Stranger in the Room: A Novel (7 page)

“I was hitting it pretty hard last night, Keye. It’s not my usual. I swear. I’ll take really great care of her. And I appreciate you letting me stay. It means a lot.”

“Where’s the coke?”

“It’s gone. Look, I was out with friends. We had dinner, drank, did some coke. I had a little left. That’s all.”

“Great,” I said, but I’d already decided to call Mother and have her check up on both Miki and my surly feline. Miki had freely admitted to drinking and drugging before seeing the man in her window. If there had been a man at her window. Most people who use stimulants also use pills to come down. No telling what else was in her system. And then there was the thing with Marko and the food. She’d seemed completely stumped, like she’d really forgotten she’d called the restaurant. None of it was sitting well with me.

I looked at the time display on my phone. “I have to get moving. Somebody blew a court date.” I went to the couch and put my shoes on. “I need to pick them up.”

Miki followed me. “A bail jumper? I want to come. I’ll get my camera.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Oh come on. Don’t you want company? I’ll turn the stove off and we’ll go.”

I was silent.

“Keye, look at me. I’m clear as a bell.”

If that was true we wouldn’t have a dinner tray from the restaurant sitting in the kitchen. I looked up into her blue eyes. I fully intended to tell her she absolutely could not come. But she had that caged-animal look. I knew it well. “Okay, but you have to do what I say. I’m serious. This is my work.”

Miki kissed my forehead. “I’ll behave. I promise.” She skipped off down the hall to get her equipment. “Is it dangerous?” she called from the guest room.

“Only if you’re afraid of boogers.”

  
6

T
he hours between five and seven are great for bond enforcement. Southerners never seem to think things can go wrong at supper-time. People are just getting in from work and preparing dinner. They’ve left the outside world behind and walked into the safety of their homes. It had been a sacred time in our household growing up. No one shows up at your door during those hours unless they want a seat at the table. It’s just common decency. No business. No solicitors. No telephone calls. My parents had been fanatical about this. Mother was passionate about cooking, and if she spent all day doing it just to see our faces light up, our faces better be at the table and friggin’ lit up on time or she would throw a full-on fit. And Emily Street could really pitch one.

We pulled into the Sunshine Duplexes in Chamblee near I-285 in the scarred-up ’97 Neon I use when I don’t want to make a big splash. The dented hood was an unrepaired reminder that texting while driving is irretrievably stupid. It was a low-income area, ethnically diverse, with a heavy concentration of Korean, Vietnamese, and Hispanic immigrants who had gathered near Buford Highway, the strip in Atlanta for just about any kind of authentic flavor you’re craving, from Japanese to Ethiopian and everything in between. And it was a good place to find honest employment if your English or your green card wouldn’t hold up.

“So what did this guy do?” Miki wanted to know. She had her camera hanging around her neck.

I gave her the short version and omitted certain details involving Wriggles’s attempted transfer of DNA. “He robbed a convenience store.”

She was checking her camera. The light was still good and would be for a while. She leaned out the window with the camera to her eye. So much for keeping a low profile. A group of boys with baseball gloves and a bat were playing on the crumbling pavement. There was no green space at all. The entire complex was paved, cracked, forgotten. “This is fantastic,” she said. “Let me out.”

I parked at a closed-up duplex.
No trespassing
signs were hung on the boarded windows. The pavement had broken away so badly that the tiny driveway was nearly all weeds. A tin overhang that had once been a carport drooped hopelessly. Miki got out and headed for the boys playing ball. Miki had a way with boys of all ages.

I looked back at Wriggles’s file. He was white and six feet tall. The photograph showed a receding hairline and a mousy brown ’fro—a poor man’s Steven Wright. That he moved into a community where he’d stick out like a football bat when he was supposed to be on the down-low was cementing the idea that Wriggles wasn’t a very talented criminal. Fine with me. Easy money.

The boys had gone back to their game. Miki was talking to them while she snapped pictures. I walked over. “Anybody want to earn five bucks?”

