4
“You go there,” Ellery pointed, because it was small and immediately hid anybody going up from view.
“What about you?”
Ellery gave Galen a speaking glance, and Galen grunted. “I’ll take the closet. Ellery, follow your mother.”
“I’ll take under the desk,” he said. “Everybody go !”
Normally, hiding under a desk would be a really bad idea—but in this case, Ellery thought he could swing it. A truly massive antique, a mix of ebony and cherrywood, the desk sat back in the corner by the staircase. If somebody went up the staircase in pursuit of Ellery’s mother, Ellery could tackle him, and if they saw him huddling underneath, Ellery was certain his mother would be on the assailant’s back like a vicious killer primate out for blood.
And hiding underneath it was like scooting back into a deep, dank cave.
One that stank of sweat and wet metal and semen, Ellery discovered with a roil of his stomach. Oh God. He eyed the stained leather cushion of the rolling chair in front of him and spotted suspicious crusty blotches.
The antique carpet under his hands was as rank as a movie theater, and he wanted to vomit.
Whatever had been going on here— whoever had been going down here—this ostentatiously tacky mansion was being treated like a brothel, and the man in power didn’t appear as though he was in charge of a damned thing. The real power was the man with the gun.
The sudden splintering of wood toward the french doors was the only indication Ellery had that his mother must have locked the things behind them as he and Galen had scoped the room. Clever woman, his mother, and absolutely bloodless in a crisis, but Ellery didn’t want her anywhere near the damned gun.
“Where’d they go?” The voice was smooth, cultured—Newton Dwayne, the choir director, whose face no longer matched his cherubic mask from before his stint in prison.
“I have no idea.” Gannett Hoover sounded… well, out of it. Shocky. As though he couldn’t have recognized the people they were pursuing even if they’d been in the same damned room. “Maybe they went out the rear, toward the ballroom.”
“I’ll check there,” Dwayne muttered. “If you see any of those people, use this !”
“Why?” Hoover mewled. “Why should we shoot them? They could have come in, asked their questions, and left, and we could have fled . Why would you even pull out your gun?”
“ Because they knew !” Dwayne growled. “All those kids escaped last night—how long do you think it would be before they connected us, huh? How long before every domestic in this whole hornet’s nest blabbed?”
“But my wife…,” Hoover breathed. “She wasn’t a threat. She… she….”
There was a rustle, and Ellery had the impression that the men had shifted position. He could picture the shorter, squatter Dwayne grabbing Gannett Hoover by the fine cashmere sweater. “You may be a sniveling pile of shit, Gansy, but don’t you ever forget who you belong to. That screaming cow was going to take you from me, and that was never going to happen. She was just as much deadweight as fuckin’ Retty, and Mel should have gotten rid of that dumb cow back in college. So yeah, I shot your wife, but it’s not like you were fuckin’ her, Gansy. Face it—your teeny weenie can’t get it up unless I’m balls-deep in your ass.”
“I hate you,” Hoover breathed. “I loved her. She was kind. But I hate you. You… you turned me into this thing , and I kept getting you kids to feed you because I was just… oh God… you’re going to fuck me for the rest of my life, aren’t you?”
Dwayne’s next words chilled Ellery to the pit of his groin. “If. You’re. Lucky. Now stay here !”
There was the sound of pounding footsteps, and then, to Ellery’s horror, a sort of meandering step, not to the couches, which Ellery had first assumed, but toward the desk.
Without peering into the dank cave where Ellery crouched, Gannett Hoover collapsed into the stained leather chair.
“I know you’re somewhere in here,” he said, loudly enough to carry. “Up the stairs, the closet—do you think you’re the only ones who’ve ever needed to hide from him?”
Ellery breathed very lightly through his nose, and didn’t twitch a muscle.
“I didn’t send him out to find anybody,” Hoover continued, in that same lost shocky voice, and Ellery heard the words again. I loved her. She was kind. But you turned me into this thing… .
“Why did you send him away?”
Ellery thought he was going to die, because that was his mother talking to Gannett Hoover, and he had a gun !
“I wanted space,” Hoover said softly to Ellery’s mother. To Ellery’s simultaneous relief and horror, Hoover turned the chair so he was facing the hidden staircase and scooted the chair a little as well. If he lay on his stomach—an appalling thought—Ellery could weasel out and be behind the man in the chair.
