Gun Machine

Twenty-Seven

TALLOW DROVE his unit out of Ericsson Place, bone weary, abstractly disappointed, and feeling a lot less anchored than he’d let on to the lieutenant. He had no evidence. Just a theory that got wider and more sprawling and ungainly and borderline insane as the days went on. He tried to focus on one thing—other than his driving—and settled on the moments in which he thought he met the man who lived in apartment 3A. Tallow tried to summon up every detail of his experience of the man. The color of his hair and beard. His scent. His body language. The way he took the cigarette from Tallow. The way he pinched off the filter and put the filter in his pocket.

“The bastard,” Tallow muttered to himself. It may have just been the act of a man who disliked a filter on his tobacco. But, Tallow thought, wouldn’t it have been nice to go back and pick that filter up, with a nice clean print on the treated paper that covered it.

Tallow swerved, mounted the sidewalk with one wheel, stamped on the brake, and very narrowly avoided causing a pile-up. He didn’t even hear the chorus of car horns Dopplering past him.

The man pulled off the filter. But he smoked the damn cigarette. He had to have left a butt. As careful as he might have been with the filter, he couldn’t have just pinched off the burning end and pocketed the cigarette butt too. Could he? No. He didn’t smell strongly. That would have stank, in his pocket, and Tallow didn’t make him as the kind of man who’d want you to smell him coming. He had to have crushed out the butt. Or tossed it and hoped it’d burn out.

It was a wild and stupid hope.

Tallow rejoined the traffic and pushed hard for Pearl Street.

He parked across the street from the tenement. He pulled gloves, a ziplock bag, and a tweezers from the glove compartment. He stood where he had stood when he met the man. He looked around, and thought, furiously. He’d walked away before the man had finished his smoke. He shifted his feet into the position he believed the man had occupied. Put his hand in his jacket pocket, to simulate keeping the filter. The tweezers acted as his cigarette. He pushed imaginary smoke up from the burning end, as the man had.

He pretended he was finishing the smoke. The cigarette was burning down toward his fingers. That day, Tallow had already crushed his out. Tallow looked in the gutter. There were three butts scattered there among a few dead leaves, a little crushed glass, a penny, and a small potato chip bag, each butt crumpled and twisted by multiple encounters with things much bigger than itself. They all had their filters on. Tallow crouched and looked. One of them was the brand he had been smoking.

Tallow looked around, scanning for places he might jam a cigarette butt into without burning his fingers.

No.

He crouched to the gutter again. Picked up the potato chip bag.

Tallow looked up at the sky, took a deep breath, and quelled the shaking in his fingers.

Over sickeningly slow seconds, disappointment like a snake in his gut waiting to bite through his heart, he untwisted and peeled open the bag. Someone had taken it out of the gutter, folded it, tied it into a knot, stamped on it to make it look more naturally smashed, and tossed it back on the road to be ignored, run over, and swept up.

There was a cigarette butt in the middle of the knot.

Tallow laughed.

He extracted the butt, dropped it into the ziplock, and sealed it. Tallow returned to the car with it and the potato chip bag, which he awkwardly inserted into another ziplock when he got inside.

All I want, Tallow said to him, is proof that you’re not invisible too.

Moving through the main lobby of One Police Plaza, Tallow, still in a mode of hyperfocused noticing, picked up bad air. People were looking at him for the first time since the case had begun bringing him to the place. Tallow picked up his pace, laptop bag in hand, and walked to the farthest elevator he could find.

He moved through CSU in long strides. Bat was mantled over the bench in his and Scarly’s cave of crap and didn’t even look up as he began speaking.

“Bae Ga,” Bat said. “Twenty-four years old. Originally from Incheon, South Korea. Killed in the Kitchen eighteen months ago. Mathematician. The weapon used was a Daewoo DP-51. Which is a South Korean handgun.”

Tallow laid his bag on the bench with care. “A mathematician. Was he studying here?”

“He was working here. Some kind of financial job, for a company called Stratagilex. Mutual funds or something. I don’t have a good grasp on financial stuff.”

“Get me a name at that company. A boss. And a phone number. Where’s Scarly?”

“Behind you.”

“Jesus. Okay. I have something for you. Bat, you’re just sitting there.”

“It doesn’t fit the pattern, John. It’s a wild result. He faked a mugging on some Korean math whiz and shot him with a matched weapon, but the victim has nothing to do with anything else we’ve seen.”

“I don’t agree,” said Tallow, opening the bag. “Scarly, look at this.”

“What the hell have you got there?”

“I told you I thought I met our guy. I gave him a cigarette. He tore the filter off and put it in his pocket. He smoked the cigarette. He can’t have pocketed the butt, because it’d stink, and he’s careful about that. So he threw the butt into a potato chip bag being blown down the street, because who’s going to be crazy enough to come back and check all the litter for a single cigarette butt that’d eventually be blown far from the site anyway?”

