Gun Machine

Eleven

TALLOW KNEW he could expect a phone call from the lieutenant before the end of the day. He had to show that he had at least covered the basic underpinnings of the investigation, such as ensuring the crime scene wasn’t demolished tomorrow. To be replaced, Tallow now sourly dreamed, by some shimmering half-real wizard’s castle.

Covering the bases meant driving out of the 1st again, to One Police Plaza.

Crime Scene Unit was still, against all logic, located at One PP. Yet it covered the whole of Manhattan. Some of its responsibilities had been delegated to Evidence Collection Teams, one of which he knew had been working at Pearl Street today. But the heavy lifting of forensics was all at One PP. An overworked, under-resourced, and, in Tallow’s opinion (back when he’d cared to voice one), under-vetted department. How anyone had thought problems with CSU and chain of evidence would be solved by creating ECTs was beyond him. They just added more links to the chain and were staffed mostly by people who were both under trained and virulently pissed off with their lives.

CSUs, by contrast, tended to be simply insane. Cops still talked about the CSU supervisor who had sort of accidentally opened fire on his staff during a demonstration, and there was the legendary CSU from twenty years ago who was famous for telling any people who asked how to effectively and untraceably dispose of a body, in return for the price of a bottle of Smirnoff and/or a go on their wives. CSUs were hated, and they hated in return. Their hate was corrosive and shameless. They had simply “lost” the evidence on the shooting of four officers a few years back, and they dared anyone to do anything about it. There was a lot of political noise, denouncements, and public apologies, but in the end, every CSU who had been at One PP before it happened was still there afterward.

Tallow was nervously aware that his name was on the worst cold-case dump CSU had ever seen. He was not looking forward to having them look at him and judge by eye exactly how much his organs might be worth on the black market.

He realized he was standing by his car staring into space and lifting and reseating his Glock in its holster. Tallow scowled at himself and got into the car. And then got out again and got into the driver’s seat, even angrier with himself.

One Police Plaza was in the orbit of Pearl Street. Pearl Street left the 1st Precinct and curled around One PP before heading for the Brooklyn Bridge and then on to the tip of the island. A brown, Brutalist block of a thing that still looked like it’d been helicoptered in by an occupying force to act as a base for some provisional authority. The tangle of fencing, checkpoints, ramps, and bars around it did nothing to dispel the illusion. Invading long-lost cousins in blue, here to force civilization on their barbarous island relatives from behind their monolith perimeter.

But they’d been here too long, and the invaders in their original Brutalist ship had seen some of their number go native. Whenever he went to One PP, Tallow had the notion that everyone there could tell from his spoor that he was a regular police from the 1st; that people weighed him by look and judged that he was not the sort of Major Case guy they make TV shows about. Somewhere else that Tallow didn’t belong.

He found an elevator and descended into the dungeons of the castle of his distant tribesmen.

The elevator doors opened to reveal a very large man brandishing a bloodstained antique phone receiver in a plastic bag and proclaiming “I found this up him!”

“You know,” said Tallow, “I really have no response to that.”

The very large man’s face fell. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”

“I figured. Where can I find your boss?”

“I thought you were her.”

Tallow had to ask. “You found that up someone’s…?”

“The body’s seventy-eight years old and thin as a whip. You wouldn’t have thought it’d even fit up there without dislodging his heart.” The very large man looked at the phone with a new thought. “Although I guess that would have killed him quicker.”

“Listen, I need to see your boss.”

“She went out for coffee. At some point.”

“How long have you been waiting outside the elevator?”

“Don’t judge me.”

“I really need to see your boss.”

“Why?” He waved the phone handset. “What could be more important than this?”

“Okay. How about you tell me who’s handling the Pearl Street cache?”

“Oh. That.” Tallow was fairly sure he hadn’t just admitted to sexually tampering with kittens, but you wouldn’t have known it from the look in the large CSU’s eyes. “You’re that guy.”

“I am in fact that guy.”

“I’d move into a hotel if I were you, guy. Don’t tell anyone which hotel. And buy armor.”

“I’m going to need body armor now?”

“Maybe like a suit of armor. And a human shield. You’re on Scarly’s shit list until you’re literally a fossil and the sun’s turned into a red giant.”

“Oh God. All right. Who’s Scarly and where do I find them?”

Down a dirt-smeared corridor lined with wooden doors to offices barely big enough to rate the term. Latex paint in some dismal government shade of green was peeling off every vertical surface he looked at. Tallow followed the raised voices coming from the open door at the end.

