A Mighty Fortress (24 page)

I opened the door, slowly, and the faint illumination from the street and rear parking lot provided enough light for me to look up and down the hallway and confirm that I was alone. Here in this room, at least.

I stuck my head in the room and followed the light.

I jumped at the sound of music. Where the hell did that come from?

It was my phone. My damn cell phone. I quickly hit the reject button. I checked the number to make sure it wasn’t Kara calling to tell me she’d left, but it was a number I didn’t know.
 

I turned the phone off and kept crawling.

I passed through the door I’d opened a moment before. There was still enough light to see that I was alone. Then I made my way to the far window and peeked through the blinds. The spot where Mattie usually parked was empty. But damn it, there was Kara’s white BMW parked a few spots away. I didn’t like what that meant.

I heard a sound again—another floorboard upstairs.

It was time to really assess the situation. I had no doubt now that someone was upstairs. It was time to spend my last glimmer of hope. “Kara, is that you?” I yelled out. “Kara, are you okay?”

Nothing but silence.
 

Then, a slight creak of a board. It could have been the old office shifting.
Yes, the humidity of the storm could cause the shift,
I told myself. But the next one was too loud. It, no doubt, was caused by human movement.

Broken lock. Power out. Unidentified intruder. This was plenty enough to call 911. I turned my phone back on and dialed.

A voice asked me what my emergency was.

I whispered: “I think there’s been a break in. I don’t know the address. A law office in Hyde Park. Wilcox and Associates.”

The floor above me shifted again. I hung up.

I returned to the hallway. The next door on the left was Kara’s office; I eased my head in. Her office didn’t have the benefit of much streetlight, so I took out my phone and used it to shine enough light to see that her office was a mess: papers scattered everywhere, her shelves cleaned out, even the wall decorations removed. This wasn’t caused by trial prep; someone had turned it upside down.
 

Phone in hand, I could see I was getting a call again. An unidentified number. Probably 911 calling me back. “I cannot talk,” I whispered after answering.

“Sir, are you inside the building?” It was the 911 operator.

“Yes.”

“Leave the building, sir.”

“Okay.” I hung up. Mattie’s office was next.
 

You see enough death, you develop an instinct about it. Not just when it’s about to happen, but when it’s already happened, and when it’s about to show you its ugly face. It’s the absence of something that should be there; the presence of something that you don’t want to see but that’s always in the offing.
 

That feeling hit me hard as I stepped into Mattie’s office. Call it a sixth sense, but I knew she was dead before I saw her. Whoever had done it had lucked out and found her in Mattie’s office. By the looks of it, she was probably leaning over his desk, compiling exhibits.
 
She gave him a clean, easy shot.

It looked like Kara was shot in the back, right near her lungs. She’d fallen over the desk. I wanted to cry when I found her. I put my fingers on her neck, searched for a pulse. If there was one, it was beyond my detection.

I figured the power must have still been on when she was shot; there was no way she’d be working in here in the dark. Whoever it was had cut the power after the shooting, for some reason I couldn’t guess. Or it was possible that the power outage really
was
caused by the storm. Bad luck for the intruder, whose work certainly would have been made more difficult by the outage.
 

I glanced down. There was a roller case next to the door to Mattie’s office, but this wasn’t the case I’d loaded in Kara’s trunk after the hearing. I bent over to get a better look. It was filled with evidence, all right. It looked like someone was compiling every computer storage device he could get his hands on in the office: CDs, DVDs, hard drives, USB thumb drives.
 

A light flashed outside. I glanced around, wondering if, hoping that, it was the strobes of police cars. But it was just another flash of lightning, followed by another. The second flash gave just enough light to see the reflection in the window: a man was behind me, taking aim with both hands.

I whirled around swinging, first with my left fist and then with a right roundhouse. No sooner had I made contact than the gun fired. I felt fire on my shoulder and neck—an old familiar burn. The blast knocked me to the floor.

