Giving Him Hell: A Saturn's Daughter Novel (Saturn's Daughters Book 3) (2 page)

And I had this unholy obsession about serving justice.

“If there were any fairness in this world, petty-minded officialdom would be illegal,” I muttered, wishing for a good excuse to send Leibowitz to another dimension.

Even knowing my dangerous propensities, Andre looked only vaguely alarmed as he cut off his phone and tried 911 again. “He’s one of us. Maybe he’ll learn.” He returned his attention to reporting a fire. At least he’d finally got through. Whether the fire department responded was another question. Officialdom didn’t like having their tires melted on our polluted blacktop.

“Or maybe we could isolate those who lack the imagination to see the bigger picture and ship them to Nebraska,” I snarled, knowing he wasn’t listening.

Andre would have had the sense to look alarmed if he’d heard me, because I could do exactly that. I preferred visualizing baddies to other places or into other things. It just seemed less permanent and safer than sending them to hell without a trial. Nebraska sounded about right.

I sauntered toward the cop. Leibowitz hated me on general principles. There was no point in wasting a good hate.

Only last spring, I used to hide from Leibowitz and most of the rest of the world. I’d been small, crippled, and invisible, and carried a big grudge. These days, thanks to insanity or Saturn, whichever you’d like to believe, I had straight legs, great eyesight, pretty teeth, and my hair belonged on a shampoo model. And I now had my law license—but that was mostly thanks to me and no heavenly entities.

“Leibowitz!” I shouted. “Call the damned ambulance! If you ticket an injured man, I’ll sue your fat pants off.”

This was how I’d built my clientele so quickly. I stood up for the little guys, and there were
waaaaay
more of them than there were rich fat cats around the Zone. Couldn’t say that I always won in court, but I had other methods.

“He’s not injured,” Leibowitz said with suspicion, looking at the shocked Do-Gooder. “He tried to set the place on fire. So, go ahead, sue me.”

“
China
tried to set the place on fire.” I gestured at the burnt wires hanging from the lamp poles. “We’re suing the manufacturer. Call the ambulance for the real injured parties here.”

Since sirens were finally screaming in the distance, I knew Andre had succeeded in reaching 911, but it was always good to give Leibowitz a task he understood.

Sure enough, he was distracted enough to tuck away his ticket book and wander over to look at the homeless guy struggling to sit up. He didn’t help the bum, mind you, but he did pull out his phone.

I glanced warily at the nearest alley. Had the Cookie Monster really been invisible to everyone else? A gnawing in my gut told me I needed to investigate, but did I really want to know if I was nuts or the Zone had upped the ante?

Fortunately, I didn’t have to answer that question yet. People came first.

“Thanks,” the DG I’d just saved from a ticket said, rubbing his head and staring at the wires. “They all went up in flames at once. How is that possible?”

He was young and lanky, with sandy hair, but he looked intelligent enough to want to dissect the wiring.
So
not a good idea.

“If you accept the impossible, you’ll fare better down here,” I suggested, holding out my hand to distract him from live wires. “Tina Clancy. And you?”

“Rob Hanks, scout leader for Dedicated to Good’s ninth division, pleased to meet you Ms. Clancy. And I have to accept responsibility for the faulty wiring. I just want to know how it happened so I can file a report.” He studied the dangling wire, but it still looked too hot to handle. “Thank you for talking the officer out of a ticket. Our funds don’t cover fines.”

“Leibowitz is a decent guy with a few frayed ethics I’m trying to clean up. It’s possible to change people, but not the Zone, Mr. Hanks. In case you haven’t noticed, technology has problems down here. There’s a reason we only accept cash and not credit cards, and even cash isn’t safe. I’m sure there are far more appreciative neighborhoods than ours, and gangs are less hazardous to your health than an environmental disaster zone. You really should take your folks elsewhere.”

He looked at me with puzzlement. “Senator Vanderventer has given us a grant to help clean up this area. He’s set up a foundation in his late grandmother’s name just for this purpose. He wouldn’t send us anywhere dangerous.”

Rage nearly blew off my lid. I smothered it before I did something rash like send Max to hell for a second time. It had been only a fluke getting him back the first time around, and he’d not been the same since he woke up inside his cousin—the wretched senator.