Scarly was a birdlike woman in her midtwenties in the process of yelling “Of course I don’t care if you’re bleeding! I’m fucking autistic!” at an ill-looking man with five years on her whose appearance wasn’t improved by the absence of a chunk of left ear. As she continued to berate the man, she scratched involuntarily at her forearm, exposed by a T-shirt she’d lost weight since buying. The forearm was wrapped in plastic that was fixed on by duct tape.

“You know what, Scarly?” the bleeding man said, flapping his arms. “There’s a letter in my apartment that says that if I’m found dead at work it’s going to be your fault and you probably did it deliberately.” He wore a lab coat that he’d dyed black, which gave him the look of a sickly, oil-covered seabird trying to take flight.

Tallow knocked on the doorjamb, scanning for a second what seemed to be the feculent office of a crazy hoarder who really enjoyed the scent of month-old used burger packaging.

Scarly rounded with an acid “What do you want?”

“It’s the police, Scarly,” the other man said, pressing a grimy towel to his ear. Tallow could smell the chemicals on the towel from the door and winced at the thought of that residue cocktail leaking into the man’s bloodstream. “They’ve come to take you the fuck away.”

“Of course it’s the police, you moron. We’re all police. We work in the police shop.”

“Detective John Tallow, 1st Precinct.”

“You,” said Scarly. “I hate you so much my dick is hard.”

The other rounded on Tallow too. “You. This is your fault.” He took the towel off his ear and turned his head to show it to Tallow, bobbing up and down. “You did this to me.”

Tallow sagged in the doorway. “How did I do that to you?”

“Because I had to test-fire some fucking archaeological handgun that Wilkes fucking Booth probably discarded as too old and rusty to kill Lincoln with, and the chamber jammed and the firing pin shot out of the back of the fucking gun and ripped off a chunk of my fucking ear! A handgun that you found. Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?”

Tallow just looked at him. Looked at him until the other man was silent and unsure. Tallow could feel the woman’s eyes on him, but he kept his gaze on the man with the ruined ear. And then Tallow said, quite quietly, “I don’t know. I was half deaf from gunfire in the field and wearing my partner’s brains on my face at the time. I am very sorry that I was not thinking of you. Now, I’m supposed to be on leave, because I saw my partner get his head blown off and I killed the man who did it. You should probably also be aware that I knew that man was dead before I took careful aim and shot him through the brain. But I’ve been ordered to conduct this investigation, without a partner. And it hasn’t been a cool day for me so far, and I am sick of threatening people and staring people down and trying to get people to behave like useful humans. So what I’m saying to you is that if I lose my temper, which I try very hard not to do but obviously I’m not having a great week, then whatever happens afterward will be explained away as the actions of an officer suffering from PTSD. I am really not available for any of the usual CSU bullshit. I understand my lieutenant has already begun to make amends to you for the situation. Therefore, while I am very sorry about your ear, I have to tell you that if anyone decides to make my life more difficult…”

Tallow took a breath, and smiled. “Well. I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you people. Your name’s Scarly?” he said, turning to the woman.

“Scarlatta,” she said.

“Hello. I’m John. And your name?”

“Bat.” On Tallow’s chill look: “Hey. Parents in the eighties. What’re you going to do?”

“Go back in time and kill them before they breed,” Scarly suggested.

“She’s not really autistic, by the way,” Bat said. “She just thinks people will bug her less if she says she is. And, um, we’re sorry about your partner.”

“Yeah,” said Scarly. “That does actually suck.”

Tallow leaned on the doorjamb, buying a moment to take in their office. One workbench, a chair on either side. Two laptops, one ruggedized, the other with a few gouges in the brushed aluminum. Plastic shelving up on all the walls. Inflatable speakers hung around the room, their wires vanishing into stacks of files, jars of strange powders, boxes, and containers of alchemical and likely illegal things Tallow chose not to recognize. Whatever wall space was not covered by storage was papered over by printouts and clippings, a riot of black-and-white imagery that probably made sense to no one but these two. Food wrappers, disposable coffee cups, and pill packaging formed a small mountain under the worktable. He spotted an old black plastic bucket filled with well-worn paintballing gear in the far corner of the room and wondered if the red on the back of one gun’s butt was paint or old blood.

“You’re not the CSUs who were originally on the job,” Tallow said.

“No,” spit Scarly. “It got handed off to us. Which makes perfect sense, because what you really want on a job like this is as much confusion in the evidence chain as possible. And I guess me and Bat hadn’t eaten our ration of crap for the year. So here I am, with a career-ending job and a working partner with the magical talent of making guns shit themselves in his face.”

“So,” said Tallow, “tell me how I can make your lives better.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I know my boss did something, like I said…”

Bat sniggered. “Yeah. Your boss made some disciplinary paper on our boss fall into a memory hole.”