The man in the chair with the gun, facing his mother.
Reluctantly, Ellery got to his hands and knees and began inching his way out of the gap between the chair and the desk.
“Space to do what, young man?” Taylor Cramer asked softly. “Because it’s not me you’re pointing that gun toward.”
Ellery froze, hoping he was reading her signals right. Oh. Oh no.
“I… my wife never knew,” Hoover said apologetically. “But you people—you people know, don’t you?”
“That your old choir director sexually abused you?” Taylor’s voice was kind, Ellery thought in a panic. So kind to this man who had done so many terrible things.
To this man whose level of choice had been arrested, as he probably had, in the moment when his agency and innocence had been stripped away.
“I was a bad boy,” Hoover whispered tearfully. “And… she was so sweet. She… she didn’t like Schmitty, but she kept saying he could stay at our house. That’s what good Christian women did, right? Offer a place for the disenfranchised. And he kept… he kept….”
“And you were like a little boy,” she said. “You felt like you couldn’t say no.”
“I couldn’t!” There was a sob, and Hoover muttered, “Oh God. Oh God….”
“Son, I wish you wouldn’t do that with the gun,” Taylor said, and Ellery’s stomach lurched. He’d paused, because his mother had sounded like she had it under control, but at the throbbing note in her voice, he started to creep out from under the desk again.
“And then he came up with a scam—that’s what he called it. A scam. That I should run for office. He said it was the greatest grift of all time. We had a president who did the same thing, right? And I couldn’t say no, and he… he sold Bibles and gold watches that never came, and I cashed in my retirement, and we came out here, and I ran for office and… and it just got… big. And his wife started sending kids here…. I… God help me, I needed some fucking space .”
“So you gave the victimized children to your abuser,” Taylor said, and while her voice remained neutral, Ellery could tell she was having problems not saying something awful, not asking him what the hell he was thinking, or not demanding that he find a backbone.
Ellery’s mother had always been one to show compassion but also demand accountability—but nobody wanted to see the inside of Gannett Hoover’s brain pan. Just hearing it was awful enough.
“And it all got so much worse,” Hoover whispered. “And this morning… this morning he had his… his goons hauling Retty out to the mines, and my wife…. Ginny finally saw. She came out and asked why they hadn’t gotten Retty an ambulance, like she’d told them, and he… he shot her.”
Hoover collapsed into tears then, obviously distraught, and from Ellery’s angle on the floor, he was almost clocked by the gun as Hoover let his hands dangle by his sides.
Very gently, scooting so he was in no way in the line of fire, Ellery disengaged the gun from Gannett Hoover’s hand, and still holding the thing—safety on, mindful of the many times Jackson had taken him to the gun range in their off-hours—he managed to scramble out from under the desk.
His mother let out a breath. “You know what you’re doing with that, son?” she asked.
He nodded, adding, “It’s horrible in there.”
She grimaced. “I… I get the feeling this is a place of significance for him.”
Hoover was still sobbing, head in his hands, and Ellery shuddered.
“There’s just… there’s no justice for a guy like this,” he muttered. What? They put him in prison where he would continue to be everybody’s meat? But he’d facilitated the trafficking of children, and odds were had predated on them himself. There was no penalty, no justice, that would make up for what he’d done, other than the hell he’d been condemned to when he was just a child and had apparently lived in ever since.
“We should move,” his mother—ever practical—said, before they could start trying to change the world for the unforgivable sinners as well. “Do you hear anything out front?”
Ellery moved to the french doors, which had been shattered at the lock and frame, and peered cautiously into the foyer. “The FBI is completely absent,” he muttered. “Whatever jammer they’ve got working apparently starts at the threshold and doesn’t budge.”
“What about—”
At that moment two things happened.
One was that Newton Dwayne crashed in through the doorway near the back of the room, wielding his gun. “Did you find them—Jesus, Gannett, get your shit together!”
And as Gannett Hoover’s soft moan of total surrender sputtered across the room, Ellery heard the faint roar of ATV engines.
For better or worse, Ellery needed to make his position strong.
While Dwayne was still gesturing with the gun like a rank amateur, Ellery crouched behind the monstrosity of the desk and—after making sure his mother had ghosted up the stairs already—fired a little to the right of his target.
Dwayne whirled, aiming desperately, and Ellery realized that the light was on his side.
