The Baker Street Letters Read online

Now they knew that the faint light they had seen from above was coming from the tunnel opening, fifty yards or so away. They approached tentatively, not speaking, walking past the high mounds of freshly dug earth and stacks of rebar and concrete tunnel linings.

  Reggie looked hard into the shadows and saw no one. But it was too dark to really tell; anyone could have been in the excavation watching them, and there was no way to know.

  They reached the entrance to the tunnels—two of them, each about fifteen feet in diameter—but only one of them had any source of light. Black lettering on the concrete face of that one identified it as 110-Left.

  Reggie checked his watch again, then stepped to the opening and looked in as far as he could.

  “Well, we’re here. Tunnel 110-Left,” said Laura.

  “I think the idea was we go inside.”

  “No doubt,” said Laura. “Cheery thought.”

  They entered the tunnel, walking between the steel rails.

  In this part of the tunnel, concrete linings had already been set in place. Lamps attached to the upper portions of the walls glistened in shades of white, gray, and silver off the concrete, and reflected iridescent patterns on the steel rails and dark rainbows on oily substances that floated on the occasional pools of water.

  But the electrical installations weren’t complete, and there were gaps, with darkness and loose hanging wires, between the glow of each lamp, and there were dark recesses in the tunnel walls.

  It was surprising how much their footsteps echoed on the damp sand and gravel.

  In the far distance—or near distance; it was nearly impossible to judge, given the perfectly straight path of the tunnel and the reflecting light—was a dark obstruction of some kind, dead center in the tunnel, with a faint halo from residual light in the tunnel that continued behind it.

  They were moving toward it rapidly, and as they got nearer, pieces of tunneling equipment and trailing carriers were distinguishable along the sides of the tunnel.

  Reggie put his hand on Laura’s arm to stop her from continuing forward.

  Now the haloed obstruction in the center of the tunnel was distinguishable. It was the mole, a massive tunneling machine.

  And on a recessed service shelf in the tunnel wall on the right was a dark object that Reggie had at first supposed was another piece of equipment.

  But it wasn’t. It was a man, sitting very still on the shelf, legs dangling over the edge, facing the farther end of the tunnel, in the direction of the mole.

  Reggie and Laura took another few steps, then stopped.

  The man turned his head; the features of his face were still indistinguishable.

  “Closer,” he said.

  It was the same voice Reggie had heard on the phone, but now he was certain where he had heard it previously.

  It was the angry man from the soup kitchen. It was Mara’s father.

  “Ramirez?” said Reggie.

  “Move closer,” the man said again. “I can’t see your faces.”

  They moved closer. Cautiously.

  Now the man stood up. He was wearing the oversize dirty overcoat Reggie had seen when he’d chased him in the alley.

  Ramirez stared back at Reggie’s face for a moment and seemed satisfied.

  “Show me the map,” he said.

  Reggie pulled the Variety magazine out of his coat pocket and extracted a sheet of the map from it.

  “Closer. Can’t tell from here.”

  Reggie stepped closer, unfolded the map, and without letting go of it, displayed it for Ramirez.

  “Okay,” said Ramirez. “That’s it. That’s the one.”

  Reggie expected Ramirez to try to take the map now, but he didn’t. He just stared at it intently, as if mesmerized, as Reggie held it out before him.

  “Damn eyes. Can’t see shit anymore. But see that mark at the bottom corner? That’s me. That’s my own mark. That one’s the truth.” He said this almost longingly. To Reggie, it seemed the man was beginning to lose focus.

  “How will you clear my brother?” Reggie said quickly, bundling the map back into the newspaper.

  “What?”

  “My brother. You said you can clear him.”

  Ramirez paused and looked annoyed, as if Reggie were insisting on the trivial. “Yeah. They think he killed that jerk under the freeway, right? Well, he didn’t. I did. I killed the little bastard.”

  “Why?” said Laura.

