Reapers (38 page)

Hobson trundled forward. Ellie walked after him, rifle in hand. Dee held hers tight to her chest. The lantern flashed past portraits of colonial Americans, presidents and preachers and masted ships at war. The next door opened to a cavernous room of furniture and antique household goods. Ellie was too focused on putting space between them and the attacker to pay much mind.

"Left," she said.

Hobson veered through the door. Broken glass crunched under their feet. Rusted knives rested in the few displays that hadn't been looted. Ellie took the lead into another expansive room. The torchlight shined on full suits of armor, lances soaring above the empty figures' heads. By her count, they'd made three left turns and should be headed back to the main entrance, but the far wall of the next room was blank. Doorways led left and right.

"God damn it," Ellie said.

Dee gazed at lacquered red Japanese armor. "Are we lost?"

"Keep your voice down." She tried to picture the museum's layout in her head, but the grounds were massive, with scores of rooms on each floor. Something scuffed behind them. She whirled, but the room they'd just left was utterly dark. She dropped her voice to a whisper. "Blow out the lantern."

Hobson frowned. "Did you hear something?"

"Blow it out!"

He snuffed the lamp. The room went so dark she thought her eyes might pop from the strain. The scuffing noise repeated, nearer. She could no longer see Dee or Hobson, but she felt them freeze in place, eyes arrested on the doorway beyond. The feet swished over the tile, in the doorway now, not twenty feet away. Ellie's thighs quivered. The figure began humming: Brahms. He chuckled softly, then moved past, continuing toward the center of the museum.

"Look," Dee said once the scuffling faded to nothing. Ellie wanted to laugh, but she could see the outline of Dee's arm pointing in the darkness. Reoriented toward the way they'd come in, the room to their left was lit by the faintest hint of silver.

Ellie made her voice so soft she could hardly hear it herself. "Not a word."

She edged forward, step by step, leading the way with one hand. She passed into the next room. Skylights allowed the pale glimmer of stars to touch the white statues and wood furniture arrayed around the walls. Ellie paused to listen. High above, wind scraped the leaves against the windows.

From the center of the museum, a man screamed, first in terror, and then in an octave-climbing shriek of pain.

Dee sucked in air, the precursor of a scream of her own, and clapped her hand to her mouth. "What was that?"

"Guardian of the museum?" Hobson said, inappropriately amused.

"Doesn't matter," Ellie said. "Time to go."

She walked briskly, commanding herself not to run—too noisy—and squeezed past a staircase to the left. Down a long hall, she saw more silver light. The front doors.

"Cover me," she whispered.

The two knelt and trained their guns across the expansive room. Ellie bent low and jogged to the doors. There, she got down and braced her gun over one knee while first Dee and then Hobson crossed. Outside, they grabbed their snowshoes and ran without pausing to buckle them on. Their feet sank to the ankles in the snow. Ellie zagged east, then north, then east another block.

"Do we have a destination in mind?" Hobson said. "Or is it 'away'?"

"The attack tells us we're on to something. We need to follow up at City Hall, but the sheriff's office will be closed by the time we get downtown." Ellie cast about the street. Her shoes were soaked. "Let's get as far south as we can. Try to find an apartment. Basement will be warmest. We'll return to City Hall in the morning."

"And what if the trap was set by the sheriff?"

"Then he'll be right there in arm's reach."

He looked unconvinced, but didn't argue further. They put on their snowshoes and trudged south down Park Avenue, passing stately hotels and office towers that looked ready to blast into space.

"Okay, so I'll ask what we're all thinking," Dee said. "Who do you think that
was
?"

"The attacker?" Hobson said. "Or the attacker
of
the attacker?"

"Either one!"

"Much as I'd like to imagine it's a vengeful mummy, it was more likely your run-of-the-mill lunatic."

Ellie's mind kicked out an answer. "The shooter's someone who knows about the slave trade."

The sheriff crooked a brow. "What if it's the government themselves?"

"Then why go for a botched ambush five miles away from your base of operations? If they thought we were that much of a threat, they could have marched us inside a courtroom and executed us."