“But that wasn’t enough to get you two off whatever hook she’d decided you deserved?”

Bat gave Scarly a meaningful glare. “Guess not.”

Tallow pointed at Scarly’s arm. “You were getting a tattoo when you were maybe supposed to be processing the shootings at Pearl?”

Bat made a face. “Her wife insisted. Switched her cell off and everything.”

“You know,” said Scarly, “if I’d known marriage was this much trouble, I never would have joined the protests demanding the right. You straights can fucking keep it.”

A great tiredness draped its boughs across Tallow’s shoulders. “Could we maybe continue this near some coffee?”

They led Tallow to a small conference room a couple of corridors away and persuaded a coffee machine to grind out a tarry paper cup full as he spilled into a worn plastic spoon of a chair and tried to marshal his forces. The CSUs sat opposite Tallow. Scarly dropped a folder of photos on the tabletop and pushed him the cup as Bat finished swabbing his ear and tossed the stinking towel on the table too.

“So. Seriously. Where are we right now?” Tallow asked. Not really wanting the answer. He tried to close a hand around the precious coffee but had to jerk his fingers away, sharply enough that his wrist popped painfully. Tallow wondered if the other end of that coffee machine was slurping water out of a lake in Hell.

“The ECTs are moving the guns in small batches,” Bat said. “We’re making them take so many photos that one of them asked if she was being trained to shoot porno.” He opened Scarly’s folder and fanned out the photos, all from apartment 3A. “They’re coming back here, we’re logging them, matching their locations in the apartment to the floor plans and the previous coverage the other CSU team took. And right now, we’re picking weapons at random to test-fire and do ballistic matches on. When the fucking things don’t explode on firing.”

“And that wasn’t even the oldest one,” said Scarly.

“I refused to test-fire the oldest one we’ve seen so far. Look what the fucking Bulldog did to me.”

“How old?” said Tallow.

“You’re interested?” Bat leaned forward. His large eyes widened disconcertingly, to the point where Tallow worried that they might fall out of Bat’s head and into his coffee. Where they would boil and possibly explode.

“I like history,” said Tallow, gingerly sliding his cup to one side.

“Stay put. I got something to show you.” Bat flapped off into the corridor.

“What was the gun that exploded?” Tallow asked Scarly.

“I think it didn’t explode so much as come apart like rotten cheese. Once our guy used a gun, he put it in his little room and seemed not to touch it again. They all just rusted out on the wall or whatever. There’s paint in some of them.”

“But the firing pin flew out?”

“That’s what he says. I haven’t looked at the gun since he fired it. An old Charter Arms Bulldog .44. Cheap-ass gun gussied up to look like a serious gun. Wouldn’t be surprised if a chunk of the hammer had flaked off and blown back.”

Tallow tried the cup again, and this time it didn’t burn. He sipped the coffee. Corpse mud and cloying sweetener. He drank more anyway. “Why do I know that brand? I can’t put my finger on it, but it…” He grimaced.

“Son of Sam.” Scarly smiled. It might have been the first time he saw her smile. “Son of Sam used a .44 Bulldog.”

“How would you remember that? You a gun freak?”

“I’m a CSU. We’re all gun freaks. And Son of Sam is still an open case around here. Of which some grim asshole reminds us every six months. Like it’s our fault or something. I wasn’t even fucking born when he was arrested.”

“You’re kidding me. I thought the new DA closed the case.”

Scarly laughed harshly. “And give up a stick to beat NYPD with? Listen, you, me, and anyone else without a brain tumor knows Son of Sam was a lone gunman. But if you’re crazy, and you squint at it, and you’ve maybe got something the size of a golf ball sitting on the part of your brain that you use to put your underwear on properly in the morning—then, hell yes, you see evidence of a magic devil cult helping the guy blow complete strangers away before going home to hump Rosemary’s Baby or whatever Satanic people did for fun in the 1970s.”

Bat swept back in, cradling a gun in a clear plastic bag. “You’re going to love this.” He grinned.

Bat laid the package in front of Tallow.

“What the hell?” said Tallow.

“I know, right?” Bat was delighted.

“It’s a flintlock.”

“It is in fact an Asa Waters Model 1836 flintlock pistol, which sold new at a hefty nine dollars. The last flintlock sold to the U.S. government, in fact; a .45-caliber, muzzle-load. Based on the kind of naval boarding pistol that you could load with shrapnel, nails, or any other thing that was lying around.”

Tallow picked it up, turned it around in his hands. “It’s not in great shape.”

