Giving Him Hell_A Saturn's Daughter Novel Read online

  I tried to gauge the eerie silence and realized that was what was truly alarming. On a quiet night, the Zone blasted music, Harley engines, ambulance sirens, and drunken laughter.

  I heard nothing. It was as if the building had been enveloped in a smothering quilt—or transported to another planet.

  Milo fled into the cold the instant I opened the front door. Smart cat. With the door open, all the noise returned. I even heard a tug tooting in the harbor.

  “Okay, I’m getting out. After you.” I gestured politely for Sarah to go ahead of me.

  She hesitated. After what we’d been through, she actually hesitated. I frowned and waited.

  “Could I stay here, please?” she whispered.

  I blinked and groped for all the reasons that was so very wrong. All I got out was “Why?”

  She shrugged and held up her hands. “I didn’t turn into a chimp.”

  Oooohkay, that was a notch above all my reasons. Scary, but a logical point. She’d been frightened but her usual response hadn’t happened. She’d screamed like a normal person.

  “The wail and the bats don’t scare you?” Maybe I was the only one who heard them? Nah, Milo had run too.

  She shrugged. “I won’t go into the basement. They didn’t follow us up, did they?”

  For all I knew, she didn’t realize the black ash on her clothes was bat remains. I wasn’t the one to tell her. “It’s cold in here. There are no beds or covers or anything,” I pointed out.

  “There are elves swimming in my birdbath,” she argued back. “And it’s warmer here than in my house. You have an old couch in that back room.”

  It made me really uneasy to have Sarah camping out in my office, and not just because of the basement adventure. I glanced at the door to my file room. So far, I hadn’t accumulated enough files for me to bother worrying about the expense of building a locked vault.

  I couldn’t imagine that Sarah had any interest in the civil complaints in the drawers. So I had no logical reason to say no. I asked hesitantly, “You think the Zone turns you into a chimp?”

  “It’s where I work and live. That’s all I know.” She tried to look defiant, but she had orange hair and pointy boobs and short, plump legs and mostly she looked like a truculent orangutan. Okay, so I don’t know my primates well.

  “Write a note saying you won’t sue me if you freeze to death. We’ll figure out something better in the morning.” I was so kicking myself for agreeing, but I was spooked and wanted to make certain Milo was all right. And yeah, I wanted out of there.

  She offered a tentative smile. “I’ll try not to scare Ned.”

  I hoped she hadn’t set her heart on my good-looking assistant because she realio, trulio, wasn’t his type. Or preferred gender. I just nodded, stepped out, and locked the door. I took a moment to inspect the noisy street at the bottom of the snow-covered hill, watch my breath smoke the air, and gather my shattered nerves. I needed to plot my next move.

  Maybe tomorrow I’d get to the bottom of hell. Humor, ho, ho.

  ***

  I woke up the next morning with Milo on my pillow. I knew I had to be exaggerating what had happened in the cellar last night, but I still checked my hair for bat remains after I got up. I prayed I wasn’t rewarded or punished for turning flying rodents into confetti. That had been self-defense and not a judgment call. I was still pretty amazed that it had worked.

  I’d showered the night before and had no excuse to do so again, so I aimed for the closet. Much as I’d like to be a free-loading superhero, I had real clients who paid real money and expected me to sit in a real office working if I wanted real food in my belly. What I did after hours—was likely to get me killed. So I focused on normal.

  I liked wearing a classic tailored look for my office—made me feel lawyerly and less like the outcast I’d been all my life. But now that I had nice straight legs to show off, I favored short skirts and funky tights with my shirts and blazers. I checked out the window to see if I could make a quick run across the street without freezing.

  Fuzzy gray fog clung to the glass, obliterating all sight of the world outside.

  Hot and cold air make fog, and we had some real weather clashes happening out there. I told myself fog was better than crazy gas, and hell wasn’t changing the weather.

  Not knowing whether I’d be walking into a sauna or a snowstorm, I sauntered from my hidey-hole just before nine. I let Milo decide whether he wanted to follow. He took one look at the fog and curled up on the window seat cushion. Not dumb, my cat.

