Giving Him Hell_A Saturn's Daughter Novel Page 15
Laughter and applause erupted from the unused storage areas in back.
Nineteen
Laughter and applause in an empty building is a lot scarier than one would think. Schwartz shoved his muscled arm in front of me to hold me back, then slipped silently through the lobby to the back hall.
I tiptoed after him. Maybe we should have thought about weapons, but in my experience, weapons usually caused more harm than good. Shooting the uniforms blocking Andre’s building would have been bad. Turning them into gnomes . . . Not good but probably not deadly.
I was contemplating getting a baseball bat to keep handy, when Schwartz relaxed and let me catch up to him. Even I recognized the sound now—a television. We’d been afraid of a sound heard in every normal home across the country.
Given that we had no power and that I owned no television, it didn’t make sense, but that was canned laughter. A child’s voice chimed in. I didn’t know any children.
For all that mattered, why was it warm in here when it was freezing everywhere else in town? I’d learned to regard heat with suspicion.
It had been a long, strange day. I didn’t know how much more I could face, but if I couldn’t take a hot shower, I might as well keep on pushing on.
I walked into an ordinary family room in what had once been my empty, cobwebbed storage area. Cora, my snake-wielding bestie, and Jane Claremont, my perennially bankrupt journalist friend, glanced up from a catalog they’d been perusing. They’d appropriated the couch Andre had left in one of the smaller offices. A floor lamp illuminated the wall. A toddler sat in a kid’s car seat and giggled at a cartoon on a computer screen.
“Cozy,” I said, leaning against the wall while Schwartz studied the computer setup and cartoon with interest. “Ned said we had no utilities.”
“Utilities are working in the neighborhood behind here,” Cora said with a shrug. “Frank hooked us up and turned us on. Don’t ask questions.”
Frank was Cora’s boss and the shady owner of Discreet Detection. I never questioned him, but I raised an eyebrow at Jane. She lived in my old apartment a bus ride away from the Zone.
“I called to tell you that the state is going forward with the eminent domain plans,” Jane said, “but somehow I ended up talking to Cora. One thing led to another . . .”
“I got your keys from Sarah,” Cora said. She was blunt where Jane shied from speaking out. “I was freezing my tail off. Jane here’s about to be booted from her place, and Frank said he knew a man who knew a man, and here we are.”
I glanced at our resident cop, but he didn’t seem concerned that Frank was stealing utilities. Schwartz wandered off to inspect the rest of the place—or in search of an operational bathroom. This side of the street was closer to sane neighborhoods. It made a crazy sense that we could hook up to their lines.
I collapsed on the sofa, raising a cloud of dust. The fabric was so old, I couldn’t even tell the color. Probably a good thing since it seemed to be woven in a paisley design. “We could be sitting on a portal to hell,” I said off-handedly.
“Yeah, well, if it’s warm, I’ll put a grate over it,” Cora said, not believing me. “Maybe we can shove MacNeill and his henchmen down it and add fuel.”
I snickered. It really had been that kind of day. “What happened with the apartment?” I’d let Jane take my old place last spring. It was a student slum, but the rent was low and the space large enough for a kid.
“Lost the fast food gig,” she admitted. “And the newspaper is failing. They haven’t paid me in months. I thought I’d take the eminent domain story to the Post and the Sun-Times, and see if either of them would let me freelance. I could get some good human interest as well as the news story.”
I heard water flushing. We had working bathrooms! Glory hallelujah! How did one turn on water lines?
Leo wandered back a moment later and I pointed him at Jane. “Tell her the Zone is dangerous, and she can’t live down here with a kid.”
“What she said,” Leo responded obligingly. “Although technically, the hill isn’t in the Zone.”
I beat the heel of my hand against my forehead. “Not helping, Schwartz. Ask Sarah if you don’t believe me. The cellar here is haunted.”
And sociopath Sarah lived here and had murdered a man not yards from where we were sitting. And I had fascist gnomes guarding all the dark corners.
