Bubbles Ablaze (15 page)

“B
ubbles! Bubbles Yablonsky!”

Oh, that's right. It was Bubbles. Well, that wasn't very sophisticated, was it? Strippers and cartoon characters were named Bubbles. What genius had given me that annoying name, I'd like to know.

“We need to get you out of here.”

Yes we do, I agreed mentally. Right after this snooze. “Let me sleep.”

Muscular arms surrounded my chest and lifted me up. A man began praying out loud, “Dear Lord. Please save this lamb in your flock from an untimely end. Give me the strength to carry her to safety as you have given so many in your flock the power to do great feats in times of hardship. Amen.”

My head fell back and I let out a loud snore. That roused me a bit, enough to be conscious of the baseball cap and tousled blond hair. Zeke Allen.

“Hey, sleeping beauty.” He slapped my cheeks gently. “Wake up. Wake up or you're history. And we know how you are with history.” He threw me over his shoulder. “How much do you weigh?” he asked.

“One-eighteen.” Like most women, I could lie about my weight under any condition, CO poisoning, fire, crashing airplane, you name it. I was one-eighteen, come hell or high water. “Don't forget my purse.”

“Leave it.”

“Get it. It's my purse. A girl's gotta have her purse.”

He knelt slowly and picked up my purse.

“And my shoes,” I added, since they had slipped off my feet when I lay on the couch.

“Man, no one would have gotten off the
Titanic
if you'd been around.”

A few minutes later Zeke carried me up the stairs and into the church. The air was better, but my head was still splitting. Oww.

“Was that you praying?” I asked.

“Never hurts, does it?”

He took me outside where there was bright sunshine, blue sky and plenty of clean air—at least as clean as it gets in Limbo, PA—and laid me carefully on the dry grass. I clamped my head between my hands and wished for sleep. Why won't people let me sleep? Always moving me from this place to that place.

Zeke bent over me. He leaned down and pressed his soft lips against mine. They were full and alive. For the teeniest, tiniest moment, I felt twenty-two again. Vibrant. Carefree. A virile man caressing me. My chest rose into his and I let go. Breathless. Choking. . . .

“Get off!” I said, pushing him away and coughing. “What are you doing?”

“Mouth-to-mouth.” He sat back, offended. “You stopped breathing.”

My heart was racing. Whatever Zeke's motivations, I had to admit he had stirred my juices either by pumping in oxygen or, well, you know. . . . My lungs were now working and blood pounded in my brain so hard I could hear my pulse.

“You didn't have to give me mouth-to-mouth,” I whispered.

“Are you kidding? When I found you in the church you were nearly dead. Although you wouldn't have been in there in the first place if I'd been able to do my job as your bodyguard.”

There was a sound like an amplified mosquito in my ears.
Eeeeee
. “What happened?” My question came out like a wheeze.

“Darned if I know. I stopped by the bank to cash a check while you were at the Main Mane. When I left the bank, I found all this white junk in my tailpipe. It was stuffed in my carburetor, too.”

Zeke took off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his sandy hair. He was tan and healthy from life in the outdoors. He would've made a great surfer—if the Pacific Ocean ever moved to Eastern Pennsylvania. “I may be crazy, but I swear it was mashed potatoes.”

Genevieve strikes again. Guess she was securing more than Roxanne's home when we were at the Main Mane.

“By the time I went home and got my Dad's tow truck, your car was gone from the salon. I sweet-talked your cousin Roxanne into telling me you went to Limbo. Located your car parked on Elm Street and ran into Pete Zidukis, who said you were up by the church. That's where I found you, passed out and half dead. All because of mashed potatoes.”

“Guess that should teach you not to spy on people.”

Zeke plucked a blade of grass. “Spying on you?”

“Confess,” I said, still too woozy to raise my head. “The only reason Steve Stiletto hired you was so that you could report back to him on what kind of progress I was making on this story while he was in New York.”

“No, ma'am. I'd never do something like that and Steve doesn't pry. All he asks me are a few questions about how you're doing. I say ‘fine.' He asks what you did during the day. Sometimes we talk about his stint in India and his plans to open another AP bureau in England. For that he pays me five hundred bucks a day. Never made money so easy in my life.”

I started coughing again, this time out of shock. “Five hundred bucks a day. That's—”

“Almost one thousand bucks so far. I didn't set the price, he did. He said if I kept a bead on you for a week he'd pay thirty-five hundred bucks wired straight into my checking account.”

Hey, that could buy an engagement ring.

I put out my hand and Zeke helped me up. I swooned in dizziness and had to lean against him to get my balance. I was surprised by how tall he was, how his shoulders were so well built. How he smelled like cut hay. He was a hick. A cute hick, but a
hick nonetheless. I couldn't help comparing him to Stiletto, who was so worldly, so sure of himself. Zeke was more like a rough piece of marble, ready to be chiseled into David by the right hands.

He supported me around the waist as I attempted to take a few baby steps.

“The thing is, my gravy train's not gonna pull into the station if my boat keeps getting plugged with spuds,” he said. “Over forty now, my car smells like french fries. I'm just glad I've got the tow truck as backup. Otherwise no self-respecting woman would go out with me.”

“And I suppose you're lousy with women?” I asked.

“Afraid not.” He held me steady. “The ones around here are too silly. I'm looking for a woman of strong moral character. A woman who's more mature—like you.”

Had he just called me old? I closed my eyes and opened them deliberately. Each time the earth swiveled a bit. “I'm, ahem, mature enough to be your babysitter, Zeke.”

“Since when do you babysit twenty-three-year-olds?”

I tried to take longer steps, but my knees buckled.

