Giving Him Hell_A Saturn's Daughter Novel Page 16

  I wanted to go all red ragey and curse the lot of them, for stupidity and cluelessness, if nothing else. Unfortunately, I understood law and logic and knew the judge was right.

  I turned on smug MacNeill. “I thought Acme meant to support us in this. How can the city justify leaving on your utilities when you’re sitting on vats of poison?”

  Andre caught my arm as if to warn me not to lose my temper and turn anyone into a toadstool. I wasn’t at that level yet. I had my lawyer hat on.

  “Our chemicals have been properly contained and inspected,” MacNeill said with a politician’s smile. “We’re here simply to offer the residents of Edgewater aid in finding new situations.”

  Andre tugged my arm, yanking me back down from my outrage place.

  The singing and maracas stopped in the other room. Sort of. I think someone was chanting a protest song as they were being led out. I had nuns standing up for my neighbors. I couldn’t let them down.

  I faced the judge and announced coldly, “You have not heard the last of this.”

  “Is that a threat?” the judge asked with a scowl.

  “As they say in the westerns, that’s not a threat, that’s a promise that I will appeal by all legal means available, and I and my clients can be very creative.” I turned on my high heeled boots and strode out, Andre beside me.

  Oddly, I wasn’t shaking with rage or disappointment. I had enough understanding of the judge’s side of the law to know he had right on his side. We shouldn’t be placing innocents in harm’s way.

  But the Zone had its purposes, and it needed to be protected, like wild animals and national forests, maybe. Hard to pitch that argument. Most people would rather shoot wolves and loot national forests of natural resources than protect them. It was difficult to convince people that existence was more important than money.

  Which was apparently why I had been placed on this planet. Saturn’s daughters could bring about justice in situations that didn’t fit into courts of law.

  “Okay, Saturn Daddy,” I muttered under my breath. “How do I fix this?” Beating the judge with a tire iron and wishing him dead was not an acceptable alternative. Beating MacNeill . . . Nah, even I couldn’t justify that. He’d actually done me a favor once. He wasn’t totally evil. Yet.

  News photographers snapped pictures of nuns being escorted from the courthouse. The PR possibilities of those images would get the public’s attention, but that wasn’t enough to solve the Zone’s utility problem.

  The photographers ignored Cora in her business suit. She fell in step with us as we strode down the steps.

  “Now can we blow up Acme?” she asked cheerfully.

  “That’s one solution,” Andre agreed, “But I think Clancy has already overruled putting people out of work.”

  “I should have let Gloria blow up the good senator,” I said bitterly. “He’s the one who sent the utilities checking infrastructure. He wants the Zone shut down as much as Acme does. The Zone needs to own its utilities. Wonder what it takes to get that?”

  “Magic,” Andre said, stopping on the sidewalk. “We’ve had a good run, but the end is in sight.”

  That was not what I wanted to hear.

  “The fight has drawn your parents out of the house. That’s a positive step forward,” I reminded him. “We’re not giving up yet.”

  “I can’t run a business without utilities. Nancy Rose is moving her plants to your office, but they need her fancy plant lights. I’m all out of tricks,” Andre said in resignation.

  I stared at him in disbelief. Andre never gave up. He was a fighter. Then I remembered the fat check he’d been offered. He was fighting his amoral instincts. I was on my own here.

  “Don’t be a bigger jerkwad than necessary, Legrande. We’ve got to find out what’s under the street before we give up,” I warned. Not wanting to discuss our potential demises in hell, I stalked off to my bike.

  I wasn’t ready to die, especially for the damned Zone. But the Zone’s inhabitants had stood beside me every step of the way, accepting all my dangerous peculiarities. I couldn’t let them go homeless and jobless.

  Maybe we could move underground, I thought grumpily as I cruised on home. Plenty of heat under the street. No water or electricity, though. Even if I found whatever had caused an explosion yesterday, I didn’t know what I could do about it.

  I’d been in some pretty bad places before, but this one seemed insurmountable. It was almost Christmas, damn it! They couldn’t put people out of their homes and terminate their jobs over the holiday.

