Home Free by Sonnjea Blackwell Page A

me.
    “Oh, Alex, is everything okay? I called you
back as soon as I got home from work, but I never heard back from
you. Are you all right?”
    God, she was worse than my mother when I got
home late in high school. Missing curfew isn’t a good idea when
your mother is an ER nurse. Or, evidently, when your neighbor has
no social life. “I’m fine, Deb. Is that giant black cat one of
yours?”
    “Oh, only Boots and Socks are mine. The rest
are strays. I just put food out for them so they don’t starve.”
    What did she think cats did before Purina
came along? “So the black hellcat isn’t Gloves or Mittens,
then?”
    “Boots and Socks. No. It must like you,
though. I’ve seen it on your porch a few times. It never went to
your house when the other people lived there.”
    “No, it doesn’t like me. It left me a message
yesterday. I think it’s threatening me.”
    “A message?”
    “It killed a mouse and left it on my front
porch. Who does that? Maybe it’s a mob hit-cat.”
    “Cats do that when they like you. They bring
you things to impress you. It could have eaten the mouse, but then
you wouldn’t have been impressed.”
    “Impressed? I would have been fucking
thrilled if the dumb-ass thing had eaten the Ebola-infected rodent
instead of leaving it in a stinking dead heap on my goddamn welcome
mat.”
    Debbie looked appalled. I wasn’t sure if it
was my language or my lack of respect for the feline-American
community or both. I didn’t much care.
    “Ebola?”
    “Plague, whatever.”
    “Well, if a cat decides it’s yours, there’s
nothing much you can do about it.”
    “I’m not a cat person,” I growled.
    “Apparently it doesn’t think so,” Debbie
answered, angling a nod towards my feet, where Lucifer was again
attempting to tangle me until I fell on my ass. I jerked the car
door open and jumped in, slamming it shut before the beast could
sneak in. I gave Debbie a perfunctory wave and backed out with a
lurch. I didn’t feel a sickening thump. Damn.
    I made my way through the inversion
layer-induced haze that had settled over the streets already,
clicking the knob on the AC one notch higher every quarter mile.
Five notches later, the system was on max and I was sitting in
front of a broken down bungalow on Cherry Street, around the corner
from the DMV. It was a neighborhood that was hostile when I was a
kid and hadn’t gotten any better. Yards were hard dirt and, more
often than not, surrounded by chain link. Windows were barred. The
sun’s ultraviolet rays were extra intense because there were no
trees to block their trajectory. The residents were depressed,
destitute, drug-addicted or very likely all three. I checked the
number on my pad again. Forty-two eleven was more of a shack than a
house, the wood siding hanging off in sections, one banister
missing from the porch steps, litter in the yard and an off-kilter
screen door that looked like it had been slammed one too many
times. There was a beat-up Toyota Tercel parked in the driveway,
and I guessed the odds of there being indoor plumbing were no
better than fifty-fifty. According to the internet, this was Lonnie
Chambers’ house.
    I wasn’t sure what I was going to say if
someone answered the door. “Hello, what did Lonnie do to get
himself killed?” seemed a little crass. I figured I’d think of
something when I got there. I angled myself out of the Element and
locked it with the gizmo. There was a teenage girl sitting on the
front porch of the house across the street, rocking a stroller back
and forth and watching me impassively. The house was poor but
better maintained than the others on the street. The girl had dark
skin and wavy black hair, and I guessed she was probably Mexican,
although from this distance I couldn’t tell for sure. I hoped she
was babysitting, but I knew that was naive. I nodded in her
direction and received no response. I made my way up to Lonnie’s
front door and knocked.
    A woman answered the door. She