Chapter 64: Local Gangs Have No Manners
The two figures stood in the wreckage of what had recently been the museum's front door and looked at what was in front of them.
The Roman centurions, mid-argument, had frozen in place with the instinctive threat-assessment of soldiers. Jedediah had one hand on his hat and one hand on something at his hip. Octavius was on his horse, which had reared slightly. Three Neanderthals near the natural history wing had stopped moving entirely and were watching with the focused stillness of things that understood predator dynamics. The miniatures had vanished from the information desk with the speed of people who had decided that being small was currently an advantage.
And from the far end of the main hall, barely visible in the low lighting, the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex had turned its head toward the entrance.
The rhinoceros figure looked at all of this.
The boar figure looked at all of this.
They looked at each other.
"The boss said one security guard," the boar one said, quietly.
"I heard what the boss said," the rhinoceros one said.
"There are soldiers."
"I can see the soldiers."
"And a dinosaur."
"I have eyes."
A pause.
"Is someone having a party?"
"It's a museum," the rhinoceros one said, with the specific frustration of someone whose operational briefing has turned out to be significantly incomplete. "Museums don't have parties."
"Then what is—"
"I don't know what it is!"
"Hey."
Rango came over the service desk in one motion — not dramatic, just efficient, the way you move when you've already decided what you're doing and your body is just catching up — and walked across the foyer toward the two figures with the deliberate calm of a man who is angry and has chosen to express it as precision rather than volume.
He looked at the door. At the frame. At the hardware his predecessor's predecessor had installed in 1874 and which had survived a century and a half of New York weather and had not survived tonight.
"You broke my door," he said.
"We're here to—" the boar one started.
"You broke my door."
"—collect something," the boar one finished, apparently deciding the door comment was rhetorical. He produced a folded document from his coat — not the card from earlier, an actual blueprint, technical, hand-drawn — and held it out. "This part. Your museum has it. Boss wants it."
Rango took the blueprint. Unfolded it.
A cylindrical component, mechanical, concentric rings along the exterior. Precision manufacturing. The kind of thing that showed up in estate donations from aerospace engineers and got labeled rocket debris, origin uncertain and placed in the aviation hall because no one knew what else to do with it.
He'd seen it three weeks ago when he'd done his quarterly inventory of the aviation wing. It had a card. The card said cylindrical component, possible satellite debris, donated 1987, provenance unclear.
He refolded the blueprint.
"Who sent you?"
"The Foot Clan," the rhinoceros one said, with the pride of someone naming an organization they expected to carry weight. "Shredder. You've heard of him."
Rango looked at them.
"The Foot Clan," he said.
"One of the largest operations in New York. Primarily East Side, but expanding. Samurai, ninjas, serious infrastructure." The rhinoceros one's tone had the quality of a sales pitch being delivered by someone who had delivered it before and found it effective. "We're not here for trouble. Hand over the part and we're done."
"You're telling me," Rango said, slowly, "that a ninja organization sent two half-orc enforcers to break down the door of a natural history museum at midnight to steal a piece of rocket debris because your boss wants to use it to—" he looked at the blueprint again — "do what, exactly?"
The boar one and the rhinoceros one exchanged a look.
"Reassemble the device," the boar one said.
"And the device does—"
"Destroys the world," the rhinoceros one said, with the casual delivery of someone reporting a weather forecast. "According to the boss."
The museum was very quiet.
Ted, from the information desk, said nothing. But Rango could feel him making notes.
"Okay," Rango said. "Here's what's going to happen. You're going to squat against that wall—" he pointed — "and wait while I call this in to the people who handle this kind of situation. You can explain to them about the world-ending device."
"You called the cops?" the boar one said, with genuine offense.
"Not yet."
"That's a low move, man. We were very upfront about being here to steal something."
"I appreciate the transparency," Rango said. "Wall. Now."
The rhinoceros one lowered its head.
The boar one raised both Uzis from behind its back — compact, suppressed, the kind of hardware that was expensive to acquire and suggested the Foot Clan's infrastructure was not hypothetical.
"Or," the boar one said, "you give us the part."
Rango looked at the Uzis.
"Here's a question," he said. "Knock knock."
"What?"
He kicked the rhinoceros one in a location that needed no further description and drew in the same motion, putting three rounds into the boar one's center mass before the Uzis found their angle.
The boar one staggered. Looked at its chest.
The rounds had stopped in the hide. Not penetrated — stopped, the way bullets stop when they hit something that has different physics than skin. The boar one reached up and plucked one out with two fingers and looked at it with mild interest.
"Huh," Rango said.
He was already moving.
The rhinoceros one, recovered from the initial strike with the speed of something that carried its pain threshold in a different place than humans did, lowered its head and charged — a full committed charge, the horn catching the light, aimed directly at Rango's sternum.
Rango stepped left.
The rhinoceros one went through the wall.
Not a metaphor. Through the drywall, through the lath beneath it, through the museum-grade plaster that had been applied in 1921, and embedded itself in the structural brick behind, where it remained, wedged at the horn, making sounds of considerable displeasure.
The boar one had both Uzis up and firing.
The rounds went through the foyer in a horizontal sweep that was not precise but did not need to be — at that rate of fire, the corridor of probability was wide enough. Display cases shattered. A scale model of a 1940s biplane that had been in the aviation wing since the Eisenhower administration came apart. A reproduction Greek amphora that Rango was fairly certain was actually an original Greek amphora exploded into several hundred pieces.
A centurion who had not moved fast enough went down.
Rango felt the specific cold clarity that arrived when something crossed a line.
He went through the foyer at speed, the red-blue charge of McQueen's gift visible in the peripheral — felt rather than seen, the way heat is felt before it's processed — and hit the boar one with the full momentum of a vehicle that had decided a direction and committed to it.
