A Mighty Fortress

by S. D. Thames

  “Uh-huh. I left the stall, started washing my hands, and there she was. doing the same thing right next to me and saying the same things she’d said in my dream the night before. ‘You need to go home, Evangeline. You need to go home.’ I turned to look at her and she disappeared, but I could still hear her voice. ‘Now, Angel, you need to go home now.’ It sounded like she was talking through one of those microphone bullhorn things.”

  “What do you make of all that?” I asked.

  A long sigh. “We see what we want to see.”

  “So you wanted to see your mom? You wanted to go home?”

  “Sure. Call it premonition. Maybe it was my mom, or maybe she was just reappearing in my subconscious.”

  “You do realize she probably saved your life?”

  “I think our subconscious knows more than we realize.”

  I realized I was leaning forward on my elbow now, staring at her. “Did you talk to your dad about that, about what you saw?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? Isn’t he like a preacher or something?”

  For whatever reason, she decided it was time to turn off the lamp next to her. Then it only took about three seconds for the floodgates to open. She went on to talk a long time about what it was like growing up with her father. How she always felt pressure to be perfect—not just from him, but also from her mom—and how it was always her mom who would console her at night after her dad had whipped her with a belt for failing to meet their standard of perfection. Then, her mom would tell her that he’d done it because he loved her, and she’d lie in bed all night, unable to sleep, wondering what kind of love that was. She’d go to school the next morning, with little sleep and bruised thighs.

  She took a deep breath. “I remember one night after my mom got sick, I asked her if God was doing this because he loved her. As soon as I said it, I knew it sounded different than I meant it to. I didn’t mean to say it out of spite, but that was how it sounded.”

  “Did your mom know that?” I asked, staring at the dark ceiling above me.

  “I don’t know. She nodded a little bit, and left my room crying. I asked my dad that same question not long before the night he hit me.”

  “And what did he say?”

  She wiped her eyes. “Here’s the last preacherly thing my dad ever told me: he said God took momma home as an act of mercy. You know why?”

  I shook my head, knowing she couldn’t see me.

  She answered anyway. “So she wouldn’t have to live to see the whore her daughter had become.”

  Without thinking, I grunted.

  She was quiet for a moment. I expected to hear her sniffle or snob, but instead her voice turned angry. “That was the day my dad died to me. He later told me I was dead to him, too, but he was already dead to me when he told me that.”

  “Then why’d you go there Sunday night?”

  “I already told you why. My mom told me to.”

  I thought about that for a minute. Then I said, “I have a feeling your dad regrets a lot of things, too.”

  “As he should. He lost his wife, his daughter, his church.”

  I don’t know why, but I asked, “You think he lost his faith?”

  She didn’t answer.

  We said nothing else before falling asleep.

  When I awoke, she was lying on the floor next to me with my arm wrapped around her. Dammit. I didn’t want to move and risk waking her up, but I didn’t want us to be that close, either. Sleep had removed all pretense from her expression. Probably from mine too, and once awake, I couldn’t help but stare at her. She may have been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, at least in the way she was beautiful, and here she was, sleeping right next to me, wearing nothing but her underwear and my T-shirt.

  I was about to stand slowly when she opened her eyes and met mine.

  I wanted to look away but couldn’t.

  She smiled faintly, closed her eyes again, and told me she was sorry, but I made a damn fine pillow.

  I dozed off for another half hour. When I awoke this time, Angie was even closer. For whatever reason, this time her proximity only made me anxious; my heart was racing and I felt short of breath.

  I took my time standing, careful not to wake her again.

  Once I was standing, she rolled over and extended her arms over where I’d just lain. I watched her for a minute, and suddenly felt chilled by the feeling that someone was watching us.

  I started in the kitchen. I was especially tired, so I left the Keurig alone and set a full pot of dark roast to brew. Then I made my way to my office. My iMac was happy to see me, as I was happy to see him. It’d been a long week. I checked the cloud and made sure the notes I’d taken in Wauchula and Miami appeared there. I pulled Bob Hunter’s scribbled phone number from my wallet and put it in my desk drawer for safe keeping. It was only then that I realized it had been a week—an entire week—since Mattie Wilcox had woken me up and set me on this journey. A week later, two dead—four if you count Kiki and Jimmy—one critically injured in Kara, and one missing in Mattie Wilcox. And Sal Barton—did his attempted suicide have anything to do with the puzzle I found myself lost in?

  The coffee pot chirped, so I returned to the kitchen. Along the way, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching us, so I looked behind every door and in every corner for Giuseppe. Finding no sign of him, I poured myself a cup of java and returned to the computer.

  I still had more questions to look into about McSwain and Scalzo. I searched the property records and confirmed that McSwain’s company did in fact own the storage garage where Sal worked on Harleys and Scalzo’s guys had worked on my face Sunday night. That company owned a lot of property in Tampa, and I already knew what most of it was used for. And then I started running more searches on websites like Craigslist, Backpage, and a host of others that popped up when I entered the right keywords.

  I sipped my coffee as I scrolled through page after page of women offering their bodies for sale like they were selling lawn-mowing or house-cleaning services. I’d seen enough for now to give me a lot to think about.

