Giving Him Hell_A Saturn's Daughter Novel

  GIVING HIM HELL

  Saturn’s Daughter, Book 3

  Jamie Quaid

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  September 30, 2014

  ISBN 978-1-61138-419-2

  Copyright © 2014 Patricia Rice

  One

  My first December in the Zone, and I simply hoped for peace on Edgewater Street.

  Forget peace on earth. The industrially blighted outpost of south Baltimore that I called home had become so damned complicated that I yearned to just walk down the hill for a little normal Christmas shopping. After the horrors of this past year, I deserved a Currier-and-Ives holiday.

  In my office, watching the snow fall in greeting card prettiness through the big plate glass window, I abandoned my desk to grab my coat. For the first time in my entire history, I had money in my pocket, and I could do what I wanted.

  Through my office doorway, I watched my six-foot-five quarterback assistant catch a buzzing fly against the glass door in the front lobby. I held my breath while he eyed the insect like an appetizer. Then he opened the door to let in a client, and I sighed in relief as he sheepishly flung the fly out the door. Ned was a trifle self-conscious about his former life as an amphibian.

  It had been a brief episode in Ned’s thuggish career, and I wasn’t certain how much of it he remembered, but it pained me every time Ned pounced on an insect. I held myself responsible for his condition and used him as a chronic reminder not to misuse my weird abilities.

  Hi, my name is Justine Clancy, and I’m a freak of nature. Or Saturn’s Daughter, according to my mother and grandmother, but they’re not in the picture much anymore. Mom was hiding in an isolated Peruvian village, and Themis . . . I wasn’t totally certain she wasn’t communicating from the Beyond. Since a few months after my twenty-sixth birthday, when I learned I could damn my boyfriend to hell and get rewarded for it, I’d been without a rulebook. I had no idea what would happen the next time I damned someone. So I tried very hard to keep my vocabulary polite.

  “C’mon, Clancy, It’s lunchtime. Let’s find something to eat.” The client who had just entered dropped ominous envelopes from the city on my desk.

  Most people called me Tina. He was just being obnoxious.

  Andre Legrande could have walked out of my favorite old-fashioned cowboy movie, the kind where the slick gentleman gambler wears a frock coat and silk ruffles and vest. Today, under his shoulder-hugging leather blazer, he wore a blue silk shirt that emphasized taut abs and wide pecs. Combine all that hunkiness with thick black hair, and curious blue-green eyes and a smile that could melt bones, and Andre was the most dangerous man on this side of Baltimore. He knew it, too, and his arrogance was another reason, despite our past history, I wasn’t going to bed with him.

  Mostly, it’s unethical for a lawyer to sleep with her clients, and Andre’s business paid over half my bills. The amoral cad liked to kick me in my principles.

  “It’s almost Christmas,” I reminded him. “I’m going shopping.”

  Andre helped me pull on my leather biker jacket. The proximity to his spicy aftershave had me drooling, so I had to counterbalance with snideness. I tapped the stack of letters he’d just dropped on me. “Don’t beat up any of those building inspectors or you’ll end up paying twice.”

  “The city is after us because of all the damned tourists,” Andre grumbled. “You’d think the idiots would have the sense to stay out of an environmental hazard zone. Acme used to keep the city off our backs and the tourists off the street. You’re the one who took Acme’s management out of commission. You do something about it.”

  Acme is our neighborhood chemical factory and unhealthy for our environment in so many ways— but people have to work.

  “Tourists are profitable,” I argued, half-heartedly. I pulled on my gloves, striving not to admire Andre’s conquistador profile.

  “Not for the tourists,” he warned. “I’m suing the moron who shit his pants when one of the Dumpsters got in his way. The damned fool shot at a frigging Dumpster and missed.”

  Among other things, the chemicals permeating the Zone’s ground have given theoretically inanimate objects the ability to move. Waltzing Dumpsters used to scare me too. It would only be a matter of time before the media realized the Zone wasn’t just a drunken hallucination or a new kind of theme park but the real deal.

