Damn Him to Hell Read online

  I was wondering if I could visualize blowing up the van’s tires, and engaging in my usual internal debate on morality, when Ernesto came rampaging out of the shadows with his wheelbarrow. Ernesto is pretty much a Danny DeVito doppelganger with a bad attitude. The hazmats he was attacking were twice his height and muscle. And there were two of them. Had he lost what passed for his mind?

  Ernesto rammed the heavy wheelbarrow into the back of the first hazmat’s knees. With a cry, his victim lost his grip on the stretcher and crumpled backward into the barrow. His abrupt release caused the end of the stretcher to fall to the road, and in a very smooth chain reaction, Leibowitz flipped—unconscious, face-forward—into the barrow on top of the hazmat.

  No way was Ernesto holding up that mass of flesh. The overloaded wheelbarrow tilted forward. Ernesto struggled to keep it upright, but he couldn’t balance the weight of two men. With a clunk as the metal hit blacktop, Leibowitz was unceremoniously dumped back to the street. Without the cop’s deadweight on top of him, Ernesto’s hazmat victim scrambled out of his ignominious position.

  Both body snatchers started swinging fists.

  I didn’t like Chesty’s sleazeball manager any more than I liked Leibowitz, but the unfairness of two young, strong men beating up on one little old guy hit me squarely in the justice button.

  It would be wiser for all if I could learn to think these things through in quiet contemplation, but that’s not really possible when fists are involved.

  Without much practice at my new talent, I was flying without radar. The image of body snatchers cracking knuckles against solid ice appeared in my head, and, hidden in the alley, I went with it. No idea where that visual came from. I just got mad, visualized, and boom! It happened.

  Unfortunately, the enactment of a visualization was not always literal, but this time I came close. The whack of knuckles hitting a hard surface and the howls of shock that followed said I’d done something.

  With my back to a brick wall, I peered around the corner again. The body snatchers nursed cracked bones—or smashed hazmat gloves—cursed, and glared in disbelief at the iceberg between them and Ernesto. The pink ice was already melting into Edgewater’s chemically enhanced blacktop. So maybe I’d frozen gas.

  Ernesto tugged at Leibowitz’s nearly three hundred pounds, attempting to load him into his rusted wheelbarrow. Disguised in my suit, I considered it safe enough to saunter out to help him.

  The diminutive manager sent me a suspicious glare but refrained from questioning pink rock candy mountains as long as I was helping him load the cop. Weirdnesses happened in the Zone. We left the attendants bandaging busted knuckles and shoved our unorthodox gurney toward Chesty’s.

  Before I entered the bar, I stared down the oddly empty street. It felt like a science-fiction film: earth after a nuclear war had wiped out all life forms. Or maybe that was just the effect of the moonwalking suit I was wearing.

  Beneath the wispy weird cloud, I could see that the police had barricaded off the end of Edgewater that led up to Acme Chemical. Were they keeping Acme in or us out?

  Since there were a dozen official vehicles at the plant and zero on our side, my bet was that they had sealed off Acme in the foolish belief that the cloud wasn’t hurting anyone down here. If a tank had blown, they probably had multiple injuries inside the facility. Out here, we were invisible. Or unimportant guinea pigs.

  I followed Ernesto into Chesty’s . . . and walked in on an impromptu town hall meeting.

  Or maybe it was a triage camp. Ernesto trundled his burden to a pallet on the floor and unceremoniously dumped him out. Comatose old people sprawled on blankets littered the floor between tables. And men in hazmat congregated around the bar, arguing, giving the place the appearance of a tavern on the moon.

  Oddly, there were several people in hospital scrubs circulating from pallet to pallet, testing pulses and bandaging injuries. They didn’t seem any older than me. Medical students? The cheap housing in the industrial district attracted penniless students from the various universities and even Johns Hopkins, but the Zone seemed an unlikely hangout. Why weren’t they wearing hazmat suits?

  I saw no sign of Paddy, but Ernesto had returned to the bar, where he was passing out drinks. Hazmat helmets were off or open. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that none of us had eaten this morning. Alcohol on donuts and empty stomachs was unappealing and not a particularly smart idea.

