The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,53

wrestle a girl and run off in a golf cart. I searched the upstairs bathroom for a first-aid kit, then, armed with peroxide, I stretched out the collar of my shirt and inspected the bite on my shoulder.

“Sonofabitch.” The bite was ugly, already turning a nice rich purple around the broken skin, and it hurt. The peroxide’s sting brought tears to my eyes. “That’s it,” I grumbled, and headed for the bedroom, where, after a few minutes of searching, I found a 9mm and ammunition in a shoebox in the closet. I loaded the gun and headed downstairs.

There was a canister with coffee on the kitchen counter, so I made a pot and waited. The guy was wearing one shoe and driving a stolen golf cart. I didn’t think he’d stay away long, and I was right. It took only an hour for the front door to open very slowly. I heard him walking lightly through the house, heard closet doors opening, shower curtains jerked back. Then his big eyes peered round the corner at me sitting at his kitchen table. They dropped briefly to the gun, then to the coffee cup, the coffeemaker, and back to me.

I rested my hand on the 9mm. “Have a seat, Mr. Echeverria.”

He cursed softly, slumped into the kitchen shoeless, and plopped down at the table. “Nothing ever works out for me.”

“Oh, great, a whiner,” I said. “Could the day get any better?”

He would tell me later that he had tried to buy himself a normal life when he bought his house and his new name. But nothing had been normal since he fled. He was frightened all the time, always looking over his shoulder. He believed they might kill him one day for what he’d done.

The tapes were in a safety deposit box. First thing Monday morning, he promised, he’d make a withdrawal, sign my agreement, swap me the tapes for the five-hundred-thousand-dollar cashier’s check I offered him. I invited myself for the weekend just in case he changed his mind. He objected weakly at first but soon settled into the idea when he realized I wasn’t leaving.

By Monday morning, I understood what he’d done and exactly how he’d justified doing it. I understood everything in excruciating detail. His entire life! I knew his sister’s name and that he’d had chicken pox at thirteen. I knew the birth date of his second girlfriend and his grades in high school. I knew the names of every cat he ever owned and their litter box habits. The sonofabitch was never quiet. I thought about killing him myself.

“The tapes will tell you,” he said for the thirtieth time over coffee in the breakfast nook that the money stolen from my client had paid for, “how they feel about anyone with different skin color or, God forbid, an accent. They told jokes in those meetings. Racial jokes. But it wasn’t just the jokes—it was what was happening at policy level to discriminate.” He stared at me. “They would laugh at you too. They would refuse to promote you or pay you an honest wage just because you are not white.”

In my face he’d seen the heritage that I myself knew nothing about. He was hoping to tap into some hidden rage inside me. He was out of luck. There wasn’t any rage. I was numb by then to him and to the sound of his voice. If he’d said he planned on whacking off in a giant vat of peanut butter, I would have nodded and said, “That’s nice.”

I didn’t listen to the tapes once I had them in my hands. I didn’t want to know. My job wasn’t about saving the world from assholes. I just wanted to bill out the two thousand bucks I had coming and walk away from Ray Echeverria without a lump in my throat. I stuffed the tapes inside my suitcase, locked it, and carried them onto the plane with me. I’d done my job. I was comfortable with that.

By dusk on Monday evening, I was watching the sun sink behind the western slopes through the smudged window of a 767 about to take off for Atlanta. I was tired from sleeping with one eye open on a couch at Echeverria’s house, and it wasn’t long after the plane shot into Colorado’s wide, flat sky that I drifted off to sleep.

I dreamt I was in a little diner, the kind that serves salad on thick white plates with cherry tomatoes and