“What’s wrong with her butt?” the wife asks her husband as he frantically struggles to get up from the couch and remove the thumb drive full of raunchy porn from their television, the screen now cascading a half-dozen XXX gif-style images. The man spying on the married couple across the street begins to laugh, but the roof he’s standing on is not his. His camera *clicks* unintentionally, its flash inadvertently alerting all of the neighbors (including the wife and husband), and out from the second story window comes the roof’s owner, with a bat, swatting at the spy because he’s on private property.
The next morning, a mother and daughter receive a slew of photos depicting their upstairs neighbors, although one of these photos presents the mother and daughter sitting inside watching television on the first level of their shared duplex at 12 AM, so they text their spy:
We’re only paying for pictures of the husband and wife.
A week prior to the XXXUSB incident, the husband and wife called the local police department about their downstairs neighbors potentially selling and cooking [drugs]; the husband recently received a title change at work, and the previous employee is now a cop, so they talk; the wife works three doors down from the town’s Police Benevolent Association, where its president satiates her local “detective intrigue” (a.k.a. gossip) during morning coffee. Since last Saturday, there’s been a stakeout of detectives in the couple’s side-bedroom, and they drilled through the floor/ceiling of the duplex to place cameras & microphones on the downstairs neighbors to monitor their erratic behavior in:
• the living room, where the mother and daughter smoke cigarettes and watch television and sleep on couches;
• the mother’s bedroom, which contains a pile of clothes and a dresser at about 10 o’clock from the door with a mirror tilted at a seven-oh-clock angle;
• the kitchen, where their dogs won’t stop barking (so a lot of the upstairs mic audio is muffled); and
• the daughter’s bedroom, half of which is filled with a 6 x 10-foot box that looks like a large computer server.
The detectives upstairs can’t drill into this box.
(Side note: The couple had ill suspicions of their new duplex neighbors when they began smelling cigarettes at random times from downstairs, having already told them thrice to not smoke, finding empty little baggies all over the basement, constant banging and moving around between 5 PM and 4A M, burnt bed sheets. Each weekend there are about 36 different cars entering the vacant driveway; cops have been to the apartment three times involving stolen money; and one of those times the mother wasn’t home, so the daughter simply ran off.)
The husband is dancing at a club during the release show of JE M’EN TAPE by DJ Coquelin & MC Cloarec when, from the stolen wallet incident downstairs, Stranger #1 is on the second-floor banister flailing hair and dancing up a sweat. The husband approaches Stranger #1 looking for [drugs]. They hit a pipe on the club warehouse roof, and the duplex downstairs’ daughter’s phone number is exchanged.
A few nights pass. It’s the weekend now, and the husband pays Brooklyn Russell to take the subway and LIRR out to the duplex’s downstairs neighbor’s apartment to meet with the daughter and sly the scene.
For a week, the husband doesn’t hear from Brooklyn Russell. Instead, the duplex’s retired next-door neighbor texts the wife and explains there has been someone in and out of their apartment (knowing the couple left last weekend), and it’s not the landlord. The husband finds out that Brooklyn Russell has been sleeping on their couch for the past few days. Brooklyn Russell explains how high the downstairs daughter makes him, and his post-usage activity is being studied in the upstairs apartment by a forensic scientist and a DEA agent. They’re unsure what Brooklyn Russell has experienced downstairs, but they’re certain it’s one of four underground, virtual narcotic trips that the government doesn’t even want state police to know about, let alone local cops.
On the way back to his new apartment in Queens, the husband turns the couple’s leased car around and decides to see for himself. The daughter opens the front door — quickly closing it behind her upon noticing it was the her upstairs neighbor — and asks if the husband needs anything. The husband requests “Lock me in.”
While calling the downstairs mother, it’s the spy who sees the first sign of fire when smoke begins pluming from the back of the duplex. The spy runs from his apartment, across the school yard (being chased by the administration), and toward the duplex, as the wife arrives because the husband didn’t come home last night — and she doesn’t notice the smoke — as she is stopped by the next-door neighbor who is frantic with information.
Then her phone rings: *LANDLORDS*
Stranger #1 and Brooklyn Russell run from the upstairs patio and out the front lawn, passed the wife who’s asking Brooklyn Russell if the detectives are still in the side room. Brooklyn Russell yells, “Hell no, lady. Who the fuck is you?” Black smoke now billows from the downstairs neighbor’s daughter’s room. The wife runs back to see the daughter’s arm being broken by the PBA president while handcuffing her, and the husband’s sweat glands are excreting iridescent liquid, pinned down by the DEA agent, as the forensic scientist extracts blood from, spinal taps, and inner-tubes the husband’s melting body.
JE M’EN TAPE blares throughout the block off a stereo somewhere within the duplex, which is now ablaze.
More about: DJ Coquelin, MC Cloarec