The far end of the room had two open doors into what was a wide, well-lit space, so that end of the room had natural light, but not enough to blind.
Ellery, on the other hand, was in a pit of darkness, his mother hidden by shadows up the staircase, he himself nearly invisible behind the computer and stacks of paperwork on the desk itself.
“Gannett, the hell —”
Gannett had slid out of the chair and was curled up in a corner of the room, his hands over his eyes. “Schmitty, don’t…,” he whimpered. “Please… no more….”
“Who’s got the gun?” Dwayne demanded, and Ellery stayed low as Dwayne approached, caution in every movement. He wasn’t great with guns, Ellery noted with detachment. He hadn’t had lessons. He had no stance, no squared spine, no sturdy triangle between his arms and his chest. He held it up in one hand, his wrist shaking, as he scanned the room frantically for other hazards besides his unknown assailant crouched behind the desk.
And still the sound of ATVs got louder.
“I told those punks to shut off the engines,” Dwayne muttered. “Gannett, get out here. Did you just shoot at me?”
“No no no no no no no…,” Hoover was chanting, and upstairs, on what sounded like the second floor, Ellery heard the sound of shrieking and thumping, and his heart squeezed in his chest.
His mom was up there!
But he couldn’t peek over his shoulder, the risk was too great, and he kept shifting his crouch as Dwayne swung wide, hugging the sides of the living room, his back now toward the great coat closet that was probably used for guests.
Ellery’s vision sharpened, and he steadied his aim, ready to shoot at this horrible person and then defend that action in a court of law, when the closet door exploded open, and before Newton Dwayne could even squawk in surprise, Galen brought his cane down on the back of Dwayne’s head.
The roaring of the ATVs grew louder, and there was a crash of glass from the ballroom as the things rumbled in like an exhaust-belching hurricane, and over the din, Ellery heard Jackson’s voice—Jackson’s?—shouting his name.
And in a spill of Chanel jackets, sensible pumps, pearls, and hose, two women tumbled down the stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom, in front of Gannett Hoover, who was still mewling like a kitten. Galen’s assault of Dwayne with the cane came to an abrupt end as Dwayne grabbed it and upended Galen, who crashed to the ground with an angry snarl, and Taylor Cramer scrambled to straddle a woman who must have been Valerie Trainor from behind and, using the woman’s knotted hair as a handle, slam her forehead into the hardwood floor on the edge of the stained carpet.
Repeatedly.
“Ellery!” Jackson cried, and as Ellery heard his feet thundering down the hallway and into the sitting room, he saw that Dwayne had turned toward this new assailant with his gun, however inexpertly held, aimed at the lighted end of the doorway.
“ Jackson, he’s got a gun !” Ellery screamed, and as Jackson burst through the same door Dwayne had charged through, another shot rang through the house, this one from Newton Dwayne’s weapon.
“Ouch, fuck !” Jackson snarled, and his momentum through the house was derailed as his body wrenched sideways.
Oh fuck. He’d been hit! He was still running, but Newton Dwayne’s entire attention was turned toward Jackson and Cody as he tried to fix his aim to take another shot.
Ellery was done with shooting.
With a rush at Dwayne’s back, he used the heavy Berretta in his hand to clock Newton Dwayne on the back of the head, and their opponent went down in a bruised, concussed pile of debris.
“We’re right here!” Ellery yelled, dodging the body as it crumpled. “Jackson, get your ass over here! Somebody needs to go fetch the goddamned FBI !”
Galen had regained his footing and was beating the shit out of Newton Dwayne with his cane again, and Jackson, probably following his voice, sprinted through the great sitting room to Ellery’s side and took in the situation.
“Galen, stop,” Jackson said automatically. “If you kill him, you might get disbarred.”
“Fucker,” Galen muttered, but he staggered a little, the move forcing him to put his weight on the cane, and Ellery figured he’d about exhausted his strength.
“Cody,” Jackson called, “could you zip-tie that guy?”
“On it, boss!” Cody had followed Jackson into the great room, and Jackson—clutching a wound in his arm—turned his back on that situation, giving Ellery some faith that it was well in hand. He’d dropped his briefcase in the hallway as the situation had gone to hell, and now he turned to grab it, reaching for the first aid kit he’d started carrying since, well, he and Jackson had become a couple.