“This building has been here a hundred years. It won’t go up in flames overnight,” Cora said scornfully. “You fret too much, Clancy.”
“Anyone home?” Andre called from the lobby as if he owned the place. Which, oh yeah, he did.
“Only us wannabe ghosts,” I replied wearily. Maybe I should go back to my cat. My bed would be warm. But I had no hot water.
Entering, Andre arched his sleek dark eyebrows at the sight of our motley crew. “Don’t suppose Frank could get the rest of the town hooked up?”
Frank had been monkeying with our infrastructure for so long, that wasn’t as good a guess as it sounded.
“He’s working on it. But the utility guys are likely to be back out in the morning, so we’re laying low for now.” Cora returned to scanning the catalog.
“Sleeping bags, anyone?” I asked, closing my eyes at the inevitable. “I’ve never counted the bathrooms. How many are working?”
“Hundred-year-old building, Clancy,” Andre reminded me. “Three floors, three restrooms. No showers. No kitchen.”
“How about the Morgan building where they’re stashing the bums? Are they living with three toilets too?” Maybe I could move my guests in there.
“I think they’re setting up Port-a-Potties,” Jane said. “I’ve been writing up the homeless situation, too. Lots of good human interest.”
I dragged myself out of the sofa, grabbed Andre’s coat sleeve, and hauled him to the front and my office. “What is your father saying about his eminent domain research?” I asked where Jane couldn’t hear. Having a reporter around made life difficult.
“He’s consulting with the authorities you found for him and putting together a petition to the court fighting it. Since we’re on the extreme edge of Baltimore’s boundaries, they’re also researching the city-county line. We’d be in a stronger position if Edgewater and the surrounding streets could be rezoned, but all the voting residents need to sign the request. I doubt that many of our people are even registered to vote.”
I snorted. “Which ought to make it easy. You, me, and Julius can be the town.”
“We’ll probably want to expand as far as we can, so we might get Paddy and Pearl and the interns next door to sign. We can ask the streets behind here.”
“But it’s the state that controls eminent domain, right?” I asked. “So if those wheels are already in motion, we can’t stop the demolition. We could be making a town from a hole in the ground. Maybe the state’s right and we should all just pack up and move on.” I couldn’t let my preferences deny the safety of others. The idea of Jane and the Do-Gooders being polluted by Acme’s chemicals gave me cold shivers. I really didn’t like them being down here.
“I’m not packing it in so Acme can build a medical center to experiment with the drug that made my mother comatose for ten years,” Andre said angrily.
He never got angry. I conceded the point.
“Okay, Dane owes us. Now that we’ve solved his little problem, let’s have him twist some arms, starting with our utilities.” I pulled out my toy phone and punched in Dane’s number, while asking, “Can Julius take down MacNeill and stop Acme from supporting the med center? Paddy is no use.”
That’s how my office became Command Central. I might make a lousy superhero, but I knew how to lead a protest.
***
By Wednesday morning I had resorted to sleeping on Sarah’s cot—she hadn’t come in last night—with Milo as my blanket. Flushing toilets, a shouting kid, and a cat batting my nose didn’t fully wake me up. Rubber wheels rolling around in the room beneath me finally got me stirring.
The second story room was warm, so we still had gas connections. I rubbed my eyes, checked that I was still reasonably decent, and stumbled upright. My singed hair flopped in my eyes as I availed myself of the facilities, then splashed water in my face. Haircuts weren’t happening soon.
I needed to kill someone so I could wish for a new nose, I thought in disgruntlement, peering at my protuberant proboscis in the faded mirror.
Of course, after yesterday’s touch of hell, I wasn’t in any hurry to sell my soul to Satan or Saturn or Gloria in return for a petite nose.
I rambled downstairs to find my hunky office assistant handing out clipboards and petitions to a steady stream of teenagers and . . . I wiped my eyes again. Bums? Why not? They were living here, too.
Katerina was working in one of the back offices, wheeling her chair back and forth as she yapped ninety-miles an hour at some poor peon on the phone. She’d acquired one of the doors from the cellar as a desk top. She’d had it mounted on a couple of small filing cabinets purloined from who knew where. Papers already littered the surface.
