Hungry Ghosts

by Susan Dunlap

  “Stop! Just stop!” Her hysteria scared me almost more than our being trapped. I had the flashlight. “Look at the light. Put your hands out and walk toward me.” When her arm touched, I eased her in and hugged her. I wanted to hold her till she calmed a bit, but there was no time—no time for guilt, explanations, no time to spare. “Do you have your cell phone?”

  “In the car.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “There’s got to be a door switch in here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes sense. Put one hand on the wall; hang on to my back.” Sliding my feet, I moved toward the slither of light under the metal doors. Grace didn’t speak but her tight breaths—each inhalation broken off with a gasp—said it all. How could I have allowed my so good, so committed sister to come charging down into this tomb? All she’d thought about was protecting everyone else. Oh, Gracie! I wanted to say, “I love you, Gracie,” but I didn’t dare. Instead, I swallowed, controlled my voice, and insisted, “There’ll be an emergency switch because it’s a storage area, not a prison. We’re not in the nineteenth century; this is now.” I reached around for her hand. “Here’s the ladder. Run your hand along the other side. Start at waist level, brush across. Be thorough, but don’t waste time.”

  She didn’t ask why, and I didn’t tell her that the biggest danger was not the metal doors closing but the killer pushing those big planters over them. I spread my fingers, swathed my hand back and forth on the other side of the ladder, moving a couple of inches higher each time, desperate for a switch, a button, a chain, anything.

  “Darcy, there’s nothing here! We’re fooling ourselves. There’s no way out! That’s the way they built these tunnels, so prisoners couldn’t get away!”

  “Shut up! Just shut up! What kind of role model are you?” I’d almost said, What would Mom think? But that would have turned her, and me, to mush. “Keep at it. I’m starting up the ladder. If the switch isn’t down here, then it’ll be at the top.”

  I felt along the right side, and then the left. No switch, no loop, nothing. Panic swirled in my stomach. Why would there be an exit when there weren’t lights here? There was no electricity; what was I thinking? How could I have— Stop! In Zen practice we don’t push away thoughts, we let them go. But I pushed them out now and focused on my breath. I felt the metal ladder cutting into my hands, my feet pressing against the step, felt the dank of the tunnel icing the sweat on my back. Felt the moment as it was. Watched the incipient panic recede.

  Pencil-point lines of lighter dark outlined the metal doors. “Gracie, I’m going to push the door open. Stand to the side. I may fall.”

  She didn’t answer.

  The doors met to the right of the ladder. I climbed till my shoulders touched metal, braced my feet and pushed. The metal vibrated but didn’t give.

  I moved up to the next step, hunched over under the door. “I’m trying again.”

  Gracie said nothing. The only sound was her short, thick breaths. She was doing all she could just keeping quiet. I inhaled, braced one hand next to my shoulder, shoved with all my strength.

  The door shifted; the light was wider, brighter. My feet slipped off the rung. I grabbed. Too late. I heard the metal clank as I landed on my back in the mud.

  Mud splattered my face. I gasped for breath.

  “Oh, Darcy, are you all right?”

  “Uh-huh!” I forced out, and pushed myself up out of the muck. “Yeah. The mud cushioned my fall.” My back throbbed. My head swirled, my vision was blurred, but maybe that was from the mud. I reached for the ladder. “There’s something heavy on it, but it’s not locked.”

  Grace gave an odd squeak, the shadow of a laugh. “Of course it’s not locked, Darce, we took the key.”

  “We’re so good!” I started up the ladder, ribs screaming each time I hoisted myself up. “I have to get more leverage. Come up behind me, brace my back so I can use both hands.”

  I climbed till I was squatted double like a power lifter. Grace grabbed the ladder around me.

  “If I start to fall, jump. I don’t want to kick you.”

  “You’ve finally grown out of that?”

  I forced what passed for a laugh. Gracie was trying so hard. “Okay,” I said, “ready? Go!” I exploded up with the fury of childhood. The metal shimmied, gave. Light came through as one door released an inch. But the weight atop it held, and I slammed back down into Grace. “You okay?”

  It was a moment before she managed a yes.

