The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,3

himself over, a blue-white explosion knocked him backward. Just a little black powder, some petroleum jelly, a battery and a couple of wires, a few fireworks to slow him down. My ears rang from five feet away and for a couple of seconds I had to fight my way through a million tiny flashbulbs.

Johnson lay there like a slug, motionless. I approached him cautiously, Glock steady, and checked him for signs of life. Breathing fine. Out cold. I pulled his big arms up behind him. His palms were scorched.

“It wasn’t supposed to be quite that dramatic,” I told his limp body as I snapped cuffs on his wrists and threaded a belt around his waist and through the cuffs. “But then I really don’t know shit about explosives.”

I rolled him onto his back. With one size-thirteen shoe in each hand, I attempted to drag him by the ankles. Damn. The guy was at least two-sixty and dead weight. I’m five-four and a half on tiptoes and one-ten if I drink enough water. I moved him about three inches before I gave up. I could have used my mobile phone to call the cops for a pickup, but the girl jokes would have run for weeks at APD.

I plopped down on the ground and poked him in the ribs with my Glock. “Come on, you big fat baby, wake up.”

His eyelids rose a full minute before his eyes were able to focus.

“Hi,” I said cheerfully, shining my flashlight into his bloodshot brown eyes. I was holding it cop-style over my shoulder and near my face. “Remember me?”

He squirmed angrily, then made grunting animal sounds when he realized his hands were locked behind him.

“Now, would you like to walk your fat ass to my car, or you want me to call the cops?”

“Who you if you ain’t no cop?”

I thought about that. It wasn’t a bad question. “Soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know,” I promised him, nudging him again to get him on his feet. But he was having trouble getting up without his hands. I got behind him and pushed.

“Ever think about a diet?”

“You like it, bitch,” Johnson slurred. He seemed a little loopy. “You want some Antonio. You know you do.”

Oh yeah, bring it on. Nothing like a big ole fat man with a prison record.

“Okay, Lard Boy. Lets you and me take a drive.”

3

The old Sears Roebuck building is an Atlanta landmark. It took seven months to build it in 1926, and even in its day, the building, which includes a guardlike tower in the center, looked more like a prison than the center of retail activity. Two million square feet of faded brick sprawls for acres and rises up nine floors above Ponce de Leon Avenue on the outer edge of Midtown, where you couldn’t stop for gas without getting heckled by street people or hit up for money before the cops moved in. For the last few years the sign out front has read CITY HALL EAST and the building currently houses overflow from our growing bureaucracy and a portion of Atlanta’s massive police force. This will soon change. The mayor closed a forty-million-dollar deal with a developer who says it will be the city’s hottest new address in a couple of years. Condos, live/work artists’ spaces, restaurants. So it goes in Midtown Atlanta, where the landscape is ever changing and scaffolding is a thriving industry. The city was hashing out details on where the current residents will end up, but no one seemed happy about packing up their offices and moving out. At least not the cops I knew firsthand.

A couple of blocks east, a breakfast line was already forming at the community soup kitchen. The temperature hadn’t dropped below seventy-eight degrees at sunrise in a month. We were having a real southern-style heat wave, but the homeless line up for breakfast in jackets. It must be hard to stay warm when your stomach is empty. I wondered how the city’s hottest new address would get along with the soup kitchen regulars.

At the station with Antonio Johnson, I saw Lieutenant Aaron Rauser watching me from his office across the hall in Homicide. Johnson was fully alert by then, cursing, struggling, trying to make a scene, showing off a little. He’d been fine in the car, quiet in the backseat, still fighting off the drugs and the explosives, but when I was using one of the station phones to call Tyrone, whom I