“Lucy!” Jackson snapped, and Ellery’s mother put both her hands on her opponent’s shoulders and shoved, although the woman was mostly groaning now. “Who in the fuck is that?”
“Valerie Trainor,” Taylor said with a sniff. “She tried to hold a gun on me, and I introduced her to my briefcase.”
Ellery sucked air in through his teeth. “The leather is steel reinforced,” he said.
Jackson chuckled meanly. “So she’s going to need some new cheekbones and a new set of teeth,” he said. “Lucy, stand down. Cody—”
“I’ll get there,” Cody said.
Jackson had drawn near Ellery’s side by this time, and gently—oh so gently—he tugged the gun from Ellery’s grip and held it, safety on, down by his thigh. Ellery could see the trembling in his hand now, the clenched jaw he used to disguise the pain, but he could also see that the wound in his arm was superficial—a graze—and while they probably had to settle themselves in for some stitches and a fever—Jackson always ran a fever after an injury—Ellery felt an almost giddy sense of relief that he might be okay.
“Who’s the guy sobbing in the corner?” Jackson asked.
“Gannett Hoover,” Ellery told him. “He, uhm, told us that Dwayne killed his wife.”
Jackson grunted and gestured with the gun, since his other arm was being held gingerly to his ribs. “I can vouch for that. Retty’s still alive—she told us who was in the pit with her.”
“Still alive?” Valerie Trainor muttered thickly. Cody was on her now with the zip ties, and with some help from Ellery’s mother, Jackson’s new partner pro tempore rolled the woman over to her side so they could talk. “Retty’s not dead?” she asked, the hope in her voice pitiful.
“No, ma’am,” Jackson said. “Although you all tried your best.”
“Schmitty did it.” She sobbed weakly, tears cutting through the grime and blood on her face. “Our whole lives together, that was my one request. He not hurt Loretta Jane.”
There was a groan from “Schmitty’s” place on the floor, and Ellery winced as Galen gave him one last thump with the cane.
“This sadistic asshole broke a promise?” Galen asked, his usually even tones dripping with fury. “I am fucking surprised.”
“My daddy said I had one goddamned thing to do,” Trainor continued, as though the rest of them weren’t speaking. “I had to watch out for Loretta. And she tried so hard to help, but Schmitty said she’d fucked up, had ruined the entire goddamned operation. Nobody would notice a dead kid, he said, but when females start shooting up apartment buildings, somebody’s going to sit up and pay attention.”
Ellery’s vision went red, and at that moment the FBI crashed in through the foyer and through the ballroom entrance, crying out, “FBI, put your weapons down and step away from the civilians.”
Jackson cocked his head at Ellery and said, “Really? You thought we needed these bozos?”
Gerald Manning, who had come racing in from the ballroom—probably, Ellery realized dimly, because it faced the back of the property and led to the paths that went between the federal land and the mansion itself—lowered his weapon, and glared at his black-suited, sunglass-wearing compatriots.
“Really?” he said. “ Really ? How hard is it, you guys, to make me look cool?”
Jackson chuckled weakly. “Are those kids safe?” he asked.
“Yessir,” Manning said soberly, holstering his weapon. “I left my partner there and called in reinforcements to come take the kids into custody, and the attorney general is getting hold of Mr. Cramer’s child advocates as we speak. Your search-and-rescue people got the wounded woman in the air and are taking her to the nearest hospital, in handcuffs as you apparently suggested to them.”
Jackson gave a hard nod. “Fair. Don’t worry about these hosers. You’re cool.”
“Great!” Manning said, perking up and appearing absurdly young for a middle-aged man shaped like a bulldog. “Now could you, perhaps, enlighten me as to what in the actual fuck we burst in on here?”
Hoover was still sobbing, Melanie Schnarf/Valerie Trainor was crying quietly, and Conway Schmitt/Newton Dwayne was moaning and bleeding onto the carpet, which, outside of the cave under the desk, appeared to be pristine.
Ellery noted dimly that there wasn’t a domestic assistant or housekeeper in sight.
“This,” Jackson said with grim emphasis, “is what happens when pure evil meets vanity and weak minds and festers for twenty years.”
“Very pretty,” Ellery’s mother said sharply. “While you’re elaborating on that, Jackson, is there any way you could stop bleeding ?”
Jackson grimaced. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and Ellery held up his briefcase, which was more easily rifled now that he’d set down the gun.
