Hungry Ghosts

by Susan Dunlap

  The car sat in the lane. Grace let out a sigh and turned to face me. “For money, that’s how! Painkillers are big-money drugs. Find a way to tame that poison and you’re a multimillionaire.”

  “Tia had that capsule in her purse when she went into the tunnel. She didn’t come out with it. Turn around.”

  Grace pulled the wheel right. Only then did she realize the car wasn’t moving. She hit the gas and hung a U.

  “So, Tia heard about the frog dart—”

  “Golden poison dart frog, Phyllobates terribilis. It’s not named terribilis for nothing.” She shot through an intersection.

  “I tried to get the police to look for it, but they’re caught up with Jeffrey’s murder. Korematsu won’t back me up. And the guy who seems to be in charge thinks I’m a fool, and I don’t think he cares much for John, either.”

  “The capsule’s in the tunnel?”

  “I’m almost positive.”

  “Almost?”

  “Tia stashed it there. But it wasn’t there tonight. Here’s what must have happened. It slipped down a chute at the end of the tunnel.”

  “Chute to?”

  “Who knows?” I said, bracing against the dashboard as we sped across Van Ness.

  “Who knows! Who knows! The Bay, the drinking water? We’re not talking about merely the deadliest of frog dart poison, we’re talking poison that’s been amped up as high as possible, reborn as weapons-grade. This could be a disaster. A disaster that could hit tomorrow or six years from now. We have to get it out of there.”

  “I’m not totally positive—”

  “Odds are it’s there, right? In a leather purse that could get eaten by rats. The vial could get broken and spill and . . . We can’t take the chance.”

  If I wanted someone to keep me from going into that tunnel and down that hole, I was riding with the worst person in the city. Just the thought of it filled me with fear, but I knew it had to be done, and if I didn’t go down that hole, my sister would, and she, who had had no physical training, might well die down there.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE CRIME SCENE van and what looked to be the last patrol car were pulling away as we passed Pacific and parked on Columbus, where there was less chance of anyone spotting Grace’s beat-up-into-uniqueness station wagon.

  I said, “I need to picture the reception, to place where we all were. I’m trying to remember where Eamon went to get the key.”

  “Think, now.”

  “I am, but you can’t just summon a memory, Gracie. It’s not like—”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “Fine, but—”

  “But what? Why are you stalling? If you don’t want to go down there, I’ll go. We’re talking about an epidemic that could wipe out the entire city.” She slid out of the car and strode off.

  I followed suit, catching up with her quickly on Pacific. “You’ve got your reputation—”

  “Yeah, it’ll be a great comfort while I watch people die. Listen, I’d call in the authorities if I could. Believe me.”

  “I’ll call Korematsu—”

  “Darcy, if he was going to go back down there and get the purse, he wouldn’t have cleared off.”

  “Maybe they even have it already. Maybe he listened to me, after all.”

  “If he’d found something as dangerous as frog dart poison, the whole area’d be cordoned off. So, the key?”

  “I’ll have to hunt.” We were in the courtyard now. I stepped inside the zendo. At the reception, when Tia insisted on seeing the tunnel, Eamon had stepped into the vestibule. He hadn’t been gone a full minute, so the key had to be in the closet. I opened the door and spotted it in the back. If I moved it, Grace would never find it and neither one of us would have to go down that hole. If I—

  My thoughts shocked me. Didn’t I care about the epidemic? What kind of person was I? I was the perfect person to do this. I’d had years of training to handle hard situations. I had done car rolls and blind drops into catchers four stories down. I’d been worried, but not shaking. Bad as those gags were, there’d been rescue crews on the set, paramedics standing by. Bad as they had been, they were over in less than a minute.

  But this hole was an entirely different thing, and it viscerally terrified me.

  The thing was, giving in to fear frightened me more. I wondered if this was what Tia felt. Only half; her high came from beating back the laws of ordinary life. I grabbed the key and the emergency torch and stepped outside. How bad can it be? I asked myself. Grace will be right there at the top of the hole. If there’s any problem, she’ll get help. She’ll be inches away the whole time.

