Stranger in the Room: A Novel (44 page)

I looked over at the table, saw the 9mm next to gaily-colored paper plates and napkins that matched the party hats with little balloons in pink and blue, almost exactly like the ones in the crime scene photos from his eighth-birthday party.

He picked up a knife and I froze. He cut a slab of cake, started to eat it with his hands, devour it grotesquely as if he were starving, his wide face twisted into a mask of grief. Tears ran down his cheeks as he leaned forward to blow out candles. Icing and cake were smeared on his cheeks and lips and shirt. Blue food coloring had stained his teeth. He grabbed the back of Miki’s hair and jerked her head back. I saw dried blood on her face for the first time and a bruise covering her cheekbone and right eye. How long had he been here tormenting her? I looked at Officer Jacobs. He was looking back at me, but his skin was very pale and his eyes seemed unfocused. He’d been hurt, I realized. It was the only way Richards could have gotten past him.

Richards started to yell again, something I couldn’t hear over the storm through the glass. He reached for the gun. I had to get inside.

I raced back under the deck off the master bedroom and yanked a
wheelbarrow from the crawl space. Alarms in every octave wailed across the city—ambulances and cop cars, tornado warnings. The thunderstorm must have spawned a touchdown somewhere in the city. I hoped Rauser had heard me. I hoped some of those cops were on their way here. But I couldn’t wait. Richards had started to cry—his ritual, his letting go. He was going to kill them.

I scrambled up on the wheelbarrow and saw the blood that had seeped into my pant leg, but I wasn’t feeling any pain now. Stress hormones, training, instinct; they were all doing their job.

I grabbed onto the deck railing, closing my eyes against pelting rain, pulled myself up. The screen door was latched. I punched out the mesh and reached in, lifted the hook from the eye, then pushed open the wooden door. The wind roared. And I knew the pressure had shifted too. He’d know a door had opened somewhere in the house. I left it open, hoping he’d blame the storm. Maybe he’d come to check it out.

I stopped, listened. No crying. No raging. No sounds to support the sickening scene I’d witnessed through the window. Richards’s fucked-up birthday party, with its little plates and napkins and cone-shaped caps with elastic bands and cake, was silent now.

I kicked off wet shoes and pushed them under the bed, waited, shivering, behind the bedroom door. I’d started to consider the odds. Richards was a big guy. I couldn’t handle him physically. He’d have his 9mm and Officer Jacobs’s service weapon too. I closed my eyes, breathed out some tension, waited.

Five seconds, ten, fifteen
. Not a sound.

I came around the door and started down the hallway, sidestepping an old floor register on creaking 1950s hardwood floors. My clothes were heavy and dripping wet. I looked into the guest room where Miki had been propped up in bed. The covers were half off the bed. She’d been dragged out. I peeled off the soaking APD windbreaker and kept moving, Glock steadied.

I leaned around the doorway to the living room and took a quick look. Jacobs’s handheld scanner was on the floor, smashed into pieces near the front door. The scanner had squawked and annoyed Richards. Or frightened him. Police dispatch would have tried to contact Jacobs as soon as Rauser received my call. Richards had probably run
into the living room on hearing it. I imagined him crushing it under the heel of his big shoes, raging around Rauser’s house. Miki must have been frightened to her core.

I turned the corner into the living room, first right, then left. Nothing.

I moved down a long wall toward a wide archway, part of the house Rauser had renovated, the dining room with an open kitchen behind it. My body let me know I’d reached that leaping-off point. No turning back. That’s when the rest of the world retracts. I heard my own breathing and the
pat-pat, pat-pat
of my pulse. Everything else shrank away. That’s what pure, blind fear does. It pulls you through the keyhole.

I swung into the dining room, saw Miki and Jacobs. Something struck a window, was whirled away by the wind. There was blood spatter under the officer’s chair. He was struggling against his restraints. The birthday candles on the cake flickered. The gun was gone. My eyes swept the kitchen. The light changed. I’d been in Rauser’s house enough to know something had just moved in front of the living-room windows. I hit the floor and heard the quick pops of the 9mm. I scrambled on my elbows to get out of the way.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Keye. You’re the missing party guest.” It was the first time I’d heard his voice undisguised. It was weirdly high pitched and deeply southern. I was at the far end of the table, pressed against the floor. I needed to get into the kitchen and away from Miki and Jacobs before they got in the way of a bullet. I heard footsteps approaching and Richards called my name again, tauntingly. “Keye …”

That’s when I felt it—pressure, like coming up from the ocean floor too fast. I felt it in my head and in my ears a split second before it sounded like we were on a tarmac. The air smelled like sulfur and natural gas. The entire house trembled. The windows shattered, popped out. A filthy, black cloud slammed into the front of the house like a transfer truck. Richards was thrown forward. His gun went off again. I saw him hit the floor on his stomach. I aimed. He raised his head, looked at me through the table legs.

“Jesse, freeze.
Now
.”

And then a bomb went off. The ceiling split. Drywall and insulation and everything stored in the unfinished attic rained down. Tree limbs punched through the roof, punctured windows, whipped out across the house like they’d been rubber-banded, sweeping away anything loose, scraping against my body like huge wire brushes. Dirt and water poured into the house. I looked up and saw the swirling sky and the wide trunk of a pine tree, thousands of pounds balanced on brick and wood.

Richards had disappeared. Miki and Jacobs had both been knocked over in their chairs. The table had tipped. Cake splattered on the floor.