  The fog was clammy and clinging but not as cold as it could be. Yesterday’s snow had mostly melted away in the strange warmth. Street noise was oddly muffled, but nothing like the dead silence of last night. I had an only-woman-on-the-planet moment as I crossed the street with zero visibility.

  I had my key out, prepared to unlock my office, before I realized the door had been jimmied. My cautious nature took over, and I froze—until I heard a scream.

  Sarah! Sarah had been in there overnight.

  Caution be damned. I shouldered the door open, preparing mental whammies.

  A shot flew over my head, and I ducked and rolled for the gloom behind the door.

  The spooky gray light through the front windows didn’t help me see. Using the open front door as a shield, I peered out to locate the muffled struggle.

  Sarah had stopped screaming. That was bad.

  A man’s voice cut the silence. “What the f—” the word was severed by a male shriek. Then even the shriek died.

  More muffled struggling. Hunting my phone and scanning the darkness, I finally detected two shadows rolling across the floor of the back hall. My lobby was too huge to see across clearly in the darkness. I had to hope that one of the figures was Sarah, but the hall was too distant to tell.

  Probably because Sarah in her chimp form wasn’t an obvious shape. I hesitated over punching 911.

  “Sarah, don’t kill him,” I shouted, panicking when I finally realized her inner chimp was in the process of throttling an intruder.

  Chimps are not cuddly stuffed animals. They’re mean and strong and unpredictable.

  The chimp kneed the perp into prostration. I swung the light of my phone in her direction. That provided enough illumination to see that the chimp sat on the intruder’s chest, pounding his head into the wood floor. She glanced up at my shout and let go of her victim’s throat long enough to put her really flexible foot on his chin while she groped around the floor.

  I wasn’t certain of the Saturnian etiquette here. The jerkwad had apparently attacked Sarah, so I figured he was hers to deal with. But unlike my preference for visualization, she liked to kill.

  Her long chimp arms swept an object off the floor, and before I had the wits to react, she blew the guy away at close range.

  Damn, but cleaning blood and brains off my floors was not the way I wanted to start the day. Double ewwwww. I’m a lawyer, not a badass superhero. I fought the urge to upchuck.

  Taking a deep breath, I forced down the need to regurgitate my egg burrito. Then I donned my lawyer stoicism and punched my phone to begin the process of legal clean-up.

  I didn’t dare leave Sarah alone while she came down off Cloud Chimp. And I wasn’t calling 911 to arrest a chimp. I needed my hero, Lieutenant Schwartz, my across-the-hall neighbor. While I wondered if a chimp had the mental capacity to ask Saturn Daddy for long legs, he answered my ring.

  “Put your pants on, big boy, and meet me in my office,” I told him. “I’m pretty certain Sarah just blew away an intruder.”

  Studly-Do-Right said a bad word and hung up. I rang Andre next. This was his building.

  My assistant arrived for work about the same time as Andre and Schwartz ran across the street. Dark and indiscernible little ol’ me was hiding cross-legged behind the door when all the big manly men rushed in and right past me.

  They saw Sarah first. Schwartz flipped on the overhead. The fluorescent beam added a cold gray-blue illum
ination that didn’t prettify the bloody sight at all. I turned away.

  Ned choked and ran back outside to barf.

  Schwartz held out his arm to prevent Andre from contaminating the crime scene while Sarah’s big dark chimp eyes watched him.

  Andre searched the shadows until he found me on the floor, staring at my fancy phone. He grabbed my elbows and hauled me up and shoved me out the door with Ned.

  I didn’t even pretend I wanted to stay. I held up the text screen to him.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JUSTINE! —THEMIS

  Six

  Themis was my invisible grandmother. I’d never seen her, anyway. She just left me messed-up messages in seriously weird ways. I had to wonder whose phone she’d stolen to text, or if she’d psychically invaded the air waves because the only number attached was zeroes.

  I’d forgotten today was my birthday. I was twenty-seven, one year short of attaining my full Saturn powers, if I wanted to believe Themis. And Sarah. Apparently the planet rotated the sun approximately every twenty-eight years. I still viewed astrology as superstition but astronomy made even less sense in this scenario.