Scarly gave him a hard stare. “Who’d be crazy enough to think we could get anything off a cigarette butt that was probably hot when he threw it into the bag and therefore melted plastic onto it?”

“Me. Look. He left a long butt. He had to, right? There was no filter. And he wasn’t enjoying it so much anyway.”

Scarly turned her stare on the evidence. “Shit. We have two shots. Bat, get people the fuck out of the clean room and make sure the plasticware’s been UV’d.”

Bat was at the laptop, scribbling on the back of an old, unstuck coffee sleeve. He passed the thin cardboard to Tallow, walking around. “What have we got?”

Scarly was pulling latex gloves out of a pants pocket. “We’ve got cigarette paper to smoke for prints, and I want to trim the mouth end and try the fast EA1 proteinase method on it.”

“The fast one?” Bat said. Tallow watched them click into professional mode.

“Yeah. I don’t think we’ve got time for anything else.”

“The trim’s going to be problematic. We need a centimeter square of paper for the fast one, and that’s going to cut into print space.”

“No, we cut the end all the way around, gives us a total of a centimeter. We’ll reserve the tobacco in case we somehow get more time.”

“Slow up,” Tallow said. “More time? Fast method?”

Scarly sighed. “My boss has been told by her boss that too many resources are being eaten up by the case. We’re going to get pulled off this, sooner rather than later.”

“And who do I get instead?”

“Nobody, John. I don’t know what’s going on, but we’re not living in the same world we were two days ago. All our sins are forgiven, and the case is going to be sunk just as soon as some asshole finds a big enough anchor to hang on it. Possibly one just your size.”

Tallow leaned against the bench.

Scarly’s face hardened. “So. Yeah. We’re waiting for the word. But in the meantime, we are still doing this. So we’re going to use the fast method, and clear people the fuck out of the clean room, and get as much done as we can as soon as we can. All right?”

“All right. Go.”

“I was.”

Bat spread his wings and hustled her out of the room. “The man’s just trying to do his job, Scarly. Don’t snap at him.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

“It’s not my fault, I’m fucking autistic—”

Tallow read off the information Bat gave him and dialed the number. Ninety seconds of fairly sharp conversation with secretarial interceptors brought him the voice of an executive named Benson.

“Ms. Benson, thank you for speaking to me. Let me make this very fast: I’m in the middle of a homicide investigation, and it just now looked like it had ties to the death of your former employee Bae Ga. The question is simple. I need to know what the nature of his employment was.”

“Bae? Bae was so brilliant. Bae wrote algorithms for us.” She had, Tallow thought, a voice like Lauren Bacall’s, all cigarettes and brandy, enough age to know the way of the world and enough youth to still be capable of disappointment in it. “He was the new generation. He spoke excellent English—he came from a port city, you know, very international in outlook—and he was so brilliant, so gifted. And such a relief to work with. Before him, we had to use Russian physicists for algo work. Lunatics, for the most part. Bae was going to bring us to the next level.”

“Are you talking about algorithmic trading?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone ever try to hire him away?”

“Everybody did.” She laughed. “Goldman Sachs, Vivicy, Blackrock, you name it. But he wouldn’t go. He was young enough to believe in loyalty, bless him.”

“You liked him.”

That laugh again. “I looked after him. I sometimes wondered what might have happened if I hadn’t opened the closet door for him, as it were. He was going to a party in one of those awful new buildings in Clinton that night, you know, to meet his new boyfriend. He was a lovely young man too, an architecture student. I encouraged Bae to get out of his wizard’s cave from time to time. I said, You found a lovely young man who wants to show off his brilliant boyfriend at parties, so go, go.”

She paused. When she spoke again, her voice was lower and harder. “And then. Shot like a dog.”

“One last thing. And this is just curiosity, but I’d like an answer. How did the loss of Mr. Ga affect your business?”

Ms. Benson laughed. “Andy Machen would be polishing my shoes if I still had Bae today, Detective. He was, and is, irreplaceable. You only luck into one mind like that in a generation.”

“Thank you for your time, Ms. Benson.”

“If you find anything—”

“If anything new comes up, I will of course call you.”

“Thank you. The business doesn’t matter, you see. We soldier on, you know. But I miss him. And he didn’t deserve what happened to him, not even a little bit.”

“Thank you, Ms. Benson.”

Tallow hung up and put the piece of cardboard into his bag before heading for the elevators and down to the map of a murderer’s room in the basement.

Assistant chief Allen Turkel was standing in the emulation.

Tallow ensured that he didn’t break step on seeing the man. “Sir,” he said with a nod, and proceeded to the table outside the emulation.

“Detective John Tallow. This is an impressive piece of work.”

“Thank you, sir. How can I help you?”

“I’m really not sure yet, Detective. I just wanted to see what you’d done down here, with this space you stole from my building.”

