Home Free by Sonnjea Blackwell Page B

looked vaguely
familiar. I thought she was probably around my age, although she
could easily have been ten years older. She had straggly, colorless
hair that might have been washed a week or so ago, the remnants of
a black eye and the vacant expression that I’d seen any number of
times on Max’s drug addicted brother. Even so, she looked like she
had been pretty, back before the drugs and the domestic abuse had
started, though it would take more than one makeover shows to get
her there again. If she was Lonnie’s wife, I would have to presume
she didn’t miss him much.
    “Yeah?” Inside, the shades were drawn,
cutting down on the glare and those pesky probable-cause
searches.
    I extended my hand. “Hi, my name is Alex. I’m
sorry to intrude. I was hoping you could give me some information
about Lonnie Chambers.” That sounded reasonable to me.
    She looked at my hand like I was handing her
a plate of dogshit, nose wrinkled and mouth a half sneer. “He’s
fucking dead.” Slam.
    Hunh. Well, that was certainly information
about Lonnie Chambers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the information I
needed. I stood there like a doofus, staring at the door for a
minute, trying to think of what to do next. I was too embarrassed
to knock again. Finally I turned towards my car. I spied the girl
across the street still watching me. What the hell, I thought, at
least she can’t slam the door in my face.
    I crossed the street and ambled up the walk,
trying to seem unthreatening. It wasn’t hard, since the girl had
seen me make an ass of myself and appeared to be enjoying my
discomfiture. She was watching me, a smirk on her face, and I
prepared myself to be humiliated by a teenager. She looked to be
about fifteen and had a world-weary countenance that suggested she
had seen more in her decade and a half than I had seen in twice
that time.
    I smiled. “Hi. I’m Alex. What’s your name?” I
didn’t extend my hand this time, since there was evidently
something disturbing about it.
    “Alex a dude’s name,” she said, rocking the
stroller and meeting my gaze without blinking.
    “It’s short for Alexis. You can call me that,
if you’d rather.”
    “Whatever. I’m Angela. That a fucked-up
looking car.” She gestured towards the metallic orange Element.
    I’d noticed when I was in college that a lot
of my fellow art students tended to like unusual-looking things
simply because they were unusual-looking. I guess I fell into that
category, because I thought the Element was bitchin’. I’d resisted
the art-school compulsion for tattoos and piercings, limiting my
rebellious self-expression to weird hair colors and funky shoes and
occasionally going without underwear. The Element was like funky
shoes. And I wanted it before I realized how much Max hated it.
Really.
    “You don’t like it?” I asked Angela. “I think
it’s pretty cool.” I didn’t know if cool was a cool word to
use to a teenager. It was so hard to keep up. Cool, hot, bad, dope,
rad, gnarly, sick, sweet. Once I watched an extreme sports
championship on television. I could never figure out from what the
pubescent broadcasters were saying if a contestant had just set a
new world record or had fucked up royally, so I didn’t know who to
root for. I switched to a Steelers game. At least then I knew who
to hate.
    “Didn’t say I didn’t like it, just it’s
fucked-up is all. What you want with Miz H? Don’t look like you
buyin’.”
    “Miz H? She’s not Mrs. Chambers?”
    The girl shook her head. “Nunh-uh. He her old
man, but they ain’t married. Her name Henderson. Sherry
Henderson.”
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Sonofabitch, that’s why she looked familiar.
“You know Lonnie got shot, right?”
    Angela nodded.
    “You know anyone who would want to do
that?”
    “Prob’ly plenty a people. Nobody like him
much.”
    “Why?”
    She gave me a bored look. “He take his belt
to his old lady a lot. Prob’ly he owe people money.”
    “For what,