The Stranger You Seek Read Online Free PDF Page A

appreciate that while he wasn’t looking. Rauser had a few jagged edges, but he was a handsome guy if you’re okay with off-the-charts testosterone levels, the kind of guy who has to shave down to the collarbone every morning. He’s more Tommy Lee Jones than Richard Gere. More Gyllenhaal than Pitt.
    The kitchen where he stood doctoring his coffee was really just a corner of the converted warehouse, with all the necessary appliances, a sink, red marble countertops, no walls or partitions. He saw a couple of leftover figs on the table, glanced at me for approval, then plucked them all off the plate. A raging sweet tooth was just one of the things we had in common.
    Big puffy leather sectionals had been strategically placed throughout the wide-open space just beyond the kitchen, along with leather cubes in bright colors—red, purple, mint, red, purple, mint. Most of the main space was painted a very light sage, but the longest, most open wall was periwinkle with a shocking Granny-Smith-apple-green line painted across the center, part lightning bolt, part EKG monitor. I had given away my decorating power of attorney to a local designer based solely on her reputation in the city, a decision I questioned later.
    “All we need is a goddamn purple dinosaur!” I’d blurted out upon first seeing our newly designed commercial loft. The designer, standing with hands on hips and her subordinates lined up reverently behind her, had very explicitly and through clenched teeth explained to me as if I had some disability how sophisticated and dramatic the space was. Sure. Okay. I can appreciate drama. Hey, I’d paid good money to have her drag us into the twenty-first century and, by God, I was going to learn to love it. A wide, flat-screen plasma television that lowered itself out of the rafters on demand was the highlight for me. It thrilled me each and every time. Neil, Rauser, me, Diane, even Charlie now and then, we had all spent evenings here watching games and movies, playing foosball on a table Neil and I had ordered and then paid someone else to assemble. Two fights had broken out regarding competing ideas for assembly before we realized we were not equipped for the project. Damn thing must have been in five hundred pieces.
    Rauser walked toward us, blowing steam off his coffee and watching us from under arched brows. Neil and I were joking around about something silly and that seemed to irritate him.
    “Ah,” he said, loud enough to interrupt. “The intellectual stimulation here, it’s what I come for.”
    “Why
do
you come?” Neil asked with a smirk.
    Rauser came back with “To see if you suck dick as good as you make coffee.”
    “You wish,” Neil said without looking at Rauser. He was fixed on his computer screen, which was a jumble of shifting letters and symbols and numbers. For all I knew, he was hacking into the CIA. He’d done it before, changed their logo by replacing the word
Intelligence
with one he liked better.
    He swung his chair around, folded his arms over his chest, and studied Rauser. “By the way, I put a mild hallucinogen in the coffee this morning.”
    Neil and Rauser seemed to always be in some kind of competition. My presence made it worse, I decided, so I turned for my office before this escalated into scratching and spitting. I had work to do, but Rauser was hot on my heels.
    He followed me into the far left corner of the warehouse that is my office. No glass or walls for privacy. Oh no, that would have been too simple. Instead, the design firm simply erected a huge wire fence. It’s something like an enlarged version of barbed wire and about ten feet high—barbed wire on steroids, and backlit in deep blue, sort of an artsy East-Berlin-during-the-Cold-War thing. Really different and, I have to admit, beautiful, in a moody anti-corporate corporate way.
    Rauser plopped his ancient leather case on the outside edge of my desk and, after wrestling briefly with one of the brass latches, opened