Giving Him Hell_A Saturn's Daughter Novel Page 3

  “They’re forcing the homeless off the harbor,” he said indignantly, all fiery-eyed and waving the invisible flag of justice.

  Damn, I wondered if Saturn had sons.

  “The harbor isn’t healthy,” I countered.

  “Where else can they go?” Rob argued. “The shelters are full or won’t take addicts. At the harbor, they’ve got tents and barrels for fire and they look out for each other. Where in heck does the city expect them to live?”

  Heck. The guy actually said heck. I’d pray for him if I believed in prayer. “And I suppose you want me to sue the city to stop them?”

  He got all steely-eyed and resolute. “Yes.”

  “And I suppose you want me to do it for nothing?”

  More fiery idealism. “Yes. Lawyers do pro bono.”

  “Established lawyers. With real clients and lots of money,” I reminded him. “Do you have any idea how much it costs to heat this place?” I gestured at the twenty-foot pressed-tin ceiling.

  He looked a little more desperate. “They’re old people. Army vets. They deserve better.”

  He almost had me there. I’d once feared my psychic grandmother was living in the camp. Still wasn’t sure that she wasn’t. Of course, I wasn’t even sure she was alive. And Max and his friends were vets. I wasn’t immune to idealism. I’d just had to learn practicality.

  “The harbor is polluted. It’s dangerous,” I repeated. And could be sitting on Granny and fire-making blobs. “Find them a city park, an empty building, and I’ll do what I can, but fighting to let them kill themselves with chemical beds is not on my agenda.”

  His eyes lit with new enthusiasm. “This area is crammed with empty buildings! They’d be better off inside for the winter. Will you help us hold off the cops if we trespass?”

  I knew this wouldn’t end well, but I sympathized with his cause. The homeless at the harbor were mostly homeless because they couldn’t take care of themselves within the strictures of a so-called civilized society. If we found them a building, one of them would eventually burn it down or stab someone for a better corner or another bottle of whiskey.

  In my jaded mind, those animal survival techniques weren’t a whole lot different from white-collar workers using more socially acceptable tactics to rob and steal each other blind. And it wasn’t as if our guys would ruin the neighborhood by moving in.

  And every once in a while, I knew, someone could be saved with a helping hand—and that’s where my bleeding heart kicked in.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I agreed with a sigh of resignation. “But Andre probably owns most of the buildings on Edgewater, and he doesn’t always recognize the law.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Rob said gallantly. “He can’t hope to rent out those wrecks.”

  Well, yeah, he could and he had, but Rob was heading out the door and there was no point in hindering his progress.

  Ned leaned back in the massive sixties’ orange desk chair we’d dug out of the rubble of the warehouse next door. “Lawyers don’t encourage crime,” he said disapprovingly.

  “Define crime,” I said. “Leaving those old guys out in the snow is a crime in my book.”

  Which was kind of where I got myself into trouble. Law books existed for a reason, but I had this really bad habit of wanting actual justice.

  Justice would be making Acme pay for the damage they’d done. Justice would be allowing the denizens of the Zone control over their destinies. And their electricity. And when I got feeling irritable about the lack of justice around me, people ended up in hell.

  Four

  It was still snowing when I left the office after dark. Intent on avoiding confrontation with Gloria and hell before dinner, I sloshed through several inches of wet stuff on my way to Chesty’s. And then the walk turned dry.

  Amazed that anyone had bothered shoveling sidewalks, I checked the building I was passing to see who this energetic person might be. The boarded-up windows looked like every other empty storefront on the street as far as I could tell. Odd.

  I reached the first intersection—and the road had been plowed. The city never plowed down here.

  The reason for the clear intersection became apparent as I crossed—the street was hot.

  Swearing, I hurried to the other side. I could feel the heat even through my heavy-duty Uggs. Hot streets, that was just plain scary given my fear of Gloria and hell’s dimensions.

  I pressed onward, keeping an eye open for any more dangerous anomalies. That didn’t take long. A red-hatted garden gnome statue relaxed and splashed his little feet in a gutter of gushing melted snow that steamed like a hot bath. Shit, this couldn’t be good.

