The Stranger You Seek

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  A couple of blocks east, a breakfast line was already forming at the community soup kitchen. The temperature hadn’t dropped below seventy-eight degrees at sunrise in a month. We were having a real southern-style heat wave, but the homeless line up for breakfast in jackets. It must be hard to stay warm when your stomach is empty. I wondered how the city’s hottest new address would get along with the soup kitchen regulars.

  At the station with Antonio Johnson, I saw Lieutenant Aaron Rauser watching me from his office across the hall in Homicide. Johnson was fully alert by then, cursing, struggling, trying to make a scene, showing off a little. He’d been fine in the car, quiet in the backseat, still fighting off the drugs and the explosives, but when I was using one of the station phones to call Tyrone, whom I worked with as a contractor at Tyrone’s Quikbail, and let him know I’d nabbed Johnson, the rascal started acting up.

  Cops, trickling in at the end of their shifts, laughed at the commotion. “Hey, Keye,” one of the uniforms snickered. “You don’t look so good. You let Fat Boy kick your ass?”

  I rolled my eyes and handed Johnson over for printing and then waited for the receipt I’d need to collect my money from Tyrone. When I ducked into Rauser’s glass office in Homicide, detectives sitting in their open cubes made kissing sounds. Rauser’s relationship with me was an endless source of amusement at the station. I suppose we seemed an unlikely pair. Rauser is white and twelve years my senior. We had come from different worlds and there were whispers around the station that we were lovers. Not true. But he is my best friend.

  “Good morning.” I was trying to be cheerful even though my head was pounding. I hadn’t had time to wash up and I was still picking glass out of my forearms and wiping away dried blood.

  Rauser looked terrible too. He gestured to the desk where they were fingerprinting Antonio Johnson. “Why you have to take shit work like that?”

  “Money,” I said, but he wasn’t buying it. The smile dropped off my face. It was his tone. Sometimes that’s all it took for Rauser to do that to me, and I didn’t like it. He had that look in his eye. He always picked on me when something wasn’t right in his world.

  “Keye, for Christ’s sake. You got degrees and corporate accounts. You don’t have to do that crap. I don’t get the choices you make sometimes.”

  I was playing with the pencil cup on his desk and refusing eye contact, which, in his mind, was dismissive and I knew it, but I wasn’t in the mood for all his Daddy stuff.

  I briefly ran a mental list of the corporate accounts he was talking about. The retainers were fat. I’d paid down some of the mortgage on my loft with them. But the work was mind-numbing—employment service application checks, nanny backgrounds, lawsuit histories on contractors, workers’ comp cases, unfaithful spouses, service of process. The odd subpoena offered a bit of challenge from time to time, but for the most part it was all excruciatingly boring.

  I’d been a licensed Bail Recovery Agent since leaving the Bureau. It bought the groceries while I built my private investigating business, and it still supplemented my income nicely. My shrink, Dr. Shetty, says it’s a power thing, that I have a brutal case of penis envy. What can I say? I like strapping on a big Glock now and then.

  And the degrees: criminology from Georgia Southern, doctoral studies at Georgia State in developmental psychology. And none of it, even with eight years at the Bureau, would earn me a real position with a law enforcement agency in this country. Not now. Drinking had changed all that. It entered my records as it tore away at my life and discredited me professionally forever. I couldn’t even jump on the expert witness gravy train. Expert testimony requires an expert who can’t be discredited on the stand. That’s so not me. My closet is full of bones.

  I was fifteen when I first heard about the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, and I could think of nothing else after that. I tailored my studies and my life around getting there, and a few years later, there I was. And then I blew it.

  Sometimes you only get one chance at something. Sometimes that’s a good thing too. When that door slams shut on the thing you couldn’t live without, what happens next is when the real education begins. You have to figure out how to make some peace with it all, how to have an interior life you can live with. Digging down deep is never really a bad thing in the end, but it will flat-out kick your ass while it’s happening.

  “Keep screwing around with bonding-company trash and you’re gonna get hurt,” Rauser grumbled, then muttered something that sounded like “sick fucks.”

