Gun Machine

Nineteen

TALLOW WOKE up about six a.m., feeling like boulders had been rolled over him in the night.

The shower didn’t help. He endured a short but explosive session on the toilet, and when he turned to flush there was blood in the bowl. He got dressed, stuffed some things back in the laptop bag, and left.

At seven a.m., he was outside a large florist’s store that he knew, on Maiden Lane. They were just opening, bringing in leafy goods from trucks temporarily double-parked on the tree-lined street. Tallow slid in the front door, past two unpleasantly healthy men in wife-beaters and jogging pants carrying pallets of heavy pots like they were cafeteria trays. A slender woman spotted him in the gap between two large and odious monoliths of vegetation that might have been triffids and said, “I’m sorry, we’re not really open yet.”

With a smear of regret, Tallow badged her. “I know. I just have a quick question about something.”

The woman walked around to him, wiping her palms on a pair of jeans that hadn’t been blue in five years. She was white like lilies, and willowy, her hair the pale glow of blondes who have worked in the sun for a long time. “What did you need, Detective? Is this quick question for a wife, a girlfriend, or your mother?”

“I didn’t badge you to get special treatment, I promise. I need to see a tobacco plant, if you have one.”

Her eyes said she was in her forties, but only two lines were drawn on her forehead as she made a small pensive frown. “Hm. You know, I think I do. Come with me.”

She led him past four or five stages of plant life, along an aisle, and into a small jungle of shrubs. Tallow watched her eyes tick down and across three levels of shelving. She settled on a small pot containing a sickly-looking collection of sticks topped with wispy white heads. “Woman’s tobacco,” she told him. “The Native Americans used the leaves to alleviate heavy periods, postnatal sickness, and stomach problems.”

There were so few leaves on the object that Tallow didn’t want to touch them for fear of killing the thing.

“Or there’s this,” she said, lifting a heavier pot filled with a vivid, vigorous green foliage that sprayed white trumpets of flowers whose mouths were a warm pink. “Your basic Nicotiana tabacum, cultivated tobacco, a distant relative to the tobacco seeds the Taino Amerindians gave to Christopher Columbus, which became the plants that Jean Nicot gave to the French court, where people were so goddamn delighted by the effect the ground-up leaves had on their heads that they named the plant after him.”

Tallow rubbed one of the leaves between thumb and forefinger. He got a, yes, a distant relative of that slightly sharp scent, just barely suggestive of cigarette tobacco, that he’d detected in apartment 3A.

“That’s it,” he said. “I think. Maybe if I crushed it up and burned it.”

“You crush and burn it, you buy it,” the florist said with a smile.

“Sorry,” Tallow said. “It’s for something I’m working on, believe it or not. You seem to know about this stuff.”

She rolled her eyes around the room. “I kind of should, don’t you think?”

“Sorry. Sorry. I’m not really awake yet. Would you know if this is the sort of tobacco plant that would have grown naturally around here, way back when?”

She bit her cheek, turning the pot around in her soil-streaked hands. Her nails were longer and stronger than he would have expected for someone in her job. “Well. It’s a cultivar, like I said, and some people think it has a couple of other tobacco plants mixed up in it. But sure, something pretty much like it would have grown around here. The woman’s tobacco would have been local too. You would have found it on the slopes headed down toward where Pearl Street and Water Street are now, back in the days before the natives sold the place to the Dutch.”

Tallow made a decision. “I’d like to buy this, um, this one with the flowers here.”

“Nicotiana tabacum.”

“Yeah.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t do cop discounts. And women really do prefer roses.”

“I’m sure they do. But I think the person I’m looking for prefers Nicotiana tabacum. And I don’t take cop discounts.”

Which was a damned lie, because in the past couple of years he’d done it a lot, and he knew it, and she knew it just from the look in his eye, but Tallow paid full price for the pot and a bag of plant-food sachets, and was happy to do it. He thanked her and left, dodging another weight-lifting display as he went.

Tallow’s next stop was the coffee shop, where he purchased a cardboard tray of six of the morning specialty, an iced coffee, in the grotesque venti-plus, that was made with nothing but too many shots of espresso and seriously chilled cream. The half a dozen drinks came in milkily translucent corn-plastic containers stamped with a cartoon of a naked man plugging himself into main electricity through his genitals and leaping into the air with the joy of voltage. Tallow made a pit in the backseat of the car and placed the tray in it. The tobacco plant sat in the foot well of the passenger seat. It wasn’t yet eight a.m. So far, Tallow had remembered everything except food. He figured he could survive until lunch and pointed the car at One PP.

Tallow walked into Bat and Scarly’s office to find Bat slumped on a chair with his head on the workbench, turned away from the door, while Scarly softly sharpened an old straight razor on a worn strop, watching her partner intently.