She waved at me and I moved on. Julius had said he’d filed the papers and got me a date with the judge about the utility problem. We’d agreed to start with demanding the return of the Zone’s services. I should locate Julius and find out where and when I was to perform my courthouse Idiot-Who-Doesn’t-Know-What-She’s-Doing act.
I nearly fell on my face when I discovered Julius in the storage room with Jane and her kid. I’d never seen him outside the house. I should have known he’d never let Katerina go too far without him or Andre, but I’d thought all those years of treating Katerina had left him agoraphobic. What the . . . heck?
He held up a finger to tell me to wait, finished his phone call, made a note on a legal pad, and handed it to Jane, who typed it into her laptop.
“Eleven sharp, Judge Crater’s office,” he told me. “I have your brief here.” He pulled papers off a printer that hadn’t been there last night. “Go forth and get our services back.”
Ah, utilities were the mother of all necessity or something like that. His house was as cold as mine.
“The utilities are a lost cause until we fix the sinkhole,” I muttered, skimming through the petition. My visit to Dane’s cellar had cured me of my interest in descending to the Zone’s equivalent.
“We have men on that. At your request, the senator has twisted arms, and Acme will be joining our cause. The utilities will have to send workers to locate the sewer main break. They can’t deny taxpayers the services for which we pay.”
“Sewer main break?” Right. Give it a name the judge understands. Hey, Judge, Acme blew a hole to hell, probably wasn’t a good starting point.
“You’re our new spin doctor?” I asked Jane.
“Part time,” she agreed. “I’ll file objective news stories. Mr. Montoya says he has connections at the Sun, and they may be interested in me freelancing. I could be the Zone’s press office.”
“Oh, that’s objective, for sure.” I backed out. I left Milo guarding everyone else and headed for home and clean clothes. Showers were apparently still out of the question. Maybe I could take a couple of the vagrants to court with me so no one would notice if I smelled. Or maybe my stench would wake up the judge.
Across the street, Mrs. Bodine gave me her usual toothless chirpy greeting, apparently no worse for being occupied by my grandmother. She handed me a bucket of water she’d been heating over the fire. “Here, dear, Leo brought the water over from across the street. I’m heating another if you need it.”
I accepted gratefully. I’d already bought her a quilted red satin jacket for her Christmas gift. Maybe I’d add a red sweat suit to go under it.
It would take half an hour to drive over to the courthouse, with light traffic, and it was already ten. I was about to have my first real day in court as a lawyer, and if we got into utilities versus sinkholes, we could end up debating the existence of hell. Oh goody.
How did I dress to represent insanity?
Attitude. I needed attitude. That whole dress-for-success thing was me trying to be a normal lawyer. It was time to admit that I wasn’t normal and neither were my clients. But judges were, sort of.
So I went with semi-normal. It was cold, and I meant to take my bike because I could zip around obstacles—like traffic. Black leather bike pants were needed, but I topped them off with a perfectly spiffy gold angora turtleneck from the thrift store, a black blazer, and Max’s biker jacket to keep out the cold. I pinned my most glamorous asset up in a loose topknot to pretend propriety and hide the missing hunks.
I wasn’t large in all the right places, but I knew how to use what I had. I dragged on knee-high heeled boots and grabbed the cool briefcase Andre had given me for graduation, shoved in my petitions, and dashed off to court.
Security at the courthouse scrutinized me strangely, but I wasn’t carrying anything more dangerous than pant buckles. I dashed down the hall and hit the judge’s courtroom at one minute to eleven. Removing my leather jacket and helmet, I straightened my blazer, left my hair up, and strode toward the assigned room with Julius’s petition in hand. A security guard redirected me to the judge’s chambers. My eyebrows soared. So much for my day in court.
Ex-senator MacNeill, Dr. Abdul Bakir from the new medical center, and another gray head, probably someone from the city, were waiting for me in the office.