  I cast a guilty look over my shoulder at the office, but Schwartz blocked any view. Ned had stopped barfing and gone back inside. He’d been a big bad bodyguard once, but I guess since his days of frogdom he was a bit too sensitive for the tough guy gig.

  After glancing at my text, Andre half-dragged me across the foggy street in the direction of his house, wearing his grim, clenched-jaw expression. I protested, but not heartily. My fine legal mind still didn’t grasp murderous primates and invisible grandmothers and dangerous birthdays.

  “Schwartz won’t arrest a chimp, will he?” I asked anxiously as we reached the steps. “It was self-defense. The goon was probably gunning for me.”

  “Stop thinking about it. Visualize a happy place and go there,” he ordered. “I’ll send you a birthday cake.”

  Andre was probably just trying to stop me from blowing up his building with rage, but I was more than willing to disconnect from reality. “Will you pop out of it, naked?” I asked.

  “Dream on.” But he almost sounded amused as he opened his door. “You’re in shock. What was Sarah doing in your office?”

  “Sleeping.” I shrugged. “Or not sleeping. That couch isn’t conducive to rest.”

  Andre’s father—my silent partner Julius—met us at the front door. He has a brilliant legal mind, but he quit leaving the house to care for his wife. When I was the only lawyer in the world who would defend Andre against a murder charge, Julius had agreed to give an inexperienced newly-hatched lawyer like me advice. Civil cases are much more my style, though.

  Despite the rugged sweater, Julius still possessed an elegant old world look. Maybe it was the thick shock of white hair or the dark Spanish eyes and high cheekbones. Hard to say. Andre would look like him some day.

  “I’ll pour some brandy. Sit down,” Julius ordered. He took my other arm as if I were a cripple and pushed me onto Andre’s plush leather sofa.

  “Coffee,” I demanded, coming down from my silly place and finally leaping to the angry conclusions that Andre was trying to steer me away from. “Someone needs to investigate why Acme’s goons are gunning for me again. This is not Sarah’s fault.”

  “Clancy’s back,” Andre said wryly, halting in the doorway instead of fetching coffee. “Find a rope and I’ll tie her up until the boys in blue are done.”

  “If Schwartz is calling his squad, I can’t abandon Sarah.” I was up out of the sofa before Julius could stop me.

  Andre scooped me up by the waist and flung me back. “Sit. Stay. Let Schwartz handle this. Keep your mouth out of it, got that?”

  That was so not fair, using my size against me. Besides, I detested being patronized.

  I jumped up again and rammed my heel into Andre’s instep when he tried to repeat his maneuver. “Do you have any idea what Sarah can do to Schwartz and his men if they frighten her?” I shouted.

  Andre backed off warily. “What can Sarah do?”

  “What, you’re not omniscient?” I mocked. “She can damn them all to hell! Don’t you get that yet?”

  Andre remained motionless, processing that admonition long enough for me to run out the front door. I heard sirens in the distance and cursed.

  Andre was right behind me as I returned to the office. Ned was cradling a terrified Sarah—in person, not chimp form. Ned glanced up at my arrival, a picture of male bewilderment.

  Sarah’s usually kinky orange hair now fell in long, shimmery copper curls to the floor, covering her mostly bare assets. That was some hair, topping my Saturn-granted shampoo-model mop by a mile. I hadn’t even known she was a natural redhead.

  Sarah had offed a bad guy, and Daddy Saturn—or Satan, which I was starting to believe was the correct designation—had rewarded her with Lady Godiva hair.

  Ned and Schwartz must have watched Sarah morph from chimp back to human. The Zone bred peculiarities, but Sarah’s handicap pretty much topped them all. She would be embarrassed out of her mind, and they were politely trying to ignore it.

  Schwartz read from his little notebook. “Your assistant says the victim, one Harry Bellamy, worked for Acme and the Vanderventers but lost his job after Mrs. Vanderventer’s demise. Bellamy had to take a job with the electric company. He had his tools from the utility truck with him. Ned has no idea why the victim would blame you, but vengeance could be his motive for breaking and entering.”

