“Santa Claus? Sasquatch?”
“They’re real. Sasquatch comes from a big family. They’re all over the place. Santa Claus is getting on in years. I don’t know how much longer he can keep it going.”
“I’m not taking the hook,” I said to Diesel.
“You were thinking about it.”
True. It was hard not to believe Diesel. He looked trustworthy. And “normal” had a tendency to expand in his universe.
“Are you sure we’re following the monkeys?” I asked him after a half hour of walking on pine needles and struggling through underbrush.
“I’m sure we’re following them. I’m not sure they’re taking us to Gail.”
We were on an ATV path, and the next moment, we stumbled into the Easter Bunny’s yard. He was back in his chair, wearing the same sad rabbit suit, and he was still smoking.
“Hey, Bernie,” Diesel said. “How’s it going?”
“It’s not Bernie,” he said. “It’s E. Bunny.” He took a long drag, pitched his stub of a cigarette onto the ground, and lit another. “Oh hell, who am I kidding, it’s Bernie. The bastards retired me, suit and all.”
“You don’t have to work anymore,” Diesel said. “This is the good life.”
Bernie nodded. “It ain’t bad. I get to sit here and smoke all day. Toward the end, they came in with all that no-smoking crapola. That was a bitch. You know what it’s like trying to sneak a smoke in a rabbit suit? It’s the shits.”
“Did you see a couple monkeys go past?”
“Yeah. One of them was wearing a scarf.”
After an hour, I was thinking everything looked familiar. “Have we been here before?” I asked Diesel.
“Yeah. The stupid monkeys are leading us in a circle. Bernie’s homestead is just ahead.”
“How did you know his name was Bernie?”
“I Googled Easter Bunny.”
“And it told you the Easter Bunny’s name was Bernie?”
“Okay, so I asked around.”
“Who did you ask?”
“Flash. He has a friend at the DMV, and he looked up the rabbit’s license plate.” Diesel draped an arm across my shoulders. “Do you believe me?”
“No.”
Diesel grinned. “People believe what they want to believe.”
We ambled back into Bernie’s yard and stopped to watch Bernie blow smoke rings.
“Looks like you’re still following the monkeys,” Bernie said, squinting through the smoke at us. “You’re about three minutes behind them. And watch out for the Jersey Dev il. He’s been in a real bad mood lately.”
We walked about a hundred yards, and ran into Carl. He was sitting back on his haunches, looking dejected.
“Where’s the other monkey?” I asked him.
Carl looked up. The monkey was in a tree.
“What’s he doing there?”
Carl shrugged.
“This was a stupid idea,” I said to Diesel.
“Yeah, but at least you walked off your sausage-and-egg sandwich. It would have gone straight to your ass.”
“I’m going back to Gail’s house, and then I’m going home. I don’t care about Munch. I don’t care about Wulf. I don’t care about their wicked weather machine. I don’t care if it rains rhinoceroses.”
“What about Gail Scanlon?”
“She’s on her own.” I looked around. “Which way do I go?”
“Wait,” Diesel said. “Do you hear something rumbling?”
I stopped and listened. “It sounds like Elmer’s truck with the broken muffler.”
We walked through the woods, following the sound. Carl tagged along, but the scarf monkey stayed in the tree. The truck cut out, but we kept walking in the general direction. The trees thinned, and we came to a large patch of scorched earth. A small, egg-shaped Airstream travel trailer sat on the edge of the clearing. Elmer’s truck was parked next to the trailer.
Diesel knocked on the trailer door, and Elmer answered.
“Holy cow,” Elmer said. “What a surprise. Nobody ever visits me. Do you want to come in?”
I gnawed on my lip. I didn’t want to be rude, but there was only one door. If Elmer farted and the trailer went up in flames, I’d die a horrible death.
“No thanks,” I said. “We were just out for a walk.”
“We’re looking for Gail Scanlon,” Diesel said.
“That’s the monkey lady,” Elmer said. “I met her once. She was real nice. I heard she was missing, and all her monkeys got loose.”
Elmer looked past me at Carl.
“Is that one of her monkeys?”
Carl gave Elmer the finger.
“Yep,” I said. “That’s her monkey.”
“Do you have any neighbors?” Diesel asked.
“The Easter Bunny is a couple miles through the woods. And one of the Sasquatch boys lives down the road a ways. Used to be a young couple living in a little house at the end of Ju nior Sasquatch’s road, but they moved out, and then the house burned down. I swear, it wasn’t my fault.”
“Anyone else?”
“Not in this little patch of the Barrens,” Elmer said. “There’s some businesses on Marbury Road. A couple antique shops, the Flying Donkey Mine, a bed-and-breakfast that don’t serve breakfast.”
“Is it a real mine?” I asked him.