Turkel was smiling, creating the suggestion that he was just ribbing Tallow. Tallow was still geared up. He saw the wear on Turkel’s wedding ring. He was a man who took it off a lot. Not just to shower. It got slipped off and into pockets a lot. Turkel regularly paid someone quite a slice of money to cut his hair, and his teeth were fixed in preparation for a job in which he was in front of cameras and audiences often. His shoes were thrown from supple leather with a cultivated grain, a silver chain linked across the throat of each.

“Borrowed, sir. And I couldn’t live in the actual crime scene. It would’ve slowed down retrieval of the evidence even more.”

“Well, that’s evidence of you at least giving half a shit about department resources, Detective. Tell me: Do you ever think about promotion?”

Tallow just looked at the man.

“It’s just a question, Detective. Did you plan on staying a detective all your life?”

“In all honesty, sir, I don’t plan for a lot. But if you’re asking: No, I don’t really think about promotion.”

“I know cops like you,” said Turkel, lifting his chin and smiling with the warmth of a man who thinks he knows where the power in a room is. “I always thought there were three kinds of cops. Police like you, who think they’re born to the job they’ve got, and they’ll do it until it kills them or they walk away from it. And cops like your lieutenant, who want to be promoted because promotion is there, and they figure getting promoted is the job. Police like that, I have no real use for. Oh, your lieutenant’s a good manager, and I’ll make good use of her, but strictly speaking, she’s not here to be a good police officer. She’s here to be a good candidate for promotion.”

Turkel paused, and Tallow accepted the cue with false graciousness. “And the third kind? Sir?”

“The third kind are police like me. Police who need to be promoted because they see what the real job is. A street cop sometimes finds it hard to see it this way, Detective, but police like me are the real idealists in this job. We’re the people who actually have a vision of how the department can adapt and change and serve the city better. That’s why I wanted promotion. Want it still. Because I want to change and improve your life.”

“My life.”

“The lives of the police under my command. Which is you. But I also have a responsibility to the people of this city. They are, after all, paying us, in a roundabout way. And one day they may be paying us directly. So I have to manage resources. Like this one. What purpose is it serving?”

“It’s what the case is all about, sir,” Tallow said.

“I thought it was about a lot of unsolved homicides you reopened.”

“You really want to talk about this, sir? I mean, really talk about it?”

Turkel put a level gaze on Tallow. “Yes,” he said, after a moment.

“All right, then. It’s about the unsolved homicides, of course it is. To us. But to him, it’s about this room. The killings were the means to this end.”

“I don’t understand,” Turkel said. “The killings were the end. He just had to store the weapons afterward, so they weren’t found.”

“No, sir. This room is the point, for him. Let me…”

Tallow stepped into the emulation and looked at where Turkel was standing. “No. Stand over here. Face this wall. And then sit down.”

Turkel frowned at him. “I’ll stand.”

“All right.” Tallow stepped outside the whiteboard perimeter. “Focus on the middle of that wall.”

“…It’s a shape.”

“Yes, sir. Now pan across the room, heading left.” Tallow walked around the emulation, feeling like an animal pacing just outside the reach of campfire light.

“All the way around?”

“Yeah. You’ll see where to stop.”

“Christ. It’s patterned, somehow. It’s like the guns all flow together, almost. There are gaps, but…”

“That’s right, sir. There are gaps. Each of those gaps is a future kill.”

“Oh. Oh Christ. Oh Christ. It wraps onto the floor.”

“And there are more gaps, sir. And the great machinery of it all goes into all the other rooms, and around and back again.”

Turkel’s voice was very quiet. “What is it, Tallow?”

“It’s information, sir. It’s the work of a very methodical, very functional madman who is writing a book out of machines that kill people. It’s an information flow, it’s code, it’s pictograms, mathematics that mean nothing to anyone but him. The work of a serial killer in permanent totem phase, permanently energized, permanently in the moment and permanently laboring to complete his message to history. That’s what’s been set loose in Manhattan over these past twenty years, sir.”

Turkel looked like he was going to throw up.

“How long have you known Andrew Machen, sir?” Tallow said.

“More than twenty years now,” Turkel muttered abstractedly, eyes still tangled in the gunmetal belt of the room. “Why? What?”

“Would you say you’ve known Jason Westover for the same amount of time?”

“What?” Turkel came back to himself a little, and looked around for Tallow. Tallow was circling the emulation. Turkel could glimpse the detective only between gaps in the whiteboards.

“Why do you think Andrew Machen bought the building, sir?”

“What? Where are you? Why would he buy the building?”

“For his little wizards, sir. For his algorithmic traders to continue making invisible maps all over the 1st District and make their money from hiding.”

“You’re talking nonsense. Stand still, damn it. Why would Machen buy—”

“See, that’s what’s been bothering me, sir. But it occurred to me, just five minutes ago, that you’re all so busy making your invisible new maps of the city that…well, none of you can see the others’ maps.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Tallow?” Turkel was, Tallow thought, starting to sound a little unglued. The sound helped Tallow cancel out the internal susurrus of his own fear.