  Once I reached Edgewater, I stopped in front of Tim’s forlorn Christmas tree stand in the empty lot next to the florist shop. He’d sold quite a few over the weekend, but with no hope of festive lights, sales would be down. Or dead.

  Not wanting to return to my office filled with unhappy people—and plants, apparently—I parked the Harley and walked over to a glowing manhole cover. I really couldn’t blame the utility workers for not wanting to go down there.

  Seeing both sides of an argument sucked and wreaked havoc with decision-making. Compromise seemed so puny compared to a glorious flag-waving cause, even if it was doomed.

  The low roar of heavy equipment along the harbor provided depressing background noise.

  A vagrant wandered over to join me, beer can in one hand, cigarette in the other. Cigarettes had been banned in the Zone, but I wasn’t arguing with anyone’s choice of lifestyle. If he blew himself up on hazardous gas and waste, that was his problem. I just didn’t want to go with him. I kept my distance.

  “Used to sleep down there,” the vagrant informed me. “Nothin’ but sewer lines. All the rest of that crap is buried. They’d have to dig up the cables and pipes. They’re being assholes.”

  I had to take a minute to work my way around that convoluted declaration. The utility lines weren’t down there?

  Of course they weren’t. One couldn’t expect utility workers to muck through sewage to connect an electric line. And running water pipes through sewage was a recipe for disaster. They had to dig up the streets to reach water lines. I glanced overhead. And power lines. We had buried power lines.

  I’d been had.

  I punched Andre’s number into my phone and waited to see where the Zone would send me. Amazingly, it only took three tries to reach Andre. Maybe turning off the utilities had limited whatever interference polluted our phone signals.

  A cacophony of voices provided background to his irritated greeting. He must be at my office.

  “Have Frank and his friends hook us up to Acme or turn on our mains,” I told him. “Let Acme foot our utility bills. It’s only sewage we need to worry about.”

  “Are you down the hole, Clancy?” he asked in disgust.

  “Not yet, Legrande.” I hung up.

  It made a crazy kind of sense. Chemicals had flooded the streets and harbor. Street runoff went into the sewers. Chemical sludge and gas could have been filling the pipes for a decade. I sooo preferred scientific explanations to hellish ones.

  I looked around me. Edgewater was eerily silent with no businesses open. Even Bill’s place looked deserted.

  Another vagrant wandered up to bicker over the beer can. I moved on. I should have gone home, but I had no utilities, and my office would be a madhouse. I needed a place to think.

  Unlike my former obedient self, I jaywalked across Edgewater in front of Chesty’s. Even our street cop must have been toasting his toes elsewhere. He didn’t appear to hand me a ticket. I took the side alley that led behind the restaurant, to the Dumpster lane between the buildings and the deserted harbor.

  I watched bulldozers dump layers of pollution into trucks . Where did one carry polluted dirt? To another hazardous zone?

  A utility crew was jackhammering pavement outside the chain link fence line. Looked like it was okay to risk the lives of workers if the EPA said so. I wondered if they got hazardous duty pay.

  Shivering in the chilly wind, I leaned against a Dumpster in th
e shadows, hoping to go unnoticed.

  I saw no signs of a sinkhole or explosion. But even Themis had admitted another portal had opened—in the sewer? Did I really want to locate it? To what purpose?

  I still had hopes of negotiating a truce with Acme long enough to demand Zone representation before the city council so we could protest the medical center. I’d believe anything rather than climb down a fiery manhole.

  Without my being aware of his approach, Frank materialized beside me, crossing his arms and leaning against the tin can, too. He wasn’t much taller or wider than me. Dressed in rumpled gray slacks and shirt topped by a faded brown jacket and fedora, he blended right in with the shadows.

  “Weird stuff happening,” he said cryptically.

  I arched a cynical eyebrow in his direction.

  He shrugged. “Weirder than usual. Do-Gooders are trying to build a greenhouse garden over a manhole behind the insurance building.”

  “Locavore gardening. Makes sense to me. Use the natural heat.” Crazy, but not weird.

