Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

they felt like they were about to dislocate. “I have been calling you and calling you! Where have you been?”
She held me at arm’s length to peer into my face for some sign of distress. “I’m fine, Mrs. Atwater. I’ve been busy.”
Atwater cocked an eyebrow at me in an expression that clearly said that she didn’t believe me then turned her attention to Shaw. “You’re the detective on Rebecca’s case, aren’t you? Have you been with her all this time?”
“Oh yes ma’am,” he assured her with a bright grin. Something about the way Mrs. Atwater had asked her question struck me as odd.
“What do you mean, ‘All this time?’?” I demanded. “I’ve only been gone a few hours.”
“I have not seen hide or hair of you in three days,” she retorted hotly. “I thought that you’d been snatched again and were suffering only God knows what kind of torture. I was worried sick!”
I had a hard time reconciling Atwater’s claim that I had missed three days with the sensation of time I had experienced in Sidhe Knockma so I let it go. I had heard that time inside the Mounds was as helter-skelter as the occupants, so perhaps Atwater wasn’t exaggerating. At any rate, I wasn’t going to argue the date with her in the middle of the breezeway where everyone could hear, not while the contents of my refrigerator were calling to me.
“The next time I leave town for a few days, I’ll be sure to let you know,” I told her as I gently pried my body from her grasp. The old broad was strong, so I actually had to pull pretty hard. She let me go with a disappointed pout, and since she didn’t have anything else to harass me with, she turned to go home.
“By the way, the workmen finished in your place yesterday. I inspected the work myself to make sure they didn’t cheat you.”
I gave Mrs. Atwater a blank stare. “Workmen were here?”
“Why yes. Didn’t you call for a contractor to fix the damage?”
“Maybe the apartment managers sent them over,” I suggested quickly as Mrs. Atwater frowned suspiciously.
“Or you have a secret admirer with as much sense as he has cash.” Mrs. Atwater tittered at the idea and blushed at whatever lewd thought she was thinking. “If I were you, I would find the man and marry him before he can get away. You have no idea how frustrating it is to have a husband who can’t do anything practical.”
“I’ll do that,” I promised in order to humor the woman. I turned my back on her and pushed my key into the lock.
“You better step up your game, young man.” Mrs. Atwater giggled, gleefully nudging Shaw in his ribs with her elbow. “You’ve got competition.”
Shaw gave her an indulgent chuckle and she disappeared back into her apartment. I had hesitated in opening the door, fearing that there might be something nasty waiting for me on the other side. Anxious and open to suggestions, I gave Shaw a questioning look.
“You first,” he replied with a shameless grin.
“Gee, thanks. How chivalrous of you,” I said dryly.
“Don’t you judge me. I’ve got two kids to think of and you can’t die.”
I couldn’t argue the point but that didn’t mean I liked it. After all, if you shoot me, do I not bleed? “You’re such a baby.”
I stepped to one side of the door while Shaw took a position opposite me. I twisted the knob and swung the door open waiting. Nothing happened so I stuck my head across the threshold and looked around. When nothing came flying out of nowhere to bite my head, I took a cautious step inside. I waited. I didn’t hear or see anything out of the ordinary, so I continued on my way. Shaw followed close behind, his eyes flicking from one side of the room to another as he searched for some source of danger.
My apartment was exactly as it was before Baja and Kootch busted down my door and shot the place up. There were new doors on the cabinets, the dents left on my refrigerator by bullets were gone, and my counter tops had been repaired or replaced. In the living room, the blood had been washed away from the couch and the carpet as if it had never been there.
“Can I borrow your phone? I gotta call my children and try to explain why I wasn’t there the other night.” Shaw didn’t sound happy about having to make the phone call, but I gave him permission to use my landline, pointing at it as I did so. While he dialed the number I began a methodical search of the rest of my apartment to make sure nothing was missing or lying in wait to attack me. I discovered a small brass plate etched with strange geometric patterns and some kind of weird plant placed on a shelf in my living room and then another in my bathroom. Otherwise, there was no evidence of theft or tampering with my things.