“Andrew Machen didn’t see the maps the killer draws on the city. He bought the building on Pearl according to the needs of his own maps, without a clue that his own hired murderer used that building to store all the guns he ever used. I like to think that it came as quite a shock.”

Tallow stepped into the emulation, behind Turkel. “It’s all maps, sir. This is a map. A map of a room.”

Turkel turned on Tallow, eyes juddering in their sockets, thinking as quickly as he could. “Are you saying Andy Machen hired this man to kill all those people? Are you really saying that? Where’s your evidence? Where’s anything to support that?”

“Are we still speaking honestly, sir?”

Turkel took a breath, straightened, and visibly found his courage. “Yes.”

“And no one can hear us.”

“That’s right, Tallow.”

“So you’d like to hear my sense of the case.”

“Fuck you, Tallow. You won’t be on the case long enough for it to make any difference.”

“All right, then,” Tallow said, walking around the assistant chief in a slow circle. “Twenty years ago, you were probably a patrolman, Jason Westover was probably fresh out of the army, and Andrew Machen was, I don’t know, selling old ladies’ gold fillings on the street. And you all knew each other. Maybe coincidental drinking buddies. Maybe childhood friends. Who knows? I’ll find out. And you were all young, and reasonably arrogant, and ambitious, and hungry, and a little bit greedy, and a little bit sick of how slowly things can happen even in the big city. And one night, one of you said, What if we could just kill all the assholes that are between us and the things we want? And each of you laughed, and had another beer. But the idea stuck, didn’t it? You couldn’t shake it off. And you—a policeman, a soldier, and a banker—couldn’t help but start talking about how such a thing could possibly be done. What happened next? Did one of you know a guy? Did you go looking for a guy? Someone you could somehow place total faith in. Someone you could pay to be so dedicated to the job that he would remain, here’s that word again, invisible in the city for as long as it took. And it always seemed to take longer than you’d thought, didn’t it? There was always someone else who needed to be helped out of the way of your constant advancement. And you knew the stats, didn’t you, sir? You knew how many unsolved homicides could be hidden inside the annual numbers. But what’s brought us to this place here today, sir, are the things you didn’t know. You didn’t know your man was keeping all the guns and hiding them in an apartment on Pearl Street. Jason Westover certainly didn’t know that the security devices whose disappearances he was turning a blind eye to were going to secure the door of that apartment. And Andrew Machen didn’t know he was actually buying the complete revelation of the entire scheme.”

Turkel convulsed and threw up.

As the man was down on his hands and knees emptying his guts, Tallow had to restrain a very strong urge to kick him in his heaving stomach. Instead, he stepped away from the stink.

Tallow had dropped at least three outright, extemporaneous inventions into his narrative, including the bit about Westover knowing about the security door on 3A. His instinct had told him that these three men were talking, regularly, and a little disinformation could work to his advantage in the long run. If he had a long run.

“What the fuck is going on in here?”

Turkel’s energetic puking had managed to blanket the sound of the elevator doors opening. Tallow knew the voice, and he knew the face he’d see. A woman’s face that had the constant appearance of having just taken a strong shot of Scotch whisky.

“First Deputy Commissioner,” Tallow said.

She was flanked by two plainclotheswomen, and she moved in quick little stamps of steps across the room and past Tallow.

“Not talking to you. Al, get the fuck up off the floor.”

“Food poisoning,” rasped Turkel, coming up on his haunches, rummaging for a tissue.

“Good. Maybe it’ll kill you so I won’t have to. What the fuck are you doing, Al?”

“Wanda—”

“I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re trying to fuck me out of my job. Don’t think I don’t know you, Al Turkel. I should grab the back of your head and fuck your eyes out right there on your knees. You want my four stars, you be a man and take them by fucking gunpoint.”

“Oh my God,” said the assistant chief, “what is happening.”

“What’s happening is you trying to bury the Pearl Street case in the same fucking week it opened, that’s what. Trying to bury it and get away with it, knowing full well that if the commissioner got hauled up by the mayor or God knows who over it, he wouldn’t shit down your neck, he’d shit down mine, because that’s what a first deputy is for. Queen Shitrag.”

“You’re insane, Wanda.”

“You want to know what’s insane? The captain of the 1st, a man with maybe one ounce of juice left, which he’s been saving to buy himself retirement with full benefits a couple years early, spending it today on this kid”—pointing at Tallow without looking at him and yet pinning him unerringly—“after he got the memo from your desk telling him to bury the fucking case.”

Tallow rocked a little on his heels.

“I don’t have to go to you to manage my borough, Wanda,” Turkel said, clambering shakily to his feet.

“Your borough. My city. What the fuck are you doing?”

“It’s insoluble. It’s just a waste of resources. I’m having all the evidence gathered, and CSU will continue to process it in a nonprioritized work stream until a solid background is developed.”

