The Long Wait
- By Robert Clymer
- •
- 30 May, 2025
- •
Ghost Navarro on Infidelity
It was just past 10:00 p.m., and Las Vegas pulsed in the distance, vibrant, reckless, and glittering with stories no one dared speak out loud.
Gabriel “Ghost” Navarro sat motionless behind the wheel of his surveillance
vehicle, windows cracked just enough to keep the windshield from fogging. The
dull hum of the city was the only sound in the alley. That, and the faint
static of his earpiece.
The man he was following hadn’t come out yet. Third floor, red brick motel, south-facing window. The same routine all week.
Except tonight, there were two shadows inside.
Ghost’s fingers rested lightly on the rigged handheld camera, lens pointed at the door across the street. His eyes, though, his eyes were somewhere else. Somewhere quieter.
“Infidelity,” he thought, as he watched the digital timer blink. It wasn’t just about cheating. It was about betrayal. Emptiness. That feeling in your stomach when something is wrong and no one will admit it, not even the person you love. Especially not them.
Clients always came in with the same look. Not angry. Just tired. Tired of guessing, tired of hoping.
Most weren’t even looking for a confrontation. They just wanted the spinning in their head to stop. Wanted proof. Wanted peace.
He’d seen it a hundred times. Probably more. The moment when truth became unavoidable.
A light flicked on behind the motel curtains. Movement.
He adjusted the zoom with muscle memory and kept still. The woman in the window wasn’t the wife. She hadn’t been last night either.
He pressed RECORD. No judgment. No emotion. Just truth.
“The job isn’t to accuse,” he thought. “It’s to confirm.”
There was no glory in this kind of work. No drama. Just cold documentation—locations, timestamps, footage that might one day sit in front of a judge or across a divorce table.
But the silence, that was the part no one warned you about.
The silence between clicks. Between frames.
That was where Ghost’s thoughts lived.
He thought of his brother sometimes during these waits.
The cases he never got to finish.
The truths he didn’t get to bring home.
The motel door opened. The subject exited with the woman on his arm. Ghost’s camera tracked them without so much as a sound.
He exhaled slowly.
“You don’t follow the heart,” he reminded himself. “You follow the subject.”
That was what Sin City Private Investigators did. What he did. Brought calm to the chaos. Showed people what was real, even when it hurt.
Because in the end, there was one rule:
“They don’t see me. But I always see them.”
