Murder in Wichita

"Mr. Logan, your five o-clock appointment is here." Lance looked at the rain beating against the windows of his office and sighed. Fuck. He had been hoping the couple who had scheduled the meeting with him might have cancelled because of the shitty weather. Why the hell had he agreed to this in the first place? His boss, Mr. Mitchell, had been the one to come up with the idea of having the accounting firm provide free financial advice to low-income people having money problems. Let Mitchell deal with the consequences of his generosity. Instead, he had talked Lance into agreeing to stay late tonight to meet with a couple who weren't able to get to the office during regular business hours. Everyone else in the office was attending a party at a steak house in Newton to celebrate the eightieth birthday of one of the accounting firm's founders, who had retired five years before. Since Lance had only come on board less than two years ago and had never worked with the old guy, he had been the default choice to meet with the couple tonight. Shit. Right about now he could really go for a Bud Light and a Bavarian Bomb at Heroes, his favorite sports bar in Old Town. He hadn't eaten all fucking day.

"OK, Julie. You can send them on back. Have a good time tonight at the party." Lance got out of his leather office chair and looked at his reflection in the window. He reached up to tighten the knot in his tie and scowled. His first day on the job two years ago, Mitchell had emphasized to him the importance the office placed on a formal dress code for its workers. At the time, Lance had owned one white dress shirt and a black leather tie he had bought online from the 665 Leather store in West Hollywood. Mitchell had looked at him oddly when he had seen the leather tie. Lance doubted whether the conservative man had ever known such a thing existed. That evening, Lance had gotten his ass over to the JC Penney store at the Towne East Square mall and bought four narrow J Ferrar ties. Up to that point, he had pretty much lived his entire twenty-two years in faded jeans and Hollister tee-shirts, with a white polo shirt and khaki pants for church on Sunday when he was living at his parents' house. Now out of college and with a decent-paying job at a respectable accounting firm, he was expected to dress the part. That meant a suit and tie every goddam day, but there was no way in fucking hell he was going to wear the big-ass wide ties that his father's generation were stuck wearing. In the two years since, his small collection of J Ferrar neckties had been joined by several Madison ties he had bought online from the Belk department store website.

Hearing movement out in the hall, Lance turned and walked the few steps to his office door, ready to greet the couple who had delayed his plans to get some food and beer into his empty stomach. Shit, the sooner he got this started, the sooner he could leave and get some supper, and if he was lucky, maybe get some cunt for the night, or even better, some cock and a tight asshole. It was Friday night, after all, and he had no plans for the weekend, except a ball game at Lawrence stadium tomorrow night with an old friend from college to watch the Wingnuts get their ass whipped. Again.

He saw a young black woman coming down the hall, walking slowly in her high heels, looking like her feet hurt. And no wonder. Either she was about eight months pregnant with triplets, or she was dangerously obese and about to faint from diabetes. Lance guessed it was the former. At least, she was pregnant, not necessarily with triplets. She was dressed as fashionably as a seriously pregnant woman could be, wearing black leggings under a denim skirt. Her white blouse stretched tightly over her expansive belly to the point where it looked slightly ridiculous. But her hair, makeup, and jewelry showed someone who took her appearance very seriously. Lance figured it sounded like a slightly racist stereotype and therefore would never say it out loud, but the few black women he knew well were all experts when it came to fashion. The woman's facial expression, however, didn't match at all the self-confidence with which she dressed. In fact, she looked rather embarrassed to be there. Well, that was understandable. After all, she was there to get financial advice on how to get out of debt.

"Mrs. Morgan?" Lance held out his hand to the woman.

Taking his hand, the woman smiled shyly. "Mr. Logan."

"Please call me Lance."

"All right, Lance. I'm Samantha."

"Thanks for coming in this afternoon."

"Thanks for staying late to meet with us. I know you probably are supposed to leave at five."

"No problem." Lance smiled, not really meaning what he said. He hoped she couldn't tell he was being insincere. What he was really thinking about was something he had seen recently on a porn site he jerked off to regularly, where a woman every bit as pregnant as Samantha was getting the shit fucked out of her pussy. This woman was seriously hot, pregnant or not, and he could feel his cock begin to twitch. He hadn't been hard all day, not since he had gotten out of bed with a boner and rubbed a load out before he came to work. And he didn't normally get horny over black women. He preferred his bitches blonde and with big tits that he could grab while he fucked them.

"Is your husband here?"

"He's in the restroom drying off. Our umbrella was only big enough for one person. I'm afraid he got awfully wet."

"I see. We'll just wait for him then. Please have a seat. Can I get you some coffee in the meantime? Or a bottle of water?"

"No thank you. He won't be long." Samantha sat down in one of the two chairs arranged in the small space between the desk and the office door, while Lance sat down behind his desk. His cock was really starting to turn into a major hard-on.