“Al, you fucking moron. Someone killed a cop with a gun stolen out of evidence that belonged to Son of fucking Sam. What do you think happens when that inevitably fucking leaks? Is it you that’s going to be asked questions? No. Some happy shithead is going to be training a camera on the commissioner just after he’s spent an hour fisting the mayor with handfuls of thousand-dollar bills—or whatever the hell it is the commissioner has to do to keep his job from week to week—training a camera on him and saying, Hey, I hear your department deep-sixed the case of the mass serial killer who stole another serial killer’s gun out of your storage depot and used it to kill a cop, which was just one among the two hundred or so homicides you managed not to notice were connected. Any comment?”

“Wanda,” Turkel said wearily, “aren’t you supposed to be on medication for days like this?”

“Fuck you. Your order’s been dissolved.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Can and did. I know you want my job, Al. I know you want the commissioner’s job one day too. And you’re very good. Your mistakes are few, and you’ve risen up through the ranks pretty quickly. But I’ll tell you this for free: You’re thinking like a manager. You think that at your level it’s still all about clearances and hiding the stats you can’t clear. That’s fine for CompStat and promotional reviews. But when you get to my level, Al Turkel, you need to see a bigger map. You’ll take the hit on your stats, or else you’ll be shot dead by the media and the politicians. And in this case, by every other cop in the department, who’ll ask what happens if they get inconveniently shot by a gun you don’t want to admit is out in the wild.”

She actually spit on the floor next to Turkel. Tallow began to understand why the first deputy always traveled with security.

“Fuck you,” she said to Turkel. “Be a police officer.”

She turned on her heel and walked back the way she had come, past Tallow. Looking at him as she approached, she said, “You’re John Tallow?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re an asshole,” she said as she stamped to the elevator.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Tallow kept his eyes on Turkel and listened to the first deputy leave. He counted off another minute in his head as Turkel cleaned himself up and pulled himself together, and then Tallow walked to the elevator himself.

Turkel said nothing as Tallow waited. After two minutes more, the elevator returned and the doors bumped and dragged open.

Tallow stepped inside. Turkel, not looking at him, spoke then, slowly and deliberately, with broken glass in his voice:

“I could have stopped this. You remember that, when you go home tonight. I could have stopped what happens next. But now I won’t.”

The doors closed with a jump and shudder. The electronics of the elevator car skipped out for a moment. For a few seconds, it all went dark in there.

Tallow spent fifteen minutes trying to scare up a janitor to clean the emulation, and when he did, he ended up having to bribe him with ten dollars.

“I don’t believe I have to bribe you to do your job,” Tallow said.

“And yet, here you are, paying me to do the job I already get paid for,” said the janitor, snatching the banknote from Tallow’s fingers. “The world of commerce is a mysterious and frightening thing, and not for the likes of you and me to ponder.”

“I could have just told you to damn well do it,” Tallow observed.

“Maybe you could have.” The janitor smiled, pocketing the ten. “I’m sure there’s some way you could have given the order that would have made me do it without your ending up ten bucks lighter. But we’ll never know, will we?”

Tallow’s eyes went glassy as he processed Turkel’s words. “That bastard,” he finally said, and moved.

His phone rang as he walked back to CSU. It was the lieutenant.

“It’s only a reprieve,” he said.

“What is?”

“The assistant chief’s order got rescinded. But all that means is tomorrow he’s going to release another order, one that’s phrased differently, probably through another channel, and that’ll be that. He’s probably working out how to do it right now.”

“Tallow, what the hell is going on over there?”

“I swear to God, I just watched the first deputy commissioner slap Assistant Chief Turkel around right in front of me.”

The lieutenant gave an explosive, surprised laugh. “Oh my God. Was she wearing those crazy flat hiking shoes?”

“She was. Walking around like she was stamping on ants.”

“I love her so much,” the lieutenant said. “I really hope she makes commissioner one day.”

“Turkel knows Machen,” Tallow said. “Machen, whose company is buying the Pearl Street building. Machen, who’s such good friends with Jason Westover that he introduced Westover to his wife. Machen, who tried to hire a Korean math wizard from another company and failed, shortly after which the Korean math wizard was found dead, killed by a Korean handgun.”

“For Christ’s sake, John,” the lieutenant said, “give me some goddamn evidence, not more conjecture.”

“Do you think I’m wrong?”

He heard her take a deep breath. “Not completely, no. But this is getting very big and very chaotic, very quickly, and you’re not helping matters by seeing connections everywhere. Bring me something that can be seen by the naked eye. Because if you’re right about one thing, John, then it’s probably that the assistant chief will find another way to sink the case. It’ll happen because you’ll let him. You won’t have anything concrete, and he’ll latch onto the one thing that looks to him like it can be cleared—”

“Ah, hell,” said Tallow. “And the first deputy handed it to him on a platter. She was yelling at him about the .44 Bulldog.”

“Get me something. Soon. Because the captain just started putting his desk shit in a box, John. He’s done, and just waiting to be told he’s done. He threw himself in the path of one bullet for us. Don’t let them fire another. Because I’m not taking it for you.”