Granny Vanderventer
was probably torching Christmas wreaths from hell to voice her objections to Max using her money for charity. I held the senator’s grandmother directly responsible for the chemical flood that had warped the Zone and its inhabitants.

Rob didn’t deserve my wrath. Max and his Do-Gooder soul did. I was taking me down one stupid senator. Around here, we lived with blue blobs and fiery manholes, for pity’s sake! Sending innocents in was the kind of idealistic stupidity that had got him killed once already.

“Take the money and run,” I advised the overgrown Boy Scout. “Because Vanderventer and his interfering lunacy will be withdrawing his offer shortly.”

A fire truck screamed down the road and pulled up short at the manhole.

I opened my phone and walked toward Cora, who was admiring the scurrying of Do-Gooders and tourists as they beat out fiery wreaths and occasionally threw punches when they got in each other’s way.

Since the gas cloud earlier in the fall, casual violence had become chronic. Occasional bouts of benevolence erupted as well, but mostly they went unheralded—just like in the real world.

I reached Max’s—Senator Vanderventer’s—voice mail. “You flaming moron,” I shouted at the phone. “Do you want to get these nice people killed? Pull your Do-Gooders out of here
now,
before your grandmother starts crisping them!”

I wished I had enough money to fling phones at the wall to express my frustration, but I’m not that rich. I clicked OFF
and shoved the cell into my pocket. Lawyers probably shouldn’t throw tantrums anyway.

“Grandmother?” Cora asked, crossing her arms and letting the snake wrapped around her biceps sink back into her tattoo. Once upon a time, Cora had been a prostitute working the streets in the Zone. Weirdly, the chemical flood had given her tattooed snakes a life. That was just how the Zone worked. “Were we talking to the good senator? Must be nice to have private congressional phone numbers.”

“Dane’s a tool meant to be used,” I muttered.

Granny Vanderventer had been evil, as in demonically impaired. She and her real son, Senator Dane Vanderventer, had my boyfriend Max killed and had done their best to kill me.

Except Max’s Do-Gooder soul now resided in his cousin Dane’s senator body, which was a source of constant confusion. Don’t make me explain.

“And what does our good senator have to do with flaming wreaths?” Cora asked with interest, as the fireman attempted to find a hydrant. I winced as a hose melted before they could hook it up.

“Dane’s formed a foundation with granny’s money to improve the Zone that she polluted.” I should have known he’d do that. I’d threatened him with mayhem if he dared close down Acme, because mass unemployment was as toxic as chemicals in this industrial backwater. The DGs were his retaliation. “I’m sure he didn’t order flaming wreaths, though. Do you think there’s a gas leak?”

Cora gazed at the pole outside the office with interest. “They were gas lamps once, but they quit working a gazillion years ago. The city wired them for electricity back before the chemical spill, but they’ve been blowing out lately. Maybe they’ve reached their expiration dates.”

I didn’t have to turn to recognize the snort of derision behind me as Andre’s.

“They call it infrastructure deterioration,” he said, pocketing his own cell now that the posse had arrived. “Our sewers and water mains are leaking, the underground wires are corroding, and the gas lines are decaying. And until recently, we didn’t have enough tax base to be worth the city’s time. The good senator has apparently been pulling strings to finally get inspectors down here.” He didn’t say that with appreciation.

I wasn’t so certain that bad wiring was at fault, but Andre hadn’t seen Granny’s face screaming at him from a gas flame. Max and I had, though, and we knew there were stranger things between heaven and earth than even Hamlet knew about. After all, Max had lived in the outer rings of hell—or another dimension—for a while.

“And here come the infrastructure police.” I nodded at a yellow truck covered in ladders and spitting out men in hard hats and orange vests. “That was mighty quick.”

The fire department’s tanker truck arrived at the same time. Amazing. Two trucks at once—Max had really been leaning on the city. Usually, they just waited for us to burn down. This bunch intelligently hooked hoses to the tank instead of hunting non-working hydrants.

Andre ignored the wreaths and firemen and focused on the utility guys. “That was one of the notices I gave you this morning,” he said, his usual insouciance barely hiding his irritation. “For whatever reason, we’re to be inundated with line crews covering every damned utility at once. I predict power outages and gas shut-offs in our future.”