  I lowered myself gingerly into a chair across from his desk. There were two of them, thin black vinyl cushions with metal armrests. I was sore from the tumble I’d taken earlier and it was just beginning to sink in.

  “What’s wrong?” I demanded.

  Rauser slipped a cigarette from his shirt pocket, stuck it in the corner of his mouth. The flint on his Zippo caught after the third try. He wasn’t supposed to smoke in the building, but I wasn’t going to correct him. Not today. “Remember when there was just, like, normal stuff? Somebody shoots the guy in bed with his wife or something? Nothing weird. Just normal everyday murder.”

  I shook my head. “Before my time.”

  Rauser pulled open his desk drawer and dropped his cigarette into a hidden ashtray and, head down, massaged both temples. For the first time, I realized that there was more silver than black in his hair. He was nearly fifty, handsome and fit, but a lifetime of caffeine and cigarettes, a lifetime of chasing monsters, had turned him to ash.

  “Bad case?” I asked.

  Rauser didn’t look at me. “Understatement.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” I told him. “Good guy always wins, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Rauser said, with about as much conviction as Bill Clinton at a deposition. “And maybe Judge Judy will come in here and shake her ass for us too.”

  “I’d like that,” I said, and Rauser showed me his smile for the first time today.

  4

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  It was the first time I had been so near to her, although I’d seen her many times. And she had seen me. Whether it was conscious I am not sure, but her eyes had skipped over me in public places. I stood on her porch waiting for her to answer the door. I didn’t need to wait. She had not even latched the screen. So safe in your little homes, I kept thinking, and an old song came to mind. Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky … and they all look just the same …

  She came to the door wearing a pale blue cotton shirt, a dish towel in her hand, perspiration around her hairline. She motioned for me to follow her. A hot breeze from the street rushed through open windows. She took me to her kitchen and offered me a chair at her table. She cooks early before the heat is too bad. The house has no air-conditioning. It is stifling already. The stink of boiling cabbage nearly choked me when we stepped into the room. The countertops were Formica, poisonous yellow and dated. She was chattering about her son coming home from summer camp that afternoon, and all I could think about was how she would smell once the chemicals began their wild run.

  “My son is always starving,” she said, and smiled at me as if starving were an endearing quality, a clucking mother hen. “I’m glad you’re here. I didn’t realize it would be today.”

  I did not tell her why I was there. I did not want to ruin the surprise. The silly cow was smiling at me and using the back of her hand to push sweaty hair off her forehead. I was thinking about her skin, the warmth of it, the texture, the salty taste, the firm resistance against my teeth as I bite into her.

  She offered me iced tea and set it in front of me. Sweat trickled from the glass onto the tabletop. I did not bring my hands from my lap, did not touch the glass. I touch nothing. I am invisible.

  I had my briefcase on the table opened aw
ay from her. She was at the stove stirring a pot of purple cabbage. “How do you think little Tim will do living with your sister?” I asked. I could not resist the urge to play. These things go so quickly.

  She turned from the stove. “My son lives with me. I don’t understand.”

  You will.

  A shadow crossed her face, something uneasy. Alarm lit up her dark eyes as they moved from the briefcase to my face, to the hands I had kept in my lap, to the kitchen door. Something inside her was clawing, urging, begging for attention, some still, small voice warning her to get out, but she was not going to listen. They never listen. It is absurd, really, utterly absurd. They do not want to offend me. What if they are wrong? It would be so impolite.

  I closed my eyes and breathed. Beyond the food and the heat I detected it at last, the onion scent of fear, hers and mine, hanging heavy in our shared air. It hit me like an electric current. The chemicals were surging, cortisol was practically bleeding out through our skin, my heart and hopes clamoring at the thought of what was coming next. I felt a deep and urgent ache between my legs. All I could see was this small woman. All I could smell. All I wanted. She was everything.

  I stretched on tight surgical gloves so sheer I could almost feel the air against my warm fingertips, and took my favorite toy from the briefcase—satin-finished with a white-gold throat, a crook-back with four and a half inches of high-carbon steel blade. I looked at her narrow back as she stood there stirring her cabbage and wondered if she felt it yet, our connection. I wanted her to feel it, to know it, just an instant before my hand reached her.

