Bubbles Ablaze

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  I glanced at my watch. “Eleven forty-five. When did you get here?”

  He wiped his bloodied nose on his sleeve. “Around nine. Press conference was supposed to be at nine-thirty. When I pulled up and saw no one around, I called Salvo from my Jeep.”

  Jeep? Hmmm. I didn’t remember seeing any Jeep. I thought it best not to mention that, though, considering Stiletto’s incomprehensible affection for the drafty, rusted vehicle. In his injured state there was no telling what he’d do if someone had stolen his Jeep.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “How come you’re not at the hotel?”

  “Mr. Salvo sent me a fax to the Passion Peak saying a Lehigh businessman had been found shot dead in this mine. Except my message said the press conference was at eleven-thirty.”

  “Yeah, well the whole thing is bogus. We’ve been set up.” Stiletto pounded on his legs to get the circulation going. “Salvo said he didn’t know what I was talking about, hadn’t e-mailed me on the cell phone, hadn’t heard about a murder. Next thing I knew a fist crossed my nose, I got hit on the back of the head, lights out and then you were here.”

  I sat back on my heels and considered this.

  “So you didn’t hear the gunshots?” I said.

  “Gunshots?”

  “Two of them. From the mine. Minutes ago.”

  “That can’t be good.” Stiletto squinted in confusion. “Is it my imagination or have we started moving?”

  It appeared as though we had. The coal car was creaking with increasing speed down the rails and into the murky mine shaft. A flash of panic shot through my veins. I definitely did not want to go into an empty mine in the middle of the night.

  “We’ve got to stop it,” I yelled, searching for a brake lever.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Stiletto said. He took my hand, but it was too late. We had tipped over a steep decline and were hurtling downward with rapid momentum.

  I found the lever and tried to push it forward with no luck. The car just kept speeding faster. A hard object flew past us, grazing my forehead. I shut my eyes and prayed for the best.

  “Ahhhh!” I heard myself scream as we descended into the dark abyss. Water sprayed my face and wet my hair.

  Stiletto yanked the lever from my hand and pushed it forward with all his might. There was a loud screech, the acrid odor of rusted metal heating up and then the car slowed, which was a good thing as we had arrived at what seemed to be more than a puddle. It was like an underground lake. Water splashed up, around and into the car.

  We stopped.

  “Whew!” I leaned back against Stiletto’s heaving chest. The cavern was pitch black, cold and reeked of dampness—a lot like my basement before I bought the Kenmore dehumidifier. Moisture dripped onto my hair and shoulders, sending shivers over my body with each drop. I put my hand out and touched a wall of rock about an inch from the car’s side; that’s how narrow the tunnel was.

  “You okay, Bubbles?” Stiletto asked softly. “This is getting to be quite a night. Not exactly the romantic evening we had planned, is it?”

  I thought of where we were supposed to be—in a sensual entwining amidst warm red satin and cinnamon candlelight. I hoped I’d blown out those candles because we were trapped at the bottom of a clammy and frigid mine with no way to get out. It would be quite awhile until we returned to the Passion Peak.

  “I’ll be a lot better when I can see.” My fingers groped around the car floor. “Where’s that flashlight?”

  “I think it fell out on the ride down. I’ll use my camera.” There was the whine of a flash charging.

  “You’ve been hit over the head, stuffed in a coal car and you still have a camera?”

  “It’s a gimmicky Japanese job another AP photographer bought me when he was in Thailand. I had it in my back pocket. Here.”

  For a little Japanese job it emitted a huge burst of light. What it illuminated caused me to gasp in astonishment.

  “Ohmigod. Do it again.”

  “You saw it too, huh?”

  This time Stiletto leaned over me and, nearly tipping the car forward, activated the flash a second time. A blanket of white light revealed the track, which, indeed, was partially submerged. The passageway ahead was an empty black hole.

  Except for the body slumped against the far right wall.

  My first reaction was, poor Roxanne. Stinky had played his last practical joke.

  “Do you think he was the one who got shot?”

