Chapter 71: I Will Never Back Down
The rain had let up by the time Rango pulled around to the museum's rear entrance — the loading dock alley off the side street, wide enough for delivery trucks, currently occupied by something he hadn't expected.
A line.
He sat in the car for a moment and looked at it through the windshield. Thirty, maybe forty people. Men, women, older, younger, one guy in a lawn chair who had clearly planned ahead. A woman near the back had an umbrella that appeared to be hovering six inches above her hand without being held.
"Huh," Rango said.
"Yeah," McQueen said.
Ted hit him at a near-sprint the moment he stepped out of the car, which for a eight-inch bear was an impressive velocity.
"You're late. I have been managing this situation for three hours. Three hours, Rango. Do you know what it's like to make small talk with a man who can corrode concrete with his saliva? Because I do now. I know exactly what that's like."
"How many responses did we actually get?"
"Forty-seven to the post. Twenty-two showed up in person tonight, with more still trickling in from the PATH train." Ted straightened with visible pride. "The recruitment fair is a success. You're welcome."
"The what?"
Ted pointed.
Rango looked through the propped-open loading dock door into the museum lobby, where someone — Dean, almost certainly — had hung a banner.
Red background. Black letters. NEW YORK CITY FIRST ANNUAL SUPERHUMAN RECRUITMENT FAIR.
"Annual," Rango said.
"It implies institutional permanence," Ted said. "Builds confidence."
Rango pinched the bridge of his nose. "Ted. What did we put in the post for compensation?"
Ted's energy shifted approximately three degrees toward evasive. "A competitive rate."
"How competitive."
"...Ten thousand a day."
The alley was quiet except for the distant sound of the city and, closer, the murmur of thirty-some people in line who were all pretending not to listen.
Rango picked Ted up, tucked him under his arm like a football, walked through the loading dock door, and closed it behind them.
"Ten thousand dollars a day," he said, at a volume calibrated for the interior. "Per person."
"These people are going up against a Prince of Hell," Ted said, from under his arm, with the composure of someone who had prepared this argument. "Azazel is Lucifer's right hand. He's been operating on this plane for decades. If this goes wrong, some of these people are going to die, Rango. They're not contractors, they're a suicide squad. You want to pay them like they're doing weekend temp work?"
Rango set him down on a display case.
He thought about it.
"You're not wrong," he said.
"I know."
"The problem is I'm currently broke."
Ted stared at him.
"The brownstone was cash. That wiped most of it. Between that and operating costs for the last six months, I'm sitting on maybe thirty thousand liquid." He looked at Ted. "Which is three people for one day."
"You posted a ten-thousand-dollar-a-day job listing," Ted said slowly, "without having the money."
"I didn't know you'd posted a ten-thousand-dollar-a-day job listing."
"I did it for morale!"
"Whose morale?!"
"Everyone's!"
They looked at each other.
"Dom called earlier," Rango said finally. "He's got a buyer for the pieces from the Cape Town job — the art and the coins. Wire transfer, few days out. We're fine, we just need to float it." He exhaled. "Keep going. We'll make it work."
Ted visibly recovered. "Yes. Right. Okay." He hopped off the display case. "I'll send them in one at a time."
"Ted."
"What?"
"Good instinct on the pay rate. I mean it."
Ted stood a little straighter and went to manage the line.
The lobby had been rearranged into something that looked like a job fair, if job fairs were held in closed natural history museums at eleven PM. Folding table, chairs, portable lamp someone had dragged from the security office. The banner overhead. A whiteboard that said PLEASE HAVE YOUR ABILITY READY TO DEMONSTRATE — NO EXCEPTIONS.
Dean and Sam were behind the table, not talking to each other, with the specific quality of silence that meant they'd been not-talking for a while.
Dean looked up when Rango came in. "Where's McQueen."
"Alley."
"Good." Dean stood up. "Because I went out there an hour ago and found him parallel-parked so close to a '68 Chevelle that they were basically spooning. He left a note on the windshield. He left a note, Rango. It said 'call me.'"
"He's been doing that."
"He needs to stop doing that."
"Probably," Rango agreed. "Go handle it."
Dean went, with the energy of someone who had been waiting for permission and was now fully committed. The door swung shut behind him.
Rango dropped into Dean's vacated chair. Sam was staring at the table with the particular focus of someone not looking at something specific.
Rango put his arm around his shoulders. "Talk."
"It's nothing."
"It's something. You've got the face."
Sam was quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you actually think we can do this? Because Azazel isn't just some black-eyed crossroads demon. He's been building toward this for thirty years. He has people seeded everywhere. He had Mary—" He stopped. Steadied. "He touched our lives before we were old enough to know it. And now we're sitting in a closed museum interviewing people who answer Craigslist posts, and you're going to tell me we've got a plan."
Rango leaned back. Looked at the ceiling.
"You know the difference between a hero and a coward?" he said.
Sam looked over.
"Nothing. Biologically, emotionally — nothing. Pull them apart and you find the same thing. They're both scared. They both know what's at stake. They both feel exactly the same thing standing at the edge of something they might not come back from." He looked at Sam. "The only difference is what they do next. One of them acts anyway. The other one finds a reason not to."
Sam didn't say anything.
"So yeah," Rango said. "I'm scared. You're scared. Dean's been scared since he was four years old and he's been out there anyway, every single night, for twenty years. That's not nothing. That's the whole thing." He sat forward. "So I don't want to hear that voice again. The one that's already making peace with losing. That voice gets people killed faster than anything Azazel can send."
Sam was quiet for a long moment.
Then he nodded. Once, solidly, the way Sam nodded when he'd actually decided something rather than just agreed to stop discussing it. The look in his eyes shifted — not to something easy, but to something steadier.
"Okay," Sam said.
"Okay," Rango said.
The loading dock door opened, and Ted's voice carried through the lobby: "First candidate. Please come in."
The door swung wider.
The first interviewee walked in.
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