The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) (28 page)

I tried it again and this time was able to pull the air into my lungs. I breathed out and took another hit, and then one more. I’m not sure if it was a placebo effect, but my head did feel a bit clearer.

“I think it’s working,” I said, sounding very much like Alvin or one of the other lesser-known Chipmunks. “I feel a little better.”

The sound of my voice produced a huge laugh from Megan. “You sound ridiculous,” she said in her new falsetto, in between bursts of laughter.

“Well, you’ve lost your Kathleen Turner quality as well,” I said. “Now it’s like being stuck in a cave with Cyndi Lauper.”

“Or the munchkins,” she added.

This last example sparked a thought. “You know,” I said, “Franny told me that she saw something in my future that involved the dark and munchkins. And here we are. Isn’t that weird?”

“Did she say how you got out of it?”

“That didn’t come up.” I handed her the nozzle and waited while she took another hit. She handed it back and I filled my lungs to capacity. We sat for a moment in silence, knowing that the next person to speak would re-start the wave of laughter. Finally I spoke.

“We should keep moving,” I said, trying to deepen my voice and coming up short.

Megan stifled a laugh. “Yes, you’re right,” she finally said. “Let’s see if we can find the yellow brick road out of here.”

After several minutes of slowly making our way through the various sized caverns, we fell into a sort of routine. We’d crawl into a new cavern, take a couple hits off the tank, use one of the diminishing sheets of flash paper to determine our next step, and then move on.

Then rinse and repeat, as the saying goes.

I had to hand it to the men and women of the St. Paul Parks department. So far they had done a very thorough job of blocking each of the potential exits we had come across. Any image I’d had in my mind of lazy, indolent public works employees had been completely shattered. Those guys were good and even though it might end up killing me, in a way I grudgingly admired their determination to find and plug every damned hole in the bluffs from Wabasha Avenue all the way down to the Sibley Memorial highway. It was evident that at some point in the past someone had taken his job very seriously.

It was hard to keep track of time in the dark, but after traversing several small and medium-sized caverns, I guessed that nearly an hour had gone by.

As we moved forward, Megan’s memory of the layout of the caves had started to become less precise. I didn’t blame her—it had been over twenty years since she’d played hide-and-seek in this space and we had gone deeper and farther than the areas she had previously played in. However, she wasn’t looking at it that way and her level of frustration grew with each new, unfamiliar cavern.

Unfortunately, I was unable to take her self-recriminations seriously, because the madder she got at herself, the more she sounded like Donald Duck in the midst of a bout of cartoon road rage. And of course, my laughing only made things worse.

“Shut up,” she snarled at me after one particularly hilarious outburst. “It’s not funny. We’re going to die in here.”

“That may well be,” I said, my voice just a tad lower than hers. “But we’ll die laughing.”

“And it’s all my fault,” she continued. “If I’d only let Pete sell the corner when he first suggested it, nobody would have died. Nothing bad would have happened. We wouldn’t be stuck this cave right now.”

“Megan, I don’t think your ex-husband’s murderous tendencies really fall under the heading of your fault,” I suggested. “You’re the victim here and Pete is the bad guy and you didn’t do anything wrong. Here’s what you should do,” I said, moving into therapist mode. “Instead of beating yourself up, you should push that energy outward and use it to get out of here and bring that little bastard to justice.” I paused for a moment, waiting for a response.

Megan burst out laughing. “Maybe what you’re saying makes sense, but there’s no way I can take advice from anyone who sounds like that,” she spit out between peals of laughter. “You sound absurd.”

“So do you.” This led to more laughter, followed by another couple hits off the nozzle. The tank was feeling considerably lighter, but I didn’t think this was the ideal time to mention it. “Are you ready to move on?” I asked.

“I think so.”

I ignited another sheet of flash paper, revealing that we were in a pretty large cavern. In the brief burst of light, I could see at least three corridors leading out of it. “Which one looks good to you?” I asked.

Megan responded with a yelp of surprise. “What was that?” she cried and even though her voice was ridiculously high and squeaky, I could hear real terror in it.

“What happened?”

“Something just touched my head,” she said, still panicked. I heard the sound of her tousling her hair frantically. “What was it?”