  But Stiletto didn’t answer. Despite his injuries, he was out of the car and stomping through the water. “Let’s see now. Here we go.” He picked me up and I flung my arm around his neck, careful not to touch his bruised cranium.

  Although he was working hard to sound calm, Stiletto was on high internal alert. The sinews in his neck stood out like steel rods, and his heart thumped faster than a racehorse’s. He took about ten paces and then let me down gently onto fairly dry ground.

  It was still so dark that I couldn’t even make out shapes. Stiletto moved around and then said, “Aha!”

  A beam of light shot out. Stiletto was wearing a headlamp.

  “I don’t even want to know where you got that.”

  “From him,” he said, pointing to the lump against the wall. “It was on his head. Though why it wasn’t lit is a damned good question.”

  I knelt down. The man appeared to be in his mid-fifties. His hair was black and plastered neatly to the side into a hair-sprayed helmet. He was wearing a pink Izod polo shirt, an Eddie Bauer green down vest, spiffy khaki Dockers and a pair of brown Rockport Professional Walkers. His only adornments were a Rolex rip-off watch, a thick gold chain around his neck and a salesman’s smile despite a six-inch bloody hole blown into the middle of his chest.

  “I’m guessing he was the target of the gunshots you heard.” Stiletto was putting his tiny Japanese job to work, shooting like a madman.

  It was not Stinky. For one thing, no pocket protector. “Is he dead?”

  Stiletto paused from shooting and looked at me like I was an idiot. “You could drive a truck through that hole. Of course he’s dead.”

  I studied the corpse while Stiletto continued clicking away. For some reason this man’s face was familiar. Familiar in the way movie stars and TV actors are. As though you know them when you really don’t.

  Stiletto stooped down to get a tasteful profile shot. Newspapers are generally reluctant to plaster bloody corpses on page one, unless the corpses belong to impoverished foreign rebels and refugees. Inside the newsroom, however, up-close murder scene photos are hot property. We journalists aren’t much more than voyeurs and gossips when you get right down to it.

  “I guess this whole evening wasn’t a hoax after all,” Stiletto said.

  I nodded in agreement. “The fax said there’d been a businessman shot dead in a coal mine and what do you know. . . By the way,” I looked up at him, “what do you know?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize him,” Stiletto said. “Haven’t you been keeping up with the news like Tony Salvo keeps nagging you?”

  I bit my lip. Truth was, although I was supposed to read the News-Times cover to cover, including, ugh, sports and stock quotes, usually I couldn’t get past the comics, marriage announcements and coupons. The rest was too boring. It was obvious from Stiletto’s response, though, that our Mr. Body had been some big shot. But who?

  I never had a chance to ask because at that moment there was an abrupt flash of yellow and white light that reflected off the tunnel’s walls. For a nanosecond I cheerfully hallucinated that the police had heard reports of the gunfire and had come to our rescue. I didn’t have a chance to discount that as ridiculous because my attention turned to what sounded like a tremendous explosion followed by an odd rumbling and rolling sound. Stiletto took two strides and grabbed my hand.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but we better run.”

  Next thing, we were scrambling down the
tunnel, away from the coal car and the body. Little stones were slipping into my sandals and digging painfully into my toes, but I didn’t dare stop to remove them. We sloshed through puddles and came up against rocks that forced us to turn left or right. Stiletto’s headlamp cast eerie shadows against the wood beams supporting the black rock walls.

  I was getting short of breath and I couldn’t take it anymore. Stiletto was dragging me, but to where? We were stuck in a tunnel. There was no way out. Or was there?

  As we passed what Stiletto’s headlamp showed to be a deep crevice, I dug my heels in and tugged at him.

  “C’mon, Bubbles,” he urged. “What’re you—”

  Breathless, I pointed to the crevice. Stiletto nodded and I stepped in, crouching as far as I could against the wall while the rumble roared louder. Stiletto shielded me with his body and we both closed our eyes. I tried to pray, but all I could think about was my teenage daughter Jane and whether or not she was going to go along with her boyfriend G’s asinine plan to pick grapes in France after graduation from Liberty High School.

  And then it hit us.