  Accepting that Ernesto had been helping and not harming for a change, I tramped through the kitchen as if I owned it. I’d worked at Chesty’s as both flunky and waitress, had friends back here who fed me for free, so I knew my way around.

  Pulling off my gloves, I set the coffee machines running, gathered every edible in sight, and, wondering if gas had contaminated the food, carried it to the bar.

  “If you’re not worried about the air in here, then I’m assuming the food is safe,” I announced mechanically, still stupidly wearing my hood in hopes of reducing the gas effect. “Coffee will be ready in a minute.”

  “Thanks, Tina.” The tallest suit pulled off a glove and swiped a whole mini-loaf of bread from the tray. Polite, with big hands—that would be Schwartz.

  Andre was leaning with his back against the bar, watching the students and their patients, only half-listening to the hubbub around him. He’d removed his hood and gloves, so he could only narrow his eyes at my arrival and not complain too loudly about lawyers being a waste of suit.

  “Are they dead?” I asked as Andre swiped a handful of brownies.

  “Comatose.” Frank pulled off his hood gear and took one of the mini-loaves and a bucket of butter.

  “Why aren’t you taking them up to the house then? Isn’t it dangerous down here?”

  “Hard to say,” Andre growled. “Paddy was out there earlier. He says the gas is only affecting those who are already sick. But it knocked out Sarah, so keep your suit on.”

  Andre didn’t fully grasp what Sarah and I were. Neither did we, actually. But he’d seen the identical tattoos of justice scales on our backs, and he wasn’t stupid. In fact, sometimes, he was freakily prescient.

  “Unless you have him, I think Acme got Bill, too,” I warned.

  There was true remorse under Andre’s curses this time. If Paddy was right, did that mean Bill had been sick already? He’d seemed plenty healthy, although he’d once been a heavy smoker. Like most men, Bill probably thought himself invincible and had never bothered with doctors.

  So I kept my suit on, even though I was starving. But I snatched the last brownie and crammed it under the hood to munch, and fed a sardine to Milo in my pocket.

  “Where’s Paddy now?” I asked, intent on my goal of rescuing Sarah.

  Ernesto produced a tray of coffee. The aroma was heavenly, but I couldn’t figure out how to drink coffee and keep my hood on. Frustrated, I took it off despite the warning. I could die of starvation or get some caffeine and go berserk with gas. I chose the latter as more interesting.

  At my defiant action, Andre asked, “If I was mayor and passed a law forbidding you to go outside without a suit, would you obey it?”

  “What do you think?” I greedily sucked down coffee.

  “I think lawyers ought to obey the law,” Andre replied grumpily.

  “And mayors only make laws the voters want, so you don’t get to be dictator. This voter wants coffee. Now, again, where’s Paddy?” Andre’s charm didn’t work so well on me, and he knew it. Neither did his attempts to distract, although the kiss still burning my cheek had potential.

  “Paddy’s probably locked up with Sarah and Bill in the decontamination chamber,” Schwartz answered, averting further squabbling. Leo didn’t talk much, but when he did, it was effective.

  “Decontamination chamber?” I’m quick. I got it. I just wanted it spelled out clearly before I flew into a vengeful fury. I was starting to recognize the signs of mindless red rage that meant I was headed for full-out ballistic. Now I had to figure out how to control it.
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  Hearing the anger in my voice, Andre broke a bread loaf and stuffed a piece in my mouth. “Don’t go berserk on an empty stomach.”

  Even a day old, the bread was good. Rosemary with a hint of garlic. I couldn’t yell with my mouth full, but I could glare daggers at the back of Andre’s thick head.

  Schwartz added cream and sugar to his coffee. “Acme,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes at his terse explanation. “They’re decontaminating the plant but not us?” I asked, chewing as fast as I could but still talking through a mouthful.