“It wasn’t me. Let’s take another look.” I ignited another sheet of flash paper. The room was too large to really see everything in that quick flash, but the burst of light triggered a response from somewhere above us, deep in the murk. I could hear the distinctive, unsettling rustle of wings. “I think we’ve got bats,” I whispered.

“Oh crap,” she replied, not even trying to keep her voice down.

“No,” I assured her. “Bats are good.”

“I hate bats. And I don’t want to hear that shit about how they eat mosquitoes. Right now, I don’t care. I hate them.”

“I’m not talking about mosquitoes. If we’ve got bats, that means there must be a way out somewhere around here.”

“How do we know?” she said, calming a bit. “I mean, maybe they just live in here all the time.”

“Well, I’m no bat expert,” I said. “But I think bats have to go out every once in a while to get things like food. That’s the good news.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is that we won’t be able to see what direction they’re going when they go. And, now that I think of it, I believe bats can get out of a place through a hole about the size of a quarter, which wouldn’t be much help for us.”

“So tell me again…how is this a good thing?”

“Well,” I said as a new thought occurred to me, “if it’s safe for them to breathe in here, it’s probably safe for us.” A doubly important point, I realized, as the helium tank was feeling dangerously close to empty. “We just need to see where they go when they leave and find a way to follow them.”

“When do they typically go out?”

I paused, wondering at what point I had suddenly become the de facto bat expert. “They head out at night, if you can believe all the old horror films. Or maybe dusk.”

“And when is that?”

I had gotten so used to her high-pitched voice that it no longer struck me as odd. “I’m not sure. It should be soon, though,” I said. “It gets dark pretty early now.”

As if they heard and understood me, there was more rustling above us. It was quiet for a moment, and then it started again. The sound was moving away from us. I pulled out my dwindling stack of flash paper. I ran the pieces through my fingertips. It felt like I had maybe three left. The noise continued above us.

“I think the bats are moving. I’m going to set off another flash. Watch and see if you can tell where they’re headed.” I ignited the sheet as I tossed it in the air in front of us. In the brief light, I thought I detected shadows moving.

“I saw movement toward the opening on the far left,” I said. “How about you?”

“I’m sorry, when I see bats, I shut my eyes,” she said. “It’s a primal kind of thing.”

“Actually, I don’t blame you,” I said. “But I think the left corridor is the one we should head down.”

“With the bats?”

“After the bats. Or as the French might say,
après le
bat.”

“So you’re promising me that there will be no bats in the corridor when we go through it?”

“Absolutely,” I lied. “We’re following them. At a distance.”

“Okay then.”

We groped our way through the blackness across the cavern until we located the far wall, which I discovered first with my forehead and then, less painfully, with my hand.

I felt around the wall until I found the opening to the passageway. “We’re going to have to duck down to get through here,” I said, “but at least we won’t have to crawl.”

I went through first and could hear Megan moving into the space behind me. The cramped corridor got even skinnier for a few feet, requiring us to turn sideways in order to keep moving. I began to fear that it would get narrower and narrower, forcing us to retrace our steps, and then it suddenly became wider and I stopped worrying about that.

That’s when they came.

First I heard the hum of wings, which resembled the noise of static on a radio, but the acoustics in the passage were such that I couldn’t really place where the sound was coming from. And then suddenly the bats arrived and it didn’t really matter anymore.

They hit us from behind like a cold breeze, hundreds of them, bouncing off our bodies like pinballs.

Apparently we were standing between the furry little winged bastards and their night on the town and they were determined to get around us by any means available.

They fluttered between our legs, under our arms, past our ears and eyes, slapping us in our faces with their cold webby wings. I’ve never walked through a car wash, but I think that’s the closest thing to what we experienced, except that we weren’t being sprayed with water. Water would have been great, a welcome treat, but that’s not what the bats were carrying. They were flying and flapping and peeing and Megan and I were getting the works, the Deluxe Super Wash. Only a couple dollars more, but absolutely worth it.

Did I mention that Megan screamed continuously through all of this? I don’t know how that slipped my mind. Yes, she freaked out completely and I really didn’t blame her, except that the majority of her screaming was done directly into my right ear. She clung to my arm like a deer tick and dug her nails so far into my skin that I think her fingers actually met halfway through my limb.