“I suppose years ago it might have been. I don’t know what kind of mine, though. Then it was a tourist attraction. Only thing, there was hardly any tourists. It closed almost as soon as it opened, and it’s been closed since. And, of course, there’s the Dev il, except he isn’t much of a neighbor.”
“Do you know the Dev il?” I asked him.
“Not personal. I hear him flying over the trailer at night sometimes. Lately, he’s been flyin’ a lot. I tell you, the Barrens are strange and getting stranger.”
“Have you ever been in the mine?” Diesel asked Elmer.
“Nope. I thought about it, but it got closed before I got around to visiting. I thought it might have been interesting.”
“I think we should take a look at it,” Diesel said.
“You can’t go in. It’s all boarded up.”
“Then we’ll look at it from the outside,” Diesel said to Elmer. “You feel like driving us over there?”
“Sure,” Elmer said. “I’ll get my keys.”
I glanced over at Diesel. “I thought you said it was a bad idea to get in a truck with the fire farter.”
“He’s what we’ve got. If we don’t go with Elmer, we walk two hours through the woods to Gail’s house. That’s two hours less to find Munch and Wulf.”
“Yeah, but what if we’re in the truck and he farts?”
“If he farts, we’ll jump out of the truck and run like hell.”
Elmer came out with the keys. I got in front with Elmer. Diesel and Carl climbed into the back.
“Do you ever explore around in the woods?” I asked Elmer.
“Hardly ever. I got a creaky knee. Makes it hard to walk in the pine needles. And the truck’s gotta have a road. I hear them ATVs riding around behind me, going in the woods, but I haven’t got one of them.”
It took twenty minutes to get to the mine, and Elmer was right about it being closed. A large, weather-beaten sign advertised tours of the Flying Donkey, but the sign was more of a tombstone than anything else. The Donkey’s gift shop windows were covered with crudely nailed-on sheets of plywood. The plywood was warped and water-stained. The shop door was boarded shut. The parking lot was large, made to accommodate tour buses that never came. Weeds struggled to grow in the cracks in the blacktop. The mine itself was several yards behind the gift shop. A path led from the parking lot to the mine.
Elmer parked close to the gift shop. We left Carl in the truck, and Diesel, Elmer, and I got out and took the path. Another sign was posted at the mine’s entrance. closed was spray-painted over the tour times. A half-assed chain-link fence was propped across an e
ntrance that looked more like the approach to a cave than a mine.
A dirt path continued past the mine entrance. A smaller, barely legible sign announced that this was a nature walk.
“I’m feeling in the mood for nature,” Diesel said, setting off on the path.
Elmer and I walked along with him, and it occurred to me that this was a maintained path. It should have been overgrown by now, but the brush had been weed-whacked away. Diesel stopped after a couple hundred feet and then quietly walked several yards into the woods. We followed him and stared down at an air shaft. We returned to the trail and found six more air shafts at regular intervals. We stood over the last air shaft, and muffled voices carried up to us. Diesel motioned for silence, and we quietly walked back to the trail.
“This is why we couldn’t see it from the air,” Diesel said to me. “These underground caves can be huge and wind around for miles. Everyone walk in a different direction. Go two hundred feet and come back. Look for any disturbance in the undergrowth.”
I walked about fifty feet in and saw a wire running pine tree to pine tree, even with the top of my head. The pines were straight and tall and most of the lower branches had been trimmed. An antenna stretched along the trunk of the pine tree, disappearing into the upper branches. There were wires crisscrossing the stand of trees, and I counted twenty-six antennae joined by the wires.
I returned to the path and waited for Diesel.
“I found the grid of antennae,” I said to Diesel. “They’re hidden by the pines.”
“And I found a hatch that’s probably the roof over a rocket silo.”
“I didn’t find nothin’,” Elmer said.
Stephanie Plum 14.5 - Plum Spooky
TWENTY-FOUR
WE WALKED BACK to the mine entrance and pulled the gate away. A walkway led into the mine interior.
“This is con ve nient for them,” Diesel said. “You can pull a truck into the lot, off-load materials, and move everything along an underground path. They probably have a couple heavy-duty carts. And probably there’s another entrance to this cave. Maybe several. I’m guessing if we go back to the fuel depot and the two houses where Munch was living, we’ll find they all hook up with this cave system. And there has to be another house or business where they can park cars.”
“Now that we’ve found them, what’s next?” I asked. “Police? Homeland Security?”
“That would ruin my chances of containing Wulf. I need to get into the mine and look around.” He turned to Elmer. “I want you to go to Gail’s house. You know where it is, right?”
“Yep. I know exactly where.”
“There’s a guy staying there. His name is Hal. He’ll be dressed in black, and he works for a company called Range-man. Tell him about the mine, and tell him Stephanie and I are inside. Ask him to tell all that to Ranger.”