  “That bullet took out the bar window and the arm of one of my bartenders. Just give me one good excuse, and I’ll sue Acme too,” Andre grumbled.

  “Gun control laws should involve intelligence tests,” I muttered as Andre accompanied me to the outer lobby. “But Acme has no responsibility for keeping out tourists or idiots.”

  “Someone has to keep them out. The Zone isn’t normal and Acme is the reason!” he protested, as if he weren’t preaching to the choir. “Imbeciles are going to be trouble if we don’t find some way to move them along.”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. He was right. The Zone with its dangerous idiosyncrasies was no place to play. It was a worse place to live, but once infused with the chemicals that permeated the area, some of us had little choice.

  My assistant, wearing a pink shirt, rose-colored tie, and a pink quartz earring, held the door open for us—as if he hadn’t been hunting more flies in the window.

  I worried about Ned’s other froggy friends and whether they’d ever returned to normal. They’d been Acme thugs and the world was probably better off without them, but my over-developed conscience didn’t like condemning people without a real trial. Consequences inevitably sucked. I wanted a rule book that promised I wouldn’t go to hell for condemning people without due process.

  Outside, a cold wind rushed down the hill, promising heavier snow than the pretty flakes falling now. My office was in an old storefront across the street from the row of Victorian houses where Andre and I lived. Andre probably owned the whole street, but our apartments were in separate buildings.

  Below us, in the Zone proper, I could see bums warming their hands over steaming manholes, unbothered by the traffic creeping around them. I knew manholes could steam in the cold, but this steam had an oddly red tint to it. Given that sidewalks here turned to green mud and the buildings glowed neon blue, a little steam wasn’t worth questioning.

  “No wailing sirens, no gaseous clouds, no chemical waste lines exploding.” I recited my litany of gratitude every time I saw this peaceful scene. “May Saturn be praised.”

  I was being facetious. So far, no one had told me if my Saturn was a planet or an antique god, but astrology and ancient gods made as much sense as anything else.

  Andre snorted. “If you think killing off Gloria Vanderventer means the Zone will stay peaceful, you haven’t lived here long enough. Something’s stewing. It just hasn’t broken out yet.”

  I knew that. Gloria and her grandson Dane had once owned Acme Chemical. They had been evil personified, as far as I could determine. I’d damned them both to hell and been rewarded for my good deeds. I had no other way of verifying that they were actually gone. I worried sometimes, because I’d seen them writhing in flames and cursing me.

  But they hadn’t succeeded in destroying my home, and it was the season of peace. I wanted—needed—to celebrate my new security for a while. After a lifetime of wandering, I finally had a home, friends, and a new career. That was worth a revel or two before life started tossing fireballs at me again.

  “Are the Christmas lights on the streetlamps supposed to be pink and orange?” I asked cautiously, still admiring the view as we strolled down the hill. “Because they kind of clash with the red wreaths.” The day was gray enough for the tw
inkling lights to sparkle nicely.

  Andre jammed his hands into his pockets and studied the holiday scene below. “No one here paid for decorations. That must be the DG’s work.”

  The DG, otherwise known as Dedicated to Good Inc. or the Do-Gooders in local lingo, had been inexplicably attempting to clean up the Zone these last weeks. They were mundanes from outside the Zone. For whatever reason, we’d become the nonprofit’s charitable cause, whether we wanted it or not.

  “Cheap bulbs from China,” I suggested. Or the Zone’s pollution was already eating at them. It happened.

  “Don’t go getting happy ideas about this spell of quiet,” Andre warned as we headed down.

  I grimaced. “It’s Christmas, Legrande. Be merry. We’ll worry about calamity in the new year.” I walked faster, eager for my shopping trip.

  The orange and pink bulbs below exploded into little flames that ate the red wreaths and produced colorful circles of hellish flames on all the lampposts.

  Then the manhole covers blew off.

  I hated it when Andre was right.

  Two

  Andre and I watched the flaming scene in awe and horror.

  To add to the Zone freakishness, a blue blob the shape of the Pillsbury doughboy crawled out of one of the exploding manholes and sauntered toward an alley, away from the flames and in the direction of the polluted harbor.

