The Stranger You Seek (3 page)

“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 away 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.

T
he 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 about. 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.

Charlie visits at odd times, never really anything to count on—midmorning or late afternoon, but generally several times a week, always smiling and almost never without a gift. In the summer he might fill up a worn baseball cap with blackberries. In the winter he plants pansies in the planter outside our front door. There’s a nursery two blocks away and we think he pinches them at night when the only thing between Charlie and flats of beautiful, bright pansies is five feet of chain-link fence. He seems to like the yellow ones with the deep purple eyes, the same ones, coincidentally, in short supply on the long wooden tables at the nursery.

He came in smiling with his little helmet sitting crooked on top of his head and the thick-rimmed glasses he wears pushed all the way up to his eyebrows. He was wearing his courier’s uniform—shorts with an embroidered golf shirt, short white socks. His body was lean and strong, and the muscles in his legs let you know that Charlie was a kind of athlete, but something about the way he held his head, the occasional tic, the open-mouth stare that seemed to grip him at times, made it clear that something was very off about poor Charlie.

He held out his upside-down baseball cap. “Figs,” he said, too loudly and with enough of a slur so that it sounded like
fligs
. “You like fligs, Keye? Neil, you like?”