  I pretended not to see him as I spun around and marched back home to fix my own dinner. At least the Victorians were on a hill out of the Zone—or Gloria’s—reach. I hoped.

  Gloria’s goons had once blown up Andre’s warehouse next to my office, but she was dead now. If I kept telling myself that long enough, I might learn to relax and enjoy floating garden gnomes.

  After feeding Milo and nuking a meal, I concluded I couldn’t relax until I’d investigated the Zone’s anomalies, but I could attempt it from a relatively safe location. If I wanted to know what was under the Zone, I could start by investigating the bowels of my office building. Maybe I could determine the extent of the danger.

  I went in search of mole clothes. I dredged out ancient corduroys and a sweatshirt and a hoodie.

  “Want to go for a walk?” I asked Milo as I loaded up a tote with flashlights and batteries and other useful equipment.

  He washed his whiskers and eyed me with suspicion. Then, head held high, he trotted to the door. Milo is one very spooky cat. I could swear he understood me. Worse yet, he had a tendency to follow me when I was heading for trouble. His escort wasn’t exactly a good sign.

  I hadn’t anticipated any other company, but emerging onto the porch, I almost fell over Sarah Jones, currently a waitress at Chesty’s. Sarah and I had a peculiar relationship based on the fact that we wore identical scales-of-justice tattoos on our backs, presumably making us both Saturn’s daughters.

  Except Sarah took her justice powers to some pretty weird extremes in attempts to beautify herself, and I avoided sending tools to the devil in exchange for wishes. Not that I hadn’t done it, mind you, but I’m trying harder not to these days in fear for my eternal soul. Or wheelchairs. Or pointy boobs like Sarah’s.

  She sat on the snow-covered front step looking as if someone had just run over her best friend. Crap.

  I sat down beside her. “Something up?”

  “I’ve got elves swimming in the birdbath,” she muttered. “I don’t believe in Santa but I got elves. What’s next, reindeer?”

  This was a huge conversation for Sarah. When I’d first met her, she’d jump at a car door slam and turn into a chimp if a man looked at her. Sarah’s not real clear on how she did it, but she had admitted to killing her abusive husband. I was thinking she’d damned him to hell, and Saturn had obliged by giving her a chimp’s strength to send him there. Just my guess.

  “Reindeer—or the devil,” I suggested experimentally, to see if her late mother had passed on information that mine hadn’t.

  She shrugged. “Life is hell. That makes sense. Elves don’t make sense.”

  “Neither do dancing Dumpsters.” If garden gnomes were her only problem, I had better things to do than freeze my ass off. I got up and brushed snow off my corduroys. “I’m going exploring. Want to come?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t.

  “Dumpsters don’t dance,” she argued, following me across the street.

  Sarah’s company was dangerously unpredictable, but I had no good reason to tell her to get lost.

  The pavement up here wasn’t as hot as the Zone’s and the road was getting slick. I hoped that meant I wouldn’t be descending directly to Gloria’s den—yet.

  “The Dumpsters just roll around,” she continued. “I figure it’s earthquakes or the ground settling.”
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  Everyone lives in their separate states of denial. I shrugged. “If you believe that, then believe garden gnomes are rolling around in your bird bath.”

  “You mean those weird little statues people put on their lawns? We don’t get those down here. We don’t have grass.” She waited for me to open my office door without any expression of curiosity.

  I categorized Sarah as a classic sociopath. Raised by a serial killer mother and abused by her husband, she was what life had made her. I had hopes the Zone would morph her into a better person, eventually. It had already improved her social skills.

  I had no good reason to damn a coward with extreme reactions to fear, but I stayed clear of her when possible.

  “Maybe your elves are escaping the heat of hell,” I suggested, flicking on a flashlight. I didn’t want Andre seeing lights and coming over to get in my way. It was time I learned the Zone’s secrets. I knew tunnels existed up here on the hill. I didn’t know if they connected with the main drag.

  Milo trotted ahead of the light beam. Sarah simply shoved her hands in her baggy coat pockets and followed.