They went through the entrance, out into the street, and the boar one hit the pavement with an impact that left a mark in the asphalt.
Rango got on top of it. Put the brass knuckles on. Went to work.
The knuckles connected without the gold flare of the Holy Cross, without the blue-system glow that the supernatural encounters activated. Just metal and momentum and physics.
He noted this. Filed it. Not supernatural. Something else entirely.
Forty seconds. The boar one stopped moving, which took longer than it should have because the hide was genuinely impressive, but physics was patient and Rango had time.
He stood.
Behind him — "Rango!" — Ted's voice, sharp and specific.
He dropped.
The Uzi burst from the rhinoceros one, which had extracted itself from the wall and was firing from the museum doorway, went through the space where his head had been and sent chips of brownstone off the building behind him.
He came up from the roll with the boar one's dropped Uzi in his hand, emptied it into the rhinoceros one's legs — not the hide, the legs, the joint mechanics that even dense hide had to accommodate — and watched it go down with the satisfaction of a problem being correctly solved.
He crossed back to the museum entrance.
Stepped over the rhinoceros one, which was sitting against the doorframe leaking something dark from its knee joints and looking extremely put-upon about the entire situation.
He crouched down. Looked at it.
"Who is Shredder," he said, "and where do I find him."
The rhinoceros one looked at the Uzi. At Rango's face. At the Uzi again.
"Foot Clan runs out of the East Side warehouse district," it said, with the practical resignation of someone who has recalculated the situation and arrived at a new strategy. "Old Puck Building on Lafayette. Shredder's been operating there since the nineties."
"What does he actually want with that component?"
"I told you. World domination device, reassemble—"
"Does he know what it actually is?"
A pause.
"Honestly," the rhinoceros one said, "I've been asking that for three years. The boss is very confident. We don't push back on the boss."
Rango looked at the blueprint again.
Looked at the aviation hall.
Thought about a cylindrical component with concentric rings, donated in 1987, provenance unclear.
"Stay there," he said.
He stood. Turned to face the interior of the museum. The centurions were helping their fallen comrade toward the restoration room — he'd need to check the damage later. The miniatures were coming out from under the information desk. Ted was on the counter with an expression that communicated a significant amount without using any words.
"Ted," he said. "Is Marcus okay?"
Ted looked toward the east wing. "Walking. Took a ricochet off the amphora, not a direct hit." A pause. "The amphora is not okay."
"The amphora was real."
"I know."
"That's coming out of someone's deposit."
He pulled out his phone.
Texted Amos: Foot Clan. Shredder. Trying to steal something from the aviation wing. Any context?
Then he looked at the ceiling, thinking about a world-ending device that the rhino-orc enforcer of a ninja gang was describing with the confidence of someone who'd been told it was true and the doubt of someone who'd been living with the claim for three years.
A manhole cover in the middle of the street moved.
Rango watched it.
It lifted, rotated, and was set aside with the deliberate care of something that was trying not to make noise and was only partially succeeding.
Four heads emerged.
Green. Large-eyed. Moving with the alert, scanning awareness of things that had learned to read street-level threats from below street level.
They came up one after another — large, each one different in the specific way of siblings who share a template but have developed distinct variations — and stood in the street looking at the museum entrance, at the rhinoceros one sitting against the doorframe, at Rango standing in the ruined opening with a borrowed Uzi and an expression that had stopped being surprised approximately forty minutes ago.
The largest one — red mask, two sai at his belt — looked at the rhinoceros one.
Looked at Rango.
Looked at the door.
"We," he said carefully, "heard there was a situation."
Rango looked at four large green figures standing in the middle of a Manhattan street at midnight.
Looked at the broken door.
At the unconscious boar figure on the pavement.
At the aviation hall and the component that apparently someone needed badly enough to send multiple parties after in the same evening.
"Yeah," he said. "There's a situation."
He stepped back from the doorway.
"You might as well come in," he said. "Ted, we're going to need more chairs."
Ted looked at the four figures climbing through the entrance.
Looked at Rango.
"Back in Ghana," he said, with the tone of a man who has been compiling a list and has reached an entry he finds particularly notable, "when a mission got complicated, it got complicated in ways that followed some kind of logic." He paused. "Ninja turtles are not covered by any logic I was trained in."
"They're not—" the blue-masked one started.
"He knows," Rango said. "He's processing."
"We have a name," the blue-masked one said.
"I know. Everyone does tonight." Rango set the Uzi down on the information desk. "Start talking. All of you. I'll make coffee."
The red-masked one looked at the broken door. At the rhinoceros one. At the state of the foyer generally.
"We can fix the door," he said.
"I know a guy," the orange-masked one added helpfully.
"His name is April," the purple-masked one said. "She's a reporter, actually, not a contractor, but she has contacts—"
"Mikey."
"—which is relevant because—"
"Mikey."
"—documentation might matter here—"
"We'll circle back to the door," Rango said. "Sit down."
They sat.
The museum settled around them — exhibits watching from careful distances, Ted doing the thing he did where he appeared to be still while actually moving into a position with better sight lines, the T-Rex skeleton at the end of the hall turned toward the gathering with its ancient patience.
Rango looked at the rhinoceros one, still in the doorway.
"You too," he said. "Inside. Sit down."
The rhinoceros one looked at the four turtles.
"I'd rather stay here," it said.
"I know. Inside anyway."
It came inside.
Rango pulled a chair to the center of the group and sat in it backward, arms crossed over the back.
"Okay," he said. "The component in the aviation hall. Everyone tell me what they think it is and why they want it, and we'll figure out who's right and what happens next."
He looked around the circle.
"Nobody's leaving until we do."
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