The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,104

favorite is Mama’s Gonna Get You Free Bail Bonds & More, off Memorial Drive.

I took the stairs. I’d been in the elevator here before—fingerprints all over the buttons and filthy carpeting and the feeling of not wanting to touch anything. The stairway smelled like pee, but at least I knew I’d make it upstairs, something that was always in question with the elevator, which groaned at the slightest provocation. What if I was the last little bit of weight it could bear? I’d already had three Krispy Kremes today. What I like in an elevator is no element of surprise.

The outer lobby in Tyrone’s office was quiet, the secretary’s desk unmanned but neatly arranged. I’d seen lots of different faces at that desk. Tyrone used a temp service a couple of days a week.

“Yo, Keye. What up?” He was wearing a lemon yellow blazer over a red silk shirt. When he leaned back from whatever he’d been reading and crossed an ankle over his knee, I saw that his pants matched the jacket and his socks matched his shirt. In contrast to the drab offices, he was like a flare in a desk chair, a bright and shining light. Tyrone was six-four, with a strong jaw, square weightlifter’s shoulders, and dimples when he smiled. I thought he was pretty. So did he.

“You gonna get the kid for me?”

I shrugged. “What’s it pay?”

“Come on now.” He laughed and dimples broke out everywhere. “Don’t do me like that.” He lifted a manila envelope up off his desk and held it out. “Kid’s name is Harrison. You take this and I’ll make sure you get a good one next time.”

Lyndon Harrison had been pulled over on I-75 inside the Fulton County line, the file said. He had agreed to a breath test, which put him just over the legal limit for alcohol. He’d behaved badly when the officer told him he’d have to go to the station, and the cop had promptly added resisting arrest to the DUI charge. His mother had put up her house to guarantee the bail. The house would have been quite a return for Tyrone on a six-thousand-dollar guarantee, but he wasn’t that kind of guy, he told me, and grinned.

I took Mitchell Street to Capital Avenue, got over on DeKalb Avenue near Grady Hospital and drove east toward the Oakhurst section of Decatur. Oakhurst had once been a run-down area of shut-ins and crack-heads, dealer-infested and dangerous. In the last few years it had been undergoing a sort of face-lift. The combination of urban sprawl and soaring property values in Atlanta and Decatur, which now meet at several points, had changed the life of many longtime Oakhurst residents. Tiny frame houses on quarter-acre lots were suddenly worth hundreds of thousands, and residents began putting up For Sale signs in their yards. Gradually these neighborhoods were being renovated or razed. Still, some of the old residents stayed, so it was not uncommon to see renovated homes with towering additions and privacy fences next door to a weather-beaten shack in stunning disrepair.

The Harrison home was on Winter Avenue near the East Lake MARTA station, a little white brick with black shutters and a pampered square of green lawn. Lavender plants bloomed under the front windows and gerber daisies had been planted around the mailbox. A golden retriever spotted me through the front window when I rang the bell, and barked ferociously, but his entire body was wagging.

The boy who answered the door looked eighteen at the most. He didn’t fit the picture I had of Lyndon Harrison, the bail jumper. I could smell pot smoke through the screen.

“Hi,” I said. “Is Lyndon around?”

He smiled. “Hang on, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and as soon as he disappeared, I let myself into a small slate foyer with a coatrack and a mirror and a golden retriever who nuzzled my hand until I consented to giving him some attention. I knelt down next to him and rubbed his ears.

“Can I help you?” a male voice asked.

“Hi, Lyndon,” I said in the most nonthreatening tone I could come up with. As I stood, my left hand moved to my back pocket, where I had a pair of cuffs. “My name’s Keye Street.” I held out my right hand to Harrison, but he didn’t take it.

“Yeah, so?”

Lyndon Harrison was tall with the wire-thin body of a boy who hadn’t quite begun to fill out the frame he’d sprouted. I smiled. I was still hoping he