  “The guy was lurking. I watched the place for days, so there was no doubt about it. Always seemed to be coming down the stairs when she got home. Always seemed to be coming down the stairs when she got her mail. Not shuffling around like he was shy and wanted to meet her or something like that, but lurking, dammit, for no good.

  “Three nights ago I see him go into the alley. After midnight. There’s no doors over there, just fire escapes, and windows, and one is Mara’s, so I paid close attention. Then I see him start to climb her fire escape in the dead of night. I stopped him.”

  “One way to put it,” said Reggie.

  “Killing him was just good luck. I wasn’t trying to hit him that hard. And I wasn’t trying not to.”

  “For what it’s worth,” said Reggie, “I don’t think he was actually after your daughter. I think he was after your surveys. I think he learned that what he had stolen from her earlier was just a copy. He was looking for these. The people who sent him needed the originals.”

  “Point is, no one sneaks into my little girl’s window in the dead of night. Not him, and not you, either. Guess I didn’t hit you as hard. But I knew she wasn’t in at the time; must have made me soft. Anyway, I wheeled the guy’s body away in a grocery cart. I figured I’d push him all the way down to the channel, but when I got to the overpass, I saw somebody running up from the warehouses on the other side of the road.”

  “I suppose that would be my brother,” said Reggie.

  “I didn’t ask for introductions. I covered the body and took off.”

  “We’ll need you to tell all this to the police.”

  “What? Oh, like a confession? No problem. I mean, if it actually comes to that. C’mon.”

  Ramirez jumped down from the service step and started to walk where the tunnel construction was still in its early stages, freshly dug and unsealed. He moved slowly into the portions where the concrete had not yet been poured.

  There was one single lamp, just next to where the mole had stopped. The lamp sent out yellow light that glimmered off the steel of the mole and reflected in amber and blue streaks through plastic sheeting that covered the nearest tunnel walls, shimmering the way a fire flickers.

  Laura looked into all that and then back at Reggie. Both of them stayed put.

  Ramirez stopped and looked back at them. “C’mon, what are you waiting for?”

  “The police will take your statement. We can all leave now.”

  “What? Oh, no. You don’t get it. We can’t leave yet. Don’t worry,” said Ramirez. “It’s not far.”

  Reggie looked at Laura.

  “I suppose we have to take him back with us, don’t we?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Reggie, “or we can’t prove a thing.”

  “All right, then.”

  They both moved forward after Ramirez.

  They walked on in the tunnel, fifty and then more than a hundred yards. Construction was less complete here, with bare earth and stacks of steel and wood braces along the sides of the tunnel.

  And then they stopped.

  Ramirez was behaving oddly, touching the freshly excavated walls as they walked, putting his face right up next to the dirt, and muttering something that sounded like “fools.” He took several rapid steps farther into the tunnel, staring overhead as he went. Then he poked his nose up against the sides of the tunnel and began making sniffling sounds. Then he swiveled and came quickly back.

  “What do you smell?” demanded Ramirez.

  Reggie and Laura looked at each other.

  “No
thing,” said Reggie.

  “Just the damp earth,” added Laura.

  “That’s nothing,” said Ramirez, “you smell that everywhere.” Then he took two quick steps, and with a fierce grab, he pulled a handful of dirt and clay out of the wall behind them.

  “Taste this,” he said to Reggie, proffering the handful of dirt.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Taste it,” repeated Ramirez. “My own buds are all shot to hell from the booze.”

  Ramirez seemed quite tense now. Reggie tasted the dirt.

  “Well? What’s it taste like?”

  “Dirt?”

  “Oh, hell,” said Ramirez, turning from Reggie to Laura. “You try it.”

  Laura took a small portion of dirt and clay between two fingers and placed it on her tongue. She pressed her lips together and considered it.

  “On the buttery side, with a bit of an aftertaste, but rather standard, I should think—except for a hint of something unpleasantly like rotten eggs.”

  Ramirez stared.