  I think she did. I think she wanted it.

  The neighborhood is trendy, between the Virginia-Highlands section of Atlanta and funky Little Five Points. My tiny investigating agency is in what was once a row of forgotten warehouses on Highland. A couple of years ago the owner decided to renovate the exteriors, adding aluminum and brushed-nickel peaks and overhangs, a breezeway in bright Miami deco and some metal sculptures. It looks like a demented welder got hold of a crack pipe. They are now named The Studios and marketed as commercial lofts. Our landlord raised the rent on his current tenants—me, the gay theater company next door, the tattoo artist and body piercer next to them with the S/M stickers on his Jeep, and the Hindu hairdresser on the end. The renovation would bring us more business, we were told. More walk-ins now that we appeal to the nearby coffee-and-biscotti crowd. I hate biscotti. I mean really. Has anyone ever once had a craving for biscotti? And walk-ins. Hate ’em. They’re usually total freaks. People with any sense do not window-shop for a detective. It’s just not that kind of business.

  I love the neighborhood, though. I catch myself humming show tunes all day when the theater company is rehearsing, and when I work late, I sometimes pass costumed people on my way in and out, loitering, talking, smoking. Last night a woman in a mermaid costume watched me walk in. She had a cigar in her mouth and she squinted through smoke at me, but didn’t speak. Neither did I. What do you say to a gay mermaid? A dry-erase board propped up on an easel announced dress rehearsals for Swishbucklers.

  Two doors down, the hair salon operates quietly and during normal business hours. The owner deeply resents terms like “hairdresser,” “haircutter,” or, God forbid, “beautician,” and makes it well known she prefers “hair artist.” In addition, she was recently assigned a new spiritual name by her guru and would very much appreciate her neighbors honoring that. We do try, though having gone from plain Mary to Lakshmi, we mangle it a bit from time to time. The name means something like Goddess of Prosperity and all the neighbors are hoping to hell it’s real and good fortune has smiled upon us at last.

  I am in Studio A and a small sign on my door reads CORPORATE INTELLIGENCE & INVESTIGATIONS. Inside, computers, printers, a couple of overused fax machines, track and fluorescent lighting, and a huge air-conditioning condensing unit give the place a kind of electronic purr. I sometimes hear the humming in my head when I close my eyes at night.

  I began CI&I a couple of years ago after emerging squinty-eyed from rehab as if I’d been living in a cave for three months. I was looking for something, anything, any work, any distraction. I never wanted to go back there. Someone asked if it was my first rehab and I remember looking at him, slack-jawed, and thinking, Jesus, it takes more than one? But I get that now. The outside, it’s a whole different deal. It doesn’t prop you up and keep you safe. It’s no net. It’s too many hours in the day. It’s being confronted hour after hour by your own glaring weaknesses.

  In those first days on the outside, I went to meetings all over town; sometimes all day long, just leave one and head to another. And I hated them. All the God stuff in AA really got to me. I know, I know. They say it’s whatever you choose as your own God, but let me tell you that when you’re there and everyone wants to hold hands and pray, it sure doesn’t feel like a choice. And all of them talking constantly about drinking really made me want a friggin’ drink. But you can’t get a drink there and that’s the point, or at least it was for me. Those meetings and those people to whom I felt so superior and despised at times for their frailties and for their kindness, very patiently and knowingly put up with my shit and saved my life in spite of my bad attitude. I went out into the world then to get the business going rather than going back into the package store on the corner.

  CI&I kept me busy, and it caught on—traditional investigative services, missing persons and skip traces, corporate bug sweeping, fugitive apprehension, and the occasional foray into the unadvertised.

  “Denver.” Neil chuckled. “We got him. He bought a house there.”

  Neil is blond and usually a little shaggy, with at least a day’s worth of stubble on his chin. He was sitting in front of a computer screen, a Cuban shirt unbuttoned to the navel. Neil always seemed a little out of place to me in a city with no beach to bum around on. When I bent over him to have a look at the screen, he smelled like coffee and pot, his own personal speedball.