“I’ve got a first aid kit,” he said. “If the Day-Late-and-a-Dollar-Short Surprise Posse could gather up the criminals, we can give you a brief history of bad-guys central.”
Manning gave a nod, and the four agents—who apparently had been playing on their phones in their cars until they’d heard the gunshots—all holstered their weapons and began cuffing people.
“What are we arresting them for again?” Manning asked.
“Child abduction, child trafficking, child endangerment, rape, fraud, and—” Jackson took a shuddering breath. “—murder.”
“Gotcha,” Manning said. While his people worked and Jackson and Ellery began speaking, Taylor assisted Galen up and toward one of the sofas in the living room proper.
Ellery interrupted himself to say, “Mother, uhm, no. No. Galen, trust me. Come sit on the desk.” He swallowed back bile. “Trust me on this one. If they blacklight this room for DNA, we don’t want to be anywhere near it.”
“Make sure they check the closet should they do so,” Galen said acidly, the tautness of his voice indicating the pain he must be in after his spectacular assault of Newton Dwayne. Since they had to pass Dwayne’s prone body as he was being cuffed, Galen paused to spit on the back of the man’s head. “Fucker. Complete and total fucker .”
“Amen,” Jackson muttered. “Ouch—Ellery!”
Ellery scowled at him and dumped a considerable amount of anesthetic wound cleanser on the puffy crease of flesh in Jackson’s arm. “Two shots fired in this entire room and you had to catch one in the arm. You weren’t even here that long.”
“Hey!” Jackson protested as Ellery used a gauze pad to clean as much blood and debris from the site as he could. “Cody and I took out two guys on ATVs, and I didn’t get a scratch on me!”
“That’s a lie,” Cody said. “You got the same set of bruises I did from trussing those assholes.” He laughed, low and dirty. “You secure those bozos, Manning?”
“I did,” Manning said. “Unlike you people, I know how to use coms!”
“There’s a jammer somewhere in the house,” Ellery said testily. “The minute we crossed the threshold, our phones went dead, and your people got sent on vacation while Dwayne here lost his mind.” He had to fight the compulsion to spit on the back of the man’s head too. He would have to ask Galen if doing so had relieved any of the same rage Ellery felt seething in his belly right now.
“There’s another woman upstairs,” Taylor said, stepping back as the G-men assumed custody of her own victim… erm, suspect. “I’m afraid she’s not conscious at the moment.”
“Mother,” Ellery said, a bit surprised, “what did you do?”
“I did nothing!” his mother protested. “She was like that when I found her. This one—” Taylor Cramer punctuated the words with a kick to the woman’s ribs with her pump. “—was standing over her with the gun, which I assume she used like a paperweight.” Taylor scowled. “I didn’t give her a chance to use it on me, and we had quite the scuffle.”
Ellery recalled the two of them tumbling down the stairs and took in his mother’s disheveled appearance. Her hair was in disarray from its usual neat chignon, the sleeve of her jacket was torn, and the pump she’d used to kick Valerie Trainor was the only one she was currently wearing.
“Well done, Lucy Satan,” Jackson said with a wolfish grin, and to Ellery’s disgust, his mother smiled back, as delighted as a schoolkid after a fight. Then she grimaced.
“Ellery, would you happen to have some ibuprofen in that kit of yours? I’ve got some water—”
Ellery was gloved up and knuckles deep in blood and gauze, so Jackson did the honors with his free arm, passing the ibuprofen to Ellery’s mother, who promptly shared it—and the water—with Galen.
Manning surveyed the prisoners, including Gannett Hoover, who hadn’t stopped his quiet, hysterical sobbing.
“Are we going to talk about what in the hell happened?”
Jackson let out a sigh and, as Ellery finished up with the inadequate tools at hand, began to speak.
“This,” he said, “is what happens when a bunch of pissed-off entitled people meet when they’re young and plot to shit on everybody they meet on their way up the political grift.”
“That’s not true,” Valerie Trainor whined as she was hauled to her feet. “We were helping those kids!”
“You were torturing them to feel superior,” Jackson told her. “Just like you let your entire sick little clan here torture your stepsister.”
“She was so awkward,” Valerie sniffled. “Even when we were kids. She was so happy to hang out at my coattails.”