  She had held, but she was too small to do it again. Still, there was no other choice. I took a deep breath. “Again. Ready?”

  I thrust up, catching the edge, pushing with strength I didn’t know I had. Metal rattled; something shifted. I shoved my shoulders between the metal doors, twisted, braced it. “Climb around me. Quick!”

  She was up and out in seconds, caught the door, and held it till I slid out. The big masonry planter from the courtyard was still caught at the edge of the door, still atop the metal. I let the door bang down.

  It wasn’t quite five in the morning, but light as noon. I could see everything, wanted to inspect every brick and stone. The air was cold. Rain was starting. It felt wonderful. I yearned to sit there on the grate and suck the clean air down into every inch of my body to let every cell know I was alive.

  But there was no time. “We have to move. Come on,” I said, pulling her up. “He’s already stabbed two people.”

  “He?” she puffed as we ran for the car.

  “He? She? Someone strong enough to carry Jeffrey’s body and throw it down into the tunnel.”

  Grace opened the door of her car, climbed in, and unlocked my side.

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. Does this vehicle have heat?”

  “It certainly does. And food.” She sounded giddy. She gave the glove compartment a single hard rap. The door flopped and half the candy bars in the city fell out. I snagged a Baby Ruth.

  “We could be dead!” Her elation had burst, her voice a monotone now, as if the reality of the tunnel had just intersected with rational thought. “Lying down there dead.”

  “Like Jeffrey. And Tia. The killer stabbed her, stole the poison, and then climbed down into the tunnel to stuff her purse back in the corner of the tunnel.”

  “How’d he know it was there to begin with?”

  “The same way I did. Except he had a head start. When she jumped into the tunnel he knew what she was up to. So, all he had to do was watch.”

  “Wait a minute. Explain this,” she said, in just the tone she had used when bailing me out of homework crises. “Tia’s at the reception with Jeffrey. Jeffrey’s got the vial in his pocket. Why didn’t she just wait for him to give it to her? Why go to all the hassle of getting it out of his pocket?”

  “She wanted the whole vial, but he’d tried to dole it out in portions. Jeffrey’s goal was keeping her around. She didn’t have time to wait. See, Georgia had shown up at her place earlier that afternoon and threatened to sic the CDC on her. So, she had to get the vial pronto.” I fished around in the back for a water bottle. “Tia took it and hid it. Then, the next day at lunch, suddenly I’m telling her about some homeless man going board-stiff before he died—bizarre, right? Exactly what the poison dart frog toxin does. I barely had the words out of my mouth when she rushed off, supposedly to look for a diary in her garage, but instead called Jeffrey. You have to know she was asking herself: what the hell had Jeffrey been doing with that poison all this time? Was he that careless? And how long was it going to be till the police were all over it?”

  “But how could she expect to get an answer from him? I mean, she’d just robbed the guy.”

  “Because, Gracie, she was Tia Dru. She could handle Jeffrey; she always had. And, in fact she did. He probably answered her questions, plus he drove her to the tunnel, and she got out, angry, but nonetheless safe and sound.”

  The car was warming up. We smelled like we’d been in a pigsty. Still, the heat fel
t wonderful. I leaned back against the seat, trying to put my finger on the mistake we’d all made. “You know, Leo was right.”

  “Leo! Darcy, what are you talking about?”

  “‘Don’t assume!’ That’s what Leo kept telling me. I assumed it was Tia and Jeffrey who were the friends and then along came Eamon, but in fact it was Eamon and Tia all along and—”

  “Eamon! Our Eamon killed Tia? Oh, Darcy, I just can’t . . . No, that can’t be. He ate at our table. He’s slept in our house. How . . . how?”

  “I know, Gracie, it’s a shock. Eamon seems like a nice guy, but he’s always got his eye out for the next move, right? He went from being a grunt in a lab to leasing property on Pacific Avenue, with no hint of a job or income.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “We assumed what they wanted us to think. But the reality is, from the time Tia spotted Eamon at Fort Detrick, the two of them set out to get ahold of the frog toxin. Tia was desperate for anything that might numb her pain. Eamon knew Jeffrey’s father had brought the toxin here. When Tia pointed out his resemblance to Mike, Eamon saw his entrée in the city. Tia set out to cultivate Jeffrey—thus her temp job at Letterman, where Jeffrey worked. Of course, she got Jeffrey to give her the thing she desperately needed. Guys always did that for her. Hard to get better connections than that. And best of all, there was us.”