“I don’t think he needs his eyebrows, do you? I mean, they don’t serve an immediate function or anything,” she whispered.

“I am not asleep.” Bat moaned. “I am merely resting my brain. And if you come near me with that thing I will shave your face off your skull with it. Or possibly just puke in your eyes.”

Tallow laid his laptop bag against his chair, unloaded the plant on the floor next to it, and put the tray of cold coffee on the bench next to Bat’s head. “Do you have space in your fridge for half of these?”

Bat’s head rose slowly on his skinny neck ,like a sedated hen’s. He turned his head at a mechanical crawl, scanning the immediate area, until his eyes detected the coffee.

“Oh my God,” Bat prayed. “I love you. I would let you have sex on me and everything. But I am very tired and would prefer not to have to move.”

Scarly killed a cup lid with feral fingers and chugged a third of a container. Her eyes flexed weirdly in their sockets. “Oh, that’s the stuff,” she said. “That is really the stuff.”

Bat was weakly pawing at the lid of the cup nearest him. Tallow reached over and took it off for him, abstractedly wondering if this was what fatherhood felt like. Bat sipped from it like a sickly Dickensian child. Tallow half expected him to whimper “God bless us, every one.”

“Fuck me,” Bat gasped. “It’s like an angel shat ice cream–coffee rainbows in my mouth.”

“Little bit,” said Tallow as the momentary illusion of parenthood atomized. He opened his own cup and drank. “Did we get anything back on that Bulldog yet?”

“Nope,” said Scarly, bent over and putting three of the cups inside a small fridge that had been hidden by the general crap in the office. “Couple of hours.”

“Okay. Listen,” Tallow said, reaching down and pulling the lieutenant’s papers from his bag, “what do you know about Ruger nine-millimeters?”

“Place the papers where I may see them,” said Bat. “I do not wish to burn precious caffeine molecules by moving.”

Tallow did as he was told. Bat leaned his head over the paper, trying to get gravity to aid him in keeping his eyes open and working.

“Ruger nine. Scarly, what don’t I know about a Ruger nine with a circular lock on the shell casing’s ass?”

“That’ll be the Ruger Police Service. There were Luger works in it to make it a reliable nine. They did all kinds of odd variants for a while, trying to make government sales.” She stood up and looked at Tallow. “Ruger used to have this massive reputation because of the Ruger Super Blackhawk. They used to say it was a great gun for holding up trains, because you’d fire it at the train and it’d stop. Huge goddamn thing with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel, but really accurate and it didn’t break your fingers or wrist when you shot a .44 Magnum load. So it was, you know, a special gun for police by the makers of this immense fucking elephant gun that everyone’s heard of. That was the pitch.”

“So this guy was shot with a police sidearm?”

“One that was marketed to police anyway. Why?”

“Thinking about what we were talking about last night. Is it possible—even just for the sake of argument—that our guy really was matching his weapons to his kills in some sense?”

“Say it is,” said Scarly. “What have you got?”

“A petty thief killed with a junk gun that was probably stolen from its manufacturing plant.”

“Thin,” Scarly observed.

“I know. But now I want to know more about the victim of the Ruger.”

“We can do that here. You want to see downstairs first?”

“Sure. Um, probably a dumb question, but do you have smoke alarms down there?”

“Nothing that can’t be disabled,” said Bat, stirring. “But you probably won’t be able to sneak a cigarette down there without someone noticing.”

Tallow hefted the plant. “No. I want to crush some of these leaves and then try burning them.”

Bat looked at it and admired Tallow’s apparent loss of sanity. “Cool. You bought another lighter then, huh?”

“Oh shit,” said Tallow, who hadn’t.

Bat laughed. “Jesus, John. We can’t let you out of our sight, can we? Relax. This is CSU. We have plenty of things that burn shit. Hell, we don’t have much here that doesn’t burn shit.”

Scarly snorted. “That’s true. Last month a computer power brick caught fire and set light to Brendan Foley’s legs.”

“And that microwave oven that went up at Christmas.”

Scarly dismissed it with a disgusted wave of her hand. “Fucking Einar rolling in drunk for the eighteenth time with his ‘I hate all your ice-cold American drinks, I come from a very cold country and do not wish to pour more ice in my body.’ You heard what they did to his head?”

“What?”

“Well, the skin grafts took, but, you know, he basically made napalm, so there wasn’t much left under it. So they injected him with this weird sort of facial caulking that swells and firms up under UV light and essentially kind of re-inflated his head. It was cool.”

“Oh! And the old still exploded last summer!”