“Gentlemen.” I nodded politely, trying not to freak. “I hadn’t realized we were holding a trial today. I’m merely submitting a petition to have our utilities returned.”
“Where’s Julius?” MacNeill asked in his hearty politician’s voice. “We were hoping to have a word with him.”
I hid my surprise. “Anything you wish to say to my partner, you can say to me.”
The judge wandered in, frowning. “What’s the ruckus in my courtroom, gentlemen? I thought this was just a private petition.”
Uh oh. I glanced out the window. Signs waved from the pavement.
I may have mentioned last night that I needed a crowd, but I hadn’t had time to organize one.
On the other side of the wall, in the courtroom, a joyous chorus arose. The nuns?
And were those maracas? I had said silent protest, hadn’t I?
I placed my hands innocently behind my back and waited for the Zone’s version of hell to break loose.
Twenty
Judge Crater was a goatee-wielding skinny crank of a man suffering from a chronic digestive disorder if the number of Rolaids he popped was any indication.
“I don’t like holding a hearing here,” he grumbled. “I need my courtroom.”
He glared at me as if singing nuns and maracas were all my fault. I didn’t point out the protest signs on the sidewalk. The newspapers would later.
I would have liked to believe that Max’s inner rebel had hired the exorcists to exorcise a courtroom, but it was far more likely that the devil in Andre had done it. For all I knew, he had exorcists on retainer now.
“Good morning, Your Honor, I’m merely here with a request that the city rescind their order to shut off our utilities. I’m not sure why these other gentlemen are here.” I handed over the papers Julius had prepared.
The judge frowned at my boots and leather pants, but I had my respectful face and a blazer on. No contempt there, judge, no sirree.
The unidentified suit removed papers from his own briefcase and laid them on the judge’s desk. “We can’t allow that, sir. The city is representing the various utilities and their workers. The area has been labeled hazardous, and we’ve asked the governor for emergency orders to demolish it. The EPA has already begun removing the polluted material on the harbor grounds currently owned by the city.”
The choir’s voices soared higher, and a drumbeat joined the maracas. The judge scowled and skimmed both our petitions.
“Those are taxpaying citizens in there,” I argued, pointing to the courtroom. Th
e nuns ought to add a favorable impression. “The city cannot rob us of our homes and businesses because it’s found a potentially bigger, better landowner.” I glanced at the medical center man. “One assumes you’re not a nonprofit and the city will be collecting higher taxes from you than from average citizens.”
He shrugged. “We’ll pay our fair share and our employees will contribute payroll taxes.”
Andre paid pitifully low property taxes and probably had some kind of poverty or historical credits against those. Because of our technology problems, most of the Zone operated on cash. As a result, any sales and income taxes were nearly nonexistent. I got that. But that was no reason that folks struggling to survive should be booted in the chin.
Greed was evil, right? Could I justify blasting greedmeisters with my Saturn talents?
The judge hit his intercom and yelled at security to hurry up and remove the nuns. That was a shame, but I couldn’t turn him into a toad for being a prick. I wanted to open the door connected to the courtroom and see how guards removed angels.
As if responding to my wish, Andre entered the office through the courtroom side door. Past his shoulder, I caught a glimpse of three nuns leading a handful of D-Gers in a song praising God’s bounty or some such. Cora glanced up and waved, then returned to enthusiastically beating a handheld drum while Dr. Voodoo kept a beat with his gourd. Had they carried them in in briefcases? Uniformed security watched uneasily.
The door shut before I could watch security heave out my friends.
“My job here isn’t to rule on payroll taxes or the EPA,” the judge reminded us sternly. “My only role today is to decide whether the city has the right to close down a district’s utilities if that district has become hazardous to workers. The city does have such a right.”
My stomach dropped, and I shivered. I was about to fail my pals.
He glared in my direction. “Bringing protestors will not sway my decision. You may tell Mr. Montoya that I rule on the law alone. Unless you can prove the property is not dangerous to the health of innocent bystanders and workers, your petition is denied.”