  I realized I expected her to be as shocked as I’d been when the realization hit, but maybe she was on overload. She just sat in the dark car, her small angular face backlit by the streetlight, and she nodded as I said, “It was because every one of us in the family was so determined to find Mike. Because of the articles Katy got into papers across the country, how she humanized the family to grab people’s attention—the upright siblings involved in so much of San Francisco civic life and, of course, the pictures of Mike.”

  Grace’s breath caught. Her face went stony. “Because,” she said in disgust, “everyone—us, our friends, anyone who knew about Mike—really wanted to like this guy who was the next thing to him. They loved it that he fussed over Mom, spent time with John, took me to dinner. Everyone was rooting for him to be near enough to being Mike.” She shook her head. “I had doubts. Really. But he was good to Mom and I didn’t want to take that away.”

  I put a hand on her arm. “I’ll bet John, Gary, Katy—all of them—could say that. But he’s expert at playing people. Look, he was waiting in the house at four in the morning to drive me to the shoot. I liked him, too. Sort of.”

  “But—damn him!” She sat, looking straight ahead. “Damn him. Now he’s going to sell that toxin to God knows who. He’s probably already flying—”

  Wheels skidded around the corner behind us from Pacific onto Columbus. Eamon Lafferty slowed, doing a completely freaked double take when he saw us in Grace’s car. The engine coughed, as if in response to the foot of a shocked killer when he sees his victims outside their grave. He hit the gas before the engine stalled, then shot forward.

  Grace and I stared, stunned.

  “Slide over, Gracie! Let me drive!” I ran around and swung into the driver’s seat.

  “But why didn’t he stop and just kill us?”

  I turned the key and pumped the gas. “Because it’s a quarter after five.”

  “What, too close to dawn to kill? Let the gas up slower.”

  Using my lifetime’s quota of patience, I turned off the engine and started again. It caught, and patience gone, I hung a U and shot down Columbus.

  “Hey, he went the other way!”

  “I’ll catch him! Find your cell! Call 911!”

  “By the time I explain . . . let me call John.”

  I veered left on Montgomery, dead as a sepia-toned photo at this hour, and made the light to cross Market.

  Her head bobbed. The phone music twittered. “Darcy! Have you lost your mind, or are you just trying to see how fast you can burn up my engine?”

  I whipped down New Montgomery, doglegged Howard onto Hawthorne Street. “First flights out of SFO leave at six. They board at twenty of. He was already cutting it close. They don’t hold a flight for you because you got delayed killing people. Even now, he’ll be lucky if they don’t give away his seat.”

  A van pulled out mid-block. I cut around it, the screech of the wheels almost covering Grace’s plea to John. “He’s headed to the airport! With the poison! Hurry!”

  There were cars on Harrison. I honked, hit the turn signal, and cut off a white Honda.

  “Damn! Can’t you go any faster?”

  “Can’t you buy yourself a better car?” The light at Fourth turned red.

  “Go! Run it!”

  “We’d be dead!” I said as a truck lumbered through the intersection where we would have been.

  “SFO’s got three terminals, probably a hundred gates. John’s got to go through layers of police and airport police. We can’t be sure he’ll get the word out in time.”

  “Right. We’ve got to catch him on the freeway.” The light turned. I drove through, gas pedal floored, car moving sedately. “Don’t you ever get this thing serviced?”

  “Do you think I’ve got nothing else to do?”

  I eased up the on-ramp to the elevated freeway, the engine catching a bit more as we picked up speed. I switched from lane three to two, heading south now on 101. Downtown was to our rear; ahead was the straight shot to the airport. “Check behind us . . . it’ll be easy to spot him . . . he’ll be speeding.”

  “What if he’s not behind us? What if he’s ahead?”

  “I’ll deal with that,” I said with unmerited bravado. The best driver in the world can’t make a rattletrap into a NASCAR special. I signaled left, then flicked off the light.