Bat frowned. “You’re not getting it. Everything we know right now suggests that every gun in that apartment was used to kill someone. So what you’re looking at is a pistol nearly two hundred years old that our guy restored to where it’d make a reliable murder weapon and then put it up on the wall to rot. He found it God knows where, rusting out and probably near water, and got it to the point where it’d work. In fact, I’d lay odds that all that damage and scoring up around the muzzle? I bet that wasn’t him.”

It was gorgeous, Tallow had to admit. The voluptuous curve of the thing, and the rich dark wood that had clearly been polished lovingly at some moment in the recent past. The metal had lost its luster now, and there was some light pitting here and there, but, again, you could see where the metal had been pared and deeply cleaned. It did not look its age. On one of its plates was an insignia of some kind, a little too blurred by the years to be clear, and a word that might have been Rooster above it. Not Rooster. It was a longer word, but the incising had grown too shallow.

“You’re not going to test-fire it?”

“Hell no. Pointless, anyway. Our guy would very probably have had to make his own slug. What we need to do is run a query through the computer for any body in the past twenty years that was found with a soft lead bullet pancaked inside it behind a .45-caliber hole. I mean, who knows. What I really want to do is cut the barrel open and get a look inside.”

“Amazing.” Tallow laid the gun down with more reverence than when he had picked it up. “Thank you for showing me. So, you’re shooting the scene, matching the shots to the floor plan, taking them out…”

“Yeah,” Bat said, moving the gun back toward him, loving it with his wide eyes. “Some of them have paint on, as you would have seen. We’re going to process that, see if it gives us anything.”

“But it won’t,” said Scarly.

“Listen,” said Tallow. “Do you have, maybe, a big spare room around here that we could colonize? Like an incident room we could all use. But different.”

“I don’t know what that exactly means,” Bat said, frowning, “but, um, I think there’s space on the next floor down. We just shipped a shitload of evidence barrels out to the Bronx. But I don’t know if we could use that without our boss—”

“My boss just did your boss a solid. And my boss can undo it fast enough, if need be. I want that space.”

“No offense, buddy,” said Scarly slowly, “but don’t you have rooms and shit at Ericsson Place?”

“Sure. But that’s not where the case is going to get solved. It’s going to get solved here.”

Scarly folded her arms. Leaned away from Tallow. Everything about her, in fact, seemed to Tallow to be closing up. “This ain’t getting solved, Detective.”

“You think?”

“If this guy was gonna be caught,” Scarly said, “he would have been caught already. You know what you did when you put a hole in that wall? You interrupted the career of a genuine fucking bogeyman, some crazy-ass ghost-dog serial killer who filled a room with his fucking trophies to jerk off over. He’s never going to go back there. And you know what else? He’s going to start killing again, probably more and more quickly than before, so he can generate another trophy room slash jerking pit. Not only is this not getting solved but more people are gonna get killed because of it, and we won’t catch him after those either because this guy is just too damned good. All you did, Detective, is find the home address of the Devil in New York City, and now he’s moved someplace else.

“Look at these. Look at these photos. He’s arranged this shit. These are patterns. They mean something to him. Look at this one here, this sort of whorl of guns. The ones around it are finished shapes. This one doesn’t have a closed circle. You see that? There are still spaces to be filled. He wasn’t done. Look here: some of these shapes look like cogs. They look like they fit together. The whole fucking room is the trophy. A cross between a church and an engine. And now he’s going to start all over again. Because he has to. This is a life’s work.

“You know what I see when I look at you, Tallow? I see a cop who’s nine parts dead already. I see guys like you shuffle through here all the time. You stopped giving a shit about the job or yourself years ago. Look at you. Your fucking suit doesn’t even fit. And for all your big talk about the bad week you’re having, you’re not even angry. You’re just tired. Five bucks says your partner was carrying you, and ten says your boss laid this case on you because she didn’t want to waste two actual police on it. This case ain’t getting solved by you, and me and the Bat here are collateral fucking damage. You’re already dead, and this guy here? He just got reborn. So, yeah. Thanks a lot. You are not making our lives better. Use someone else’s house to pretend to work the case in, yeah?”

The room went icily, awkwardly quiet. Bat studied the ceiling. Tallow looked at Scarly. She looked at him right back. Neither of them broke the hard gaze for a full minute.

Tallow took out his phone then and checked the time.

“First,” Tallow said, “I want every photo from the scene blown up to one-to-one and matched to the floor plan. If you can score some spare whiteboards, or plasterboard or something, and have them moved downstairs to whatever large empty space you’ve got, that’d be great. I’m going out to the scene, and by eight I’m going to be at the Fetch on Fulton. Meet me there. I’m going to feed you and get you drunk, and you’re going to talk to me.”