  “Demons instead of elves?” she asked. “Mama said demons walked this earth, but I don’t think I’ve ever met one, unless it was my husband.”

  I didn’t want to believe in a superstitious, Bible-thumping hell, much less demons on earth, but events had forced me to at least accept string theory and hypothesize that hell was another dimension. And with my luck, it existed beneath my feet.

  “Maybe she meant metaphorical demons.” Even as I said it, I knew that comment went right past her head. Sarah isn’t the most educated member of our community.

  “How many kinds of demons are there?” she asked grumpily. “And can you point them out so I can kill them?”

  I rolled my eyes. Sarah didn’t want to kill demons because they were dangerous, but because she wanted to wish for a reward from Saturn Daddy. I bit my tongue.

  “Andre still won’t look at me,” she continued, proving my point. “My legs aren’t long enough.”

  Legs weren’t her problem. Andre knew she was a killer. Okay, with Andre, maybe lumpy ankles made the difference.

  “Andre has a lot of problems on his mind right now,” I suggested. “Why don’t you try for Ernesto? He has a steady job.” As the creepy manager of Chesty’s pole-dancing bar, Ernesto ought to be right up Sarah’s alley.

  I made my way through the unused warren of offices behind my front lobby. The building had been abandoned long ago for lack of elevators, lack of air-conditioning, and a general lack of anything new over the last fifty years. My rent was cheap.

  Discussing Sarah’s boyfriend troubles distracted me from fretting over what I might find in the tunnels below the building. The likelihood of spiders and rats I could handle. But after encountering Gloria’s demonic bats in Hell’s Mansion, I had kept my exploratory nature in check—until steam started emerging from the street. Self-preservation trumped squeamishness.

  “Ernesto is creepy,” Sarah protested.

  And a girl who turned into a chimp wasn’t? “He’s getting better. He even says hi and bye occasionally now.”

  I unlocked the battered wooden door Andre had once shown me. The harbor just east of here had been the site of Civil War shenanigans, and the area was permeated with old tunnels. Andre had turned the one under his warehouse into a bomb shelter, then the warehouse had been bombed. Life is just a jiggling bowl of irony.

  A blast of musty air hit us when I opened the door, but that was nothing unexpected from an unused basement. The air might be a tad warmer than I’d anticipated, but for all I knew, heat goes down instead of up here.

  That open-mind thing I was acquiring necessitated an Alice-in-Wonderland mentality. I might be heading down a rabbit hole, but I’d avoid anything in a bottle labeled Drink Me.

  The stairs were totally dark. I should have invested in a new LED flashlight. The dim beam on this old one revealed a wood step, relatively intact. I flipped an ancient light switch but nothing happened. I didn’t even know where the bulbs were to check them. Using my feeble light, I tested each step with my boot before putting my weight on it. Milo trotted down without hesitation.

  A vaguely damp concrete cellar greeted us at the bottom. I couldn’t find another switch. I swung the flashlight along the ceiling and found one of those bulbs with a chain hanging next to it. I tugged that and the bulb briefly illuminated, then exploded. Par for the course.

  Milo sniffed along the concrete block walls. A cat really needed a tail to express itself, but Milo didn’t appear concerned about his lack. He tagged my flashlight beam, leaping on it as we crossed the cellar.

  “You should start a bar down here, call it The Cellar.” Sarah studied some old abandoned doors leaning against the wall. “You could make tables of these.”

  “The neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate it,” I said, “but there might be more cellars like this nearer the harbor. You can have the doors.”

  “I don’t have the money.” She dragged one of the doors to the side and pointed to a shadow behind the others. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  Crafty, Andre, hiding the door behind a stack of doors. We hauled the stack to one side and examined the cracked and peeling panel in the wall beneath. The last time I’d opened a cellar door, I’d been hit by a flock of demonic bats. But Hell’s Mansion was a long drive from here.

  “You go first,” Sarah said, not as dumb as she seemed.