  “Yup. They’ve got the EPA and all the pros running all over the building, vacuuming up blue goo or whatever. The official reports say the air quality is good, that once the gas hits open air the harmful particles are disbanded, and so the danger is only inside the plant.” Andre sipped his coffee black.

  I followed his gaze to our elderly patients. “Right. The best kind of air quality, one that kills the old and homeless and cops. They’re just an albatross around society’s neck anyway.” My opinion of cops wasn’t high, Schwartz notwithstanding, but in this case, I was being sarcastic.

  “Ouch,” Frank said. Frank had once been a bum who lived under bridges, according to Andre. The Zone had been good to him, sort of cleaned him up. Short, dark, and wiry, he tended to lurk in shadows, kind of like me. So I didn’t know him well.

  “Tina’s a cynic,” Andre said, but he didn’t argue with my assessment.

  That’s the thing about me and Andre. We might verbally gouge each other’s eyes out, but underneath, we were often on the same page. Our methods of solving problems widely differed, however. He was sneaky. I was rash, although I prefer to think of it as being blunt and straightforward.

  “I want Sarah back,” Ernesto said, surprisingly. “She’s creepy, but she works for peanuts.”

  I repeated ouch under my breath and bit back a comment about working for bananas. Sarah couldn’t help her chimp affliction.

  At least now I had some clue as to his motive for being helpful. “Did those guys help you load up the wheelbarrow?” I nodded at the scrubs.

  “Yeah. They’re med students who live up the hill and sometimes cruise the camp to patch people up,” Frank explained. “They’re the ones who warned us the vans weren’t going to the hospital, and they’ve been helping us hijack the victims from Acme. But we didn’t see Bill go down.”

  Impressed, I watched the med students with more respect. They might be using the denizens of the homeless encampment as lab rats for their studies for all I knew, but they risked life and limb out there. I wouldn’t have done it. The EPA had labeled the fenced-off area around the harbor a dead zone for a reason.

  They were wandering around without suits. I wanted out of mine.

  “So the assumption is that if you don’t keel over after exposure, it’s safe to breathe the gas?” I asked.

  “If you don’t beat the crap out of anyone, then keel over,” Andre corrected, giving me an evil look. “Feel the need to off anyone, Clancy?”

  “I feel like that all the time,” I countered. “Maybe if I stop feeling murderous, I’ll figure I’ve been gassed and check myself in at Club Acme. Maybe I’ll do that anyway. I want Sarah and Bill out of there.”

  “Not easy,” said a weary voice from behind us.

  Paddy staggered in, covered in pink particles, like he’d been confettied.

  Paddy hadn’t collapsed. Given his odd behavior and weird mutterings, I’d figured he was mentally, if not physically, ill. Except right now, he sounded more rational than I’d ever heard him. He’d actually replied to a direct statement instead of talking about plastic and wandering off.

  I watched skeptically as he shuffled over to the food, helped himself to an apple, and settled on a bar stool as if he were a hundred years old. I did a few mental calculations. His son Dane had been in his mid-thirties when I sent his soul to hell. Chances were good Dane’s father was over sixty. Good lord, that calculation had Gloria Vanderventer closing in on ninety. I mentally voted to bring her to the Zone to see how she reacted to green gas.

  “Why won’t it be easy?” I demanded when no one else spoke. “I’ll say Sarah is my sister, she has a dangerously infectious disease, and they’ll all turn into monkeys if they don’t let me have her.”

  Andre snorted. Paddy almost smiled. I’d never ever seen the man smile. He’d muttered imprecations, deconstructed appetizers, and ignored me. Just getting him to talk had been a chore. Smiling might be fatal.

  “Acme’s on full lockdown,” he explained, sounding perfectly normal. “They have security at every entrance. The EPA thinks they’re in charge, but they haven’t been allowed into the underground labs, don’t even know they exist. They’re just removing the mixing tanks.”

  I stared in amazement. Whole, coherent, unpalatable sentences. I glanced at Andre, who shrugged.

  “Problem is,” Paddy continued, “the machine they want is underground and could blow again if they don’t stop the experiment. Bergdorff, the guy in charge, is obsessed and not particularly rational.”