“Understood. But you do get how big this has gotten, don’t you, Lieutenant? You do see how everything’s connected.”

“Don’t talk to me like that, John. Or my ultimate conclusion will be that you’re crazy and should have been on leave.”

“All right. All right. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” said Tallow, ending the call and knowing that might have been a lie. He knew in his bones that whatever he’d brought on himself, it would come that night. Considering that, with his phone in his hand, Tallow examined himself. It was a calm kind of fear he had, an emptiness in his chest and a flickering speed to his thoughts. He was still making sense to himself, though, and his hand wasn’t shaking. A useful kind of fear, then.

Tallow was held in amber for a moment by a sense-memory: He was maybe five or six years old, walking home from school. His mother was waiting on the other side of a road for him. He could see it. A T intersection, where he had to cross the road that was the vertical bar of the T. Spring. The evenings getting longer, and the promise they brought of staying up later and doing more things and using the hours of warm gold light for excitement and joy or even just soft extended times of togetherness with his parents. The promise never seemed to come true enough, but in spring the promise alone was enough to make his heart light. His mother was judging the traffic. She lifted her arms to him. It was safe for him to cross. She’d told him that morning that she was going to the store, and there would be ice cream for him at dinner tonight. He ran to her. When there was a good evening ahead, with the sky still light, it was like you stole a whole extra day from the world.

He tripped. Tallow remembered it exquisitely. He tripped in the middle of the road and came down flat on his chest. If his head hadn’t been so forward with the excitement of running to Mom and starting the evening, he probably would’ve torn his chin open or knocked his teeth out. Instead, he flopped down on his chest, palms smacking the blacktop, both knees hitting. He looked at his mother. His mother was looking at the VW camper van turning into the road. It was blue and white. He could pick the exact shade of blue off a color chart if one were shown to him right now. He could see the crawl of rust on the VW badge on the front of the van. A heavy woman was driving it; she had square-cut graying hair and a thick green sweater.

The fear was there, in his chest, that hollow horror of a sensation. His lungs were gone, vanished. His body told him there was no point in taking a breath because he had no lungs. His thoughts were a shaking procession, a praxinoscope of images and simple calculations and knowledge.

The camper van braked. Tallow’s mother stifled a scream and ran into the road to pick Tallow up. Tallow could move just fine, but his mother gathered him up and took him to the sidewalk, waving and shouting thanks to the smiling woman behind the wheel. Tallow looked at the driver, and she seemed more grateful than his mother. Tallow remembered her stroking her steering wheel, releasing a shudder of a breath. The relief of a woman who had not, after all, driven over a little boy on the way home. Tallow had thought about that, in bed at night, all week. The woman was thanking her van for being good enough to have stopped when she told it to.

Tallow thought about that, himself at five or six years old, staring up at the ceiling where his father had glued plastic stars made from some glow-in-the-dark material in the rough shape of constellations. And he also thought about having known that, either despite the fear or because of it, he could have gotten out of the way of the van. He would go to sleep smiling in absolute certainty that he could have pushed himself up and clear of the van.

He had not been properly scared in a long time, John Tallow hadn’t. Now he was, as vividly and coldly as he’d been that childhood day.

Tallow found Scarly and Bat’s cave. Bat was in it, typing on a laptop.

“Where’s Scarly?”

“Working the cigarette paper,” Bat said, only half engaged. “She doesn’t like me helping with that. The whole process makes me cough, and one time…well, we’d just had some shitty pizza, and I had stuff stuck in my teeth? And we were smoking something for prints, and I was coughing, and she was yelling at me, and I coughed, and this chunk of anchovy flew right out of my mouth and kind of right into hers.”

“So she doesn’t let you help.”

“Not so much. I’m working on trying to pull some DNA off the trim.”

“The quick method?”

“Not that quick,” Bat said. “But I can manage it through the computer from here. With the best will in the world and all the luck there is, we’re looking at at least an hour. And I have no luck and I work in the NYPD, you know?”

“Yeah,” Tallow said. “So, listen, could I borrow you for an hour?”

“What do you need?”

“You. And some of your stuff.”

“You sound like a man with a scheme, John.”

“We’re way past schemes and well into desperate-last-ditch-effort territory. Or maybe lying-in-a-road-as-a-van-drives-toward-you territory.”

“Well, okay. Let me talk to Scarly first?”

“About what?” Scarly said, appearing behind Tallow. Her eyes were bright and her breathing was fast and shallow.

“What did you do?” said Bat, and then, to Tallow, “I know that look. She’s done something. I know it.”

“You’re fucking right,” Scarly said. “I got a print.”

“Holy shit,” said Bat.

“It’s not a great print,” Scarly said quickly, “but it’s a print. And I think it’s good enough that if our guy’s been a previous customer of the NYPD, we should get a match. We got a fucking print, John. How the fuck did you even think of that?”

“What I’m thinking about right now is getting a print examiner in to confirm the latent if we get a match,” said Bat.