  The fog had thinned, but the circles and ovals under the streetlights still glistened wet and cold.

  “Odd, there’s no crime scene tape around the grate, no uniform left on duty,” Grace mused suspiciously. For Grace there was always an underside; confidence merely meant someone overlooking the pitfalls.

  “What were they going to tape off? Pedestrians had walked over that grate for two days before we got there. And it’s been hours since I was here.” I glanced at my watch. It was almost four in the morning! “They’ve had plenty of time to get what they need.” I inserted the key. It moved surprisingly easily. The grate did not. I had to brace both feet and yank. In the dim light the ladder was barely visible.

  “I’ll go first,” Grace said.

  “No.” My throat was so dry I had to swallow to get out the rest of my admonition. “You’ll stay up here.”

  “Darcy, I can handle this.”

  “What if someone comes along and shuts the grate? No one will know we’re down there, ever!”

  I swung onto the ladder before I had time to think about Grace not being at the top of the hole, not being actually in the tunnel at all, not being near enough to hear me scream. The flashlight illumined a tiny circle. How had it seemed so much more adequate when we were down there after the reception? Had it just been the party atmosphere, the sense of adventure, like a movie set where wrong can only happen within limits? Then the tunnel was crowded and small. Now I was alone and it was huge. Before, it was a party game. Now it was Jeffrey Hagstrom’s tomb.

  My feet hit the bottom. The mud grabbed them. I turned and shot the light down the wall, along the floor, and made myself walk, hand on wall, as I had earlier tonight, away from the ladder, past where Jeffrey’s body had lain—Jeffrey, who I desperately wanted to believe had been dead before he was dropped into this place he so feared.

  Jeffrey had to have been thrown down here. Nothing else made sense. By the time the killer had forced Jeffrey to swing himself onto the ladder and climb down, Jeffrey would have screamed so loud half the city would have gathered around. Pacific is a quiet street after hours. It’s an ideal spot to carry or drop a body, but a terrible one in which to move a screaming hostage.

  The tunnel had been quiet before, as if the mud sucked out the sound, but now my feet swished with each step, raising the whispers of the sailors, drunk, unconscious, or dead, who had been dropped through trapdoors into waiting carts. The putrid smell filled my lungs and I thought I was going to cough and cough until there was nothing left. The radius of my light was so narrow I had no sense of where I was in the tunnel; it seemed endless.

  My foot hit the wall. My nose was inches from it. I coughed. Spray hit my face. I blinked hard against it. “Grace?”

  “You okay, Darce?”

  “Sure,” I forced out. “Just checking. I’m kneeling now, looking down the hole. I’m flashing the light into it.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. I’m sticking my hand in, rotating the light.”

  “Do you see anything now?”

  “No. Just black.” I waited for Grace to speak again, but she didn’t. There was nothing to say. We both knew it. I stuck my head in the hole.

  It was black. The walls were rough, the chute narrow. I couldn’t see the bottom. And then I could, way down, and at the base something tan against black ro
ck. The purse! Relief washed over me; a new wave of terror washed it away.

  “Find anything?” Grace called.

  “I don’t know. I’m . . . I’m going to have to look again.” I needed to take a deep long breath and calm myself; I couldn’t stand to pull this awful air that deep into my lungs. I plunged my head back in. The walls narrowed but they were too dark, too irregular to show by how much. Space in darkness is deceptive. I could see the purse now, definitely a purse. It lay where the walls came together, maybe ten feet down. Around it were white sticks. Sticks?

  Or were they bones? What was this chute?

  Maybe they were just sticks.

  “Darcy? How’s it going?”

  “I found the purse. Down a chute. Ten feet down. I can get down there.”

  “I’m coming in.”

  “No! You’ve got to stand watch up there.”

  “Shine the light over here. I’m on the ladder. Jeez, this is slippery. What is this place? It’s revolting.”