I was practically mobbed. I showed them Wriggles’s photograph. They recognized him at once. They all wanted a slice of the pie. We settled on five bucks each. One would come with me and the others would slow him down if Wriggles made a run for it. After a brief powwow, one boy emerged as the chosen escort.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Angel.” He didn’t look up at me. He was dark-haired, around ten years old, wearing a Braves cap and generic high-tops, the kind you get at discount stores. I thought about the strangled-child case Rauser was working, then about Rauser. He’d slept all of two hours. Rauser had children of his own, grown now but loved no less. The cases with kids always wore deep lines in him.

“Don’t be scared, okay, Angel? All I want you to do is knock, yell through the door your mom wants to borrow something. Then you take off. He’ll never see you, okay?”

“I’m not scared,” Angel said, and squinted up at me in the late-day sun.

We walked up the cracked drive past little brick duplexes, each with two narrow windows in the front and one in the carport. Miki was taking pictures of asphalt and brick and everything else, moving lightly over potholes and dips like the camera was part of her. Whatever her photographer’s eye was seeing, I hadn’t seen yet.

“You know if this guy has a job, Angel?”

“Don’t think so. He walks to the beer store in the middle of the day.”

Wriggles’s carport was covered in the same rusty overhang I’d seen at every unit. It was empty except for a trash can and a recycling bin full of Michelob bottles. His car had broken down at the convenience store he’d robbed, I remembered from his file.

“He was in our house once,” Angel told us quietly, as we stepped in the carport. “He smelled bad.”

“Good to know,” I said. Vertical blinds were closed—the plastic ones you get for seven bucks at Home Depot, standard issue for apartments around here.

“The guy’s a freak. My dad says he’s bringing the neighborhood down.”

Miki hung back with her camera. Angel and I went to the door. I could hear a television. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. An impatient male voice shouted over the television. “I gave at the office!”

“Hey, man, my mom needs to borrow something.” The volume muted on the television. “It’s José from down the street.” Angel smiled up at me. “White people think we are all named José.”

“Nice touch,” I whispered. We heard someone approach the door. Angel gave me a thumbs-up and took off. The door opened.

Steven T. Wriggles was shirtless and in his underwear. And we’re not talking Calvin Kleins here. I mean just plain underwear, Walmart special, the kind boys wear in school. I’d seen more of them than I wanted to admit. White with a red band. And not attractive. Wriggles was tall, with a pasty beer belly and sparse tufts of curly brown hair on his chest. I stepped up in the door frame. Wriggles frowned.

“Was that your kid? I don’t have kitchen stuff, if that’s what you want.”

“You forgot to show up for court, Mr. Wriggles. Need to get you in and get a new date set.”

He tried to close the door on me. I pushed back with my forearms and squeezed in a little further. I felt for my cuffs. “So get dressed and let’s go.”

He put his hands on his hips, planted himself with feet shoulder width apart, defiant in his dingy underwear. I heard Miki’s shutter buzzing. He scowled at her. “Who the fuck is that?”

I charged the rest of the way in and slapped the cuffs on his right wrist. Wriggles jerked his arm away, and the dangling end of heavy silver handcuffs flew up and smacked him in the face. I think his eyes crossed for a second. Miki was in the house now too, circling us with her shutter humming like she was covering Afghanistan. And then Steven T. Wriggles did the unthinkable. With handcuffs swinging off one wrist, he brought his hand to his nose and jammed his finger inside. Then he jabbed at me with the offending finger.

“Jesus!”
I leapt out of the way and with delayed empathy understood why the clerk had emptied the cash register that day and handed Wriggles three hundred dollars. I think even Homeland Security would have caved. TSA agents would run screaming at the sheer repulsiveness of the act.