  Could blue blobs cause exploding wreaths?

  The Do-Gooders in their knit hats and gloves frantically screamed and jumped up and down, trying to douse fiery wreaths by ineffectively waving their hands in panic. I wasn’t at all certain they noticed the blob. People tend not to see what doesn’t make sense to them.

  I, on the other hand, started to wonder if the city really shouldn’t shut down the Zone, as they’d been threatening recently. The Zone had never actually created an object before. That we knew of.

  “You saw that, right?” I asked as we hurried toward our so-called business district.

  “Nothing a little cataract surgery won’t solve,” he muttered.

  “Cataracts aren’t blue. That was blue. As in Cookie Monster blue.” Even my deprived childhood had included Sesame Street.

  That neither Andre or I raced to douse burning Christmas wreaths said a lot about the Zone. Instead, we cautiously scanned the street for any more dangerous phenomena, leaving the mundanes to deal with normal occurrences like fire.

  Mostly, after realizing they couldn’t spit out a blazing wreath, the DG people stared in helpless astonishment as their fiery ornaments disintegrated. They apparently hadn’t even completed putting them up. The guy holding the last wreath dropped it and backed away.

  One of the homeless guys lay sprawled on the street, kayoed by a flying manhole cover just outside Discreet Detection Agency, where Cora Isabel worked. As the agency’s receptionist, Cora appeared in the doorway to check out the confusion. She wore her tight curls cut short to accentuate the glory of her razor-sharp cheekbones and rich coffee au lait coloring. Despite her irritating beauty queen glamor, Cora has her own set of weirdnesses. I still counted her as the kind of friend I’d never thought to have. Seeing us, she leaned against the jamb and waved.

  People began emerging with fire extinguishers to spray down the wreaths. I sincerely hoped these were normal electrical fires. In the Zone, the alternative could mean anything from more chemical floods to hell’s demons emerging.

  I wasn’t exaggerating. Much.

  “Does anyone have a clue what kind of fires those are so they aren’t blowing them up with the wrong chemicals?” I asked with reasonable trepidation.

  “We don’t all have college degrees,” Andre said scornfully as one of the sprayed wreaths exploded—as I’d feared. “We learn by doing.”

  “Ow, that’s gotta hurt.” I watched one of Chesty’s regulars dance up and down and beat at his flaming sleeves after the fire extinguisher he’d been holding turned into a torch. “Maybe we could start a Zone school and offer common sense degrees.”

  “And enroll Leibowitz,” Andre said with a resigned sigh, nodding in our neighborhood flatfoot’s direction and punching the buttons on his phone at the same time. There was no guarantee emergency services would bother with his call or even that the Zone would let the call go out, but I let him handle the outside world.

  My urge was to follow the Cookie Monster dough boy, but Leibowitz seemed to be writing a ticket to the DG’s who’d been installing the holiday décor. He’d no doubt fine the stunned bum and the would-be fireman for littering the street. Authority should be useful, but Leibowitz worked with a different dictionary than me.

  And I had this unholy obsession about serving justice.

  “If there were any fairness in this world, petty-minded officialdom would be illegal,” I muttered, wishing for a good excuse to send Leibowitz to another dimension.

  Even knowing my dangerous propensities, Andre looked only vaguely alarmed as he cut off his phone and tried 911 again. “He’s one of us. Maybe he’ll learn.” He returned his attention to reporting a fire. At least he’d finally got through. Whether the fire department responded was another question. Officialdom didn’t like having their tires melted on our polluted blacktop.

  “Or maybe we could isolate those who lack the imagination to see the bigger picture and ship them to Nebraska,” I snarled, knowing he wasn’t listening.

  Andre would have had the sense to look alarmed if he’d heard me, because I could do exactly that. I preferred visualizing baddies to other places or into other things. It just seemed less permanent and safer than sending them to hell without a trial. Nebraska sounded about right.

  I sauntered toward the cop. Leibowitz hated me on general principles. There was no point in wasting a good hate.

