The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,7
about drinking really made me want a friggin’ drink. But you can’t get a drink there and that’s the point, or at least it was for me. Those meetings and those people to whom I felt so superior and despised at times for their frailties and for their kindness, very patiently and knowingly put up with my shit and saved my life in spite of my bad attitude. I went out into the world then to get the business going rather than going back into the package store on the corner.
CI&I kept me busy, and it caught on—traditional investigative services, missing persons and skip traces, corporate bug sweeping, fugitive apprehension, and the occasional foray into the unadvertised.
“Denver.” Neil chuckled. “We got him. He bought a house there.”
Neil is blond and usually a little shaggy, with at least a day’s worth of stubble on his chin. He was sitting in front of a computer screen, a Cuban shirt unbuttoned to the navel. Neil always seemed a little out of place to me in a city with no beach to bum around on. When I bent over him to have a look at the screen, he smelled like coffee and pot, his own personal speedball.
We had been trying to locate an accountant who’d skipped town with the contents of a company safe, which included quite a lot of cash, for a large corporate entity with headquarters in Atlanta. The company didn’t want to file charges and my understanding was that they wanted the matter handled in a quiet way, just find the accountant and turn the information over to them. I didn’t ask why. Something in that safe was obviously worth going to some trouble to get back, but it was none of my business. My days in law enforcement were over.
“Guy rips off five hundred grand,” Neil said, and tucked his longish blond hair behind his ears. “And he goes to Denver? Go figure.”
Neil was the first person I called when the idea for CI&I sprang to life. I needed his expertise. He knows his way around a computer, one of those guys who spent high school with his bedroom door locked, a computer in his lap, some drugs, and a teenager’s desire to subvert. Neil is essentially a hacker, an extremely successful hacker who got himself on the FBI’s list of cybercriminals and then worked for them as a consultant. He’s on the payroll of more than one corporate giant who hired him as a security expert when they couldn’t shut him down. Neil is paid not to hack. This makes him an extortionist pure and simple. But it’s always good to have one around, isn’t it? And he works cheap. He doesn’t really need the money. He does it because he likes it, but he only likes it when he can control it. This means he works when he feels like working and on his terms. I have no problem with that. He’s a huge asset, and we get along most of the time.
He turned away from his monitor and looked at me for the first time that morning. I was wearing cargo shorts and a shirt rolled to the elbows, still very scratched up from the bond enforcement apprehension gone bad. Neil sipped his coffee and studied me seriously.
“You going after this guy in Denver?”
I shook my head. “I just want to get paid.”
“Ten bucks says they want you to go out there and get what he took from their safe, and I bet it’s not the money they’re worried about. Maybe they’re cooking the books or bid rigging. Or maybe it’s, like, sex tapes.”
I thought about that. “Still not going.”
He smiled and looked up at me through bloodshot eyes and blond lashes. “Worried you might break a nail?”
“I know you are but what am I?” I shot back.
Neil seemed momentarily stumped by this. “ ’Fraidy cat,” he rebounded, and so our day began with childish insults, just the way we liked it.
From outside, we heard hooga, hooga and moments later the door opened and Charlie Ramsey came grinning into our workspace. Neil looked at me and smiled. We work by appointment. Not a lot of regulars, just Charlie and Rauser and my friend Diane, whom I’ve known since grade school. Charlie always announced his arrival with the squeeze horn on his bicycle handlebars. He works as a bicycle courier, and as far as I can tell has the intellect of a twelve-year-old, which made him a very