  I laughed. It was such an inadequate word. I aimed the light and spotted Grace’s green loafers, already mud-splattered. She should have stayed up top, but I was so very relieved to have her down here with me. “Keep your hand on the wall as you walk. It’s easier, no matter how awful it feels.”

  “Hey, I’m a doctor. I don’t do squeamish.”

  “You’re wearing a belt, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’m going to take mine off and give it to you. If I get stuck, loop them together and brace your feet to pull me out.”

  “Okay.” Her voice was tight, but did not carry the fear that shot through me. I had doubled the lead once in a script about a child stuck in a well for days, the air getting ever more fetid, his little body weakening, sinking, getting more wedged in. With fire departments from six counties unable to— I shook my head, hard.

  “Hey, keep that light steady!”

  “Yeah, like when you were squatting on the beach outside our tent that time and you were so busy carrying on about the flashlight you toppled over and rolled into the water?”

  “What about you on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz?” she said, with a forced laugh. She understood the need for a little distraction. “‘Hold me! I want to stand up! Hold me while I stand!’ And the roller coaster hadn’t even left the gate!” It wasn’t the same thing, but this was no time to get critical.

  “Okay. You’re here.” I handed her the light, noting, not for the first time, how small she was, not letting myself dwell on whether she’d really be able to pull me up in an emergency. I hugged her, harder than I had intended, then bent, braced my hands on the sides of the chute, and slid my feet in. I leaned forward to use the lip for traction. My feet dangled in air; the mud was useless to stop my fall. I thrust my arms out. The fall stopped, for the moment, but even my arms were sliding, my body was dead weight. Carefully, so I wouldn’t create more momentum, I moved my feet out to the sides. The chute had looked narrow, why wasn’t I coming up against wall? My arms were slipping. I couldn’t fall, not onto the poison! I split my legs wider, moved my feet back and forth. Was the wall there and I just wasn’t feeling it?

  My arms jerked, slipped inches at once, they were almost vertical, near useless. I couldn’t keep on hunting for the walls like this. I thrust one foot back, one forward, and then caught wall. The back-forth wedge wasn’t as reliable as the side-to-side, but it was better than freefall. I slow-skidded the back heel until it found something that might be a ledge or a pimple-sized bulge; there was no way to tell. “Please,” I said to the outcropping, “just a little longer.”

  With side wedges you can press the edges of your shoes into the wall and do a very controlled skid. But front-back was too unsteady. Very slowly I wiggled my foot downward, feeling the rock through the rubber sole, trying to tell whether the space was narrowing. My arms slipped again, only this time I was braced. My hands were still outside the hole. The black was unrelenting; I couldn’t see anything. The smell—must, brine, decay—forced me to breathe through my mouth.

  “Darcy, you okay?”

  “Mmm.”

  I wiggled my toe an inch lower. My rear foot was losing traction. Jamming the front toe hard into the rock, I slid the back foot. It went fast, too fast. I couldn’t find purchase. It was slipping. My front knee was bending. I thrust my hands to the sides and caught wall. I was hanging on my outstretched arms now, feet dangling. The rock cut into my hands, and still there was too much mud; the friction was going. My hands were slipping. I rammed my feet out to the sides and caught wall again.

  My feet skidded. I pressed the sides of my shoes into the walls, but that only slowed the skid. Something flitted over my face, but I didn’t dare take my hands away from the walls. My hands slid.

  The wall was gone. My hands were in air. My feet sliding fast. I covered my face and fell.

  I hit bottom with a crunch. My feet hit hard, my ankle bones jammed against the sharp angles around me.

  “What happened?” Grace sounded terrified, her voice miles away.

  “I hit bottom. I thought for a minute I’d snapped my ankles. But it was something else breaking.”

  “You didn’t land on the purse! Is it intact?”

  “Oh, shit. Let me see. This is going to be tricky. It’s too tight here for me to bend over. I’m going to have to see if I can ease it up with one foot. While I balance on the other.”

