Giving Him Hell: A Saturn's Daughter Novel (Saturn's Daughters Book 3) (32 page)

“Another case of beer at Bill’s for you, dude,” I told him, giving him a quick hug. “I like a man who listens.”

“You got the boss riled pretty fierce,” he warned. “I don’t know whose arms you twisted to get us that cushy job, but it ain’t gonna last long if we keep ignoring the senator’s orders.”

“If I come out of this okay, you won’t have to worry about that. I’ve got the senator’s number. If I don’t come back out, then you can obey him all you can tolerate. I appreciate this.” I grabbed the heavy box and hurried toward the roped off excavation before they could worry. Not that the gang was much given to worrying, but one never knew when they’d take it up. After all, Lance had just expressed concern about a job, which had to be a new first.

Before I could fully psych myself for meeting the shrieking Force, a Town Car pulled up to the curb behind MacNeill’s limo. I had a prejudice against black Town Cars. The Vanderventer goons had preferred them when they were spying on me. I slipped under the tape and examined the best way into the hole.

“Justy!” a big voice bellowed.

Oh crap. Glancing over my shoulder and seeing Senator Vanderventer making an ass of himself by running toward me, I just took a deep breath, sat on my rear, and slid down the hatch, tool box firmly in hand. I’d explored caves all over the country. I hated them. Nothing lately had changed my mind about dark enclosed places. I shuddered just thinking about unleashing the Force’s wail.

I’d simply have to hope that Lance and his guys took their bodyguard job seriously and would prevent Max from coming in after me. I stuffed the earplugs back in.

If Milo came down here ahead of me, I couldn’t see him. Andre had bulldozed a really big hole in his efforts to reach me. The top was wide and deep. I could see a square concrete tunnel doorway—not the kind of sewer line I’d just traversed. Newer. Probably Acme’s entry into the underground, and where I’d whacked my head yesterday after falling down the second rabbit hole.

I flipped on my flashlight beam while the senator argued with whomever was blocking his access above.

The newer concrete had been built into an old culvert, like the one I’d traversed to get down here. The old sewer had cracked and crumbled, possibly from the earthquakes and most certainly because Andre had driven a bulldozer through this section to reach me. While shouts and arguing ensued overhead—and a lot of weird chanting—I sauntered down the underground passage. This trip down the rabbit hole felt better with a light, cell phone, and tools in my hand—and with no Forces shrieking.

I tugged at the new concrete door. The door actually opened.

“Hey, Blue,” I called into the darkness, popping out my ear plugs. “I’ve come visiting. Are you awake?”

The pretty blue neon lights lit up the ceiling for me again. Guess that answered that.

Blue?
he asked with that mental tone I took as amusement.

The concrete tunnel behind the door went in two directions, one up the hill toward the industrial park, the other down to the harbor.

“On this planet, we have names for each other,” I said out loud. “We’re all unique individuals, and that’s how we identify our uniqueness. You can choose a better name, if you like.”

I didn’t need my compass to know which direction was Acme. If they were pumping crap from underground, Acme was the direction I needed. I took the tunnel to my left.

I like Blue
, he agreed genially inside my head.
There are a great many of your kind above. What is happening?

“I’m trying to stop the bad things from reaching you.” Always interpret in favor of the listener, I’d learned at my mother’s knee. She’d advanced from tree-hugging protests to manipulating the wealthy by the time I’d gone off to college. It was only after I’d left home that she’d disappeared into the darkest Amazon.

I progressed pretty far through the tunnel while Blue pondered that, or how to word whatever question formed in whatever passed for a blob mind. It’s not as if I conversed with space aliens on a regular basis.

The
unique individuals
above are causing . . . disharmony . . . with the foul creatures belo
w, he finally said.

“Your verbal intelligence scores must be over the top,” I said, nervously. I was pretty certain he wasn’t saying
fowl,
as in chickens from hell. I feared
foul
creatures
was his way of describing the denizens beyond the veil—demonic bats and uglies like Gloria. Being reminded how close I was to Gloria’s dimension didn’t ease my tension.

I scanned the roof of the tunnel looking for the conduits Blue had described yesterday.
Wires and pipes,
he’d said. I had to be closing in on Acme. Where were the pipes to hell?