“So you made her your lapdog,” Jackson said. “And she tortured the kids you took responsibility for, let some of them escape so they had to choose between doing her bidding and starving to death. And she thought she was doing good, so she kept being a sadistic twat because you and your girls got off on it.”
“Nobody was supposed to get hurt,” Valerie protested. “Those kids—”
“Got fed to your ex-husband,” Jackson retorted, and Ellery wrapped his hands around Jackson’s arm at the elbow, below the bullet graze, to keep him from jumping on top of her and throttling her. “You let him pick the pretty boys, didn’t you? Brought them up here, let them service him. Anything, right? Anything so he’d keep the money train going. Six hundred grifts to keep your whole little tribe in clover, and you had no problem knowing he was sodomizing teenaged boys and killing them when he was done.”
“They were evil,” she whispered. “Seducing him like that.”
“Get her the fuck out of here,” Manning told the agents holding her arms, “before I kill her myself.”
Ellery stared at him in surprise. “That sounded sincere,” he said.
“It was,” Manning said, his face twisted in disgust. “Now what about…. Jesus, that guy’s in the California State Assembly, isn’t he?”
“Gannet Hoover,” Ellery said, as the pathetic blob of a man was hauled away. He hadn’t stopped sobbing. He could barely breathe. “He was one of Conway Schmitt’s—aka Newton Dwayne’s—first victims. When Schmitt got out of prison for abusing choirboys, he showed up on Hoover’s doorstep, and Hoover and his wife gave him a place to stay. And he came up with the idea of moving to California so Gannet could run for office. Schmitt brought his ex-wife along, and she formed the Moms for Clean Living with all her old sorority sisters, and between her and Schmitt, they laundered Super PAC money and ran real-estate scams and abducted kids from their parents on the promise of ‘curing’ their sexuality so they could collect school voucher money. And they got to funnel kids—boys for Schmitt, girls for the two gentlemen I understand Jackson took out—to be abused.”
Manning looked ill. “This is… gross. Atrocious. Absolutely disgusting.”
Ellery felt like the sour expression on his face would never go away. “Don’t sit on any of the furniture,” he said. “And, uhm, stay away from the rug.”
Manning shuddered, and Ellery started wrapping the last of his gauze around Jackson’s bicep. “This one’s going to haunt me,” the agent said frankly, his face bleak.
“Us too,” Jackson said, his shoulders seeming to sag. “We never would have known—not any of it—if one of the kids who’d escaped their clutches hadn’t tried to solicit Galen and his partner as they were taking a walk one evening.”
Manning gazed at him curiously. “Are we ever going to meet this witness? What did he see?”
Jackson shook his head. “Isn’t this enough?” he asked bitterly. “You have so much evidence, you’re swimming in it. Can’t we let that kid go and be a kid?”
Manning nodded slowly. “I’ll tell you, normally I’m a by-the-book guy, but you’re right. I’m sure there’s a way you came by all this information that has nothing to do with that kid, right?”
Ellery felt a small smile twitch at his lips. “It all started,” he said softly, “when Piper Lutz came to my office, trying to sell Moms for Clean Living to a law firm populated with a lot of gay lawyers. And I shut her down.”
Manning’s face lit up. “Did that really happen?” he asked.
“And then she set one of the ‘outside’ kids on us with a Molotov cocktail,” Ellery said. “We have the kid in custody, being tended to by one of the advocates. We’ve already taken his statement. Will that do?”
“Oh yeah.” Manning swallowed hard. “All those kids you guys rescued—the ones from last night, the ones from here—the more we can do to keep them out of the system and just get them help, the happier I’ll be. There’s a lot of guilt to go around in this hellhole, but none of it is theirs.”
Ellery felt like a band around his chest had loosened, and he nodded. It wasn’t justice—there could never be adequate justice for this atrocity—but Conway Schmitt and his wife were going away for a long time.
It was a start.
At that moment, there was a scuffle at the door, and Jade’s voice chimed loudly.
“Would you people let me in? I’ve got three kids here who were hiding out in that garage with the ATVs, and I promised them some goddamned food. And my brother’s in there, and his stupid fiancé, who happens to be my boss.”
“Three more kids,” Jackson said, his own face relaxing. “Alive.” He raised his voice. “Guys, let her in! And for fuck’s sake feed those kids!”
Manning snorted inelegantly. “So glad we brought you along,” he said. “It’s good to have someone in charge.”