“Right! Did you see Foley’s legs the other day when he was doing that fucked-up pantsless lap of victory around the main labs? Legs like a dead giraffe.”

“Downstairs?” said Tallow, with just a little pleading in his voice.

Downstairs was cavernous: bare and stained cement, gray pillars holding up a blackened ceiling that had broken-down flotillas of fluorescent light tubes sailing across it in lazy waves. Walking in from the elevator, Tallow saw an arrangement of wheeled whiteboards, and great blankets of clear plastic sheeting on the floor. Getting closer, he could make out big glossy photos under the sheeting and tacked to the whiteboards.

“Oh my God,” said Tallow.

“Yeah,” said Scarly. “We got into work early. Not that he was much use. We rounded up some help and got it done.”

The CSUs had run off copies of all the photos, in a rough ratio of one to one, and arranged them on the floor and on the whiteboards according to the evidentiary floor plans. The plastic sheeting had been rolled out over the photos on the floor so he could walk over them. It was as close as could be gotten to a copy of the whole of apartment 3A, with the whiteboards standing in for walls and partitions.

There was a table over to one side, with papers scattered on it. Tallow set his iced coffee and his potted plant down there, turned, and surveyed the space. Scarly deposited next to that the things she’d brought from upstairs, excavated out of their office. An old mortar and pestle, a foil tray that’d had fossil grains of rice pilaf wiped out of it with a wet nap that was itself not young, and a small chef’s blowtorch. Tallow was learning not to ask certain kinds of question about the way the CSUs operated.

“This is amazing,” Tallow said, and meant it. He wasn’t just taken aback at how well and how completely and how intelligently they’d done it. He was genuinely shocked that they’d done it at all. Tallow had expected to be down here all morning doing it himself, and he hadn’t been looking forward to meticulously matching photos to floor plans and codes, let alone scavenging CSU offices for tacks and adhesive. Walking around the perimeter of the space, he knew immediately that he couldn’t have done it as well as this. Laying this broad plastic sheeting over the photos on the floor was inspired, and Tallow wouldn’t have thought of that at all.

“What’s the plant for?” asked Bat, bending down and peering at it suspiciously. “I don’t trust plants. Food things come from them.”

“It’s a tobacco plant. I had the idea that I could smell a kind of tobacco in the apartment.”

Bat turned his judgmental squint on Tallow. “This is your much strong cop voodoo.”

“Well,” said Tallow, “we live in hope. But this is really incredible. Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome.” Scarly grinned. “Would you like to be alone with your plant now?”

Tallow walked into the middle of the simulated living room. “For a couple of hours. Until you get the ballistics back on the Bulldog. Then I’m going to want to talk about paint chips.”

“You wanna decorate?” Bat asked, raising his voice. Tallow was fairly sure he’d spent the past thirty seconds threatening the plant in a menacing whisper.

“I saw paints on things in the apartment. I want to know more about those paints.”

“You sound,” said Scarly, “like a man developing a case.”

“I’m—no. Not yet. I’m a man telling himself a story, right now…”

Tallow found his voice trailing off as he looked around. He didn’t see Scarly and Bat exchange a clever glance, just heard Scarly say “We’ll come and get you” as they both left for the elevator. They were already gone when he turned to thank them again.

He did a first walk of the emulation. There had never been a bed in this apartment, and the kitchen had been ripped out by his man long ago. There was nothing but guns. Looking down, he found the flintlock at the center of a large swirl of weapons. A goat’s eye in the middle of a gunmetal sun.

The CSUs really had done an incredible, ingenious job. Everything was positioned correctly. Walking back into the living room, Tallow got a new perspective. The arc behind the front door had to be, and was, clear of weapons, otherwise the door wouldn’t open. If Tallow stood in the arc, he could see a space close to the middle of the room that could be reached by stepping into what were now obviously two gaps in the gun coverage, each big enough to accommodate a foot.

He tried it. Reached the central space. Sat down in it, cross-legged. The position had him facing the broad wall adjacent to the door. He sat and stared at the wall, hands in his lap. Scanned the mosaic of photos. Fought to see something in them beyond arrangements of guns mounted by a very careful lunatic who had been killing people in Manhattan and getting away with it for ten or twenty years.

Not a thing. Not a thing yet, he told himself, and went to retrieve his coffee. There was no way he could re-create the lighting, he knew, which was a shame. It really had had that churchlike effect on Tallow, standing in that apartment on Pearl Street for the first time. Maybe he could just play a CD of classically inspired ambient music, he thought, and smiled a little at it. Maybe find out the name of whatever Muzak they played in the lobby at Vivicy.

Tallow sat back down in the virtual space on the floor of the simulated apartment, gazed at photographs of murder weapons, and tried to understand where he really was and what they really were.