Gun Machine

Twenty-One

THE LONGER Tallow looked at the wall, the more it seemed that the guns on it interlocked somehow.

The gaps in the surface coverage were very much starting to appear as deliberate omissions, spaces awaiting the right shapes. An immense clock awaiting the right cogs, lying in the sleep of potential until the day the correct pieces were placed and all the wheels could finally turn.

A voice said “John.” He was so lost in the gun machinery that it took long seconds for him to both register the voice and understand that it was his name being called.

Scarly was standing by the table. Her face was drawn and he could see her pulse in her throat. She held a sheet of printout. “This isn’t so funny anymore.”

“What?”

“The .44 Bulldog. It’s Son of Sam’s gun.”

“Seriously?”

“Same bullets they dug out of Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti in the summer of 1976. Those bullets went onto the ballistics database back when the DA in Queens declared the case reopened, in the late nineties. John, this is wrong.”

“In all kinds of ways.” Tallow stood up, knees protesting. He assumed, since Scarly was here, that he must have been sitting there for a couple of hours, but he had no sense of the time having passed.

“No, listen,” Scarly said, voice low and urgent. “If someone had been killed with this gun, it would have set off flashing lights. The bullet would have been dug out of the body and processed, and the odds are that it would have matched one of the Son of Sam bullets in the database. There are plenty. Even the bullets that were so deformed they couldn’t be fully matched to the weapon were scanned in and appended to the ballistics compilation on the gun. We don’t have a body for this gun.”

Tallow stretched, and regretted it instantly. Grimacing, he said, “So our guy dug his own bullets out of some poor bastard. Because, I’m telling you, there’s no way that gun is in this apartment without there being a body on it.”

“Our guy has a guy in the Property Office, John. And I don’t mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping a fucking eye on, like Son of Sam’s piece, for fuck’s sake—a guy in there who’ll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he’ll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he’s actually starting to scare me a bit now.”

“A couple of hundred kills to his name didn’t do that?”

“Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night.”

“You know,” said Tallow, “whenever I’m in danger of forgetting you’re a CSU, you always find a way to remind me. On the bright side, doesn’t Bat owe you ten bucks now?”

“Tallow. Listen. I am not going to be the one who tells my boss that our fucking serial handgun ninja got someone to steal a famous gun out of an evidence barrel and did at least one person with it and recovered the bullet and so we have at least one completely fucking unsolvable case on the list.”

“No,” said Tallow, plucking the printout from her fingers and grabbing his bag. “I’m going to talk to my boss about it first.”

Tallow waited until he was outside the main building before calling the lieutenant. He dialed her cell phone. It was midmorning, and her movements weren’t predictable at that time of day. Her phone rang. It rang long enough that he was expecting it to switch to voice mail. Then she answered with an uncertain “Hello?”

His brow creased. “It’s Tallow. Where are you?” He could tell from the background noise that she was outside.

“Does it matter where I am?”

Okay, he thought. “Well, I’d like to sit down with you as soon as it’s convenient. I have something on the case that I really need your input on before I take it further. Can I come by the office in a half hour or so and find you there?”

“Um. No. I won’t be there for a while.”

“I really need your help, Lieutenant. Where are you? I could meet you there, if that’s easier.”

“Oh God,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

Tallow heard her take a deep, shaky breath. “I’m at Jim’s funeral, John.”

“…What?”

Everything tilted, and Tallow’s feet swam for purchase until his back met a wall. He stiffened his legs and pressed his back hard against it.

“I’m sorry, John.”

“I don’t understand.”

“His wife…she wanted a quick funeral. And, well, I’m afraid she told me she didn’t want you to attend. I mean, she’s upset, obviously, and if she’d chosen to wait a week, I’m sure it would have been different.”

All Tallow could think of to say was “We’ve never met. I’ve never met her.”

The lieutenant’s voice sounded somewhat strained as she said, “Yes, she told me that too.”

“What did she say?”

“Don’t, John.”

Tallow let himself slide down the wall until his knees were drawn up and his backside was on the ground. “What did she say?”

“She said that she didn’t want a stranger at her husband’s funeral, and she didn’t want to see the man who should have saved her husband, and she didn’t want to see the man who should have died instead of her husband.”

He’d asked her to say it. He’d badgered her to say it. But he didn’t like her for saying it. And he didn’t like himself for doing it and hating her. He didn’t like anything. He covered his face with his free hand.

“John?”

“I wish people would stop saying that. Sometimes I wish people didn’t know my name.”

“John? What?”

“I was his partner. I was his friend. You tell her…” He caught himself. Gathered up everything in him in one fist and pushed it all down with everything else that was already down there. “No. Don’t tell her anything. Don’t mention me at all.”

“Okay, John,” the lieutenant said, uncertainly.

Yeah, he thought. Talk to me like that. Talk to me like I’m a basket case. Talk to me like I’m an idiot. Talk to me like I’m already leaving the force. He licked his lips like a lizard, his face tightening and hardening into sharp planes, relishing the anger that was starting to whip around inside him. He caught hold of that, too, but he decided to push it out.

“You need to be in your office in one hour. I have Son of Sam’s gun.”

He waited just long enough to hear the start of her reaction, and killed the phone call dead.

Tallow walked to his car, drove out of One Police Plaza, stopped at a store, and bought two lighters.

Homicide at Ericsson Place was empty when Tallow arrived. Everyone was at Jim Rosato’s funeral.

The lieutenant was not in her office. Tallow entered her office, stood there, and waited.