“Don’t piss on my parade, Bat. I got a print off a cigarette butt shoved in a potato chip bag. You should be paying me fucking obeisance right now and ordering me hookers.”

“We don’t need an examiner to sign off on it yet,” said Tallow. “Get the print matched. We’ll know the guy when we see him. I’m damned sure of that. I want to borrow Bat for an hour. We’ll be back. We’re going to lose the case tomorrow, Scarly, so we’ve only got tonight to develop something that looks like a theory backed with evidence. Are you up for that?”

“John, I’ve got a wife. I can’t keep staying out all night.”

“Hey. Scarly. What happened to five seconds ago when you got a fucking print?” Bat commented.

Scarly sagged and glowered at John from under a comically lowered brow. “All right. I admit it. We’re in too deep to stop now. But we’re gonna need to eat, and I need to make sure I’m not going to get my head flushed down the crapper by the wife. Let me make a call.”

“Make your call,” Tallow said. “The print’s being run now?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, good. Bat, I need some of your junk there.”

In the car, Bat said, “You’re just utterly fucking nuts if you think that’s going to achieve anything.”

“I am getting pretty tired of being told I’m crazy.”

“Well, get used to it. I mean, I don’t want to stick my nose all the way into your business, but were you like this before your partner died?”

“I thought Scarly was the autistic one with no social skills.”

“No, no, I’m not unaware of what I’m asking. I realize that’s going to still sting, you know? But it’s a reasonable question. Do you feel like you’re behaving differently than you would if you were working with your partner? Is there maybe just a possibility that…I don’t wanna say you’re traumatized or some I-need-a-hug bullshit, but…”

Tallow sighed. “You’re asking if my seeing Jim get killed has made me a little nuts?”

“Basically,” said Bat. “Only, you know, put more nicely than that.”

A uniformed policeman walked into the road, signaling for the oncoming traffic to stop. Beyond him, a paramedic rig was parked on the sidewalk. There was a man burning on the street corner. Kneeling, engulfed in flame, quite dead, very slowly collapsing in on himself.

A guano-speckled bowler hat, with turkey feathers in the hatband, blew across the street behind the uniformed cop.

Tallow heard a voice in his recent memory say I just asked her for a light.

“You’re asking if I’m a little nuts,” Tallow muttered under his breath.

“Yes, I am,” said Bat. “This plan is a crazy man’s plan.”

“And yet here you are.”

“Yes, I am. I didn’t say I didn’t like crazy-man plans. I’m saying it’s not going to achieve anything.”

“Look,” said Tallow, “can you do the thing I’m asking for or not?”

“Yes. In fact, it will be fun. I just think…ah, hell. Injun ninja, no chain of evidence, his history-fu is stronger than yours, it’s not solvable, et cetera and fucking so forth. We’ve said it to you half a dozen times.”

“History-fu,” Tallow said, slowly.

“You know what I mean. Although I question why history-fu stopped you dead and Injun ninja just blew by.”

Tallow took a deep breath. “All right,” he said, on the shaky exhale, “here’s the deal. My apartment building has three exits. Front, rear, and fire escape…”

The process took less than an hour, in the end. Bat got joyfully swept up in the execution of it and completed the work with a grinning hyperfocus that made Tallow wonder whether Scarly wasn’t the autistic one on the team after all. Bat was still vibrating with glee on the drive back to One PP.

“You enjoyed the crazy-man plan, then,” Tallow commented.

“Ha! That’s why I got into this line of work, man. That was the shit right there.”

“You became a cop because…you like building?”

Bat laughed again, wriggling in the passenger seat. “Nah. You want to know why I became a cop?”

“Sure.”

“Cop shows.”

“You’re kidding me,” said Tallow. He’d heard that line before and had never bought it. If you were dumb enough to think cop shows were like real police work, Tallow reasoned, then you’d never get into the force because you were required to manifest enough intelligence to dress yourself.

“Nope. The Tao of cop shows, man. All those cop shows I grew up with, especially those in the aughties, say the same thing. If you are smart enough, and your Science, with a capital S, is good enough, and if you refuse to give up and just keep using Science on the problem, it’ll crack and you can solve it. And the problem is always the same: the world has stopped making sense, and the cops have to use Science to force it to make sense. That’s the heart of every cop show. Give yourself to a cop show for an hour, and it’ll show you a breakdown in the ethical compact, and the process by which that breakdown occurred, and how it is fixed and made to never happen again. That’s why everyone loves them. They speak to our sense that everything’s fucked and then show you how to work to find out what really happened—simplify the world—and then deal with it. Because everybody knows that—listen, you ever cheated on a girlfriend?”

“Once,” Tallow said, for the hell of it, even though he hadn’t. Not least because the opportunity had never presented itself.