I looked up, and he was gone. So was the roller bag.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt a jolt of adrenaline like the one that hit me then. It was like a giant pulled me to my feet and threw me into a frenzied sprint out of the room. I knew I was bleeding. I knew what the burning numbness in my neck meant. Still, before I realized it, I was in the hallway, and he was out the door.

He took one last look in my direction; then he saw me and fired.

I retreated, but not before getting a better look at him. No question, he was a professional. Gloves. Mask. A tight jumpsuit. Bagged shoes. He’d leave no evidence or DNA residue behind.

I was back on the floor now.

I glanced down at my right arm, and realized then the amount of blood I’d lost. My right arm was more red than white. It was coming from my shoulder. I skimmed it with my left hand, felt the source. Moved it up. Even worse.
 

It felt like my head was filling with helium, and the air above me was pushing down hard, like a press. I was dizzy and cold.

The lights turned back on, then seemed to spread out like a vortex. I thought it was storming again, and I was outside under a heavy rain.
 

They were loading me in an ambulance, but all I felt was the thunder. It had returned with a vengeance.

And it lulled me to sleep again.

If I had dreams that night, I don’t remember where they began or how they ended. I remember waking up at random moments, seeing nurses and doctors looking at me. At times I realized they were doing more than looking, but I felt nothing but removed from the situation.

I enjoyed a deep sleep, the kind only possible with the assistance of modern anesthesia—at least for a guy like me. I dozed in and out, and it seemed that the interruptions from the medical staff slowed down, but not so much the thunder. I opened my eyes once, and daylight was pushing through dark storm clouds.
 

Then the music began. It played for a while, and I seemed to open my eyes from time to time to find its source, but all I saw was a gray sky and torrential rain—the kind of heavy rain I’d only seen in Tampa, which reminds you that this really is a subtropical climate. But the music stuck around. It seemed to accompany the thunder. The thunder was clapping like a loud pipe organ, and the pipe organ was blaring a majestic melody.

I knew I wasn’t dreaming, but I felt like I was back in Pastor Evans’s church. I could hear him speaking over the music. The song was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. But I knew it: it was the song I’d heard the Sunday morning when this all began. The one that sounded like an anthem.

I realized my eyes were open, and I was still hearing it.

Pastor Evans hovered over me now, speaking my name.

“Pastor Evans?” Moving my mouth hurt.

“Take it easy, Milo.” He seemed apprehensive, not his usual welcoming self. “Your eyes have been open for a few minutes, but I couldn’t tell if you were really conscious.”

“Seriously?”

He nodded. “I guess you weren’t.” He took a step closer, right over me now, and hit a switch, I presumed for the nurse.

“Have you been saying my name for a while?”

“Every once in a while, since you started opening your eyes.”

“I guess I heard it, but I didn’t register it. I heard that song. The song your church sang Sunday morning.”

“Which one?”

I tried shaking my head. Realized something wasn’t right. “I don’t know. It had the organ. I thought it sounded like something you might sing in a beer hall.”

“Ah,” he said. “Right before the sermon, we sang
A Mighty Fortress is Our God.
” He sang the same words, and I recognized the melody and nodded. “Is that it?”

“I think so. I think you missed your calling. You sing well.”

“Well, I hope I didn’t miss my calling, but thank you.”

“I’m sorry. Didn’t mean that.”

“That’s fine.” His smile relaxed. “It’s funny you say that about the beer hall. Martin Luther wrote that song. He was, like you, a beer brewer. I imagine he probably led quite a few beer hall songs in his day.”

It hurt to think. Hurt to breathe. “How did you get here?”

“Rico. Rico called me during your surgery.”

“Surgery?”

He nodded. “You’re a very fortunate man, Milo. The gunshot took a chunk out of your shoulder and skimmed your jaw and neck.”

“I guess that would explain why I can’t move my head.”

“A centimeter or two farther, and you could have lost a lot more blood. You might still be in surgery. They had to stitch you up a little in there. Your brain wasn’t getting enough blood.”

“I guess that explains the headache,” I mumbled.

He nodded.

“Kara?”

