper.
    Those poor kids are like pound puppies, cowering and practically piddling themselves whenever they spill a glass of milk or grind a corn chip between the sofa cushions or commit whatever other victimless crime kids are prone to. The slightest misstep and Mommy Dearest blows her top like a tone-deaf