Blue sat on my verbal intelligence remark for quite a while. Time was obviously irrelevant in his world. I had to wonder how long he’d been trapped down here.

Communication
, he finally decided.
In my home, we communicate with images more than words. Words are very primitive in comparison
.

“True. We have images we can send with machines, but not mentally, as you do. So we need words.” I had a sci-fi moment where I envisioned computer chips in everyone’s brains communicating images instead of language. Not sure even images could translate what I was doing here.

Ah hah, my flashlight connected with a conduit and a big honking pipe that steamed and rattled. I wasn’t an engineer and couldn’t identify the purpose. Overhead, I could hear the hum of engines—pumps?

I swung my beam around to study the wall. Dangly wires. More pipe—conduits? The wires connecting to the ground wire in the rubble at my feet ran back toward where Acme ought to be. Underground electrical, possibly phone lines for all I knew. Maybe gas in the pipes. A lot of this stuff looked like the enormous machinery inside Acme that Andre and I had shut down in the fall—which had caused Bergdorff, the mad scientist, to flip off his rocker.

I was playing with fire to mess with any of this.

“Justine, if you touch anything down there, I’ll kill you myself!” came a low roar from behind me. I’d so hoped Max would be cowardly Dane and stay out.

Milo reappeared and snaked his big body around my ankles, preventing me from moving too swiftly. “Whose side are you on, Maxie baby?” I called back. “Get your senatorial ass out of here. I’m more expendable than you are.”

Max was a mechanic. He’d be great down here. Dane was a senator. He needed to do good on a level beyond my capability, so he didn’t need to be getting blown up with Zone problems. I just didn’t need this confusion right now.

I edged around Milo, flashing my light up and down the pipes, looking for valves or anything sensible I could turn off. I’d messed around with generators and bad wires while growing up and had a middling knowledge of how things shut on and off. If I could shut off the motor noise, I figured I’d accomplished something.

“I can knock him down and drag him out,” Andre called helpfully. “But if he’s who you say he is, then he’s the mechanic, so maybe you ought to listen to him.”

I sighed and closed my eyes for a moment. I’d wished for company. I really would have to watch what I wished for, even when I wasn’t offing baddies. I was pretty rattled right about now and not thinking clearly enough for both of them.

“Oh swell, did the two of you shake hands and make friendly to gang up on me?” I called back, disguising my relief and fear. “Unless you came down to tell me MacNeill is turning off his stairway to hell, you’d better get your butts out of here.” I found a pressure gauge. It was chugging on full blast. Not looking healthy.

I will stop them
, Blue said cheerfully.

Oh great, a fourth party heard from, if I counted Milo. Before I could decide whether this was good or bad or even utter an epithet, the Pillsbury Blue Boy appeared between me and the tunnel entrance.

“What the f . . .” Max/Dane halted at a curve in the tunnel just within my sight. His tweed blazer over black polo and jeans and pricey athletic shoes weren’t precisely what I would have chosen for sewer explorations, but presumably he had to keep up appearances in the outside world.

He could see Blue? I’d have to work that out some other time.

Andre wore his usual smirk as he examined the creature he’d seen before. He, too, was sartorially correct, although today he favored black silk. He’d sensibly removed the coat and hat for his tour of hell. The white bandage on his head stood out in the gloom.

He studied Big Blue. “Has potential, Clancy. You do this? Not very artistic.”

I so wanted to ream him a new one—for so many good reasons.

The Force chose that moment to shriek and yowl as if someone had pulled its evil tail. If that was Cerberus guarding the gates, I hoped he was chained up, because I wasn’t leaving until I’d turned off the magic pipeline.

I was bringing down Acme’s evil if it was the last thing I did. Which it could very well be. I shoved in my earplugs and went back to hunting for valves.

“Hey, Blue, scare them back where they came from, if you can. I’m about to let all hell loose.” I’d found a valve, and I reached for a wrench in Lance’s toolbox.

Thirty-one

“Justy, that’s not a shut-off valve!” Max shouted in Dane’s rich politician’s voice. “You’ll blow the whole Zone to hell!”

He tried to dash past Blue, who was smart enough to feint back and forth in front of the good senator, blocking his path. A space alien tackle—cool—if I wasn’t actually blowing us all to eternity.

