A Mighty Fortress (41 page)

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.
 

“
Please
? I’m afraid.”

I might’ve believed her if she hadn’t talked to me like one of her customers with the same flirty tone she used when we’d first met in Scalzo’s condo. “
Pretty
please?”

I sighed. It wouldn’t take me long to fall asleep, and I was tired enough to nap on a bed of nails. “I’ll take the floor.”

Ten minutes later, we were both tucked away: she in my bed, and I on a pallet of blankets on the floor. There was a long silence that would’ve felt awkward if I weren’t falling asleep.
 
But Angie didn’t seem ready to count sheep quite yet. “I’m such a basket case,” she said with a sigh.

“What do you mean?” My interest probably didn’t sound sincere.

“I mean, you know, the screwed-up preacher’s daughter?”

“Why do you say that?”

She sighed again, but didn’t say anything else.
 

I had so many questions I wanted to ask her about what her dad had told me that I didn’t know where to begin, so I threw her a softball. “Why didn’t you go to Chad’s Sunday?”

“Honestly?”

I thought it was a rhetorical question, but I realized she wasn’t being sarcastic. “I wouldn’t ask you for a lie.”

She cleared her throat. “I really don’t know. I mean, I’ve been having these, I don’t know …”

“Dreams?” I said.

“How’d you know?”

I turned over and saw she was looking down at me. “Your dad told me.”

“My dad? When?”

“Yesterday.”

She sprung up in the bed. “Why are you just now telling me this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve had a lot to talk about, and you haven’t exactly been forthcoming.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That your mom came to you in a dream and said you needed to go home.”

She was silent.

“Is that true?” I asked.

“This is really none of your business.”

“Okay.” I turned back over.

“It was something like that,” she murmured a moment later.

“So when was that, Saturday night?”

“Among others.”

“She came to you in a dream Saturday night. So, why’d you decide to go home the next night? You sure didn’t seem to have your mom on your mind either of the times I saw you Sunday.”

“I spent most of Sunday hung over and drunk,” she said. “I was trying to put it out of my mind.”

“Didn’t work?”

She took a deep breath. “I guess you could say I had a flashback of sorts.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I got the call from Chad after dinner Sunday, when he said he needed me to come over for a change of plans. So I left Kara and Brian, and called for a cab at the hotel. While I was waiting, I went to the bathroom in the lobby to freshen up, and she was there.”

“Your mom?”

“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.”

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

Angie shrugged 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?”