A Mighty Fortress (34 page)

“I can read.” He finished looking over the contents of my wallet, and then he looked at me. “So let’s hear it. Keep talking.”

“Your daughter, Angel, she was one of the last people to see a man named Chad Scalzo alive.”

“So the police tell me.”

“Well, like the police, I’d like to ask her some questions about what happened that night.”

He studied me closely. “And what’s it to you? Sounds like the police are doing their job.”

“Like I said, I’m a private investigator. Someone hired me to investigate the murder.”

He reclined in his chair and put his elbow on the table. “Let me ask you, Mr. Porter,” he said, glancing down at my card for my last name. “You a man of faith?”

I studied him back for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“If you don’t understand the question, then the answer is no.”

“People have faith in a lot of things, don’t they? I think, really, everyone has to have faith in something, whether it’s some breed of religion, science, patriotism, or some other kind of -ism.”

He nodded, and then shook his head. “And that tells me all I need to know.”

“Let me tell you this. It’s not that simple for me, because I know what you mean when you talk about a man of faith. My best friend, he’s a man of faith. I don’t have his faith. A kid I knew from Texas, barely nineteen, jumped on a live grenade and saved me and three others in Fallujah. He wanted to be a preacher after he served his country. I carried half his body back to our base. I can tell you, I don’t have that’s kid’s faith.”

“So what
do
you have faith in?”

I didn’t take my time answering. I just said, “Myself.”

He picked up the revolver, opened the chamber, and emptied it of the slugs. He threw them on the floor, where they clanged and bounced in random directions. “I’ve spent the last six years of my life angry at God.” His hands trembled as he gripped the table.

“I’m sorry. Pastor Harkin told me.”

He seemed to ignore what I’d said. “I don’t believe in much anymore. Let me tell you that. And when I was a man of faith, there was a lot of things you often hear about that I didn’t believe in, like prophecy and visions and all that. I never believed prophecy was alive or had any reason to, and I never believed the Lord or his messengers appeared to us in dreams.”

“Isn’t the Bible full of that stuff?” I asked.

“Sure it is, but I’d always been taught to believe that stuff ended with John’s revelation, as recorded in the Book of Revelation.” He stared at the table for a moment, and tears started welling up in his eyes. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen my wife in dreams. Sometimes we’d be driving down a road, just like everything was fine, and I’d wake up and it’d seem so real until I got up and looked around this house. I always see her, but it never makes sense. It’s never had any kind of meaning or message, other than maybe it’d make me feel sick for missing her.

“But something happened Saturday night.” He turned his head and tensed his neck, as though fighting a case of chills. He took a breath. “She came to me then, and it was different.” He stared straight ahead, as though he was watching something only he could see.

“What happened, Bob?”

His eyes met mine. “She came to me. This wasn’t a dream like the others. It was like she came to me as a messenger, and she looked urgent, and her eyes were bright and cut through my soul. It made me want to hide. I couldn’t look at her, but she wouldn’t let me look away. And once she had me, she said, ‘Bob.’ Her voice was loud and sounded amplified, like she was talking through a megaphone, but it was clear too. She said, ‘Bob, you have to call our Angel. You have to call her, Bob. She is in danger. You have to tell her to come home.”

“This was Saturday night?” I asked.

He nodded. “I guess Sunday morning, to be more accurate.”

“What did you do?”

“I did something I hadn’t done in a long time. I got up and I went to church. A church over near Fort Myers, the first one I came to there. And then I spent the rest of the day praying about what to do. I thought Betty was crazy, wanting me to call Angel. As if I’d know how to call her. But wouldn’t you know, later that day, I remembered something? I remembered she’d sent me a Christmas card… I hate to even call it that. I think it told me Happy New Year, and she said she was doing great and thinking about going to school soon. This was eight months ago. But she told me to call her sometime. Wouldn’t you know, I put that card up then and put it out of my mind, because she really was gone, as far as I was concerned, and it’s easy to forget about things like that when you’ve put someone out of your mind.

