Bubbles Ablaze (3 page)

“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.

S
lagville 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.”

“How old is this mine?” I asked in a feeble attempt to change the subject.

“Opened about 1901 and operated until the Depression hit. It started up again after World War Two.” Donohue unscrewed a thermos and poured himself another cup. “McMullen's only operating two mines now. They're barely taking out two-hundred-thousand tons of coal a year. Peanuts. And from what I hear he's cutting back.”

“Who's McMullen?”

“You don't know who Hugh McMullen is?” Donohue guzzled his coffee. “McMullen is the fourth generation owner of McMullen Coal Inc., which is what owns the Number Nine mine below us. He's on his way up from Pittsburgh as we speak.”

I nodded as though interested, trying my darnedest to keep from imagining Stiletto wearing a bib and drooling cream of wheat.

“What about my Camaro?”

“It's been towed down to the Texaco. You had more than a weak battery there, hon. I'm thinking alternator.”

Alternator! That fell into the category of nightmare repair. And me here with three-hundred bucks in my savings account—my incredible windfall from the nineties economic boom.

“Okay. We've taken a ten-minute break.” Donohue checked his watch. “Time for more questions.”

It was difficult to believe there could be more questions. Donohue had already asked me my mother's maiden name, the last time I voted and where my daughter went to school. That was after he grilled me about the apparently bogus fax I'd received, the body in the mine and the explosion.

“Back to your car,” he said, flipping open to a new page on the legal tablet. “Where'd you buy it?”

I thought back. “One of my clients at the House of Beauty had a son-in-law who lost his license in a DUI. Had to sell it cheap. What does that matter?”

“You'd be surprised.” Donohue looked up from the tablet and scrutinized me. “How do you feel about legalized gambling coming to Pennsylvania?”

I was about to object again, but Donohue said, “Just answer the question.”

“I don't know,” I shrugged. “It's already one state away in Jersey. Why do we need it here?”

“Uh-huh.” Donohue made a check mark. “But no personal religious objection? You ain't one of them fundamentalist Christians or nothing.”

“I'm Roman Catholic. We've been gambling every Wednesday evening for centuries.”

Donohue grinned. “Got that right.”

“But I still don't see—”

“Are you now, or have you ever been, the victim of blackmail?”

I brought my hand to my chest. “I'm a hairdresser in a two-sink salon in Lehigh. A divorced mother of a teenage daughter and I'm usually in bed, alone, by ten. Who'd want to blackmail me?”

“Stinky Koolball, that's who.”

Stiletto's fate slipped my mind.

“Stinky Koolball a blackmailer? You've got to be kidding.”

“What, you're shocked? A half hour ago you provided a sworn statement in which you posited that Stinky Koolball had sent you the fax that nearly got you killed. And, lo and behold, the number on the fax was traced to an establishment, one Mr. Koolball has been known to frequent.”

Stinky's Lexus was gone when the cops arrived, Donohue had told me. I showed them the fax and they had traced the number to a pay phone outside a Slagville bar called the Hole. I didn't know how you sent faxes from pay phones, but Donohue assured me it could be done.

“Yeah, but Stinky wouldn't try to hurt me,” I said. “Play a joke that got out of hand, maybe. But whack Stiletto? Explode his Jeep? Blackmail? That's not the Stinky I know.”

“Then you don't know Stinky. He's a changed man.” Donohue leaned forward conspiratorially. “He got laid off last month as head cartographer for McMullen Coal and started acting postal. Calling up people, making threats. Guess you might say he went
loco mentis
.”

“He hopped a train?”

Donohue blinked. “Means crazy as a rabid coon. It's Latin.”

“Really?”

“All I know is he's one dangerous S.O.B. Roxanne kicked him out after the blackmail. Since then he's been laying low, hiding from authorities. Until you came to town and just happened to stumble upon his car at the Number Nine mine late at night.”

There was the implication that my arrival was not so innocent. “I didn't want to get involved,” I said. “I was doing my job.”

Donohue tossed the cup in a wastepaper basket. “Gonna have to arrest you anyway.” He unhitched a pair of cuffs from his belt. “Trespassing. Theft of private property. Noise in the nighttime. And, depending on what forensics determines when we find that body, conspiracy to commit murder.”

“Oh, please.” I put my coffee on the floor and crossed my arms, hiding my wrists. “The only gun I've ever held blows hair. And I never saw that dead man before in my life.”

“That's not just some dead man,” said Donohue. “If it's who I'm betting it is, the local rag's gonna regret they didn't send no one out tonight. Hold out your wrists so I don't have to get physical.”

There was an excellent chance Donohue would have cuffed me then and there had not an anxious fireman shown up at the door of the ambulance.

“You better come quick, Chief,” he said, taking off his helmet and wiping a brow. “It's bad.”

I sprang into position. “You find Stiletto?”

The fireman frowned in sympathy. “I'm sorry, miss.”

Donohue plunked his hard hat on and hustled out of the ambulance. “You wait here,” he said, pointing a stern finger in my
direction. “I don't want to add fleeing an arresting officer to your list of charges.”