I climbed over a tangle of broken branches to get to them. The house shuddered, the pine tree broke through. It seemed to split the place in two. The noise was unearthly. The roof groaned, then began to cave. Long branches that had punctured the house shifted, whipped up, lashed out. I lost my balance, fell on my stomach. My Glock spun out of my hand. Something hit my back, hard. A hand grabbed my ankle, jerked me backward. He was dragging me. He wrenched me up and over the big limbs that had stabbed through drywall and stone and brick. I fought to yank myself free, flailing and kicking at him. He grabbed the front of my shirt and jerked me up. A closed fist slammed into my face. The world turned a gold-speckled navy blue. It registered somewhere in my brain that water was splashing my face. Gasping, I felt his knee on my chest, hands squeezing my nose shut, the bottle shoved between my lips, the searing pain in my eyes. My throat was on fire. I was choking on it, trying not to swallow, strangling on the bottle of bourbon that always sits on Rauser’s counter. He was pouring it down me as I choked, as I fought to keep from drowning on the thing that had almost killed me already. I tried to open my stinging eyes. His gun. Where was his gun? I saw him leaning over me wearing the cone-shaped party hat, now soaked and drooping crazily. Blood ran down his face and neck. His temple and cheek had been sliced by glass or brick. His dark eyes were fixed on me. He took the bottle away. I saw movement in the background. Miki was on her side, still bound to the chair, pushing herself toward us.

Richards followed my eyes, turned for just a second. I didn’t wait. I
jerked the 9mm out of his waistband and shot the sonofabitch. Right through the forehead as soon as he turned his bloody, frosting-splattered face back to me.

A symphony of sirens played in the background—car alarms, security systems, ambulances, cop cars. No rain or wind. Just an eerie stillness. I pushed his body off me, flopped over on my side, retching. I heard Rauser’s voice.

  
39

E
normous trees had been yanked up by the roots out of the soaked red-clay ground and toppled over on houses, blocked streets. Parts of the city were still without power. Cops at intersections tried to control traffic under blacked-out traffic lights. It was my first chance to see in daylight what the super-cell had unleashed on us yesterday when a tornado twisted out of it and roared down Atlanta’s streets. I saw a telephone pole with the top half sheared off. A section of Dekalb Avenue had been closed because of the tangle of cables and wires in the street. You really don’t get a sense of how huge a telephone pole is until you see one lying across the road. Some businesses had boarded-up windows. Others were dotted with black punctures where windows had been.

Atlanta was shaken, but it had survived another storm. And so had I. Still, my dreams and sleep had been tainted by the alcohol Jesse Owen Richards had poured down my throat. I had my first hangover in years. I had stood in the shower last night feeling the water stinging the cuts on my body, letting myself cry, too softly, I hoped, for Rauser to hear. Later, he had propped up behind me in my bed with his arms tight around me and a towel-wrapped ice pack pressed against my face as I drifted off.

I pulled up to Miki’s old Victorian and saw a Mercedes in the driveway. My mother and father had driven her home, then gone to the
pharmacy and gotten the sedatives she’d been prescribed. She was sobbing as they walked her out of Rauser’s torn-up house. Officer Jacobs had been rushed to the hospital. Richards had shot him in the stomach when he’d opened the door.

I tapped on Miki’s door. No answer. I tried the knob. Locked. I sent a text message to tell her I was here. The door opened a minute later and I looked up at Cash Tilison.

“That’s quite a shiner you got there, Keye. I hoped we’d meet again under better circumstances.” He stepped aside for me. “Miki’s in the sunroom.”

I found my cousin on her love seat, leg propped up. “It’s my hero,” she said. “Hey, we match.” She pointed at the bruise on her face. There was a vodka bottle on the table, a bottle of pills, a hand mirror, a razor blade, lines divided out on the mirror. Cocaine, I assumed. She smiled at me. “Help yourself.”

“Miki, what are you doing?”

Tilison came in and relaxed in one of the chairs. I ignored him. “Are you okay?” I asked my cousin.

“She’s wondering if you’re safe here with me,” Tilison told Miki. “She really thought I was your stalker, can you believe that?”

I kept my eyes on Miki. “Do you seriously want to go back to that place with him? With drugs and alcohol, with him calling you names, following you? Haven’t you had enough?”

“I want him here,” Miki told me.

“Because he brings you that shit?” I pointed at the mirror. “Is that the hold he has over you?”

Miki unrolled a
Time
magazine, tossed it at me. I looked down at it—acres of green land with a swirling black tornado bearing down on a farmhouse. It was a stunning photograph. “You should see the spread inside. I’m not just going to be a finalist this time. I’ll get that award and more awards. You’re always on your high horse, Keye. I’m going to be a star. How’s
your
career going?”

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“Oh Christ, relax. Pour yourself a drink. What does it matter anyway, after yesterday?” She laughed. Cash laughed with her.

I had wanted to protect her so badly, but I couldn’t save her. Not from herself. I wanted to cry again. I didn’t. I turned and walked out.

  
Epilogue

R
auser and I were sitting at Southern Sweets. He always knew how to cheer me up. We each had an enormous wedge of old-fashioned chocolate cake on our plates, the best cake in the city, in my opinion. The café had that old-time ice-cream-parlor feel, with heart-shaped wrought-iron chairs and little round tables and a black-and-white tiled floor. Rauser always looks funny to me sitting in a small chair. He was turned sideways because his legs wouldn’t fit under the table. An overdeveloped sweet tooth was just one thing we had in common, and another reason I loved this man.