“So I found that card, and I sat in that recliner in there for the good part of Sunday evening, and about 9:30, I said to hell with it, and I called her.”

“Did she answer?” I asked.

He nodded. “She answered, said, ‘Daddy, why are you calling me now?’ She sounded surprised, but she also sounded kind of relieved to hear from me, almost like she’d been expecting my call. But still, more than anything, I heard fear in her voice. And maybe confusion, too.

“I said, ‘Evangeline, I’m worried about you, and I want you to come home.’ She laughed at that. It was just like the talks we’d had so many times when she was sixteen, and she’d be gone days at a time. But this time, I didn’t get angry—at least not at her, not right away. I just repeated myself and said, ‘You heard me, Angel, Daddy wants you to come home.’ She was quiet then for a minute. I could hear she was in a car, had a blinker on. So I said, ‘Your momma wants you to come home too, Angel.’ She asked me why I’d said that, and I told her, ‘I’m sorry, I know it sounds strange. But she came to me last night in a dream and told me I had to call you and tell you to come home now, and she sounded like she was worried about you, that you were in some kind of danger.’ She mumbled ‘Daddy’ and started crying. She asked me why I was doing this, and I told her I was sorry, I didn’t have a choice. And then she hung up.”

“So that was Sunday night, around 9:30?” I asked.

“That’s right. You can look in that room and see where I threw the phone when I hung it up. Yanked the damn jack right out of the wall. And I went to bed. You know what happened then?”

I shook my head.

“Why, I went to sleep next. But it wasn’t midnight before Joe started barking. I got up to see what was the matter. And there she was, coming up the porch. She was wearing a black dress, looked like some kind of hussy. But I didn’t tell her that. Deep inside, I was too happy to see her. She came in here crying, looking around. She looked scared and nervous, I figured just from being here. She said, ‘Did she really call? Did momma really call?’ I told her it wasn’t a call. It was a dream, the realest dream I’d ever had. She started crying more and said she wanted to talk to her momma. I tried to hug her, but she pushed me away. She went to her old room. I heard her in there talking, I swear she was talking to her momma. I stood by that door for an hour, not saying a word. Just listening. Finally, she stopped talking, and after it was quiet for ten minutes, I went to bed. Monday morning, Angie was gone.”

Bob took a deep breath. “But Monday night, wouldn’t you know she came to me again?”

“Betty?” I asked. “She came to you in a dream?”

“She told me not to talk to anyone about Angel, not unless they knew what love is.”

“What love is?”

He nodded. “Well, her exact words were not to talk to anyone unless they knew what the greatest love is.” He crossed his arms, seemingly content that the .357 was within my reach. “So, I’ve told you a lot about Angel, and now you know that I know she’s in danger. Way I see it, you got some explaining to do about why you came here lying to me.”

“I told you, that was a mistake. I shouldn’t have lied about that. I didn’t think you’d talk to me if I came here asking questions about Angel.”

“Damn right I wouldn’t. So why don’t you answer the question, mister? Seems to be that’ll tell me a lot.”

“The question?” I asked.

“What is the greatest love?”

I really had no idea what he was talking about. I wondered whether he was alluding to his love for his wife, or a mother’s love for her child. I closed my eyes and concentrated. I remembered the word Love tattooed in cursive around a heart on Angie’s hip. I knew the love I had for my parents, but had I ever loved anyone else? How would I know if I loved Val, or Rico, or anyone for that matter? Would I kill for them? Would I lay down my life for them? Then, I felt chills tingling up my arms and neck as the answer hit me.
 

I slowly opened my eyes and raised them to Bob. “What is the greatest love? Is that the question, Bob?”

He nodded.

“The greatest love there is…” my voice faltered. “…is to lay down your life for your friends.”

“What?” He turned pale. “What’d you say?”

“Oh boy,” I sighed. “I don’t know the Bible, to be honest with you, Mr. Hunter. I was raised Catholic, learned some of the stories. Best way to put it, it never really stuck, or maybe ‘gelled’ is a better word. But I felt sick two days ago, and something was telling me to pick it up and read it. I got this Bible—that friend of mine, the guy with faith, he gave it to me. It sits there, really just holding down the mail. I tried reading some of it years ago. Never got far. But this time, I was feeling sick, and something was just telling me to read it, and I did, and I opened it, and the verse I read made me think about that boy from Texas I told you about, the boy I always dream about. It made me think about the book I told you I want to write.”