“Are you okay?” His grip tightened. “All joking aside, CO poisoning is dangerous business. You're still not out of the woods. It can take hours, even days to flush it from your system. Maybe we should get you to the hospital. They got a pressure tank there just to remove the CO from your bloodstream.”

“No, thanks.” I took another step. Instinct told me that the more I moved, the faster the CO would leave my body. I had to find Jane. I had to track down McMullen and ask him why he locked me in the chapel. I took another step, which was easier than the one before. “I think I'm getting better.” Though my head still hurt like hell.

Zeke gave my shoulder a quick squeeze. “Glad to hear it. Stiletto would kill me if you bit the dust on my watch. Okay, now spill. What happened in the church?”

“Promise you won't tell Stiletto?”

“And admit that I let you slip out of my sight? What do you think?”

So as Zeke and I circled St. Ignatius's, I told him everything, including, for some reason, the part about Jane and my fears that she had a crush on Professor Tallow. Zeke was an amazingly rapt listener. Occasionally he asked me a few questions when I drifted off topic, but mostly he kept his mouth shut. The only comment he made referred to Pete Zidukis's claim that Limbo sat on a gazillion dollars worth of coal.

“That's a load of horse hockey. That rumor about the Mammoth Basin is a tall tale I've heard since childhood. The town never owned the rights to that coal, anyway.”

“Then the government didn't move everyone out just so they could sell the land to a coal company?” We had reached Zeke's tow truck.

“The government moved everyone out so they could dig up the town and stop the fire,” he said. “As long as there are holdouts, they can't do that and the fire burns on and on. But what does a crazy old fart like Zidukis care? He'll be dead in twenty years and by that time the whole town will have caved in.”

That's when we heard the shouts from over the hill. At first they were faint and then louder. It was clearly a desperate call for help.

“That's my daughter,” I said. “She's in trouble.”

Zeke opened my door in the tow truck. “It's coming from old Route 61, the portion that's been closed off because of the fire,” he said, helping me in. “We better hurry. There are some huge craters on that road. You can go straight down into the pits if you step on the wrong spot.”

I had prepared myself for a gruesome scene. Jane submerged below smoldering macadam, only her blue-topped head sticking out among the steam and smoke.

What we found instead was G, headphones on, in a bright yellow, egg-shaped vehicle completely surrounded by black rubber
bumpers about a foot thick. From each of its two windows bulged white airbags, which must have been activated when it drove into a pothole the size of a wading pool.

Jane was jumping up and down, hollering and pointing at the goof, who was stuck in the driver's seat. Stuck not by crushed metal, for I didn't think this kind of metal could crush, but by his nose ring, which had punctured the airbag and gotten caught.

“You have to get him out,” Jane said. “If the battery inside the car reaches four-hundred degrees centigrade it will explode! I've been trying and trying, but I can't push the car alone and G can't get out. Quick.”

Zeke swung the tow truck around so that its rear touched the end of G's car. We both got out and I helped him with the winch in the back, thankful that my headache had temporarily subsided in the mayhem.

“Yo! Wassup, Mrs. Y?” G said, moving the airbag aside a bit and leaning out the window as much as the airbag would allow.

“Who's that?” Zeke asked as we attached the hook to the bumper.

“My daughter's boyfriend.”

G, apparently unaware that he was about to blow up in an Armageddon mixture of battery acid and mine fire, bobbed his head to the music in the headphones.

“That's the professor you're worried about?”

“No. That's the guy I want her to get back together with. I called him and asked him to join us in Limbo.”

“I can see why. He sure is a keeper.”

I joined Jane by the side of the road.

“What happened?”

“Roxy gave G directions to Pete Zidukis's and when he got there I told him about this closed highway. So we took a drive up here and this is what happened.”

Zeke gunned the tow truck and pulled out G. G let his head hang out the window like a dog, smiling and hooting as the car emerged from the sinkhole.

“Yahoo!” he yelled. “One more time!”

I covered my eyes.

“Thanks, Mom,” Jane said. “It would've been awful if you hadn't come. Who's driving the truck?”

Zeke was out now, strolling up the road in his cowboy boots, all lean and brawn. G was busy trying to unhook the airbag from his nose ring, his double chin getting in the way. Zeke regarded him with open scorn.

“City kids,” he said, under his breath.

I introduced him to Jane and vice versa.

“Thanks for showing up in the nick of time,” Jane said.

“De nada. What's wrong with your hair?”

Jane brushed back a raspberry blue spike. “People make too much fuss over hair. I think this color's artistic. Anyway, it's only cuticle.”

“Cuticle?” Zeke wrinkled his nose. “Your mother lets you do that?”

“My mother,” Jane answered, “doesn't
let
me do anything. I'm old enough to do what I want. I'm auditing courses at a university, you know.”

“Ahhh.” Zeke brought his hand to his mouth in an effort to keep a straight face. “Well then, you are grown up. My mistake.”

“Stiletto hired Zeke to be my bodyguard while he's in New York City,” I explained.

“Really?” Jane asked. “How do you know Steve?”

Uh-oh, I thought, as Zeke revealed that Stiletto had bailed him out of a jail in Mexico. Nothing more intriguing to a teenage girl than a hunk unjustifiably imprisoned.

“Cerro Huerro?” she asked.

“That's the one. I'm surprised you've heard of it.”

“What were you in for? Drugs?”

Zeke kicked some melted macadam with his toe. “Actually, I was in Chiapas building houses with my church group.”

Church group? So that explained the praying. This was a regular John Boy Walton we had here.

“And they put you in jail for that?” Jane was suspicious. “My understanding was that the Mexican law pertaining to tourists engaging in nontourist activities only resulted in a permanent expulsion.”