I set the brass plates aside and tried not to think of where they came from or what they meant. I was hungry and sore from lying in the dirt, and all I wanted was food, bath, and bed. I told myself that the plates could have been left behind by ordinary contractors as some kind of weird business cards and I nearly choked trying to swallow my own lie. I didn’t want to contemplate what new catastrophe was brewing until I’d had some peace and rest. But like always, the lies didn’t do me any good. I was still tight with the anxiety of what might be coming.
I returned to the kitchen to find Shaw staring at the phone in open mouthed astonishment. “Are you okay?”
“Enid just thanked me for showing the kids a good time,” he replied, setting the phone on the counter like it had suddenly grown legs and feelers.
“Is that a bad thing?” It sounded like a good thing to me. Why should he be all worked up about not being in trouble? My belly gurgled at me and announced that I needed to put food into it. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Yes please,” Shaw said and continued his explanation. “It’s not a bad thing except we were in the Faerie Mound when I supposedly showed the kids a good time.”
“Uh-oh, are they alright?” I understood his fear. If he hadn’t spent time with the kids, then who did, and what might have they done to the little ones? It was enough to freeze the blood in the veins of any parent.
“They seemed okay when I talked to them.” The horror of all the possibilities flashed across his face as each one occurred to him in rapid succession. “What if it wasn’t my children that I talked to?”
“Who else would it be?” I gave up trying to find anything edible in my refrigerator and decided to order a pizza. I picked up the phone Shaw had put down and dialed.
“I don’t know,” he sighed. He rubbed at his face in frustration and then threw his hands up in disgust. “The last few days have been…bizarre.”
If that wasn’t the understatement of the century, I didn’t know what was. I ordered the pizza without making further comment and then I pulled two beers from the refrigerator and put one in front of Shaw. After what we had been through the last couple of days, I figured that we needed the booze to calm our nerves. He stared at it for a moment like he was about to refuse it but then he picked up the bottle and sucked down half of it in long gulps.
“Be careful Shaw. If Mrs. Atwater is right about how long we’ve been gone then we haven’t eaten in three days. You’ll get drunk and pass out if you aren’t careful,” I told him taking a drink from my own bottle.
“God I hope so.” He grunted, draining the beer completely. “Do you have any more of these?”
“It’s barely noon. The least you could do is wait for the pizza to get here,” I said, fetching another beer and setting it in front of him. A lot of people would have tried to take care of him and refused to give him more booze before food arrived. But hey, Shaw’s a grown man, who am I to tell him what to do? He can get shit-faced before two o’clock if he wanted to. There are worse ways to cope. Shaw drank his second beer more slowly, though it was gone by the time the pizza guy knocked on my door. I didn’t bother to get plates out for this, Shaw and I simply dug into the box and inhaled the cheesy goodness.
When the meal was finished and Shaw was nursing the dregs of his fourth beer, I folded the box up and jammed it into my trash compactor. Shaw sat unsteadily with a curious expression as he watched me bustle about doing ordinary things.
“So,” he began in a voice that was beginning to slur. “Did you ever meet Attila the Hun?”
I thought about it a moment, trying to remember where I had been when that guy was rampaging halfway across Europe. “I was living in what is now Belgium when Attila came to power. Since I am as much a Hun as he was, I had persuaded my husband to accompany me to Attila’s court (and I use the term loosely) so that I could see the man who had united the tribes.”
“Huns are nomadic. I thought you said you grew up in Budapest,” Shaw said, his eyes crossing in his effort to think straight.
“I am a thousand years older than Attila, and my people weren’t quite Hunnish at that time. That came later when the warriors came south out of the winter lands and bred with the women of the village.” I laughed at him. He was so silly trying to maintain an intellectual conversation with me while his brain was pickling.
“But that was them, not you.”
“It didn’t change the way I think of myself or the people I was born to.” I felt a pang of sadness then. It wasn’t as sharp as it had been when the grief was still new, but it was still there. “If they were Huns, then so was I.”
“Did you get to see him then?”
“From a distance. My husband had heard the rumors of what Attila did with women he found beautiful, and my husband thought me very beautiful. He did not permit me to go where I might be seen. We stayed only a few days to resupply, and then we went home.”
“What happened to your husband?” Shaw had fallen into that sympathetic tone people use when they think they’re about to hear