He nodded. “What’d it say?” He sounded afraid to hear my answer, or suspicious that I was stalling.

“The verse I turned to said something like, ‘No greater love is there than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’“

He seemed frozen for a moment, and it was as if the words I’d just spoken had to slowly penetrate his mind by layers. First, he shook his head, and then he moved it faster and faster. “Son of a bitch,” he moaned. “I never even thought of that. John 15:13.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
Of course that’s the answer.”

He rose. “Of course that’s the answer.” He stood there staring at the floor for a moment, and he sobbed the name “Betty” over and over for what seemed five minutes. Then, he grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. “Mr. Porter, please find her for me. Please find my Angel. You don’t have to bring her home. Just make sure she’s okay and get her to somewhere safe.”

I moved him away, which was no easy feat. He was strong and lanky, like an outside linebacker. “I’m doing my best, Bob.”

He finally let me pull him away. “Is she really in danger?”

I thought about Giuseppe and C-Rod and whoever was on the loose, whoever had killed Scalzo and tried to kill me and Kara, and had succeeded with Don Alexi. “We have to assume that she is. Now, do you have any idea where she might be?”

His face turned dour. “I woke up Monday morning and she was gone. I’da thought her visit was a dream, like Betty’s, but the sheets in there were messed up, and she’d left me a note saying she was going to see someone in South Florida.”

“Do you have any family there, or anywhere else in the state?”

He shook his head. “Betty and me was both only children, so Angel don’t have cousins or aunts or uncles. All her grandparents are gone, too.”

I thought I’d remembered Kara saying Scalzo’s associate Brian was from Miami. I wondered if that could be the connection. “What about that Christmas card she sent you? You mind letting me see that?”

“Sure,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared. My throat still felt dry and raspy, and my tea glass was nearly empty. So I went near the fridge to fill it up. “If you don’t mind,” I yelled, “I’m going to top off my tea here.”

“No problem,” he yelled back.

I filled my glass and returned the jug to the fridge. After I closed the door, my eyes skimmed the side of the fridge, where there were dozens of business cards, newspaper clippings, and quotes and magnets filling the wall.
 

I noticed a card for Detective John Shields. And there were cards for a plumber, electrician, debris removal, and just about any service you could ever imagine. As I was about to turn away, however, a cluster of letters spelling a familiar name caught my attention. At first, I figured my mind was playing a trick on me. I scanned the wall again, and all the business cards appeared as a jumbled mess.
 

But there it was. Those letters. A few inches below Shields’s card.
 

I pulled it from the fridge, causing a few magnets to fall off.

“What’s the problem?” Bob asked, now standing back by the kitchen table.

My heart was racing as I read the card for the fifth time.

It belonged to Sal Barton.

“When was this guy here?” I asked, after handing Sal’s card over to Bob.

He studied it for a moment. “He’s another investigator looking for her, I guess.”

“When?”

He took a contemplative breath. “Oh, it’s been a while. I’d say back in May. Maybe sometime in the spring.”

“What exactly did he want?”

“He didn’t get very far, I can tell you that. I don’t think he made it onto the porch before Jones here”—he waved the revolver—“greeted him good morning. So I can’t tell you much other than he nearly took a bullet in his fat ass when he reached for his wallet, kind of like you did a moment ago. He insisted I take his card in case she turned up. So he left it on the porch. I almost threw it away, but something was tugging at my heart, told me I should keep it, ’cause, well, you never know.”

“You said this was in May?”

He nodded and returned the card to the fridge. “So, you want to know what he wanted, I suggest you ask him.”

“I would,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say, because I wasn’t sure what had become of Sal Barton. I eyed the envelope he’d set on the kitchen table. “Is that the Christmas card?”

He nodded. “Help yourself.”