I shivered, but not just from the chilly wind. I didn’t need to walk between dimensions as Andre did to predict the future. I had an overabundance of common sense and disaster expertise to calculate the odds of the city approving of sidewalks that turned to mud and stoplights that flashed rainbows. Or manholes containing sentient Cookie Monster blobs. Trepidation escalated to flashing amber alert.

“Let’s go shopping,” I told Cora as a white hard hat walked our way. “I don’t want to be here for this.”

“Frank has our computer cable wired outside the Zone,” Cora said. “But I’ll have to shut the machines down if they’re turning off the electricity. We can’t risk frying the equipment.”

Frank was the shadowy owner of Discreet Detection. He’d been helpful in the past, but I wouldn’t want to dig too deeply into his business or his abilities. Right now, the sign above his agency was flashing a collage of unsavory mug shots—including the mayor’s. There’d been a time when my photo had been up there.

So much for normal. Resigned to hunting down new monsters instead of holiday shopping, I waited for the hardhat guy to finish flipping through his clipboard of papers. In the TV ads, guys with hardhats had six-pack abs and cleft chins. This guy was bundled up to his ears in a down jacket and wore a wool scarf muffling everything above the jacket. Management, I concluded, not acclimated to working outside.

“We’re gonna have to shut down the electricity for a few hours, folks,” Hard Hat informed us, handing over a printed memo.

“This can’t wait until after the holidays?” I asked, covering my half frozen nose with my gloved hand. “This is the busiest time of year for the shops around here.”

Well, for the clubs and bars, anyway. The florist shop and a minimart up the road was as close to legitimate businesses as it came.

“Won’t be busy if they burn to the ground,” Hard Hat said laconically, nodding at the flaming lampposts that the fire hoses hadn’t doused. He walked off without further pleasantries.

“Crap.” I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket as Cora ran back in to turn off the computers, and Andre headed for Bill’s Biker Bar to set his own office in order.

Down the block, Ernesto, manager of Chesty’s Bar and Grill, shouted his rage and shook his fat fists at another utility worker. Chesty’s is a bar and restaurant with pole dancers that caters to the industrial workers from the plants to the north. Andre owns it, but Ernesto was apparently furious at having to turn out his lunch crowd.

I studied the fizzling wreaths with disgruntlement. “If that’s you, Gloria,” I told the post, “I’m sending your bony ass straight to the deepest bowels of hell, so you’d better think twice about messing with me, lady.”

The wire shot sparks.

See, this was where superstition started. I could believe Granny had heard me, or I could figure the wiring was faulty. Except in my case, it was almost always the supernatural and not natural physics at work. My life was such an
interesting
balance of the impossible and the improbable.

That was Granny in there all right, doing her best to destroy us. Her last goal in life had been to shut down the Zone so Acme could take it over. I didn’t know why and cared less. She was gone. I wasn’t. I would not let her have a second chance to destroy my home from the Other World—if I had to hunt blue monsters to prove it.

Three

I considered hunting my sisters in Saturn—I had their useless web page so I knew they existed in some form—but I had a notion that ones with experience in evil electrical wiring were thin on the ground. Besides, I had been handling problems on my own practically since infancy, so I had no good mechanism for saying
help me,
even if I had a way of contacting them, which I didn’t.

With a sigh of regret at missing my personal holiday celebration , I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets and stalked down the nearest alley. If Cookie Monsters and fried utilities had any relation, I needed to slay me a monster.

Reaching the dead man’s land between the Zone buildings and the harbor, I could see no blue blobs. The usual assortment of vagrants camped on the chemically polluted ground, undisturbed by the Zone’s peculiarity. Of course, some of the tent people were as peculiar as the Zone.

Avoiding a lackadaisical fist fight just outside the fenced-off harbor, I turned back up the next alley—not a blue blob in sight. I headed home without a clue of how to stop Gloria. I shuddered at the possibility that the answer was—blow up the Zone.

My fancy new phone rang the “Star-Spangled Banner,” jarring me from my funk. The Zone has a warped sense of humor I’d hoped to shut out when I’d bought the not-so-smart phone. I had not programmed in the song, but I knew who it was.