Stranger in the Room: A Novel by Amanda Kyle Williams Page B

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