Hobson tipped his head to the side. "Though the incompetence of the plan would fit your typical federal modus operandi."

They made it a couple miles before Dee mentioned that her toes were numb. Ellie was about to chide her for not speaking up sooner—the inconvenience of stopping a half hour sooner than Ellie would like would be nothing compared to the inconvenience of being hobbled or disabled by frostbite—but understood, for once, that such lectures by the Mom-Sergeant were likely the exact reason Dee felt compelled to soldier on despite unhealthy levels of discomfort.

"Please speak up if you ever need a break," she said, in what she hoped was her most non-critical tone. "Or if you see me pushing myself too hard. Quinn needs us healthy."

"I know." Dee's two words could have been intoned a hundred different ways and Ellie was relieved beyond measure that they weren't defensive, but were instead spoken in soft agreement.

This parenting shit was hard. Kids bristled at the power imbalance while adults grew frustrated with the knowledge they were even less perfect than their kids believed. Negative vibes all over the place. Hard not to get petty about it. But remembering Quinn helped her stay focused. Forget counseling, what parents of teens really needed to hone their communication skills was the occasional statewide rescue mission.

They found a Midtown apartment with basement rooms that presumably once housed the super and staff. Ellie got off Dee's shoes and rubbed her feet until the feeling came back. Once her toes were dry and halfway warm, Dee pulled on three pairs of socks. With no heat source, they shut themselves in a single bedroom to trap what body heat they could and slept in layers of pants and socks and long-sleeved shirts.

It wasn't a fun night, but nobody froze. Ellie woke stiff and tired. Another cold breakfast. Microwaves had made things so easy that hot foods eaten cold had become something of a treat—cold pizza, iced coffee—but away from her home and stove, food had lost its joy, repetitive and bland, one more small task to take care of to keep yourself going, no more pleasurable than drying out your socks or packing clean snow into your water bottle.

Maybe it was the lack of accomplishment, too. She didn't have to catch this food or even cook it for herself. Back in the old days, there had been a certain hunter-gatherer satisfaction in grabbing takeout Chinese and returning home, victorious, to eat your bounty in front of the TV. Of course, they
had
captured the food they now ate. Violently. Yet it didn't make her feel proud or victorious at all.

They got off to an early start and arrived at City Hall shortly after nine. The government continued to keep its old hours; a soldier was already out front. He examined their passports and showed them inside. A different receptionist held down the desk today and he tried to bumrush Ellie with the same BS about the island being closed to tourists. As she prepared to pull him across the desk by his tie and lay down the law, he relented and let them upstairs to see the sheriff.

"You're back," he said mildly.

Ellie planted herself in front of his desk. "Does that surprise you?"

"These days, the only thing that would surprise me is if I got to go home early."

"I'm about to add to your workload. Since you last saw us, someone tried to kill us."

"Now
that's
the city I grew up in."

"Is that why you brought it to City Hall?" she said. "Before we left, an anonymous note requested a meet at the Met. It was an ambush."

The twinkle faded from the sheriff's eyes. "Who gave you the note?"

"The gopher who brought us upstairs yesterday. Wasn't him."

"What about the shooter? Got a name? Description?"

Ellie shook her head. "By now, there's probably nothing left but bones. But his motive was clear enough: to stop us from tracking down the slavers."

"I don't know if you realize this, ma'am, but you got an air around you that might rub some the wrong way. Could this attack be personal?"

"After they shot at my daughter?" Ellie said. "You're god damn right it's personal."

"We may be from the sticks," Hobson said, "but it's a mistake—and an insult—to assume we're rubes. This woman is a former federal agent. Until the digital era turned the industry into a tedious game of Google, I was a private investigator. Yesterday, in the course of pursuing a criminal, another crime was perpetrated upon us. You sit here trying to throw a cloud of dust on the matter. Is that because you're lying? Or because you're so witlessly incompetent that you're not aware of the slave trade that exists in the city you're sworn to protect?"