  Silence rippled outward as we absorbed that news. I debated the validity of one madman judging another, but I could practically feel the ground shiver beneath my feet.

  “Do we need to go in and take Acme down?” Andre asked ominously.

  Paddy shrugged and threw back a slug of juice. “They’ll halt for a while. But if the plant closes, this area really dies.” His voice still sounded rusty.

  That had been the problem all along. People needed jobs. The Zone needed customers. Acme provided both. This part of Baltimore was not particularly thriving, so any business closure was a blow. I’d once threatened Max after he became a senator and vowed to shut down his family’s business.

  My cell phone rang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Speak of the devil . . . I very decidedly had not programmed in that tune, but my messenger bag was practically rattling with urgency. Taking off my gloves, I dug out my new pay-as-you-go phone.

  “Justy!” Max shouted as soon as I opened it. “What the devil is happening down there?”

  “Good morning, Senator Vanderventer,” I purred, knowing every ear in the room had suddenly turned to me. Even Milo listened. I scratched behind his ears. “What can I do for you on this fine and glorious morning?”

  “Get the hell out of there,” was his retort, not unexpected. “Did Acme have another spill?”

  “Spill? Of course not. What would make you think that? And if there were, I’m sure your grandmother would be right on top of it. Why don’t you give her a call?”

  Max hated Gloria, Dane’s grandmother. Living in someone else’s body was a complicated business.

  He swore like the biker he was and not like the senator he was supposed to be. “I’m coming down there,” he threatened.

  “I won’t be here,” I cooed. “Really. Talk to your grandmother. Better yet, bring her down here,” I added meanly. “And if you truly want to help, have one of my friends hired at the plant.”

  That produced silence. Max had been trying to get the goods on Acme’s dirty R&D for years—until they killed him. Playing the part of a senator, he avoided the place to prevent any appearance of favoritism. If he wanted to get reelected, he’d have to stay out of the family’s dirty business, one way or another. So all my ribbing was a little in jest.

  But totally unexpectedly he said, “I can get someone my security clearance. Check at the guard gate in half an hour. Use it wisely.” He hung up.

  Every man in the place stared at me, waiting.

  “So . . . I have one get-out-of-jail-free card. Do we draw straws to see who gets into Acme?” I asked into the silence.

  5

  I’d spent years keeping my head down and my mouth shut after the college protest (read: riot) that had ended with me being arrested, shoved down some stairs, hospitalized for months with a mangled leg, and expelled from school. After Max’s fiery explosion, I’d been running on scared. In consequence, I’d developed some
grandiose notion that once I passed the bar exam, I’d miraculously morph into a respectable citizen standing on firm moral ground, with rulebooks all around me.

  Obviously not. I knew what I had to do. Even though I generously offered the opportunity for someone to develop a better plan for getting into Acme, I really wanted to be the one to save Bill and Sarah. But if I tried, the likelihood of my damning someone to hell was pretty high. It wasn’t as if Acme would let a woman with chimp hands escape without putting up a fight.

  Besides, I had a whole lot of enemies in the Vanderventer camp—like maybe all of management and anyone related to them. They probably had wanted posters bearing my face tacked to the walls. They couldn’t prove I’d done anything to Dane or sent their goons to Africa—one of my more brilliant visualizations—but after months of spying on me, they had reason to suspect it.

  “None of that drawing straws nonsense,” Andre announced. “We only have this one chance, and we have to do it right. Paddy, can you get back in without clearance?”

  Our scientist shrugged, slumped his shoulders, let his straggly hair fall over his face, and crumbled bread into his beard. “Yeah,” he muttered.

  Wow, and I’d thought I was good at keeping my head down! Paddy had me beat by a mile. Or maybe he had just miraculously recovered and simply mocked his prior behavior. In the Zone, it was best to keep an open mind. Or an empty one, ignorance being bliss and all.

  “Schwartz, if you put on your uniform and showed up at the gates, do you think you could get access as a policeman?” Andre continued his Lord of All He Surveyed act.