Only about five seconds later, a knock sounded at the open door. Lance looked up to see the woman's husband standing there. Lance grinned at him and stood up, stretching out his hand across the desk. "Mr. Morgan, I'm Lance Logan."

"Eric Morgan," the man replied, also extending his hand, and the two men shook.

"Please, have a seat," Lance said, and they both sat down, Eric next to his wife, Lance back behind his desk. Good thing the desk blocked their view of his cock seriously tenting his suit pants. If Samantha had started to get his dick hard, Eric had definitely finished the job. Lance guessed him to be about twenty years old, with thick blonde hair under a Saint Louis Cardinals baseball cap. Wearing faded jeans and a still-damp tight black tee-shirt, he could see that the man opposite him was serious about working out regularly, his chest muscles stretching the worn fabric of the tee to show off a perfect set of pecs. To top it off, Lance could see his nipples were hard. The threadbare faded denim of his jeans stretched tightly over his thighs, and around his cock, Lance noticed that the denim was frayed almost to the point of not being there. As if he rubbed himself a lot and shot his load inside his jeans. Lance recognized that from experience. He had jacked off a lot in class all through high school and college. Most of his jeans he wore still had the denim around his cock thin and worn-out from years of cum and piss.

Fuck. Now that he was horny as hell, he had to get his cock under control and concentrate on finances. Sometimes work could be such a bitch.

"So, I see from your paperwork that you decided to come in and talk to us because you were turned down for a car loan. Could you tell me your credit score?" Lance smiled at them with what he hoped was a sympathetic look. He knew it was probably embarrassing, maybe even humiliating, for the couple to tell a total stranger about how they had fucked up their finances. From the few other people Lance had met with before on his boss's charity program, he knew that it would take a shitload of effort for them to make the changes necessary to fix things. No one ever seemed to like the advice he had given, which basically boiled down to "spend less than you earn."

The story Eric and Samantha gave him was a little more complicated than most, but nothing really unheard of before. They had gotten married five months ago when Samantha had realized she was pregnant. It had been something her parents had insisted upon, even though they had despised Eric, primarily for the fact that he was a white frat boy who liked to party. Eric had finished up his second year of college while his wife lived at her parents' home, and once school was out, he had gotten a job as a bricklayer's helper. They had rented a trailer in the north part of town which took almost half of the income Eric made. Eric had wrecked his car the year before after smoking some bad weed, so his car insurance had skyrocketed in the last year, and his car had never really been fully repaired, so there was always something going out on it and requiring a shitload of money. They just barely exceeded the income limits to allow them to qualify for Medicaid, so there were doctor bills each month for their unborn baby, and there was no way in hell they could afford insurance, so they had a hospital bill to look forward to once the baby was born next month. There was barely enough money left each month to buy groceries and gas for the car.

Most of the unhappy story was told by Samantha, who was obviously the more articulate of the two, and Lance began to notice that she had an unpleasant habit of subtly putting down her husband. Somehow he wasn't doing quite enough, not trying hard enough, not quite measuring up to what she expected of him. After more than thirty minutes of listening to her talk, with only rare and brief contributions from Eric and even rarer and briefer observations from Lance to try and steer the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go, Lance pulled his laptop over to his desk and began to quickly create a spreadsheet to help them write a budget they could live with. He went over each item with them in detail, trying to pin them down with exact numbers when they both were trying to be as vague as possible. It took nearly an hour of going over the figures they had in front of them before he was able to print out the spreadsheet and give each of them a copy, along with some written suggestions he had thought of to help them save some money here and there. Lance figured it might be a complete waste of time, as both of them looked at him somewhat doubtfully, although he noticed that Eric looked at him with a bit more appreciation than his wife was showing. Poor dude, he was really stuck, without any easy way out. He probably really regretted that night fucking the bitch without a rubber.

It was a quarter to seven before Lance finally felt he had said everything he could to help them. He stood up, realizing with relief that he had been so focused on the financial spreadsheet that he was no longer tenting his suit pants anymore. Eric and Samantha both stood, and it was Eric who spoke.

"Thanks, Lance. We really appreciate all your help." He extended his hand to Lance, who smiled and shook it. Samantha also shook his hand, but Lance noticed her smile was somewhat strained, without the friendliness she had previously shown. I guess she really didn't like my suggestions, he thought. Showing them to the front door of the now-deserted office, Lance said a final good night to them and went back to his office to finish up a few things before he left for the weekend. Looking out his window onto First Street below him, he saw them walking down the street to a parking lot more than a block away. Strangely enough, they weren't holding hands, or even walking next to each other. Samantha was walking about two steps in front of her husband. Lance wondered why they hadn't parked in the garage across the street, especially since it had been raining buckets when they had arrived. Oh well, time to get the hell out of here and get some food in his stomach, and maybe, if he was lucky, a hot dude's load up his asshole.