  Besides, a different question weighed on my mind, heavier than Scalzo’s business dealings or Tampa’s sex trade. I returned to Google and typed a question:

  Are angels real?

  That returned countless pages providing accounts of alleged encounters with the ethereal. People who’d nearly died from car accidents and cancer and later claimed they’d met a celestial being who somehow allowed them to survive the ordeal.

  I thought of what Angie had said: We see what we want to see. That was what I believed. What I wanted to believe.

  But I was having a hard time with that.

  I knew the power of the subconscious. I knew the number of times mine had played tricks on me, played devil’s advocate against me, and, more importantly, pushed me to go harder and fight longer than my body was otherwise willing or able to tolerate. But deep inside, I knew it wasn’t just me. It couldn’t just be me. Could it?

  “What are you doing?”

  Angie was standing in the doorway to my office, my favorite T-shirt still hanging on her.

  “Just some reading,” I said.

  She tried to look at the screen, but I’d closed Safari.

  She cleared her throat. “You have any dreams last night?”

  I shook my head. “Not that I remember.”

  Her eyes grew dark and sad.

  “Was it your mom?” I asked.

  She nodded as a tear trickled down her right cheek. “You were in it, too.”

  “What did she say?”

  She took a moment and wiped her eyes. I thought she was about to say something poignant. Instead, she lowered her eyes and whispered, “She said I’m going to have to die.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Sunday Morning Revisited

  I stared at her for a long moment before I asked, “What did she mean, you’re going to have to die?”

  Angie shrug
ged with a surprising indifference, and it soon became clear that she wasn’t going to elaborate on her dream. She just yawned and asked if she could get another hour of sleep. I glanced at the clock on my desktop. “Sorry, we need to get busy.” I stood and walked to the kitchen, making sure she was following me.

  Once she caught up, she yawned again and asked, “So, what were you looking up on the Internet?”

  I was beginning to wonder if she thought she’d caught me looking at porn, and then I felt the need to explain myself. “Angels,” I said.

  “What?” she said, as if she’d misheard me.

  “I was reading about angels, among other things.”

  She couldn’t help but to roll her eyes. “Learn anything helpful?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But I do have some more questions for you.”

  She sighed again and told me to hold on while she poured herself a cup of joe. Then she took a seat across from me and said, “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Did any of the guys you used to see, the VIPs, they ever mention being or knowing cops?”

  “Why, is this McSwain guy a cop too?”

  “Don’t worry about McSwain right now. Whoever Mr. Silver is, I think he may be getting some help from the police.”

  “Most dates didn’t volunteer what they did for a living, and I never asked.”

  “And you never had any communication with them, outside of these dates?”

  She shook her head and grimaced at the strength of my coffee.

  “Sorry, I make it strong.”

  “Geez, I think you could lube a race car engine with this stuff.”

  “So tell me how the dates were made.”

  “Chad took care of all of that.”

  “Did anyone help him? That seems like a lot of moving parts for him to keep up with.”

  “Not really. He was very meticulous and well-organized. You know he graduated with a 4.0 at UT?”

  “A real star student. And entrepreneur,” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  It was time to cut to the chase. “What do you think about going independent?”

  “Independent?” Judging by the gulp that followed, she was apparently growing accustomed to the coffee.

  I took my own sip and nodded. “I’ve been researching call girls in Tampa. It seems there’s the independents, who work for themselves, and then girls like you, who work for someone else.”

  “Yeah, but most of the independents really work for someone else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, ultimately, everyone has a pimp. Chad, at the end of the day, call him what you will, but he was a pimp. Same with Pilka.”

  “Chad was the associate, right? Pilka was the master pimp?”

  “I never really understood what their relationship was. It didn’t really concern me.”

  “So, with Chad out of the picture, what do you say I place an ad for you? We can get the message out to your VIPs that you’ve gone independent and are available for dates?”

  She grinned. “You’re going to be my pimp?”

  “You’re not going to see anyone. We’re just going to screen them.”

  “For what?”

  “Your ad will say you’re only seeing past customers. We’ll email them to confirm, with an eye toward trying to find out when you saw them, and whether we might strike gold.”

  I could tell by her demeanor that she wasn’t crazy about this idea. “So I’m supposed to meet up with some guy who could be the killer?”

  “It’ll never get that far, I promise. But maybe this guy, this Mr. Silver, if he’s as hard-up on finding you as I think he is, will show himself.”

  She didn’t seem to be buying it. “So this guy, if he really killed Chad, he’s just going to email me for a date? You really think he’d do that?”

  “I do, if he wants to kill you, too.”

  She swallowed hard. “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass on being the bait.”

  “It will never come to that. We’ll just be posting, at least for now.”

  She thought about it over a few more sips of the coffee. “Just one more problem with that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If Vinnie Pilka were to find out I’d gone independent, especially in light of what happened last week, he’d likely be the one to have me killed.”

  I finished my coffee and found myself smirking across the table. “Let me worry about Vinnie Pilka.”