And they were gone. I sat down on the cot and gazed forlornly at my once well conditioned hands, which, scratched, bloodied and swollen, mirrored what I was feeling inside. I'm sorry, miss. What did that mean? I'm sorry miss, I don't have time to talk? Or I'm sorry miss, your boyfriend is toast?

How could I have left Stiletto down there? I should have dismissed that ladies and children first stuff and insisted that he follow me. I considered Donohue's list of hazards. What had killed him? A falling boulder? Rising water? Bad air?

My cheeks felt wet and I realized I was crying. Self-pity and exhaustion combined for a total meltdown. I threw myself on the cot, the sheets damp under my face. Scenes of Stiletto flashed in my mind like a montage of sappy Hallmark greeting cards filled with blurry photos. Stiletto precariously perched on a beam at the Philip J. Fahy Bridge in Lehigh, giving me the thumbs up. Laughing as we sat in his Jeep, top down. Wrestling a hired assassin to the ground. Making out with me on the hood of my Camaro in a downpour. Helping me break into the home of a brownie-baking neo-Nazi. Gallantly carrying me in his arms under a moonlit sky.

Our plans. All our plans for the future were . . . ruined! And we
never even had sex!
What a waste. Well, that's the last time I ever make a personal chastity vow. Curse you, Oprah!

There was a “thump” on the metal ambulance floor and then a voice boomed, “What the hell happened to my goddam Jeep?”

My head popped up.

“Stiletto?” I turned.

Sure enough, there he was, his chest naked and covered in sweat and grit, his biceps bulging. His nose swollen and bloodied. Those mischievous blue eyes flashed under the ambulance's fluorescent lights. He'd never looked so Mel. Better even than in
Braveheart.
Would someone please get this man a kilt!

“You're alive,” I said, wiping my eyes and hoping they weren't underlined by streaks of black mascara. “But the rescue workers—”

“Would've taken forever to reach me. I couldn't wait around like a helpless baby, for Christ's sake. Here, I got your shoes.” He tossed me my slingbacks and opened a bottle of water from the ambulance's supply, consuming it in one manly swig, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down.

“I'm gonna kill that Stinky friend of yours.” Stiletto wiped his mouth with a broad forearm. “He put the explosives in my Jeep. My Jeep! I took that Jeep cross-country. I loved that Jeep.”

“I doubt Stinky blew it up. Like I keep telling everyone, he's not that kind of guy. Anyway, forget Stinky. What about us? We survived!”

Stiletto snapped out of it and grinned warmly. “You're right. We survived. For now.”

With two long strides, Stiletto approached me on the cot and planted a purposeful kiss on my lips. “You were fantastic back there, Bubbles,” he whispered. “So brave. I can't wait to get you alone at the Passion Peak when this is over. We'll find our would-be killer and then we'll go away together. Someplace secluded and safe where no editor can reach us.” He leaned down and kissed me again.

I felt slightly woozy. Stiletto's kisses, even furtive ones, were intoxicating—as was the idea of life without editors. “At least we ended up in bed together.” I patted the cot.

He nuzzled my neck. “My only regret was not having made love to you, Bubbles. That's what I was thinking when I was stuck in the mine.”

That's
what he was thinking when he was stuck in the mine? I would have been thinking, Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm gonna die!

“How did you get out?” I said.

Stiletto's lips traced the curves of my neck. “I climbed.”

Like, duh.

“Cleared the rock that had fallen behind us and found a fairly
open passageway. The rescue workers had enough lights down there to illuminate Manhattan.” Then he sat up, as though he'd had a breakthrough. “Speaking of Manhattan, I gotta call the AP office in New York if I want to make the late-edition deadline.”

“The AP? Why not the
News-Times?
This could be my Big Break.”

Stiletto searched the ambulance for a phone, checking the dashboard, behind the cot, the medicine cabinet. “I'd like to help you out with that, Bubbles, but you know I only freelance for the
News-Times
when the AP doesn't want the story. I'm a staff photographer for the AP. I have to contact them first. It's in my contract. And I'm positive they'll want this.”

I thought of the photos he had taken of the body in the mine. Those photos were really good and my newspaper story would be nothing without them. What to do? What to do?

I might love Stiletto. I might want to rip off his clothes and make wild monkey love to him right on the ambulance floor. But for now he was working for the AP, the dark side, and I was desperate to get hold of those pix.

“Oh, don't tell me the AP national desk cares about a mine explosion in itty-bitty Slagville, PA?” I cooed.

“They do when Bud Price is dead in the middle of it. I thought it was him.”

“Bud Price?” Who the heck was Bud Price?

“You got it. I overheard the rescue workers talking. Price drove up to Slagville tonight to check out the Number Nine mine. Guess the Fords weren't hot off the lot today. Aha! A phone.” He had opened a wall cabinet and found a cell phone. “The disturbing irony is your fake fax was right. Price was a prominent Lehigh businessman. Emphasis on the
was
.”

I stared at Stiletto dialing the phone. “You don't mean Price of Price Family Ford in Lehigh?” I could hear the blaring ads now: Price Family Ford. Where the Price is
always
nice. “Since when does the AP care about a salesman who screams on cable TV?”