  Maybe he sought vengeance because I turned granny’s bodyguards into frogs a few months back. I glanced at Ned again. His froggy form had licked magic pink particles and turned out good. The other goons . . . I’d need our resident mad scientist to explain the results of Acme’s nasty experiments, but if our intruder was any example, it looked as if the frogs had returned to human form. Had Harry been planning on blowing up my electricity?

  Ned set Sarah on her feet. “I think maybe Miss Jones should lie down for a bit. She’s had a bad shock,” he said disapprovingly.

  Oops. He was right. Sarah needed comfort far more than I did. It’s just hard to think about protecting murderous chimps. “Put her in my office. Sarah, want coffee or brandy?”

  “Green tea,” she whispered, clinging to Ned’s arm. Her hair, honest-to-Saturn, fell to her knees. Good thing, because the chimp had only been wearing her tank top and undies, and they were a bloody mess.

  “We can leave out the chimp part, can’t we?” I asked Schwartz with resignation, observing the grim line of his mouth. Our good cop looked like a Viking. He even had dimples when he was mad. “Just say she got the gun away, and it was self-defense?”

  “Hallucinations don’t look good on my record,” he agreed obliquely. “And you have no idea why this crud was gunning for you?”

  Andre just watched, arms crossed and smirking. He knew about the frogs.

  “I may have told a few of the DGs that I’d help the homeless, even if it meant closing Edgewater.” Which was a lie of such convoluted proportions that even I didn’t know what it meant. “Since the utility company is working down there, maybe Bellamy was afraid he’d lose his job again if the street closed.”

  I might be more likely to believe in Daddy Saturn if he’d slap me for lying.

  Schwartz drilled me with a look that said I’d better come up with a better one.

  “He’s one of the same goons who stalked me a few months ago,” I protested helplessly. “Maybe they’re fixated.”

  Ned rode to the rescue, posing in my office doorway with one hand against the jamb and his hip cocked. “They’re all obsessed,” he confirmed. “They kept calling me for a while, trying to find out Miss Clancy’s schedule. After she got Andre off on the murder rap, they think she’s jinxed them. They blame her for their divorces, for losing their jobs, for some weird stuff that’s happening in their heads. I blame Acme. There’s no telling what was in the air over there.”

  “Divorces?” I asked with interest, happy to have the su
bject diverted.

  “Yeah, both George and Harry vanished for weeks after that chemist . . . Bergdorff? . . . killed himself,” Ned said with a wave of disgust. “Their wives figured they were out playing around. So when they finally went home, their families booted them. They’ve been griping ever since.”

  Bergdorff had been the head chemist at Acme until I’d sent him to hell. Harry and George had vanished, as in hopped around my office eating flies until Papa Saturn poofed them back to human. I’d never had the opportunity to watch. The frogs had just drifted away. I’d quit worrying about them once Ned showed up. I assumed they had the power to fix themselves as Ned had, but apparently Ned in his froggy state had lapped up the pink particles from Acme’s last gas blast and the others hadn’t. Acme’s cancer-curing, coma-causing mystery element had good and bad sides. Ned had been fortunate. The other two—not so much, apparently.

  So, yeah, maybe I was guilty of something.

  “Besides George and Harry, how many more of them are there?” I asked warily.

  Ned shrugged. “I don’t talk to them much anymore, so I don’t know how many are still griping. There were several squads of us. Besides George and Harry, Ben and Arnold were also there the night Bergdorff took a flying leap. They were single, so they didn’t lose wives, at least. Maybe they found better jobs. Shall I go for coffee? And tea?”

  I reached for my tote, but Andre pulled out his wallet first, handing over a wad of cash. “Buy a coffeemaker and donuts. I have a feeling this place will be needing them regularly. Schwartz, would you be a good guy and see if Sarah left clothes in the back office?”

  I couldn’t even look at the blood-spattered back hall much less crawl over a corpse to look for Sarah’s clothes. I really wanted a wall between me and the gore. My office would have to suffice. It was in the front, off to one side of the lobby, so the door overlooked Ned’s desk, the front door, and nothing else.

  The sirens screamed to a halt outside, and I retreated to my inner sanctum.

  Sarah had wrapped her arms around her knees and was rocking my rickety office chair back and forth. She cast me a nervous glance, then went back to staring at her bare feet.