And then, as quickly as they had descended on us, they were gone. It was quiet again, with only the echo of Megan’s screams reverberating in the cavern. She still clung tightly to me but I could feel her muscles relax, just a bit, and her breathing slowed.

“What’s that smell?” she asked, her voice still carrying a trace of Betty Boop in it.

“You don’t want to know,” I said, using my free sleeve to wipe my eyes.

“Oh, yuck,” she said after it finally dawned on her, and I could feel her body shudder. “That’s just gross.”

“Well, what do you expect? You scared them.”

“I scared them? How do you figure?”

“I’m sure they come through this passage all the time and didn’t expect to run into anyone.”

“Don’t tell me you’re taking the bats’ side?” she said, her voice still high, but more from incredulity than helium.

“I’m neutral on the subject,” I finally said. “I’m the Switzerland of bats and bat guano.”

Chapter 21

The previous hour or so had felt like a ping pong match between good and bad news, and when we entered the next chamber, bad news continued its winning streak.

The good news, which was meager at best, was that the moment we made it out of what I had come to think of as the Bat Corridor, we were hit with actual fresh air and could see the night sky ahead of us.

We breathed in the crisp cold breeze and, for a moment, I didn’t mind being covered in bat pee. Or I minded a little bit less.

The first wave of bad news was the realization that the only thing that separated us from our well-earned freedom was a two-foot by two-foot metal grate, a thick, barred grid with square holes large enough for a bat to crawl through. We headed immediately toward this barrier and I grasped its bars tightly, giving them a hard shake. The grate was very solid and didn’t budge.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the next piece of bad news became vividly apparent as we looked through the grate. The clouds had lifted and it was a crisp clear night. It appeared to be just after sunset and we could see the tops of the trees and, in the distance, the river and the lights of downtown St. Paul.

“Uh-oh.” I said quietly.

“What?” Megan asked, turning to me. “What is it? We found the way out. What’s the problem?” Her voice had almost entirely returned to its normal pitch.

“We’re near the peak of one of the bluffs. I can see the tops of trees. We’re pretty high up.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yes, but that’s our second problem. Our first problem is this grate. It’s really solid.” I stood back, my eyes still adjusting to the dim light, and examined how the grate was attached to the wall.

“It must be fastened on the outside,” I said, as I stepped closer and tried to see what was holding the grate in place. Megan stepped next to me to see.

Just at that moment a tardy bat flew between the two of us, brushing the side of my face as it maneuvered through one of the larger holes in the grate. Megan jumped back and yelped.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, immediately checking her hair for unwelcome visitors.

“Boy, there’s something about bats that really brings out the sailor in you,” I commented, and then returned to the fruitless task of shaking the sturdy, heavy grate. I was ready to give up but just for the hell of it I gave it one more obligatory yank. And then I felt it give. Just a little.

I rattled the grate again. “What did that TV guy say before Grey’s performance in the cave? Something about not touching the walls, because of how soft they were?”

Megan shook her head. “I wasn’t there,” she said. “But my grandfather used to lecture us about that, about how the cave walls were made of sandstone and how easy it was to dig into them. Didn’t matter how much he said it, though, we still did it.”

“So even though this is a really solid piece of metal,” I said as I examined the grate more closely, “it’s attached to what is essentially soft rock.”

“Soft rock? Like Fleetwood Mac?” Megan asked, trying to hide the traces of a smirk.

“I see someone’s sense of humor is creeping back in,” I said. “So if the rock that’s holding this is soft, it really doesn’t matter how sturdy the actual grate is.”

I stepped back and then rushed at the grate, hitting it with the full force of my shoulder and all the weight behind it. I was unable to gauge the impact I made on the grate, as the impact on my shoulder was so intense, pain-wise, that for a second I felt like I was going to pass out.

This made me so mad that I stood back from the grate and lifted my right leg as high as I could and kicked with the full force of my body. I did that twice more, with less force each time, before falling backward onto the dirt. I tried to keep my whimpering to a minimum. The grate hung exactly where it had for years and glared back at me with a silent superiority that I found annoying.

“I’ll give it a try,” Megan said, taking a position in front of the metal grid.