  “You sure know how to taste,” he said. He leaned on a spool of cable, rubbing his forehead and staring woefully at the solid earth before them. “It’s just where I knew it would be.”

  “What is?” said Reggie.

  “The gas,” said Ramirez. “They’ve drilled within a foot of the highest hydrogen sulfide pocket in my entire survey. I know there’s methane here, too, and it’s worse, because you can’t smell it. The sulfide, it gives you warning and will generally asphyxiate you before it explodes, so that’s a plus. But the methane gives no warning. One spark, and instant hell. Everyone in the tunnel is cooked.”

  “Do you mean everyone,” asked Laura, “as in us at this very moment right where we are—or everyone as in the people who will come in tomorrow and work here?”

  “Both,” said Ramirez. “They have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t know about the gas, so they’re drilling ahead, and they haven’t even connected the fans. Look above you.”

  Reggie looked. Ramirez pointed at the ventilation fans, which were set at regular internals for the length of the tunnel—but which all hung limply, with loose wires dangling.

  “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” he said.

  “Tell us all about it,” Laura said with an empathetic smile. “Let’s all just sit down over here where it’s nice and dry—it’s so damp going further into the tunnel, don’t you think? And you can tell us all about it. Perhaps we can help.”

  Reggie was familiar with this smile. And Ramirez was looking at Laura. That was probably a good thing.

  “It was the ponies,” Ramirez said, and he sat down.

  Laura moved in and sat on the service shelf right next to Ramirez.

  “Ponies?”

  “I won at the track the first day I went. The horse was called Lucky Mara, so I had to bet on it, and it won big. You know how it goes. You keep trying to recapture that.”

  “Yes,” said Laura.

  “Santa Anita, then down to Del Mar. The exactas were killing me. And the trifectas. Hell, any long shot, and a whole bunch of sure things. Anyway, I was in debt to my eyeballs.

  “Pretty soon there was nothing left. I’d mortgaged my house, hit up every friend I had at work. I was into the loan sharks deep. Everyone knew about it. And these were the real bad guys. They were beginning to lean.

  “On the day it was all due, I couldn’t pay. I was told to expect a call.

  “We were sitting down to dinner. I’d tried to get my wife out of the house before the call came, but it didn’t work, and all that happened is we had a huge fight. Mara ran upstairs to her room and cried. Then the call came.”

  Ramirez paused, as if still surprised by the whole thing. “It wasn’t who I thought it would be. I thought it would be one of my loan sharks, or someone worse. But you know who it was?”

  “No,” said Reggie, getting just a little impatient. “We don’t.”

  “Do tell us,” said Laura.

  “It was my surveying partner. Rogers. He said something about the job at Lankershim. Said we were in a position to do someone a favor. Wouldn’t say who. But someone would take care of everything I owed, and I’d get a little besides, if I’d just change a few numbers in my report. That was it.”

  Ramirez looked away. “The unholy sonofabitch.

  “But I did it,” he continued after a moment, looking at the ground. “I falsified the readings. I made a tunnel through hell look like a walk in the park.” Then he looked up again, and his face was as hard as the walls of the tunnel. “Unholy sonofabitch,” he repeated. “He’s messed with my family for the last time.”

  “What sort of messing are we talking about?” asked Laura.

  “Understand something,” Ramirez said angrily. “Nobody was better at that work than me. I cataloged every foot of every core we drilled. Some guys will fudge a record every now and then if they forgot to make the note on the spot; some guys just get a little too general, and pretty soon you’ve got Core 62 reading just like Core 12, when really Core 62 is more toward sand, and Core 12 is more toward clay. I note those things, I see every detail, and I write them all down.”

  “Yes,” said Laura, “we see that. Even how things taste.”

  “And I throw that all away,” said Ramirez. “I falsify readings on flammable gas concentrations. And within two years, with what they paid him, Rogers ended up owning the surveying company we both worked for. But I couldn’t live with myself after. Got permanently drunk, and one day I just left. Went to Alaska. Worked on the pipeline; sent money later on when I could, under another name. Sent a nice little puppy for Mara’s fifteenth birthday.”