  Don’t say I didn’t learn from experience. I removed an umbrella from my tote of tools. A cloud of bats wouldn’t catch me unprepared again. Milo clawed at the door and left scratches in the mold or algae or whatever coated it. Opening the umbrella, I twisted the door latch.

  It resisted. I rattled and tugged and the latch fell off in my hands, leaving me with no knob to turn. Sarah giggled.

  I might be small, but I’m persistent. Like a mosquito.

  I folded up the umbrella and removed a hammer from my bag of tricks. I whacked the door hardware a good one. This time I was rewarded with a click, except I had no handle for dragging the warped panel open. So I kept hammering until the latch hardware fell out on the other side, leaving a hole. One learned interesting things when traveling the country and living in shacks.

  One also learned to don gloves before sticking hands in dark corners. I pulled on my leather ones, grabbed the latch hole, and tugged. The warped wood scraped the rough floor.

  No bats flew out, but an unholy sewer stench washed over us. Gagging, I flashed my light around on the far side. Ancient crumbling brick walls. I eased past the door and into the tunnel itself. Showing definite signs of intelligence, Sarah stayed safely in the cellar. Milo, the damned cat, slipped between my legs and trotted into the darkness beyond my light.

  The floor was hard-packed dirt. I followed the tunnel downward, in the direction of the harbor. I didn’t see hell, demons, fire, or feel extreme heat. Choking on the stench, I started worrying about plumbing.

  I ran the light over the ceiling and winced when it appeared to be rough-hewn logs—under a street carrying two ton cars. Not healthy.

  I apparently had a Civil War tunnel under my office. It might make a good escape route if I trusted the ceiling. I didn’t. Unless I inherited a fortune to pour cement to support the tunnel, it looked like I’d have to find another path under the Zone. I headed back.

  “No gold?” Sarah asked in disappointment as I reappeared.

  “I doubt it. You’re free to look if you don’t mind two-hundred-year-old timbers over your head.” I dusted my hair but didn’t detect any spiders. Shouldn’t there have been spider webs?

  “Milo!” I yelled into the tunnel, listening to it echo faintly. “Get your rear end back here!”

  A ghostly shriek responded, followed by the scurrying of rat feet, a flapping of large black wings, and my curses.

  I dashed the last few feet of the tunnel into the cellar, shoved Sarah to one side, and flattened us both agains
t the cellar wall. Unearthly large shadows flitted along the ceiling. I swallowed my fear, flashed my light upward, and wished I hadn’t. I could swear, a dozen red laser beams glared back at me. The wings swooped at our hair. Sarah screamed and held her head.

  My most favorite Saturn talent is visualizing my enemies into anything harmless that appeared in my fevered mind at moments of panic. That’s how Ned became a frog—he’d been shooting at me. I had no idea if it worked on demonic bats.

  Closing my eyes, I frantically visualized the shadows converting to confetti. If I went to hell for killing bats and rodents, so be it.

  Black snow pelted our shoulders and hair. The shriek from the tunnel escalated in volume into a mournful howl, drowning out Sarah’s screams. Milo fled past us, scampering for the stairs.

  That did it. Milo wasn’t frightened of anything. In any other situation that wail could have been the howl of the wind—except there was no wind.

  With a mighty shove, I slammed the now knobless, lockless tunnel door. I was hot on Sarah’s heels a second later.

  Five

  Given my life lately, I half expected my office to blow up.

  We frantically ran our hands through our hair and brushed black confetti from our clothes as we ran up the stairs. Black bat innards for all I knew.

  I could almost sense a presence in that wail. I shivered at the eerie howl creeping up and down my spine.

  I glanced at Milo with suspicion, but he wasn’t much given to wailing, and he was racing faster than us for the escape hatch.

  We gasped for breath, still madly beating at our clothes as we fell into the upstairs hall. I slammed the cellar door and threw the bolt while Sarah raced ahead of me. I no longer smelled the sewer stench, but my neck crawled. I wanted a hot shower.

  The wail stopped. Just like that—frozen, ghostly silence.

  By the time I reached the quiet lobby, I felt like an old-fashioned jackass for fleeing from nothing but rats and a few bats and red laser beams.