  We had been trying to locate an accountant who’d skipped town with the contents of a company safe, which included quite a lot of cash, for a large corporate entity with headquarters in Atlanta. The company didn’t want to file charges and my understanding was that they wanted the matter handled in a quiet way, just find the accountant and turn the information over to them. I didn’t ask why. Something in that safe was obviously worth going to some trouble to get back, but it was none of my business. My days in law enforcement were over.

  “Guy rips off five hundred grand,” Neil said, and tucked his longish blond hair behind his ears. “And he goes to Denver? Go figure.”

  Neil was the first person I called when the idea for CI&I sprang to life. I needed his expertise. He knows his way around a computer, one of those guys who spent high school with his bedroom door locked, a computer in his lap, some drugs, and a teenager’s desire to subvert. Neil is essentially a hacker, an extremely successful hacker who got himself on the FBI’s list of cybercriminals and then worked for them as a consultant. He’s on the payroll of more than one corporate giant who hired him as a security expert when they couldn’t shut him down. Neil is paid not to hack. This makes him an extortionist pure and simple. But it’s always good to have one around, isn’t it? And he works cheap. He doesn’t really need the money. He does it because he likes it, but he only likes it when he can control it. This means he works when he feels like working and on his terms. I have no problem with that. He’s a huge asset, and we get along most of the time.

  He turned away from his monitor and looked at me for the first time that morning. I was wearing cargo shorts and a shirt rolled to the elbows, still very scratched up from the bond enforcement apprehension gone bad. Neil sipped his coffee and studied me seriously.

  “You going after this guy in Denver?”

  I shook my head. “I just want to get paid.”

  “Ten bucks says they want you to go out there and get what he took from their safe, and I bet it’s not the money they’re worried abou
t. Maybe they’re cooking the books or bid rigging. Or maybe it’s, like, sex tapes.”

  I thought about that. “Still not going.”

  He smiled and looked up at me through bloodshot eyes and blond lashes. “Worried you might break a nail?”

  “I know you are but what am I?” I shot back.

  Neil seemed momentarily stumped by this. “ ’Fraidy cat,” he rebounded, and so our day began with childish insults, just the way we liked it.

  From outside, we heard hooga, hooga and moments later the door opened and Charlie Ramsey came grinning into our workspace. Neil looked at me and smiled. We work by appointment. Not a lot of regulars, just Charlie and Rauser and my friend Diane, whom I’ve known since grade school. Charlie always announced his arrival with the squeeze horn on his bicycle handlebars. He works as a bicycle courier, and as far as I can tell has the intellect of a twelve-year-old, which made him a very good fit for us. We use Charlie’s visits as a way to avoid work. It’s nice for everyone.

  There were a lot of stories in the neighborhood about how Charlie ended up on a bicycle with a squeeze horn at forty-something. They are all some variation of this: The perfect job, great family, life was sunshine and Skittles until an armored bank truck ran him down at Tenth and Peachtree and permanently damaged him. Wife and kids left, Charlie lost a career, a home. He has a lot of pain in his neck, he once told me, and headaches that stop him cold. He doesn’t always speak well. His words get slurred and really loud when he’s excited, and combined with the fact that Charlie is also a close talker in a bicycle helmet that sits a little crooked, a conversation with him can be a bit, well, surreal. He seems to have moments of adult clarity, but they are fleeting. Mostly Charlie’s just a big goofy kid. I asked about his past one day. He talked about the accident. He talked about after the accident, but never before the accident. It was as if there hadn’t been anything up till then. In a rare and serious moment that day, he told me that the very next second of your life can change everything. He’d spent months in rehab at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta and learned that patients there referred to us on the outside as TABs—Temporarily Able-Bodied—another reminder that life is mutable. It’s a lesson I had learned before Charlie pedaled into our lives, but I’ll never forget his earnestness that day. We hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks and we always worried about him. Charlie spends his days on a bike in Atlanta’s treacherous traffic, and since he seems to have only about half a brain, he’s a kind of ticking time bomb. Rauser and Neil have running bets—ten bucks says he gets it this year, etc. I pretend I’m above all this.