  Only last spring, I used to hide from Leibowitz and most of the rest of the world. I’d been small, crippled, and invisible, and carried a big grudge. These days, thanks to insanity or Saturn, whichever you’d like to believe, I had straight legs, great eyesight, pretty teeth, and my hair belonged on a shampoo model. And I now had my law license—but that was mostly thanks to me and no heavenly entities.

  “Leibowitz!” I shouted. “Call the damned ambulance! If you ticket an injured man, I’ll sue your fat pants off.”

  This was how I’d built my clientele so quickly. I stood up for the little guys, and there were waaaaay more of them than there were rich fat cats around the Zone. Couldn’t say that I always won in court, but I had other methods.

  “He’s not injured,” Leibowitz said with suspicion, looking at the shocked Do-Gooder. “He tried to set the place on fire. So, go ahead, sue me.”

  “China tried to set the place on fire.” I gestured at the burnt wires hanging from the lamp poles. “We’re suing the manufacturer. Call the ambulance for the real injured parties here.”

  Since sirens were finally screaming in the distance, I knew Andre had succeeded in reaching 911, but it was always good to give Leibowitz a task he understood.

  Sure enough, he was distracted enough to tuck away his ticket book and wander over to look at the homeless guy struggling to sit up. He didn’t help the bum, mind you, but he did pull out his phone.

  I glanced warily at the nearest alley. Had the Cookie Monster really been invisible to everyone else? A gnawing in my gut told me I needed to investigate, but did I really want to know if I was nuts or the Zone had upped the ante?

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to answer that question yet. People came first.

  “Thanks,” the DG I’d just saved from a ticket said, rubbing his head and staring at the wires. “They all went up in flames at once. How is that possible?”

  He was young and lanky, with sandy hair, but he looked intelligent enough to want to dissect the wiring. So not a good idea.

  “If you accept the impossible, you’ll fare better down here,” I suggested, holding out my hand to distract him from live wires. “Tina Clancy. And you?”

  “Rob Hanks, scout leader for Dedicated
to Good’s ninth division, pleased to meet you Ms. Clancy. And I have to accept responsibility for the faulty wiring. I just want to know how it happened so I can file a report.” He studied the dangling wire, but it still looked too hot to handle. “Thank you for talking the officer out of a ticket. Our funds don’t cover fines.”

  “Leibowitz is a decent guy with a few frayed ethics I’m trying to clean up. It’s possible to change people, but not the Zone, Mr. Hanks. In case you haven’t noticed, technology has problems down here. There’s a reason we only accept cash and not credit cards, and even cash isn’t safe. I’m sure there are far more appreciative neighborhoods than ours, and gangs are less hazardous to your health than an environmental disaster zone. You really should take your folks elsewhere.”

  He looked at me with puzzlement. “Senator Vanderventer has given us a grant to help clean up this area. He’s set up a foundation in his late grandmother’s name just for this purpose. He wouldn’t send us anywhere dangerous.”

  Rage nearly blew off my lid. I smothered it before I did something rash like send Max to hell for a second time. It had been only a fluke getting him back the first time around, and he’d not been the same since he woke up inside his cousin—the wretched senator.

  Granny Vanderventer was probably torching Christmas wreaths from hell to voice her objections to Max using her money for charity. I held the senator’s grandmother directly responsible for the chemical flood that had warped the Zone and its inhabitants.

  Rob didn’t deserve my wrath. Max and his Do-Gooder soul did. I was taking me down one stupid senator. Around here, we lived with blue blobs and fiery manholes, for pity’s sake! Sending innocents in was the kind of idealistic stupidity that had got him killed once already.

  “Take the money and run,” I advised the overgrown Boy Scout. “Because Vanderventer and his interfering lunacy will be withdrawing his offer shortly.”

  A fire truck screamed down the road and pulled up short at the manhole.

  I opened my phone and walked toward Cora, who was admiring the scurrying of Do-Gooders and tourists as they beat out fiery wreaths and occasionally threw punches when they got in each other’s way.