  “Plants are already growing in it.”

  Okay, that was weird. Plants took time and there hadn’t been any.

  Frank nodded toward the hard hats down the block. “Those pricks refused to pay their bar tab at Bill’s. Bill threw them out, and they threw his generator into the harbor.”

  Episodes of violence had been erupting since we’d been gassed. They’d been particularly rude to Tim the other night. Maybe the utility workers had been down here long enough to absorb the pollution. I frowned more in puzzlement than disapproval. “Bill called the cops?”

  “Leibowitz can’t be found. Bill couldn’t identify the perps. All hard hats look alike. It gets weirder. Tourists are flocking to those Jacuzzis, swearing the water is healing what ails them.”

  Jacuzzis? As in, more than one? People were actually traveling to the Zone for a spa treatment? “Who the heck came up with that?”

  “I looked into it,” Frank continued. “Some exec at MSI started it. Another copied him.”

  MSI thought our hot water was really healing people? Acme’s pink and green gas attack a few months ago had cured a lot of ills, while putting the ill into comas. Not precisely a fair trade. But greed drives drug companies to experiment when they shouldn’t.

  “Is anyone comatose yet?” I had to ask.

  “Don’t know. The tourists go home—after bashing gargoyles and trashing Dumpsters. Lots of aggression. Scene is really peculiar.”

  Aggression. Acme’s new element had proven dangerous in more ways than one.

  The crew we were watching must have hit a pipe. Water spewed in a geyser higher than the nearest building. The men stepped back and just watched.

  A plain white van rattled down the alley. Within minutes, they were unloading—another hot tub.

  “Okay, that’s officially weird,” I agreed. “If the city isn’t allowing utility workers down here, what gives MSI the right to start businesses here?”

  “You try to stop them,” he said cynically. “Call the cops. See how far you get.”

  Out of fatalistic curiosity, I did. I got a sushi joint in Fairbanks Alaska. I tried a couple of more times with the same result. I debated whether creating geysers came under Saturn’s law.

  “They’re killing themselves,” Frank said unsympathetically through the wad of gum he was chewing.

  Diverted, I looked up. Sure enough, one of the drivers clearing ground zero toppled from his dozer as it scooped up harbor mud. An ambulance marked with Medical Science Inc’s logo immediately drove over the rough terrain to pick him up, as if it had been stationed there just for this purpose. As if it had happened more than once.

  Maybe MSI was already collecting rats for their experiments.

  The guys at the geyser didn’t even look up.

  “Looks like OSHA needs to step in,” I said, debating angles.

  “Could be interesting,” he agreed. “Won’t get Acme off our backs.”

  He had that right. Can’t say that I liked the way Frank’s mind worked, but he was nicely feeding my wrath. “Acme has money and power. We don’t. How can we level the playing field?”

  He thought about that as the ambulance lumbered away. “We either get rich, or Acme gets poor.”

  “Very helpful, Frank.”

  “Yeah, I thought so. Leo called and says your hard hat guy is on the prowl and you need to get home. I’m going in to fix the water main.”

  He slipped into the shadows as invisibly as Tim. Frank was creepy, but he was usually on our side as far as I could tell.

  Hard hat guy—Kaminski, the utility worker who wouldn’t turn into a gnome. The one I’d had arrested. Not someone I wanted shooting at me again.

  “Wouldn’t being bulletproof be a whole lot more practical than visualizing idiots to perdition?” I asked the universe while I checked my surroundings. If Kaminski was wearing his hard hat, he’d blend in perfectly around here.

  I retreated down the alley to the main drag, halting before I left the shadows. Tall, dark and dangerous—minus the hard hat—leaned against my bike. Damn.

  Twenty-one

  Having learned I couldn’t toadify Kaminski or visualize him into a statue, I intelligently avoided the menace—and my bike. I returned to Dumpster alley and set out in the direction of Acme, past the idiots setting up hot spring spas, and away from my home and office. I needed someone who knew how to physically intimidate without using the weapons the former frogs liked so much. I missed Max’s biker buddies. Out of nostalgia, I dialed up Lance, one of late-Max’s biker friends.