I tried the wrench on the valve anyway. “Why should I trust you, Max? This is your family gold mine.”

“What is this thing?” he asked again, backing up against the wall and trying to sidle around my imaginary friend.

While I wrenched at the valve, Max/Dane realized Blue had no real mass. Damn his intelligence. I hurriedly tugged on the valve, but it was rusted. I needed oil.

Max eased past the alien image and jumped me before I could reach for the tool box again. He used his whole body to whack my back up against the wall, grab my arm, and fling my wrench away. Maximum contact with the body of Dane—a man I’d sent to hell—kind of froze me in place. I
knew
that was Max inside there, but all I could see was Dane’s furious expression—quite similar to the one he’d worn when the real Dane had pointed a gun at my head.

He held my wrists pinned so I couldn’t punch him. I brought my knee up but he dodged.

“Your zombie is right, Clancy,” Andre said, sauntering up to examine the pipes. “Shutting that valve will only allow pressure to build. For all we know, you could spray demons across the harbor if it blows.”

“I’m not a zombie,” Max growled. “Not any more than you are at least. And what is that blue puppet who’s looking over my shoulder?”

The throbbing hum of the generator seemed louder, more ominous. I didn’t notice the Force’s wails any longer.

“Don’t ask,” I said hastily. “He probably won’t hurt you unless you hurt me.” Not that I knew if a trapped space alien with strong visual capacities could do anything at all, but I needed some leverage against two men bigger than I was. “Let me go, Max.”

I tried the knee maneuver again, except Max and I used to wrestle in the old days. He knew all my tactics. He tightened his grip.

“This crap doesn’t just pollute your head, it pollutes your souls,” I warned him. “If the two of you are here to persuade me to sell the Zone to the war machine, you can go to hell.”

Andre turned from his examination of the pipes long enough to send me a worried glare. “I think she means that literally. Either strangle her or tell her no war machines are involved.”

“No war machines are involved,” Max promised, “although strangling sounds good right about now. This tunnel could cave in on us at any moment. Or your raving maniacs could decide to come down here and shoot demons. Are you out of your mind, Justy?”

I pointed my chin at the pipes. “Those things are draining magic juice from a meteorite under our feet, and in the process, they’re probably thinning the veil between here and hell.
You’re
the one about to unleash demons if you let Acme continue.”

Max with Dane’s face turned to Andre. “I’ve seen hell. It exists in another dimension. What’s she talking about?”

“Acme is your family’s company—for both your personas. If anyone knows, you should.” Andre shouted over the noise of the pipes and eerie wails. He studied the hole the conduits ran into and started down the ladder to follow them.

I didn’t want to explore any more damned holes, and I certainly didn’t want to take the direction to hell. I wanted to scream and kick and shout, but frustration had got me here and wouldn’t get me out. I glanced at Blue, but he’d wandered toward the outside entrance. He’d said it was hard to take that form and that he was curious. He had no idea what we were talking about, no particular moral understanding of the battle we were fighting. He was more interested in the witch hunter entertainment outside. He was about as much use as Milo, who had disappeared down the tunnel looking for rodents, presumably.

“MacNeill swears that Acme is providing the chemical for the miracle cure MSI wants to experiment on,” Max said, warily releasing my wrists.

“
Paddy
may be working on miracle cures,” I agreed. “I’m sure MacNeill swears he isn’t inventing violence in a can, but even Paddy has used it,” I countered, torn between breaking these pipes and following Andre down the ladder. At least the infernal shrieking halted, although I felt it ominously hovering, just waiting for a reason to start again.

“Skeletons down here, Clancy,” Andre practically sing-songed from below us. “Several nice skeletons you can fret over. And if I’m standing on a meteorite, it would take a semi of explosives to blow it out of the water.”

Skeletons
! Murder victims? Gassed victims of Acme’s incompetence? Did I want to know?

I closed my eyes and muttered a few choice imprecations. Above us, the voodoo chanting was growing loud enough to hear over the hum of machinery. I could swear I heard a loudspeaker. I couldn’t hear what it was saying. I bit my tongue on a
damn
and reluctantly followed when Max took the ladder down. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew visit the Mystery of Acme Hell.