The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,5

mouth. The flint on his Zippo caught after the third try. He wasn’t supposed to smoke in the building, but I wasn’t going to correct him. Not today. “Remember when there was just, like, normal stuff? Somebody shoots the guy in bed with his wife or something? Nothing weird. Just normal everyday murder.”

I shook my head. “Before my time.”

Rauser pulled open his desk drawer and dropped his cigarette into a hidden ashtray and, head down, massaged both temples. For the first time, I realized that there was more silver than black in his hair. He was nearly fifty, handsome and fit, but a lifetime of caffeine and cigarettes, a lifetime of chasing monsters, had turned him to ash.

“Bad case?” I asked.

Rauser didn’t look at me. “Understatement.”

“You’ll figure it out,” I told him. “Good guy always wins, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Rauser said, with about as much conviction as Bill Clinton at a deposition. “And maybe Judge Judy will come in here and shake her ass for us too.”

“I’d like that,” I said, and Rauser showed me his smile for the first time today.

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Your Online Adult Edge Fetish & Knife Play Community blogs > beyond the EDGE, a fantasy by BladeDriver blog title > Purple Cabbage

It was the first time I had been so near to her, although I’d seen her many times. And she had seen me. Whether it was conscious I am not sure, but her eyes had skipped over me in public places. I stood on her porch waiting for her to answer the door. I didn’t need to wait. She had not even latched the screen. So safe in your little homes, I kept thinking, and an old song came to mind. Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky … and they all look just the same …

She came to the door wearing a pale blue cotton shirt, a dish towel in her hand, perspiration around her hairline. She motioned for me to follow her. A hot breeze from the street rushed through open windows. She took me to her kitchen and offered me a chair at her table. She cooks early before the heat is too bad. The house has no air-conditioning. It is stifling already. The stink of boiling cabbage nearly choked me when we stepped into the room. The countertops were Formica, poisonous yellow and dated. She was chattering about her son coming home from summer camp that afternoon, and all I could think about was how she would smell once the chemicals began their wild run.

“My son is always starving,” she said, and smiled at me as if starving were an endearing quality, a clucking mother hen. “I’m glad you’re here. I didn’t realize it would be today.”

I did not tell her why I was there. I did not want to ruin the surprise. The silly cow was smiling at me and using the back of her hand to push sweaty hair off her forehead. I was thinking about her skin, the warmth of it, the texture, the salty taste, the firm resistance against my teeth as I bite into her.

She offered me iced tea and set it in front of me. Sweat trickled from the glass onto the tabletop. I did not bring my hands from my lap, did not touch the glass. I touch nothing. I am invisible.

I had my briefcase on the table opened away from her. She was at the stove stirring a pot of purple cabbage. “How do you think little Tim will do living with your sister?” I asked. I could not resist the urge to play. These things go so quickly.

She turned from the stove. “My son lives with me. I don’t understand.”

You will.

A shadow crossed her face, something uneasy. Alarm lit up her dark eyes as they moved from the briefcase to my face, to the hands I had kept in my lap, to the kitchen door. Something inside her was clawing, urging, begging for attention, some still, small voice warning her to get out, but she was not going to listen. They never listen. It is absurd, really, utterly absurd. They do not want to offend me. What if they are wrong? It would be so impolite.

I closed my eyes and breathed. Beyond the food and the heat I detected it at last, the onion scent of fear, hers and mine, hanging heavy in our shared air. It hit me like an electric current. The chemicals were surging, cortisol was practically bleeding out