Stranger in the Room: A Novel (5 page)

  
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I
delivered the weekly reports to Super Nannies On Call, then stopped at Rapid Placement, a headhunting agency at One Atlantic Center on West Peachtree in Midtown to deliver routine background checks. It wasn’t the most exciting work, but both these companies, along with a handful of law firms and a couple of insurance agencies that used me for everything from surveillance to process serving, paid my ridiculously high mortgage every month. And then there was Tyrone’s Quikbail.

I had been a registered bond enforcement agent since leaving the Bureau. Turns out I have a knack for fugitive recovery. It supplements my income nicely, and it’s far more interesting than most of the work I do, which usually consists of sitting on some street somewhere, trying to guess what color the next car will be, listening to audio-books and drumming my fingers on the steering wheel to stay awake until somebody runs out without their crutches or shows up with a prostitute. Bail recovery is also the part of my job that Rauser hates most. But he is not allowed to go on about this. We have an agreement. I don’t whine about him being a cop and he doesn’t interfere in my career choices. At some point, both of us had stretched the limits of this agreement. Out of fear, mostly. After we’d both been hurt so badly last year, making peace with him going back to APD took some
doing. But I did it. While he was home recovering, he worried when I left the house. He insisted I carry my gun everywhere. I was the only woman in produce with a mango, some asparagus, and a 10mm Glock. We’ve adjusted because we have to. When it comes to career, neither one of us is willing to give an inch.

Tyrone’s Quickbail is in a chipped yellow stucco building near the capitol, Fulton County courthouse, tons of county service offices, block after block of bail bonds companies, and some pretty good soul food. I found a metered spot across the street from Tyrone’s office in the three-hundred block. I saw him through his third-floor window at the desk that looks out onto Mitchell Street. I got out of my car and dropped a couple of quarters in the parking meter, then went back for the bag I dared not leave. A block and a half from about a million cops around the government offices and it was still a terrible place to park a classic car. I wished I would have thought to bring the other car, a banged-up Plymouth Neon no one ever seemed to notice. It was like driving around with some kind of cloaking device.

I grabbed my bag and looked at the green-and-white box of doughnuts I’d stopped for on the way. What was left of them. Krispy Kreme had picked up where alcohol left off. Few things sent oxytocin surging through my system like the glowing neon
Hot Doughnuts Now
sign and the promise of an original glazed right off the line. Dr. Shetty says replacing one addiction with another is dangerous. She recommends developing better coping skills instead. Apparently, my love of and perhaps obsession with food is symptomatic of the larger problem, which is: I’m insecure, needy, controlling, and stressed out, and I have intimacy issues out the wazoo. Oh, let’s not forget the penis-envy thing. I cannot believe I pay a shrink to tell me this stuff. I mean, what’s the friggin’ problem with a little replacement therapy? I exercise, if you count pacing. And it’s not like I’m shut in a closet somewhere with sugar all over my face and my finger down my throat. I often remind my brainy doctor that sometimes things are exactly what they seem. I love food because my mother, Emily Street, is just about the best cook in town and I grew up with her gourmet take on traditional southern. I love doughnuts because, well, they’re good. Okay, so maybe my cut-off switch is broken. Thankfully, my metabolism is something like a wood chipper. I thought about that. Would it
last? Once I moved past the mid-thirty point, would it slow to a crawl?
Shit
. Okay, so maybe I needed to get the goddamn doughnuts out of my vehicle and into Tyrone’s hands.

“What up?”

I heard a deep male voice behind me. I turned and found myself looking into the soft brown eyes of a young man standing too near—skinny, eighteen, nineteen, jeans hanging off his hips exposing white boxers and a flash of brown abs, jacked-up Nikes. He was cute, although I had a bad feeling cute wasn’t what he was going for. His eyes dropped to my breasts.

In the background, three guys about the same age leaned against a brick storefront, watching. One of them made a big show of licking his lips. I leaned back against my car, looked him up and down. I didn’t want to show him anything. Guys like this feed on fear. “What can I do for you?”

“What can you do for me?” He turned to his friends. “She wanna know what she can do for me.” This brought on waves of laughter from the theater section, more lip licking than a supermodel photo shoot. “I tell you what you can do.” His tone had changed. He was talking tough now. “How ’bout you be my bitch for the day.”

“Seriously? Has a woman ever once said yes to that?”

“Bitches don’t always know what’s good for them.” He folded his arms over his scrawny chest. “They need somebody smart to tell ’em.” His friends applauded his genius, shouted encouragements.

“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, and tried to move past him.

He blocked my way.

“Look, I’ve had almost no sleep. My cousin, who may actually be delusional, is in my house. My boyfriend
the cop
never sleeps. And I just delivered background reports to a fucking nanny agency. One of them had bad credit. That’s it. Bad credit. Exciting stuff, right?”

“The bitch” oversharing momentarily stumped him. He was smiling at me, but his eyes couldn’t stay still. Bad sign. His nerves were firing. A tranquilizer gun would have been nice. He took a step forward. I looked up into his muddy eyes, smelled beer and cigarettes on his breath.

“I swear to God, if you take one more step, you’re going to be
my
bitch.”

He grabbed my arms at the shoulders. The heel of my eight-hundred-dollar pumps sank into his bony shin, and when he let go, my hand came out of my bag with the 10mm and slammed it against the side of his bony head. He yelped, hopped backward, went down on his butt. His buddies had that wide-eyed, excited schoolyard stare kids in packs get when a fight breaks out. I made sure they all got a good look at the Glock.

