"Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything." Ben leaned against the side of his car and
drew out a cigarette. They'd been doing a house-to-house all morning with the same result.
Nothing. Now he took a moment to study the neighborhood with its tired houses and
postage-stamp yards.
Where were the busybodies? he wondered. Where were the people who stood by the windows peering through openings in the drapes at all the comings and goings? He'd grown
up in a neighborhood not so different from this. And, as he remembered, if a new lamp was
delivered, news of it ran up and down the street before the proud owners could plug it in.
Brazen Virtue
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By Caspar David Friedrich - Photograph Own work User:Szilas,
Taken in 28 April 2007, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5213605
It's not big deal to you, but your neighbors are rolling their eyes!
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The harsh sound of his buzzer made him swear as he felt himself sucked back into that empty room. He considered snarling and waiting it out, then weighed in human nature and decided the intruder would probably keep coming back until he dispatched them once and for all.
Probably the eagle-eyed old woman from the ground floor, Preston decided as he started down. She'd already tried to snag him twice when he'd headed out to the club in the evening. He was good at evading, but it was becoming a nuisance. Smarter to hit her face-on with a few rude remarks and let her huff away to gossip about him.
But when he checked the peephole, he didn't see the tidy woman with her bright bird's eyes, but a pretty brunette with hair short as a boy's and big green eyes.
From across the hall, he realized, and wondered what the hell she could want. He'd figured since she'd left him alone for nearly a week, she intended to keep right on doing so. Which made her, in his mind, the perfect neighbor.
The Perfect Neighbor