  No sushi joint this time. Lance answered. “Tina! Moving into the governor’s mansion yet?”

  “Not quite. Still down here cleaning up his family’s dirty work. I’ve got a man who wants me dead leaning on my bike. Any chance you’re free to tell him to move on?”

  “Buy me a beer?” he asked cheerfully.

  “A whole case,” I agreed. My spirits picked up just thinking of Max’s rebel friends.

  I had no idea if Kaminski would wait around long enough for Lance to show up. Didn’t matter. I’d get to see the boys, and in the meantime, I’d taken a hankering to see Paddy. I’d be safe behind Acme’s walls, and my need for a normal approach to our problems would be assuaged.

  Our resident eccentric scientist should have been a thorn in Acme’s side now that he was on the board of trustees and not quite crazy. He’d hated his mother’s greedy chemical wars. Why wasn’t he holding up his end of the bargain and stopping Acme’s outrageous depredations?

  I walked up to the chemical plant, knowing there were men inside who wanted me dead. Or on another planet. But unlike Krazy Kaminski, they wouldn’t shoot at me. So I stopped at the guardhouse, showed my ID, and asked to see Paddy. I really liked entering lawfully for a change.

  He had me buzzed in. I hoped no one was standing at a window aiming squirt guns of chemicals at me. Last time I’d been here, I’d turned their violent goons into frogs and impaled their demented head chemist—not that anyone but Andre actually knew that for certain.

  Paddy met me in Acme’s sterile lobby. New management hadn’t improved the plant facilities, but Paddy had cleaned himself up nicely. With his beard and hair trimmed, and wearing his white lab coat, he looked like any respectable scientist.

  Since he’d been forced to act crazy for years to keep a toehold in his mother’s monstrous chemical factory, Paddy knew better than anyone that the walls had ears here. He greeted me with an innocuous, “Good to see you, Tina. Come on back.”

  Instead of taking me to a quiet office, he led me to a lab with music blaring from a computer and gadgets humming. I wandered among the beakers, gazing in admiration at nothing I could understand. “Nice set-up,” I said.

  “Annoys the devil out of MacNeill that he doesn’t know what I’m doing down here,” Paddy admitted, checking a gauge and making notes on his tablet computer. “I take my work home with me and keep it off the network, so it’s frustrating a lot
of people.”

  “Which means they’re probably not letting you see what they’re doing either, doesn’t it?” I might not get science or understand chemicals, but I knew people.

  “They have to make reports to the board. As trustee, I get to read them.” He almost smiled as he checked another gauge. “MacNeill has no idea at all what the reports mean.”

  “But MacNeill knows how to wield power and money. I take it you haven’t been able to stop this devil pact with the clinic?” I leaned against a lab table and looked for cameras in the ceiling. New management or not, I trusted Acme as much as I would a viper crossed with a piranha. For all I knew, Acme was another of hell’s dimensions.

  “Can’t say the clinic is all bad,” Paddy admitted. “We cured cancer with the X-element. Experiments need to be done. Not totally sure that condemning the Zone is a bad thing, either. Andre will be reimbursed.”

  As I’d feared, Paddy was being assimilated by the Borg. He used to sarcastically call the X-element the Magic particle.

  “Want me to start reciting a long list of chemicals meant to save lives that ended up killing or crippling people?” I asked. “How about the flip side of pink particles—the stuff that made seniors beat each other up for no reason? You don’t think a can of that wouldn’t explode the Middle East? Chemicals are the reason the Zone is what it is.”

  “And uranium is radioactive and can heat homes or blow up cities. I’m not ignorant, Clancy. The chemicals aren’t at fault. People are.”

  “Guns don’t shoot people, people do,” I mimicked nastily. “Let’s kill people then.”

  “What do you want, Clancy?” he asked wearily.

  “I want Acme to back off, to leave us alone, to plant their nasty clinic somewhere other than on our backs. I’ll let you deal with the guilt when you render half the population of Baltimore comatose with your experiments. We just want to get on with our lives.”