Bubbles Ablaze (2 page)

I
n the hours that followed it was a question I would mull over and over. Were we pushed or did the car just start down the mine shaft on its own? As I was more concerned with taking care of Stiletto at the moment, I hadn't really been paying attention.

“Stiletto,” I cried, climbing into the dirty coal car and pouncing on his body. “Steve. Say something.” I quickly unbuttoned his shirt to help him breathe.

Even in this pummeled state, Stiletto resorted to his standard cocky self. “Jesus, Bubbles,” he murmured. “Now's not exactly the time.”

“Sorry.” I shifted my weight off his abs and picked up the flashlight, examining him for major injuries. I couldn't see any obvious damage. Just blood. Had Stinky gone completely
loco
? Whoopee cushions and squirting corsages were one thing, but clocking my boyfriend unconscious was another. What kind of joke was this, anyway?

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Why aren't you with the President?”

“It was supposed to be a surprise.” Stiletto winced. “I switched shifts with Cardozo so I could be with you.”

I slapped my cheek. “You are sooo sweet. To give up the President for me.”

“President's not nearly as good a kisser.” He cracked a half-hearted smile. “Anyway, while I was driving up here, Salvo e-mailed me on my cell phone. Something about a murder and a press conference. Asked me to shoot it since I'd be in the area. I figured it wouldn't take more than a half hour. Wow, was I
wrong.” Stiletto pulled himself up and rubbed the back of his head. “I really got clobbered. Feel.”

I gently touched the spot. Even beneath Stiletto's longish, wavy brown hair, the lump was the size of a grapefruit. I didn't want him to worry, so I said, “It's not so bad,” although I was thinking, Oh, boy. This guy should be in the hospital.

“It's bad. The creep hit me hard.” Stiletto sat up further to stretch his legs. “What time is it?”

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?