Giving Him Hell: A Saturn's Daughter Novel (Saturn's Daughters Book 3) (20 page)

“Good morning, Your Honor, I’m merely here with a request that the city rescind their order to shut off our utilities. I’m not sure why these other gentlemen are here.” I handed over the papers Julius had prepared.

The judge frowned at my boots and leather pants, but I had my respectful face and a blazer on. No contempt there, judge, no sirree.

The unidentified suit removed papers from his own briefcase and laid them on the judge’s desk. “We can’t allow that, sir. The city is representing the various utilities and their workers. The area has been labeled hazardous, and we’ve asked the governor for emergency orders to demolish it. The EPA has already begun removing the polluted material on the harbor grounds currently owned by the city.”

The choir’s voices soared higher, and a drumbeat joined the maracas. The judge scowled and skimmed both our petitions.

“Those are taxpaying citizens in there,” I argued, pointing to the courtroom. The nuns ought to add a favorable impression. “The city cannot rob us of our homes and businesses because it’s found a potentially bigger, better landowner.” I glanced at the medical center man. “One assumes you’re not a nonprofit and the city will be collecting higher taxes from you than from average citizens.”

He shrugged. “We’ll pay our fair share and our employees will contribute payroll taxes.”

Andre paid pitifully low property taxes and probably had some kind of poverty or historical credits against those. Because of our technology problems, most of the Zone operated on cash. As a result, any sales and income taxes were nearly nonexistent. I got that. But that was no reason that folks struggling to survive should be booted in the chin.

Greed was evil, right? Could I justify blasting greedmeisters with my Saturn talents?

The judge hit his intercom and yelled at security to hurry up and remove the nuns. That was a shame, but I couldn’t turn him into a toad for being a prick. I wanted to open the door connected to the courtroom and see how guards removed angels.

As if responding to my wish, Andre entered the office through the courtroom side door. Past his shoulder, I caught a glimpse of three nuns leading a handful of D-Gers in a song praising God’s bounty or some such. Cora glanced up and waved, then returned to enthusiastically beating a handheld drum while Dr. Voodoo kept a beat with his gourd. Had they carried them in in briefcases? Uniformed security watched uneasily.

The door shut before I could watch security heave out my friends.

“My job here isn’t to rule on payroll taxes or the EPA,” the judge reminded us sternly. “My only role today is to decide whether the city has the right to close down a district’s utilities if that district has become hazardous to workers. The city does have such a right.”

My stomach dropped, and I shivered. I was about to fail my pals.

He glared in my direction. “Bringing protestors will not sway my decision. You may tell Mr. Montoya that I rule on the law alone. Unless you can prove the property is not dangerous to the health of innocent bystanders and workers, your petition is denied.”

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 the 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.