  We waited until the rumbling stopped and the falling rocks settled down. Both of us coughed with violent urgency, vainly trying to clear our lungs. Still, we were alive and that was enough for me.

  “You still with me, Bubbles?” Stiletto pulled me to him tighter.

  I nodded into his chest. “I’m breathing.”

  “You know,” he began, after a particularly nasty hacking fit, “it may sound dramatic, but I think someone is trying to kill us.”

  “Kill us? Get out of here.”

  “I’d love to.” He flashed me a smart-ass smile. “Seriously, look at the facts. First we get called to a deserted coal mine on a hoax, I’m knocked unconscious and thrown in a coal car. Then the car activates and hurls us into this pit where we find a dead body and there’s an explosion.”

  I tried to unstick a few lashes that had gotten plastered together with mascara and dust.

  “What I’ve been trying to figure out,” he continued, “is who. I mean, off the top of my head I can name five people who’d want to do me in, from Slobodan Milosevic to a couple of wise guys from the Bronx. None of them would think of calling me to Pennsylvania coal country and none of them would want to harm you.”

  He pulled me tighter. “Bubbles. Someone wanted us to die . . . together.”

  I ran over my list of enemies, which, unlike Stiletto’s, failed to include the dictator of a small European country. Aside from the occasional client whose eyebrows I had overwaxed, there was my ex-husband, Dan the Man, his wife, Wendy, and some people I had ticked off by misspelling their names in newspaper articles.

  That brought me full circle to Stinky and that didn’t make much sense. Stinky and I had hit the dance floor a few times at his wedding to Roxanne and shared cleanup duty during holiday dinners. Unless he was seriously ticked that I had washed fewer plates than he had, I couldn’t conceive of why he’d want to blow me up. Plus, how could he have known about Stiletto?

  “I can’t believe Stinky would try to kill us,” I said. “We danced the Hokey Pokey. Twice.”

  Stiletto held me at arm’s length. “Stinky? Who the hell is Stinky?”

  I filled in the details about my cousin’s husband and finding his locked Lexus at the coal mine.

  “Lexus, eh. He must be doing pretty well if he’s driving a Lexus,” Stiletto said. “That is, if you’re into sedans. Maybe he’s joined the coal country Cosa Nostra and been dealing coke. That would explain the explosion and the fancy car.”

  Being from Lehigh, a steel town on the Jersey border, I knew the coke he was talking about, and it wasn’t the kind people snort up their noses. That was Stiletto’s idea of a clever pun.

  “We can talk about this later,” I said. “Let’s find a way out.”

  There was barely enough room to move. Stiletto’s headlight was still operating, so we could see that we had been blocked in by the explosion. Stiletto started clearing rocks away on his side and I started to look for a passageway.

  “Stinky’s a map geek,” I said, running my hands along the crevice wall. “He spends his days charting underground tunnels for miners. He might enjoy playing practical pranks, but he’s incapable of hurting someone intentionally, much less hooking up with organized crime.”

  “That’s what Angela Gambino said.”

  Cool air flitted over my fingertips. “Who’s she?”

  “The cousin of John Gotti’s wife. And you know who he was.”

  I was almost positive John Gotti ran a pizza parlor in Allentown, but I didn’t say so. Instead I said, “I think I found a way out. Fresh air.”

  Stiletto inhaled a few times. “You’re right. I can smell it.”

  I extended my three-inch nails along the rock wall behind me. Sure enough, the crevice didn’t end. It just turned. Tightly. Very tightly.

  “What’re you doing?” Stiletto asked as I leaned down and unstrapped my slingbacks. I didn’t want to risk ruining a nineteen ninety-nine pair of faux alligators from Payless. They were brand new.

  “I’m gonna try and fit through here,” I said, squeezing into the passageway, my feet delicately feeling their way along cold, sharp rocks.

  Stiletto took off his headlamp and handed it to me. “Take this. I’ll stay here.”

  “Why don’t we go together?”