“Don’t bother,” I said from my place on the ground. “They found the one spot in all the caves where the rock isn’t soft.”

She ignored me and prepared to make her own Bruce Lee-style karate kick, balancing on her right leg and arcing her left leg directly at the grate. She gave her best karate yell and kicked firmly at the grid. Her foot bounced off the metal like a tennis ball off the side of a garage and she tumbled backwards to the ground, landing neatly on top of me.

“Son of a bitch,” she grumbled as she rolled off of me, placing her elbow squarely into my kidneys in the process. She saw a fist-sized rock on the dusty ground where she had landed and grabbed it, throwing it with fury at the barred metal.

The rock hit cleanly at the center of the grate, making a resonant clang before falling back to the ground.

We turned away, but the sound of metal grinding on rock drew our attention back to the opening. A second later the grate slipped effortlessly away from the wall and tumbled out of sight, down into the woods below.

The only unsettling part of the temporary victory was how long it took for us to hear the sound of it hitting the ground. It took a lot longer than I might have liked. I pulled myself painfully to my feet and stepped forward to examine the obstacle-free opening. Behind me I could hear Megan as she gave a small cheer of joy.

“Now what?” Megan asked as she joined me. She was grinning ear to ear.

“Now we transform ourselves into mountain goats and climb down,” I said as I began to pull myself through the hole.

The bluffs that line the riverfront across from downtown St. Paul are, admittedly, not exactly Mount Everest.

Even if there had been snow on the ground, there was no chance of an avalanche. And we were within sight of civilization, so there wouldn’t be any Andes-style snacking to worry about.

Be that as it may, it looked to be a long way down. Given the distance between us and the footpath below, I seriously wondered how a lone Parks Department worker had made it up here to install the grate, poorly or otherwise.

I crawled through the hole and stood precariously on a small ledge beneath it. I looked up the bluff and gauged that climbing higher wasn’t a practical option. It looked like quite a hike, a steep one at that, and I had no idea where it would ultimately leave us. Going down made more sense, because I could see the road below and knew that it would take us to my car and, more importantly, to my phone.

“Let me go first,” I said to Megan as I helped her through the hole. “I think I can see the safest way down.”

I stepped back to make room for her on the small ledge and felt the ground give way as my feet came out from beneath me. Then I felt a bush, followed by the branches of a small tree, some shrubs, followed by some stones – both large and small – another tree and then a series of shrubs – this time of the prickly variety – as I slid down the face of the hill.

It was not unlike riding down one of those huge slides at a state fair or carnival, except that the sliding surface was far from smooth and there was nothing between me and the hill but my pants. 

Somewhere between seven and ten seconds later I was lying in a heap at the bottom of the bluff, with bits of my pants (and some of my skin) spread out on the hill above me. It was clear that I had discovered the fastest, albeit not the least painful, way down.

I heard Megan, above me, swearing as she struggled to make her way down the hill without following the express route I had just taken. As I listened to her slow and profane progress, I did a quick systems check, wiggling first my fingers and then my toes. After that proved moderately successful, I tried moving my upper limbs and then the lower ones. I felt pain throughout every inch of my body, but nothing sharp or specific, leading me to believe that while much of me was badly bruised, none of me was actually broken.

By the time Megan reached my side, I was able to sit up, although the flashbulbs going off in my head made me wish I hadn’t. I touched a sore spot on my forehead and my hand came back red, so apparently I was bleeding in at least one area.

“What took you so long?” I asked, and then spit some dirt out of my mouth.

“Are you okay? That looked really painful.”

“Not a problem. Luckily, my body broke the fall. Help me up.” I began the deliberate process of putting my feet under me and, with Megan’s assistance, I was able to stand shakily.

I looked back up at the dark opening into the cave and shook my head at how far away it appeared. Then I turned my gaze toward the road. “This path should lead us to Water Street,” I said. “From there, we can walk or hitch back to the parking lot.” I leaned on Megan and we started toward the road. The pain, which was equally dispersed throughout my body, started to fade the more I moved and by the time we reached the road I was able to walk on my own, with only the trace of a limp.

“You know what we’re learning?” Megan asked several minutes later as we made our way along the side of Water Street.