  Our first stop that morning was at a Target on Gandy. The malls weren’t open yet, but Angie needed clothes. She still wore my Johnny Cash shirt along with a pair of Val’s gym shorts and my ill-fitting flip-flops. When we arrived at the store, the sky was dark with clouds, too dark to see any silver lining, and a light humid mist moistened everything in its reach. It would’ve been a bad hair day, if I still had hair.

  Angie was easy to shop for. She picked out two pairs of shorts and matching shirts, and a sundress. She had a body that seemed like it would fit in anything you put on it, and she knew that body well enough to buy the clothes without trying them on. Once we’d checked out, she disappeared into the restroom and then emerged a few minutes later wearing the sundress. Every man within eyeshot stood mesmerized, jealous of me, as we made our exit.

  “So we’re off to see this McSwain guy?” she asked once we were back in the car.

  I checked the time. It was going on eleven, and I figured a self-respecting businessman like McSwain might be busy at that hour on a Sunday morning. Plus, I was hungry and had realized earlier that morning that we had other work to do. “McSwain can wait.”

  Ten minutes later, I parked the Volvo outside the Palma Ceia Country Club. “What is this place?” Angie asked.

  “What’s wrong, you’re not the country club type?”

  She threw me an incredulous glare.

  “It’s okay. I’m not either.”

  The same attendant I’d met Tuesday morning was working the dining room. He gave me the same judgmental stare; only this time, it showed a hint of recognition. “Remember me? We’re running late for brunch with Mr. Pilka.”

  “Vincent Pilka?” he asked snootily.

  I nodded. “The one and only.”

  “May I tell him your names?”

  I glanced at Angie, then back to Herr Douchebag. “Sure. Tell him Chad Scalzo and Angel Hunter are here.”

  Angie squeezed my hand as we waited.

  It took Jace all of thirty seconds to make his appearance. He grimaced when he saw me. “I should’ve known it was you.”

  “I’m sure you should’ve a lot of things, Jace.”

  He got a good look at my guest. If he knew her, he wasn’t showing it.

  Herr Douchebag cleared his throat as if to remind us where we were. “Is everything in order?” he asked, directing the question to Jace, if anyone.

  I gave Jace a pat to lead the way. “Everything’s copacetic, right, Jace?”

  I started walking, and Jace had no choice but to follow. A moment later, he gunned it to pass me and assumed the lead. Once he did, I noticed he was walking with an awkward limp. “You need to get that checked out,” I told him. Angie was still holding my hand.

  “You don’t scare me, Porter,” Jace said.

  “That’s good to know, Jace. I don’t like to scare people unless I mean to.”

  He stopped us before we entered the main dining room, and then he turned to give me a serious stare. “No funny business, you understand?”

  I looked past him and saw his employer scraping the bottom of a bowl of oatmeal in the far corner of the dining room. It seemed they liked to keep Vinnie Pilka out of sight at Palma Ceia. I couldn’t blame them.

  I pushed past Jace without answering him. As I neared Pilka, he raised his phone to his ear and took a call. I knew he’d seen us when he raised his other hand to tell us to hold on, all the while never making eye contact with us. “No, I’m still here,” he said. “That’s fine. We’ll wait.” He lowere
d the phone and scanned my body, up and down, with his round empty eyes, and then did the same for Angie before looking back to Jace. “Well, look what the cat dragged in.”

  I couldn’t tell whether it was Angie or I who’d prompted the comment. His eyes were still fluttering between both of us, his lips wet with saliva and sweat. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” He was definitely eyeing Angie now.

  She nudged me to answer.

  “We’re here to resign and get paid for services to date.”

  Jace was trying hard to look tough. He tried to cross his arms and raise his chest, but that only seemed to cause him pain. He took a seat and moaned as Angie and I took the other two chairs. “Jace here is in pain,” Pilka told me once I was seated. “And it’s your fault. But we’ll come back to that. First, tell me why you and this whore are interrupting my meal.”

  Angie crossed her arms, and her cheeks turned the color of the pepper sauce Pilka was sprinkling on his scrambled eggs. I tried gesturing for her to let it go, but by then she’d already started hurling a litany of insults at Pilka that would’ve made Chris Rock blush. Pilka set his fork down and finished chewing the food in his mouth while a smirk of amusement blossomed across his face. He waited for Angie to catch her breath, and then asked her, “Now is that any way to talk to your employer, sweetheart?”

  “I don’t work for you anymore.”

  “News to me,” he said.

  Angie glanced at me as if to say it was my turn, so I took over. “Actually, we have a lot of news for you.”

  But Pilka’s eyes were still on Angie. He snorted as he laughed, and then he wiped his chin with the back of his sleeve. “Listen, sugar, you think I don’t know all about what you and Chad cooked up? You think I couldn’t have stopped it like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if I wanted to? The only reason I let you go with Scalzo is because he promised me ten percent of whatever you made the first two years, and that I could still bend your ass over anytime I wanted.” He stood up and grabbed hold of the braided leather belt snugged tight around his portly waist. Then, leering at me, he said, “You mind? I’m about to take advantage of what’s mine.”