Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution by Keith R.A. DeCandido Read Free Book Online Page B

unemployment.
    And then everything happened at once. Greg came back from what he said was a job interview completely drunk and assaulted her badly enough to send her to the hospital. After she filed a police report, she learned that he’d blown through their savings on alcohol and had been out drinking all the times he was supposedly on interviews or at job fairs.
    He used the last of the savings on bail, and then proceeded to drive their car into a truck that was in the middle of the intersection of Columbus Avenue and West 100th Street. The very next day, Jamal was arrested for drug possession. He did a deal with the district attorney to give up his supplier in exchange for probation, but then the dealer in question got someone to shoot Jamal in the back of the head.
    The day after that, she was informed that her boss had fled to the Bahamas with all the firm’s money, just barely ahead of an SEC investigation that would likely have shut the place down anyhow.
    All of that happened while Carolyn was in a bed in St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital recovering from the broken arm, broken leg, and facial contusions her late husband had given her.
    She had an even harder time finding work than Greg had, as her association with the disgraced firmwas a scarlet letter on her résumé. Nobody would even give her an interview at her level, and every time she applied for a lesser job, she was rejected for being overqualified. “You’ll be bored and leave in a month.”
    Carolyn kept telling them that she was willing to be bored if she could make rent.
    Eventually, she had to give up the place on Ninety-Seventh Street and take a crappy apartment in Sleepy Hollow. She got a job working night security at the museum, one of three guards who kept an eye on the valuables while the place was closed.
    She’d found it ironic that she got a job as a security guard, when she’d been too unobservant to notice that her husband was a drunk, her son was a drug addict, and her boss was a thief.
    Right now, she sat glancing over the security camera footage of all the galleries. Next to her was her partner at the front desk, Kyle Means. In front of her was the paperback novel that she’d finished halfway through the shift, and she had neglected to bring a second one.
    Kyle was reading off a tablet, which gave Carolyn a pang of jealousy. She’d had a Kindle, but the screen died, and she couldn’t afford to replace it. Not that she could afford to buy books anymore, either—the one she’d finished came from the Warner Library on North Broadway—but she still missed having the damn thing. Not to mention a television, an iPod, a smartphone … All of themhad died, and the only one she replaced was the phone, but she now had a flip phone that couldn’t even send text messages.
    Her radio squawked. “Hey, Carolina, where you at? Shoulda come by me on your walk-through by now?”
    Carolyn had long since given up correcting Pedro Gomez’s mispronunciation of her name. She’d met him at the dojo in Hastings that she went to for the first month after moving here, before she could no longer afford the tuition. It was affiliated with the one on the Upper West Side that she used to attend when she lived there. He’d been the one to tell her about this job. She figured that was worth his misremembering her first name.
    She grabbed the radio to reply to the third guard, whose job it was to guard the loading dock. Like the front door she and Kyle sat near, it was gated and locked. “My knee’s acting up, Pedro, I’d just as soon not bother with the walk-through. It’s not like we
need
to do it since the cameras cover everything. Hell, they don’t need three of us here, either. We can just tell Myra I did it, okay?”
    “That’s dishonest, Carolina. I got too much to confess on Sunday, I no wanna add lying to that.”
    Looking over at Kyle, she asked, “Meanie?”
    He didn’t even look up from his tablet. “I did the last walk-through, and