The sheriff clenched his hands on his desk, face going as hard as the butt of a gun. But there was a crack in the flint of his eyes. The guilt poured through and he swiveled his chair to face the bright window.

"It's not a good time to be a person with beliefs," he said. "Even ones we used to hold self-evident."

"You mean equality?" Ellie said. "Freedom?"

"I do protect this city. I'm its servant. But I got other masters, too. The ones who provide the weight to my words. If they tell me there's no such thing as slaves in Manhattan—and that even if there
were
, that my duty is to the citizens, not outsiders who couldn't keep themselves from trouble—what's a man do? This is a desirable job. I try to buck, or resign in protest, and this time tomorrow they'll have a new face smiling from behind this desk. One who's more interested in playing ball than doing right."

Hobson smiled ruefully. "This precise philosophical conundrum is why I left the force to open my own business."

"I don't care who's right and who's wrong," Ellie said. "I want my family back."

The sheriff of Manhattan leaned forward and clasped his hands over his paperwork. "Indulge a brief lecture in economics. Used to be we had too many people and too little work to keep them busy and fed. Since the big die-off, that's reversed. The computers are gone. Most all the machines, too. Most people are too busy trying to pry potatoes out of the ground to care about working some idiot
job
. For those few who are interested, what do you have to pay them with now that there's no money?"

"Luxuries," Ellie said. "Anything that's so wanted yet so hard to come by that most everyone will accept it in lieu of cash."

"Sure, and for some, there's a real thrill in negotiating to be paid in chocolate because you speculate it will only be worth more one year to the next." The man laughed and shook his head. "A salary in Hershey's. Unbelievable."

"And having things to trade is only valuable if there are other people to trade with."

"There's no currency in a pond, so to speak. I'll cut to the chase. When anyone with two legs can find themselves a subsistence farm, nobody wants to be paid with something as blasé as food. So you pay laborers in luxuries. Power, heat, coffee and the like. But these laborers still need to eat. That means you need to make sure the farmers are productive enough not just to subsist, but to provide."

Ellie's blood cooled. "Your government's running plantations."

He scrunched up his face like he was heading into a sunrise after a long walk through the night. "Here's where things get gray. Say a third party takes it upon themselves to make sure the farmers produce more than they can eat. They provide machines. Field hands. The third party takes their cut; the farmers sell the surplus; the government is kept stable. Everyone wins."

"Except the slaves!" Dee said.

The sheriff bent his eyebrows. "I'm the messenger, not the man who ordered the chains."

"The soldiers on the bridges," Hobson said. "Are they to keep people out? Or to make sure they stay
in
?"

"It's a double-duty gig. Anyway, if one of your people got snared in the net, there's no way to know where he's been sent. But I'd have a pretty good guess."

"Central Park," Ellie said.

The man nodded. "A woman named Nora Ryan lives in the boathouse on the east side of the Lake. Know it?"

"The reservoir?"

"No,
the
Lake. By Strawberry Fields." He got a look at her puzzled expression and sighed. "Come in East 72nd and follow the path straight to the big red terrace. It overlooks the Lake. Nora runs a clean farm. She used to work for me. Let her know the score and that I sent you." He slid open his drawer for fresh paper. "Now, about the man who ambushed you at the Met."

"I told you, we didn't get a look at him. Look at your people for connections to the 'third party' bringing captives into the city. That's your mark." Ellie stood. "Thank you for your help."

He stopped them halfway to the door. "How do you do it, sheriff? Do more good than harm?"

Hobson put his fists on his hips and looked down to the carpet for answers. "Your worry is you'll be replaced by someone worse. I believe that if my life is lost in the pursuit of my duties, the people who replace me will be inspired to
improve
on my work."

The sheriff of Manhattan squinted, silent. Hobson tried to tip his bowler, then remembered it was missing. They headed downstairs and exited into the overcast morning.

"From here on out, we need to think about every move we make," Ellie said. "Someone has already tried to kill us to keep this quiet. Once we're rubbing shoulders with the captives, one wrong word could bring the hammer down on our heads."

"Why do I get the idea you're only talking to me?" Dee said.