  “Be careful. If the bottle’s broken and the poison spilled . . . If it gets in a cut, it’ll kill you before you get out of the hole.”

  I shivered so violently I hit the walls. Then I couldn’t move at all. I heard myself moan.

  “Something the matter?”

  A laugh, near-hysterical, shook me. “No, Gracie, it’s fine down here now that I know there’s not as much danger of being buried alive.” Grace didn’t know the half of it. If I balanced on my ankle and it was broken, I wouldn’t be able to wedge my way far enough up to even grasp the end of the belts. If I bent over and got wedged in, I was dead. I would be stuck with my hands down and there would be nothing in the world she could do to extricate me. Even the fire department wouldn’t be able to get me out.

  “Darcy—”

  “Let me think! This is what I do for a living, plan moves like this. Just give me a minute.” Slowly I bent my knees. My ankles screamed, but I didn’t dare move my feet. I sank, squatted until my back was against one wall, my knees against the other. Still, I couldn’t reach the purse. Down here at the bottom, the chute curved in on all sides like a colander.

  I shifted my shoulders. They touched wall on both sides. But I couldn’t reach any farther than my ankles. If I could see the purse . . . If I had the torch . . . But I didn’t. There was no way but to wedge onto one ankle, lift the other foot, and hope I could get the purse loose. I shifted; the ankle screamed. With my free foot I felt with my toes. Something moved. I didn’t dare kick it up and break the poison container. Instead I moved my toe back and forth until it got under something, something I hoped was the purse, and inched it up against my braced foot. When it was ankle-high I caught my toe under, bounced it up.

  “Got it!”

  “Great.” But there had been a little pause while she caught her breath and I realized that she hadn’t believed the retrieval was possible, not really. Not that that had stopped her trying, or had me try.

  “Lower the belt and I’ll send it up. Shine the light down, at an angle, not in my face.”

  As soon as the purse was gone, I took as deep a breath as I could stand in this putrid air, ran my hands up opposite walls till I found the narrowest route, and began wedging my way up. My ankle ached, but it was on its own. Maintaining movement was vital. If I paused even momentarily, I would slide all the way back to the bottom. I wedged elbows and feet until the chute widened and it had to be arms and feet, touch, dig in, lift, touch, dig in, lift.

  “Grab . . . me!”

  “I’m ready.”

  Grace was so small I was afrai
d, but I was wrong. When I got my head out of the chute, she locked onto my shirt and gave me enough support to thrust my shoulders up. Somehow she pulled and I shot out of the chute like an easy birth. We both ended up in the mud.

  It was a minute before she said, “I have good and bad news.”

  “What?” I forced out. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t think.

  “Good: you were right, the vial was in the purse. Bad: it’s not there now. The purse, it’s got a Styrofoam insert, whittled down to fit in. But the center, where the poison vial was, is empty.”

  I pushed myself up. “Worst possible. She had it and somebody killed her for it. Jeffrey realized it. It was the first thing he’d think of. And that got him killed.”

  “And the killer has had that poison for two days. Darcy, there’s only one thing you hold on to something like that for.”

  I waited.

  “To sell it. It’s as bad as it gets.”

  But Grace was wrong about that. It wasn’t as bad as it gets. Not for another ten seconds, when the grate to the sidewalk slammed shut over us.

  CHAPTER 29

  “HEY, LET US OUT!” Gracie yelled.

  The only reply was the metal doors reverberating as they settled in flush with the sidewalk.

  “We’re down here! Open up! Hey!”

  “Save it, Gracie. If there was anyone else around, whoever’s done it wouldn’t have slammed down the doors.”

  “Maybe it was a mistake? It could be, right? Someone sees doors open at night; it’s just the neighborly thing to do, to shut ’em. It could—”

  “No one’s up there. It’s four-thirty in the morning.”

  “People could come to work early. They—”

  “Gracie!”

  “Oh, God . . . I was supposed to be watching the door! That was my job! Darcy, I should have—”