“Okay. I got it.”
Diesel took my hand and tugged me into the mine entrance.
“I hate this,” I said to him. “I’m claustrophobic. And I can’t see in the dark like you can.”
“Walk where I walk, and you’ll be fine.”
Daylight faded away behind us, and smothering blackness closed in around us. The path under our feet was smooth and level. I was close to Diesel, my hand flat against his back in an effort to absorb some courage.
We walked a short distance and came to a fork. Diesel went right and stopped.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
“Door.”
I felt Diesel put his hand to the door and push it open. Path lights dimly illuminated the corridor in front of us. We were in a rock tube, a habitrail for spelunkers. Fuel-storage tanks lined the side of the tube, and electric lines ran overhead. A narrow tunnel went off to the right, but we could hear voices ahead, and we followed the voices. We reached what appeared to be the end of the tunnel and peeked around the edge of the rock wall into a cavernous room that looked like it belonged in a low-bud get James Bond film. Monitors sat on collapsible rectangular tables. Bundles of wires snaked across the floor. A couple monster computers were housed in a makeshift cubicle. I could see the openings to two more tunnels on the other side of the room. Three men in khaki uniforms were helping Munch pack boxes.
Wulf was moving his operation out of the Barrens.
Diesel backed us out, retreated down the corridor, and took the narrow side tunnel. We came to another large cavern, where cots were stacked triple-decker and a kitchen of sorts had been built into a wall. Dormitory, I thought, but no one was in it, and the beds had been stripped of linens.
The cave smelled musty, the walls were damp, and there was the constant whoosh of air getting pumped through the tunnels.
The tunnel widened, and more fuel tanks were stacked against the rock. There was another door ahead, on the tunnel wall, and beyond the door, the tunnel narrowed and slanted downhill. Diesel listened at the door, put his hand to the lock, and pushed the door open.
It was a small, cell-like room with a sink and toilet at one end and a chair and cot at the other. A single overhead bulb lit the room. Gail sat on the cot, her eyes dead in her face, her shoulders slumped. She was wearing a khaki jumpsuit and sneakers.
“Gail?”
She looked at me and sighed. No expression.
Diesel scooped her up, carried her out of the room, and closed the door. We hustled down the corridor, retracing our steps. Diesel opened the door to the tunnel entrance, and Elmer and Carl walked through and squinted down the long corridor. Carl stood back, not sure he wanted to go further.
“Look at this,” he said. “Isn’t this something?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I got to the end of the parking lot, and I had one of them freak accidents, and next thing, my truck was on fire. So I thought I’d come see what you were doing here, but I couldn’t get through the door.”
I looked at Elmer’s pants and realized the seat was burned out and black around the edges.
Two uniformed guys stepped into the tunnel at the far end. One raised his rifle and fired.
“Oh crap!” Elmer said.
I couldn’t hear over the rifle fire if he farted, but the packing boxes lining the wall went up like tinder, and flames enveloped the first of the fuel tanks.
“Eep!” Carl said, and he turned tail and disappeared down the tunnel toward the entrance.
Diesel pushed everyone through the door, closed it, and we all ran blind in the dark until we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Behind me, I heard POW POW POW, and I suspected it was the string of tanks exploding. We burst out of the tunnel and didn’t stop running until we were in the middle of the parking lot.
Four fireballs rose out of the pines into the sky. There were more explosions, and a wall of fire roared out of the mouth of the cave. Black smoke blanketed the forest and parking lot, blocking the sun, stinging my eyes. I heard wings flapping close overhead, but I couldn’t see through the smoke. A load of road apples dropped from the sky and splattered on the blacktop, missing me by inches. The sound of flapping wings faded.
“I guess what with all the explosions, we woke the Dev il up,” Elmer said.
There was a lot of lightning, and the sky opened up and dumped water on the forest. The rain turned to hail and then back to rain. We walked to the road, past Elmer’s truck carcass, and looked back at the pines. There was still a lot of smoke, but not a lot of fire.
“Where’s the closest ride?” Diesel said to Elmer.
“There’s a bed-and-breakfast a couple miles down the road.”
“Mallory Eden’s place,” Gail said.
It was the first she’d spoken, and we all turned to her.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I’m so depressed.” Tears spilled down her cheeks. “My poor monkeys. I couldn’t tell you about Martin Munch and his partner. They had my monkeys.”
“Your monkeys are okay,” I said. “We took their hel
mets off.” Most of them, anyway.
“I want to go home,” Gail said. “I want to see my monkeys.” She looked down at Carl. “Who’s this little guy?”
“This is Carl,” I said. “He’s sort of mine.”
We walked down the road in the rain. I expected to hear sirens and see fire trucks barreling down on us, but the road was deserted. Maybe they came from the other direction.