Miki was laughing, moving around us. I whipped the Glock out of the duty holster on the back of my jeans. Wriggles’s eyes got wide. If you’ve never seen a full-size 10mm Glock, it’s an imposing weapon. The Bureau had experimented with making them standard for agents, but the size was unmanageable for trainees, and the recoil will make your teeth rattle. I got attached to mine, though. It’s a great deterrent. Dr. Shetty has some ideas about why I continue to work in fields that require a big-ass gun—something about being short and not having a penis. But even a full-on dimwit like Wriggles appreciates the sinister character of my weapon.

His hands went up. “Okay, okay. Just don’t fucking kill me.”

“We’re going to go in back and you’re going to get some clothes on,” I told him. “And just so you know, the safety on this thing is in the trigger. It’s not even really a safety. It’s really awkward. You do something gross, there’s going to be an accident.”

I followed Wriggles to a bedroom piled up with dirty clothes and
ashtrays and beer cans. He pulled jeans over his underwear and put on a blue T-shirt that had
K-Y Lubricating Jelly
printed on it in white. Just the thought of that kind of hit my gag reflex. He pushed the hanging handcuffs through the sleeve.

“Get on your stomach on the bed.”

“My
God
,” Wriggles exclaimed.

“Oh right. As if.” I waved my Glock at him and he got on his stomach. I pushed my knee into his back, pulled his arms up behind him, and got his other wrist cuffed. I used a plastic zip tie to attach them to his belt loop. Then I pulled a shirt out of a pile on the floor, rolled it up, and tied it around his head like a bandanna, pushed it down under his nose.

Wriggles started flopping around like a seal. “I can’t breathe,” he protested. “It smells bad.”

“Sorry, pal. I’m not letting that nose of yours in my car.”

Miki helped me get him turned over and up on his feet. We put him in the passenger’s seat. Miki got behind him.

W
riggles was processed while I waited for the paperwork I would need for Tyrone’s Quikbail. My cousin was surrounded by cops and, I suspected, flirting her way into some seriously great photographs of Atlanta’s Finest. There was a lot of laughing.

“I woulda put on my mascara if I’d known it was picture day,” Rauser said. He slipped his arms around my waist and bent to rub his rough cheek against mine. “Commercial Robbery says you brought in the snot guy.”

“Don’t you have enough to keep you busy in Homicide?”

He pulled out his phone, moved some things around with one of his knobby fingers, then showed me the screen. “Miki sent it to me. I’m thinking it should be my wallpaper.” It was a still shot of Wriggles in his underwear lunging at me with his nasty finger. “Can’t wait to see it on YouTube.”

“She uploaded a video?” I shot a look in Miki’s direction, and realized now why she and the cops were doing so much laughing. “I’m going to kill her,” I growled, and Rauser laughed. “As soon as I get back. Right now I need a backup pet sitter.”

“You’re going somewhere?”

“Larry Quinn called today with a job. It sounds interesting.”

“The cow lawyer? Uh-oh.”

I walked with Rauser to the breakroom and watched him pour burnt coffee into a cup. I could see the muck inside the pot. He offered me some, but texture is not really what I look for in a cup of coffee. “Somebody up near Lake Chatuge says the crematory put chicken feed and cement mix in their mother’s urn instead of ashes.”

“You’re shittin’ me. Why?” He took a sip and made a face, then added a ton of powdered non-dairy creamer, which he poured out of a sugar jar.

“I haven’t come up with an answer to that,” I told him.

“Motive is usually money,” he reminded me.

“Where’s the value in cement mix when you’ve got cremains on hand?”

“What was the explanation?”

“An employee spilled the real ashes and tried to cover.”

“Sounds plausible.”

“Larry doesn’t think so.”

Rauser made a
humph
sound. “Larry Quinn smells green. You know how he is.”

“Well, I could use a little green myself, and it means I won’t have to spend the Fourth of July with Mother
alone
.”

“Ouch. Guilt. Won’t Papa Bear be there to protect you?”

“Dad can’t help me. I think she beats him.”

“I hope that runs in the family,” he said, and did that up-and-down thing with his eyebrows.