  “What made you return?”

  “I heard about the first fire. The sandhog who was killed. I figured I had to do something before somebody else died. And then when I came back, I found that guy hanging around my little girl—”

  Ramirez stood suddenly. He looked at his watch.

  “Get going,” he demanded. “We’re due at the platform.”

  “What do you mean ‘due’?” said Reggie.

  “Just move,” said Ramirez. “I’ll tell you what you need to know when we get there. You already did enough damage by blowing my cover.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rogers has always been afraid I’d come back, and I knew he’d have people on the lookout for me, especially after the fire. But he didn’t know where I was until someone saw you chase me into the rescue mission. And then tonight a guy comes through the line at the soup kitchen, shoves a note across to me, and then runs like hell. I open it up and I see it’s from my good buddy, my friend, my old partner, Rogers, and he’s got my little girl. And your brother, too, not that I give a damn, cause I just have a sense that you guys showing up caused half of this. He’s got them both.”

  “What do you mean, ‘got them’?” said Reggie.

  “Just follow me and shut up.”

  Ramirez turned his back to them and moved on.

  Reggie and Laura paused.

  “He was all sentiment and consideration early on,” said Laura. “And now he’s just demanding. Why is that always the case?”

  “I have to follow him,” said Reggie. “But you don’t—”

  “Oh, just be quiet and move on, would you? He’s got that much of it right.”

  They continued on after Ramirez for several minutes more. Then the pale light reflecting from the lamps and concrete linings began to give way to a wide, dark area on the right-hand side, and they slowed their pace.

  They were approaching an unfinished station terminal—a platform on their right that extended for fifty yards or so along the length of the tunnel before it ended. The platform was unlit except for two lamps at the tunnel’s edge; it wasn’t possible to see into its depths, but Reggie could make out the outlines of support columns and what were probably stairs leading to a second level and, presumably, to an exit.

  They walked single file until they reached the e
dge of the platform. Then Ramirez ordered them to stop.

  “Okay,” he said, “here’s how this thing is going to work. That sonofabitch Rogers is going to show up on the platform. He’s going to want to see the map—the original. Once he’s seen it, he’s going to offer to take the map in exchange for my daughter. And your brother, if he’s still alive. And then—”

  Ramirez stopped in response to their stares.

  “Well, how would I know?” he said half-apologetically. “Point is, he’ll offer to trade her—him—them—for the map. He’s probably going to even offer to let them step down from the platform and join us in the tunnel.”

  “No,” said Reggie. “He won’t do that. The fact is, we all know who he is now. He wants the map—or to see it destroyed so it can’t be used against him—but he can’t let any of us live.”

  “Who said he’d let us live? I didn’t say he’d let us live. We all know too damn much. I just said he’d let us all be in the tunnel together. He made me bring you in this way for just that reason. He’s on the platform, where there’s ventilation and it’s safe. We’re in the tunnel, where there’s gas. He wants us all in the tunnel. Then all he has to do is toss a match. He’s not fooling anybody.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “Plan is we make sure Mara stays up there. And your brother, too. I mean, if he’s still—”

  “Yes, we get it,” said Reggie.

  “And we make sure Rogers comes down here to see the map. That’s the one thing he has to do, he has to know that no one has the original.”

  “But after he has seen it, he’ll just go back up on the platform, and he’ll toss that match,” said Reggie.

  “No,” said Ramirez. “He won’t get that far. I’ve got matches, too.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment. Then:

  “Question,” said Laura.

  “Yeah?”

  “You lighting the match while we are all in the tunnel . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “I find a flaw in that.”

  “I made this mess,” said Ramirez, “and I’m going to clean it up. I’m ready to die.”

  Reggie was about to respond that he and Laura were not.

  But now there was a sound from deep on the platform.

  “Daddy?”