He didn’t move. Stared at the back wall of her office. Pictured the guns from Pearl Street there. Conjured them in his vision and continued to scan them for clues, evidence, sense.

Ten minutes later the lieutenant stalked into the room, angry and angular in a black wool Nehru-collared pantsuit with a sharply darted asymmetrical front closure. He wondered if this, too, was new. He also found that he didn’t care.

“I do not like the way you are talking to me lately, Detective,” she snapped, walking around her desk.

Tallow put down his bag, took out the printout, and tossed it on the desk.

“Did you hear me?”

“Read that.”

“Tallow, do you want to be discharged? Do you want me to take your badge and gun right now and have you marched off the premises?”

“Read. That.”

“Tallow, you—”

“Lieutenant, I have a lot of respect for you. You have a hard job, in all kinds of ways, and you handle the pressure from all sides better than pretty much any boss I’ve ever had in the job. But you hung this around my neck, and you are just counting the days until it pulls me down and both it and me disappear from sight. I can understand that. But until what you put around my neck sinks me, you will treat me like a detective in the New York Police Department and you. Will. Read. That.”

She looked at him for a long time. She then turned her gaze to the printout, but he could see her focus vanish, could see that she wasn’t going to give it more than a glance before dismissing it, throwing it in the trash, and moving on to the far more present task of what to do about John Tallow. He directed his thoughts to anything that might be listening in the sky over Ericsson Place right then.

The lieutenant’s eyes skidded off the page, and she pulled the paper off her desk, preparing to crumple it. She glared at him, and then looked at it again, her hand closing.

She stopped. Squinted at something on the page. Slid both sets of fingers around the sides of the page, holding it still and straight.

The lieutenant laid the page back on the desk like it was ticking.

“John?”

He was John now. She was jolted. It simply remained, he thought, to see where she was induced to jump to. His career could be over in the next two sentences, he knew.

“Yes.”

“Are we sure this isn’t CSU playing a prank?”

“Yesterday I met the CSU who did the test. A piece of the gun blew back and took off a chunk of his earlobe. They completed the processing a little over an hour ago. I think it’s fair to say that their fear wouldn’t easily be faked for the sake of a prank.”

“Who else has seen this?”

“The pair of CSUs. Me. You.”

She gave him a look that said she was reevaluating him. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Do you want to sit down?”

“Standing is fine.” Tallow let a little bit of ice into his voice when he said it. She caught it.

“About the funeral, John—”

“Forget the funeral. What about this?”

She pushed her hair back, worried, eyes darting around the page on her desk. “Tell me what you think it means.”

“I think it means the owner of apartment three A on Pearl Street has or had a contact inside the Property Office and induced that person to steal this gun for a specific homicide. Knowing how incredibly identifiable this gun is, he then dug his own bullet or bullets out of his victim. So we have a gun we can reasonably assume was used for homicide by our man, but no victim to apply it to. It’s my opinion that he used this gun because he believed it had some historical, thematic, or personal connection to the kill.” At which moment, Tallow made a leap of intuition. Or a crazy guess. “Just like we’ll find that Marc Arias, killed in Williamsburg in 2007, will prove to have some connection with the police.”

The lieutenant’s eyebrows shot up. “How do you figure that?”

“He was killed with a Ruger Police Service, a gun they made to sell to police forces, I’m told with not much success. Marc Arias is going to turn out to be a guy connected to the police. Probably not a full-serving officer.”

Tallow knew he was taking a huge, huge chance at this point. Tallow also knew that his brain was moving at speed, and thinking felt like it hadn’t for years. He felt like a runner whose morning start had been hard and harrowing but who had hit the zone where the running was sweet and swift.

She turned to her computer. “You know what the police staffing the Property Office used to be called? The Rubber Gun Squad. Back in the day, they used only police who were on restricted duty or under disciplinary action.”

He watched her input a search string into the networked database. He watched her eyebrow arch again as the Real Time Crime Center component spit back results instantly. She read it off the screen to him.

“‘Marc Arias, in 2007, was a discharged officer of the NYPD whose last posting within the force was…staff at the Property Office.’”

“Lieutenant, you shoved this into my hands when I still had my friend’s blood on my clothes and told me to work the case. I’m working it. But I’ve reached the stage where I’m going to need your help. Are you going to help me, or do I stay out there on my own?”

“Don’t make it sound like you were the lone cowboy on the high desert there, John. But,” she said, holding up a hand as his mouth opened, “I take your point. And while I think this is a little bit thin, and could be entirely coincidental, the fact remains that the gun should be in storage, not in an apartment on Pearl Street.”

“What do we do about that, Lieutenant?”

“I need to speak to someone farther up the chain of command, and very quietly. This is not a news item that needs to be out in the world.” She picked up her desk phone. “Get out of here, John. I’m going to try to get the captain’s next free five minutes, and then ruin his day.”

“I can go upstairs with you, help explain all this and how we got here.”

“Go back to work, Detective. You don’t have experience in explaining things to the captain in baby talk so that he can explain things to the assistant chief for Manhattan South and not sound like a senior citizen with a kilo of Vicodin in his system. Which he essentially is. This is my job now. You go do yours.”

“Okay,” Tallow said, picking up his bag and leaving her office. As he was passing through the doorway, the lieutenant said, in a small voice, to his back:

“I really am sorry about earlier. The funeral.”

Tallow broke step for only a moment, and then continued off the floor and out of the building before all Jim Rosato’s friends and coworkers returned from gently laying him to rest in the warm and welcoming soil of the mainland.