Read Stranger in the Room: A Novel for Free Online Page A

to get the goddamn doughnuts out of my vehicle and into Tyrone’s hands.
    “What up?”
    I heard a deep male voice behind me. I turned and found myself looking into the soft brown eyes of a young man standing too near—skinny, eighteen, nineteen, jeans hanging off his hips exposing white boxers and a flash of brown abs, jacked-up Nikes. He was cute, although I had a bad feeling cute wasn’t what he was going for. His eyes dropped to my breasts.
    In the background, three guys about the same age leaned against a brick storefront, watching. One of them made a big show of licking his lips. I leaned back against my car, looked him up and down. I didn’t want to show him anything. Guys like this feed on fear. “What can I do for you?”
    “What can you do for me?” He turned to his friends. “She wanna know what she can do for me.” This brought on waves of laughter from the theater section, more lip licking than a supermodel photo shoot. “I tell you what you can do.” His tone had changed. He was talking tough now. “How ’bout you be my bitch for the day.”
    “Seriously? Has a woman ever once said yes to that?”
    “Bitches don’t always know what’s good for them.” He folded his arms over his scrawny chest. “They need somebody smart to tell ’em.” His friends applauded his genius, shouted encouragements.
    “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, and tried to move past him.
    He blocked my way.
    “Look, I’ve had almost no sleep. My cousin, who may actually be delusional, is in my house. My boyfriend
the cop
never sleeps. And I just delivered background reports to a fucking nanny agency. One of them had bad credit. That’s it. Bad credit. Exciting stuff, right?”
    “The bitch” oversharing momentarily stumped him. He was smiling at me, but his eyes couldn’t stay still. Bad sign. His nerves were firing. A tranquilizer gun would have been nice. He took a step forward. I looked up into his muddy eyes, smelled beer and cigarettes on his breath.
    “I swear to God, if you take one more step, you’re going to be
my
bitch.”
    He grabbed my arms at the shoulders. The heel of my eight-hundred-dollar pumps sank into his bony shin, and when he let go, my hand came out of my bag with the 10mm and slammed it against the side of his bony head. He yelped, hopped backward, went down on his butt. His buddies had that wide-eyed, excited schoolyard stare kids in packs get when a fight breaks out. I made sure they all got a good look at the Glock.
    The lobby door opened across the street and Tyrone came out fast, wearing a white suit and wingtips. He looked like a mocha latte. Not a lot of guys could pull it off, but Tyrone looked cool in anything.
    He jerked the street thug up one-handed by the collar with forearms about the size of Virginia hams, held him in front of me like a puppeteer. “You look at her real good, son. She’s one of my people, which means she will flat kill your dumb ass.” He turned to the group. I saw the shoulder holster loaded with his 9mm under his coat. “Any y’all mess with one of my people again, we gonna hunt you down.”
    He let go of the thug. We watched him wobble off to his friends, holding up his droopy pants with one hand and his bloody ear with the other. Not one of them looked back.
    “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
    “Don’t get on my bad side,” I reminded him.
    He pulled an envelope from an inside pocket and handed it to me. “Steven T. Wriggles. Robbery, grand theft auto, and resisting arrest.”
    I scanned the report, looked up at Tyrone. He was grinning at me. “He robbed a Seven Eleven with dried nasal mucus?”
    Dimples cut craters in his handsome face. On a normal day, I might have swooned a little. But not today. “Clerk gave him three hundred from the register,” Tyrone told me. “Which just proves nobody wants a booger touching them.”
    “Good Lord.” I sighed and looked back at the report. This wasn’t exactly a step up from nanny