  “What?” Grace was almost out of her seat, peering through the windshield.

  “Up ahead. It’s slowing.”

  “This is the West Coast, remember, Darcy? Brokers are already at work. The stock market opens at six.”

  “He behind us?”

  “No. Nothing but two buses.”

  “Damn! It’s stopping! A crash or—”

  “Get off! Darcy, trust me. Now!”

  I swung across two lanes and off at the Eighth Street ramp.

  “Straight on Harrison. If we make the lights . . . there, okay, left on Tenth. See the entrance?”

  I shot on back on the freeway. “You see him?”

  “No! Dammit, what if he’s not here?”

  “He knows we saw him, knows we’d call John. He wouldn’t dare take either of the bridges out of the city. The airport’s the only choice.” I passed Cesar Chavez, the street that had been Army when we were kids. “There he is!”

  “Where?”

  “Fast lane. Hang on. He’s picking up speed. If I miss him here, he’s gone. Call John. Tell him he’s got fifteen minutes.”

  “Army Street! Green convertible!” Grace said into the phone. “I know you can’t keep the line open, John!” She clicked off. “He’s on it.”

  Eamon Lafferty shifted right, out of the fast lane into the center.

  “We’re losing him. Isn’t there anything— I’ve got it floored.”

  He cut across two lanes.

  “Omigod, he’s not going to the airport . . . he’s on 280. Call John!”

  “I’m trying. I can’t get through! Where’s he going?”

  The 280 freeway led to the western districts of the city, to the beach, to a choice of roads south to Los Angeles. No bridges to stop him. “If we lose him, he’s gone!”

  A truck blocked the middle lanes. I hit the gas, cut him off, ignored his horn blast. The green convertible was locked in behind a van. “This is our chance.” I snapped off my seatbelt and stood on the gas. “Slide over, Gracie! Can you take it when I jump?”

  “Yes,” she squeaked.

  I angled half a car length in front of him, pulled close, opened the door. “Now!” With both hands on the window frame I kicked off, swung, and landed in his passenger seat. The sports car lurched, slam
med the median. Gracie’s car was all over the place.

  The truck’s brakes shrieked. The sports car bounced off the median, skidded across lanes that somehow had no cars in them, spun full around, and scraped along the slow lane edge. Sparks shot. Eamon jumped out and ran.

  The truck launched him twenty feet, into the exit lane.

  I yanked on the emergency lights, leapt over the windshield, and raced to him.

  Eamon’s body was mashed and bloody. Lying there, he didn’t look like Mike at all. Thank God. Brakes screeched, gears scraped, wind from the traffic whipped my thin, still-wet sweater. He lay in the lane, struggling for breath. There was a slew of questions I wanted to ask, but only one I couldn’t bear not to. I bent down close and said, “Which Portland?”

  “Port . . . . . . . land.” I could swear a look of satisfaction crossed his face before it went blank.

  For a moment I stood staring at this man who had so callously used us all. Then sirens screamed again; flashers cut the dawn sky. Grace was standing beside me, shaking. Highway Patrol cars squealed to stops, one ambulance, then another.

  “Get away from him, Darcy.” My sister had stopped shaking and was in command. To the CHP guy she said, “He’s carrying an extremely deadly poison. That truck hit sent him flying. The container may have smashed. Call HazMat.”

  We moved off the roadway, watched the CHP block off the scene. Suddenly John was walking up behind us, resting his arms on our shoulders. A tech, covered in white from head to foot, bent over Eamon Lafferty’s corpse. He checked his pockets, inside the lining of his jacket, examined his pants. He stood and walked over to the officer in charge. “Nothing here, sir.”

  “The poison’s not on him? Did you look in his car? Or the road, the median, the shoulder?” I demanded.

  “Not yet,” he snapped. “We’re going to have to close down the whole road south.”

  “Close it!”

  The coroner hurried over to John and said something lost in the traffic noise. John said something about jurisdiction.

  In the hour it was shut down I stared at the empty macadam, feeling as if I’d come full circle from the moment when I stood atop the turret on Broadway, before my high fall, before I spotted Eamon Lafferty.