The lobby door opened across the street and Tyrone came out fast, wearing a white suit and wingtips. He looked like a mocha latte. Not a lot of guys could pull it off, but Tyrone looked cool in anything.

He jerked the street thug up one-handed by the collar with forearms about the size of Virginia hams, held him in front of me like a puppeteer. “You look at her real good, son. She’s one of my people, which means she will flat kill your dumb ass.” He turned to the group. I saw the shoulder holster loaded with his 9mm under his coat. “Any y’all mess with one of my people again, we gonna hunt you down.”

He let go of the thug. We watched him wobble off to his friends, holding up his droopy pants with one hand and his bloody ear with the other. Not one of them looked back.

“Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

“Don’t get on my bad side,” I reminded him.

He pulled an envelope from an inside pocket and handed it to me. “Steven T. Wriggles. Robbery, grand theft auto, and resisting arrest.”

I scanned the report, looked up at Tyrone. He was grinning at me. “He robbed a Seven Eleven with dried nasal mucus?”

Dimples cut craters in his handsome face. On a normal day, I might have swooned a little. But not today. “Clerk gave him three hundred from the register,” Tyrone told me. “Which just proves nobody wants a booger touching them.”

“Good Lord.” I sighed and looked back at the report. This wasn’t exactly a step up from nanny backgrounds. After the robbery, Wriggles had commandeered the convenience store clerk’s vehicle when his own car had stalled in the parking lot. He then stopped at the McDonald’s on Ponce for a cheeseburger, the very McDonald’s that happens to be one block from the cop shop. Just so happened three of Atlanta’s Finest came in for lunch. Wriggles didn’t get halfway through his Big Mac before he was arrested. Given his weapon of choice and because
he had no priors, the judge set bail. Tyrone had guaranteed it. Wriggles didn’t show up for court. There was no known address.

“Is this all you’ve got?”

“Is that all? Oh come on, Keye. I saved this for my best tracker.”

I took the box of Krispy Kremes from the front seat and handed them over.

“Thanks.” He opened the box. “There’s only eight. Dang, girl. You gonna have a huge booty.” He tore one in half and stuffed it in his mouth, licked the sugar off his fingers. “Your eye is twitching. You know that, right?” He shoved the other half in his mouth with no apparent concern for the size of his own booty. “It’s kind of creeping me out.”

I got in my car and slammed the door.

“What?” he yelled, as I pulled out of the metered space. “Hey, wait.

What’d I say?”

T
he door slammed behind me when I walked back into my office. I went to my desk, wished yet again I had walls instead of a big wire fence. Neil spun around in his overpriced desk chair and squinted at me. “Anything I can do?”

Most days, I am at peace with where my life is now. I’m sober. I’m making a living. I’m in love. I own my own business. I’ve been luckier than most in this economy. But sometimes there’s a big hole where meaningful work used to be. I needed to buck up and take it like a man. There are consequences for actions. I torched my career, drank it away. I thought about Miki, about her awards, her soaring success. It never seemed to matter how much she drank or how many drugs she played with or how many times it had interrupted her work. She was so wildly talented, she was always welcomed back. I loved my cousin. I wanted the best for her. I wanted to celebrate her accomplishments … deep down. But some days, it was a very bitter pill to swallow.

“Where are you on Miki’s boyfriends?” I asked Neil, and logged in to one of the programs we use to assist us in skip traces. I started a search for Steven T. Wriggles, Tyrone’s bail jumper, the mucus guy. A dispossessory had been filed a couple of months back and he’d been evicted from an apartment off Briarcliff Road, his last known address.
I located his mother, jotted down her address and anything else that might lead to Wriggles, including a first cousin.

“As far as I can tell so far, it would have only worked logistically for one of them. The country singer, Cash Tilison. He has a house up near the lake.”

“The Lake” is what Atlantans call Lake Lanier. Not only is it the main source of water for the metro area and a major recreation area, it’s where the well-off build waterfront homes and dock their boats.

“He made an appearance at the children’s hospital yesterday. Fund-raiser from six to eight. He would have had plenty of time to get to Miki’s before she came home.”

“He also fits the body type for the guy in the window,” I said. “Hey, I’m sending you info on a guy named Wriggles. See if you can dig up a current address before I have to go knocking on his mother’s door.”

I called to check on Miki. Voice mail. I paid a few bills and pulled up the receivables program. Billing. It was mind-numbing. But a necessary evil. I worked for a few minutes, tried Miki again. No answer. Maybe she was still sleeping. Maybe she slept all day and partied all night. I had no idea about her routines. I knew one thing: I was dreading going home to another confrontation.

“Bingo,” Neil said, and spun around, smiling at me. “He wrote a check for eight hundred and fifty-seven dollars made out to Sunshine Duplexes. The notation says rent plus late fee.” He gave me the date. It was the day after Wriggles held up a store clerk with some, well, DNA. I didn’t ask how Neil got access to the information. We have an office “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

I typed
Sunshine Duplexes
into my search engine. “I couldn’t find current employment information. You see anything?”

Neil said he couldn’t find an employer for Wriggles either. Why work when you’re okay with taking what you want? I don’t have a lot of patience with takers and deadbeats. I’d worked for everything in my life, and what I didn’t provide for myself, my parents had worked their butts off to give me. I thought again about Miki and her goddamn awards. A little spurt of anger flushed my cheeks. I was in exactly the right mood to pay a visit on Steven T. Wriggles. But first I needed to go home, get into the right clothes, and see how—or what—my cousin was doing.

  
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