“Why?” Scarly said, shaking her head as if she were suddenly disoriented.

“I guess I didn’t make myself clear,” Tallow said. “You two are my new partners. And we’re solving this case. Because you know what? The one crumb of comfort I have today is that when my boss told my partner’s wife he was dead, she also told him that I had killed the thing that did it. There are hundreds of people who got told that their loved ones were dead but never heard that we’d done a damn thing about it. So we’re solving this. Am I clear now?”

Scarly peered at him. “You don’t believe that for a second.”

“Does it matter?” said Tallow, and left.

A short drive got long, Tallow trying to find a clear shot through the tangle of traffic, aiming for the Brooklyn Bridge.

The police radio was on. Tallow let the city keep him company for as long as he could stand it. Guy in Stuyvesant Heights came home, found his tires slashed, walked to the bodega on the corner to find out if anyone saw it happen, got shot through the left eye. Nobody saw anything. The Upper East Side’s “serial groper” had struck again, kicking a twenty-five-year-old woman to the ground and grabbing her crotch before she managed to set off a rape alarm that scared the shit out of him. Lexington and East Seventy-Seventh, and somehow no one saw a thing. And a sudden burst of chatter about a beat cop in the Bronx who had just got pulled by IAB after reports of his whipping a kid’s face with his badge got out. The burst of chatter being cops who claimed to have been right there and hadn’t see a thing.

Tallow snapped the radio off, his mind wandering again to that gun: 1836. His interest in history was persistent but patchy. There just never seemed to be the time to delve into any one topic he was interested in, and he always ended up skimming it and moving on. But 1836. He wondered. Pearl Street had its name because it was once paved by crushed oyster shells—mother-of-pearl. Was it paved in pearly shells in 1836? He wondered if he wasn’t traveling the same route as whoever had brought that gun into Manhattan in 1836. There was a time when Pearl Street was the water’s edge, he knew.

The headlamps of passing cars in the gathering dusk took on the glow of slowed, smeared, time-loose ghost lights in his imagination. He shook the thought off.

Tallow pulled up a short distance, and on the opposite side of the street, from the house on Pearl Street, just in time to see the ECT pull away with their latest hoard from the gunmetal trove in 3A.

Tallow got out and stood on the sidewalk, just looking at the place for a while. It took him that long to realize he had company, of a sort. An older man, leaning against a signpost. A heavy coat, suede or some other skin, roughly patched with mismatched leathers. A hide satchel over his shoulder. Soft shoes, like moccasins, just firm enough to be relatively new but already sooty from street wear. His hair and beard were all rust and snow. Tallow noticed that, for an obvious street guy, he didn’t smell terrible. Still, he thought, there’s all kinds of crazy.

Which brought back the image of screaming naked Bobby Tagg and his shotgun.

Tallow didn’t register his having taken out and lit a cigarette until the second drag. He glared at the thing, annoyed with himself. Wasn’t he supposed to have thrown the pack away?

“Tobacco?” said the street guy.

“Um. Yeah.”

“Spare one?”

“Sure,” said Tallow, locating the pack and pushing one cigarette out for the street guy. Tallow saw his fingers, callused and hatched with tiny scars. A man who had worked with his hands, a carpenter maybe, before whatever happened to him happened. Tallow had worked streets long enough to know that it didn’t always take a big thing to send someone to the point where it seemed to him that the best option was to live outdoors and eat out of garbage sacks.

The street guy pulled the filter off the cigarette with a hard, fast pinch. Tallow saw him pocket the filter as he gestured for a light. Tallow flicked his lighter and saw something between disappointment and contempt flick across the street guy’s face before he resigned himself to lighting his smoke off the flame.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

The street guy drew smoke, held it in his lungs, and let it creep out of his mouth and nose. He wafted his hand through the smoke as it rose, cupping it, dancing his fingers through it.

The man licked his lips. “Not the way it used to be. Too many, what’s the word…additives.” The tip of his tongue seemed to be trying to gather residue from his lips. “Honey. Benzene. Ammonia. Can’t you taste them? Even copper.”

“I’m going to quit again soon,” Tallow commented.

“Good,” the street guy said. “Tobacco should be used only on special occasions. Smoking it all day just cheapens its value and reduces its effect.” Exhaling again, he pushed his fingers up into the smoke, as if helping the silver curls up into the sky.

Tallow’s immediate thought was to ask the man what today’s special occasion was. He held the thought. He didn’t have the strength for a conversation with a street crazy. Instead, he stamped out his own smoke, said “Good luck” to the street guy, and started across the road to the building.

“That’s what I’m praying for,” said the street guy to Tallow’s back. “Just a little good luck.”