“Who?”

“The woman at the office. Is she dead?”

He took a breath, as though he weren’t sure whether to discuss this now.

“Tell me, pastor. I need to know.”

“She’s in a coma.”

“But she’s alive?”

“That’s my understanding.”

I felt a swell of lightheaded relief, but still I moaned, “Where’s Rico?”

“They’re getting breakfast. I told them to change, rest up. That I’d sit with you. They were here all night.”

“Have the police been here?”

“There’s been a detective checking in.”

“You get his name?” I asked.

Pastor Evans squinted in concentration.

“Rodriguez?”

He nodded. “I think so.”

“Of course.” I closed my eyes, hoping it would bring some comfort. The prior day’s events were slowly unfolding in my memory. I’d met C-Rod and told him that Wilcox had a video. That was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. My head started spinning, and I moaned again. “I must be the luckiest guy in the world.”

“I wouldn’t call it luck, Milo.”

“What would you call it?” I asked with closed eyes.

“Providence.”

I moaned again. When I opened my eyes, the good pastor was still staring at me. “Wasn’t Luther an anti-Semite?” I asked.

He nodded. “Among other things.” He waited for me to ask another question. When I didn’t, he continued: “Unfortunately, there’s only one person in church history who was perfect, and that’s why we worship Him and Him alone.”

“Sorry, now’s not a good time for this, pastor.”

He put his hand on my left arm and nodded. “Of course, Milo.”
 

“Providence,” I moaned with my eyes closed. I opened them. Pastor Evans nodded and squinted his eyes, wondering what I was going to say. “Where was providence when that little girl was thrown over that bridge yesterday? By her own father?”

He just stared at me.

“Where was God in that, Pastor?”

“I don’t know, Milo, but I know that he was.”

“You know that he was what?”

“I believe that he’s working through evil, Milo, and all the wrongs will be righted.”

“Because if we don’t believe that?”

He nodded. “Then the world is a very horrible place.”

I closed my eyes. “I’ve known that for a very long time.”

He was still holding my hand. “You’re a strong man, Milo, but your strength has its limits.”

“Yeah, Rico can tell you that,” I said, with my eyes closed.

“Trust his strength, Milo.”

“My strength is all I have.”

He took a contemplative breath. “That song you asked about? The Luther Song? It’s based on Psalm 46. Read it sometime.”

I gritted my teeth with my eyes closed.

“I’ll call Rico and Valencia and let them know you woke up. You get some sleep, Milo.”

I nodded. Waited long enough for him to leave.

“How are we this morning?”

It was a nurse, checking my vitals. “You’re a very lucky man, you know that?” She had long black hair tied in a braid and wore magenta scrubs.
 

“You think it was just luck?” I asked. “That man who just left said it was providence.”

“Whatever you call it, you’re lucky to be alive in my book.”

I thought about Kara again. If I was lucky, what did that make her?
 

It made me feel sick that C-Rod had shown his face in my room. All the coincidences made me sick.

Then I remembered the hearing that Judge Sanders had continued until that morning to view the videos. I wondered who would be there now, and what would happen. What would Mattie tell the judge?
 

Mattie
. The thought of him made me sick, too.

I checked the clock on the wall. It was a little after eight. “How long do I need to stay here?” I asked the nurse.

“Until the doctor sees you. He’ll be in later this morning. You have some stitches on your shoulder and jaw, about fifty-something, to be exact.”

No use arguing with the good nurse. I waited for her to leave. I knew this would be the hard part. Once she was gone, I stood, greeted by a cool rush to the head. I grabbed the side rail and waited while the vertigo passed.
 

I checked my arms. An IV hookup in my left, but nothing connected to it. I pulled it out, left it on the desk.

I found the closet, and then my jeans and Chucks. The hospital staff had washed my t-shirt, but it was stained with blood. Still, that would look better than a hospital gown. My phone was there too, albeit dead.

I shed the gown and got dressed. Then I bent over the sink to wash my face. I saw my reflection the instant I felt the bare skin.