“Don’t marry a psycho? Don’t let him lock you in a cave? Don’t scare a flock of bats in a small space?”

She cut me off, sensing, correctly, that I was just getting warmed up. “No, we’re learning that no one wants to pick up hitchhikers who are dirty, battered, bloodied, and smelling of bat pee.”

“Well, to be fair, they probably wouldn’t know that we smell of bat pee until after we got into their car.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “Some people have a sixth sense about bat pee and many of them seem to be driving down Water Street tonight.”

On some level she was correct. Consequently, what would have been a five-minute trip with the help of a friendly, open-minded driver turned into a twenty-minute walk back to The Wabasha Caves’ main entrance. My car was the only one in the lot—Pete must have taken Megan’s, with the idea of placing it back in its traditional spot behind her store.

I had to admit, his plan looked good on paper.

To outsiders, it would appear that I had driven Megan to The Caves, and then gotten trapped inside with her. The case would be closed, he’d get all of her assets and could sell them as he wished. And no one would be any the wiser.

“We should get out of here,” Megan said, a trace of fear in her voice. “In case Pete comes back.”

“I don’t think Pete is coming back until he’s certain that we’ve expired due to carbon monoxide poisoning,” I said as I opened the passenger door and picked up my phone. I was about to dial Deirdre when I noticed that I had received three calls, all from her. She had left the same number of voicemails. I listened to the first one.

“Eli, where are you?” she said in the message, her voice sounding more than usually stressed. “I’m at your uncle’s shop. There’s been an accident. Call me. Now.”

I didn’t bother listening to the other messages, but started the car and then proceeded to violate several traffic laws as I made my best time yet getting back to Minneapolis.

From a block away it was clear that something was going on at Chicago Magic. An ambulance, a fire truck, and several squad cars were parked haphazardly in front of the store, their flashing lights creating psychedelic patterns on the storefronts. A crowd of onlookers were being held at bay by several uniformed officers. As we approached, a voice yelled out to me.

“Eli! Eli, old boy. What’s going on?” It was Clive, standing on the edge of the crowd, holding his portable police scanner in one hand while he held a small video camera above the crowd and pointed it in the general direction of the front door of our shop. “There was one call on the scanner and since then they’ve been completely mum on the topic. Occasionally one of the medics or the fireman will come out coughing, then they turn around and go back in. What the devil is going on?”

“Clive, I haven’t a clue,” I said as I pushed through the crowd with Megan right behind me. I got to the front and was ducking under the police tape they’d strung around the front sidewalk when a uniformed officer yelled at me from the curb.

“Hey, you, stay behind the tape.”

“It’s okay,” a familiar, but not friendly, voice bellowed. “We’ve been waiting for him.”

I looked up to see Homicide Detective Fred Hutton standing over me. He lifted the yellow tape up high enough for Megan and me to scamper through, then waved us into the store. The flashing lights were creating weird patterns on his face. I couldn’t really read his expression, but I didn’t like the fact that he had been borderline polite to me. That couldn’t be good.

Deirdre was waiting for us on the other side of the door.

“Deirdre, what happened? What’s going on?” I asked, scanning around the shop. It was a small space and didn’t really seem large enough to hold the number of cops, EMTs, and firemen that were currently encamped there. They were all standing at the front of the shop, making it impossible for me to see what was going on in the back.

“Eli,” she said, putting out a hand to stop me from moving forward, “there’s been an accident. That’s why I was calling you. Your uncle—”

I didn’t wait for her to finish but pushed past her and through the wall of civil servants until I got to the back of the shop. The back counter was blocking my view, but I could see a pair of legs sprawled on the floor at the base of the steep steps that led up to our apartments.

“Harry,” I called out. I moved toward the body, but a hand reached out and stopped me.

“I wouldn’t go back there if I were you,” a voice said. I turned and was completely surprised and thrilled to see Harry, seated on a stool by the counter. One of the EMTs was bandaging Harry’s hand, but otherwise he looked unharmed.

“Harry? You’re okay?”

“I’m fine. What happened to you?”

“I’ll tell you about it later. Who’s that back there on the floor?”

“It’s that terrible magic student of yours,” he said, and then gestured next to me. “That young lady’s husband.”