  “Too dangerous. Two people climbing out of the mine are more likely than one to cause falling rock and possibly a cave-in. That would be the end of both of us. When you’re out, you can call in a rescue team from my cell phone that’s probably still in the Jeep.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. Dear brave, stoic Stiletto. Always making me his top priority. I slipped my arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek, the light accidentally bonking him in the forehead.

  “Ow,” he said.

  “You’re the best, Stiletto.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now get going.” He gave me a gentle pat on the rear as I wiggled into the passageway.

  “Coal mines are filled with passageways, you know,” I said instructively as I inched along the corridor that couldn’t have been more than a foot wide.

  “They are? What for?”

  “Because this is anthracite.” I sucked in my stomach and squirmed past a jutting rock. The conversation kept my mind off what dreaded slope or wall might be around the corner. Or worse—the possibility of long-legged, fast-running centipedes. My archenemies.

  “Usually you can’t strip anthracite,” I continued. “You find a vein and mine it from the bottom up. Like sucking out the crème in a HoHo.”

  “How do you know so much about mining?”

  “Fourth-grade field trips. Used to scare the living daylights out of me when they put us in the coal cars and sent us plunging into the pits. Thirty eight-year-old kids screaming their heads off. Better than Dorney Park. If the teachers couldn’t kill us that way, then they made us tour the fiery blast furnaces down at steel. I’d like to meet the genius who thought it was a good idea to . . . ahhh!”

  I had taken one step and nearly plunged a good ten feet.

  “You okay?” Stiletto called.

  I was more than okay. I was ecstatic. The narrow passageway opened onto a larger, vertical one that extended through many levels of the hill. Both ways. Down and up. There was a whoosh of fresh air and my headlamp revealed a rusted iron ladder that appeared to have been constructed ages ago and hardly used since. It might as well have been an elevator, I was so happy to see it.

  Anthracite miners were like groundhogs, I thought, swinging onto the ladder. They dug so many tunnels over tunnels, they forgot about them.

  “I’m fine,” I called back, my bare feet carefully gripping the ice cold metal rungs. “There’s a ladder to the top.”

  “Be careful, Bubbles. Whoever wanted to kill us might still be hanging around. Drive the Jeep to town as fast as you can. Keys are in the ignition. Drive fast and don’t look back.�
��

  But I didn’t have to drive into town. Waiting for me when I emerged from the mine were fire trucks, two cop cars and one ambulance. Everything I could have wanted—except sure footing.

  For when I took that last step out of the mine, I had made the crucial error of stepping on a keystone, dislodging it and sending an avalanche of rocks, slag and dirt into the hole below. Stiletto would be hard pressed to get out now. That is, if he wanted to get out alive.

  Just as well since his beloved Jeep appeared to have been blown to bits.

  Chapter 3

  Slagville Chief of Police Jack Donohue, a grandfatherly man with fluffy white hair and a doughy face, was either innocently blunt or diabolically cruel. I pegged him as one of those small-town police chiefs who would do well as the jefe of a Colombian drug cartel.

  “Nah, the odds are your fellow there is cooked,” Donohue said, sitting on the ambulance cot across from me. “After hanging around old collieries as many years as I have, I got a sixth sense about these things. When I was working security in the Kingston mine, why we’d lose a man a month back in the day.”

  I tried to take a sip of the coffee he had handed me in a Styrofoam cup, but my hand shook so violently the bitter brew just splashed off my lips. It had already been over two hours since I’d emerged from the hole and been ushered into this brightly lit ambulance where Donohue awaited, police forms, tablet and pen in hand. I’d been here so long that the chief had run out of questions to ask and still rescuers had not been able to reach Stiletto.

  “Any number of things could have done him in. Concussion. Lack of oxygen. Flooding even.” Donohue held out his mammoth hands and ticked off these deadly ends one by one. “Now if the black gas got him, that’s carbon monoxide poisoning, and, oh boy, you’ll have yourself a handful there, missy. First it feels like the flu. Headache. A buzzing in the ears. Nausea. Next thing’s death or permanent disability. Personally, I’d rather be dead than a vegetable.”

  I blinked and pictured Stiletto as a carrot.

  “Yup. You’ll be spoon-feeding him pudding at the nursing home if that’s the case.”