“Then you know. You break that part of the ethical compact, the basic rule that says You Don’t Do That, and it’s only hard once. When the sun doesn’t go out because you’ve been so evil…well, it’s easier the next time. And the next time. So everyone who watches a cop show knows that the bad guy ain’t going to do the bad thing just once. He has to be taken off the streets. That’s what I wanted to be. I loved the idea of being the guy who could take that guy off the streets using nothing but his brains and his hands. I’ll tell you a secret.” Bat smiled. “I don’t even tell people I’m a cop. I tell people I’m a CSU.”

“Same thing.”

“You know what? No offense, but I don’t want them to be the same thing. I’m a CSU. I solve things. I hunt and build and solve things with science. You know what a New York City cop does? Beats protesters. Rapes women.”

“Hey.”

“You can’t argue that, John. Remember that detective who raped that woman in the doorway of her apartment building in the Bronx? Remember what she said he said to her? ‘I’m not as bad as those other cops who raped that other girl.’ Remember how bad Occupy Wall Street got? Penning women up and then pepper-spraying them? Beating journalists with batons? Cracking the skull of a councilman? Dragging women out of wheelchairs? That’s what a New York City cop is. We’re not fucking heroes. So, yeah, I don’t tell people I’m a cop. I don’t like going out into the field. I like it on my floor of One PP, where we do science and just solve stuff without ever having to go outside and punch someone in the face for being in an inconvenient place and talking the shit that we so richly deserve—”

“You want to take a breath there, Bat?”

Bat didn’t even bother to fake a dutiful laugh. “You know why CSUs hate beat cops and detectives? Because you remind us of where we work.”

“Yeah,” said Tallow. “Hunting the Injun Ninja.”

That, Bat gave a little snorting laugh at, looking out of the window. “Hey,” he said. “Where are we?”

“Taking a little detour. I wanted to look at something.”

Bat peered around as if trying to track the random trajectories of a fly. “Is that Collect Pond Park over there? I thought it actually had a pond.”

“It’s been under construction for years,” Tallow said. “There was a little pond added recently, and then they drained it and now they’re re-excavating it or something.”

Collect Pond Park was a dismal flagstoned square, so gray that the stacked yellow-painted fencing from some construction phase or other actually brightened it.

“That,” said Tallow, “is Werpoes. A spring ran from Spring Street, through the stream that was dug out for the canal that Canal Street’s named for, into a pond that was eventually called the Collect Pond. By 1800 or so, the pond was just a poison pit, so they dug out the canal to drain it out. Then they filled it in, and then they stuck Canal Street on top of the canal. And all of that used to be Werpoes, the main Native American village in Lower Manhattan, on the shores of the pond. What’s left is, well, that. The pond basin, the remains of the dome houses of Werpoes, and any other sign that anyone was here before us are all well underground. Under that piece of park, and over there.”

Tallow pointed in the other direction, and Bat followed his finger.

“The Tombs,” Bat said.

“Yeah. The Manhattan Detention Complex is built over Werpoes and the Collect Pond. So’s the criminal court. The original Tombs complex was actually rotted out by the remains of the pond—the draining job was so bad that even when they in-filled the basin, the whole patch turned to marsh, and the damp crept up into the Tombs. So here’s what I’m wondering—”

“Why your brain started receiving an NPR program on massively uninteresting history?”

“I’m wondering why Jason Westover’s wife warned me not to go near Werpoes. Also, Bat, I’m going to remember that the next time you tell me my history-fu is much weak, because I did all the reading on this for that reason. The strong intimation was that our guy haunted Werpoes. But look around. The Tombs, the court, a park that a fat Chihuahua couldn’t hide in, office buildings…where’s a guy who stored his most prized possessions in a crumbling walk-up on Pearl Street going to live around here?”

“Lots of police too,” Bat commented.

“Including us,” said Tallow, pushing the car forward.

Scarly was in the office-cave she shared with Bat, lit by her computer monitor. “I made him,” she said, without looking up. Her expression was oddly blank, in a way that made Tallow’s stomach turn in some weird involuntary presage to fear.

Bat tumbled into the room, all flapping arms and nodding head. “You made him? You made who? Who’s been made?”

“Our guy,” she said flatly.

“I don’t believe it,” said Bat.

“Our guy became a customer of the NYPD right at the top of the introduction of DNA collection. His sheet’s in the database. I got a match. I made him.”

Bat looked over her shoulder at the screen and said something like “Shiiiiiiiiit.”

“John,” said Scarly, “you want to look at this.” It was spoken like a threat.

Tallow didn’t want to.

Tallow wanted to blow it off, tell them to get on with it, drive back into the 1st, get a coffee, and let the world go by. Not even watch the world go by. He remembered the days when the world was just a moving backdrop behind a stage occupied solely by himself, whatever comfortable chair he had found, and whatever thought or tune or paragraph it amused him to rotate in his head for the length of his shift. It seemed twenty years ago. He knew it was just last week, but he was unable to summon last week with any clarity. It seemed like an image of childhood summer—or, perhaps more apt, a photo of last week blurred and filtered and glazed by a digital application that stamped the patina of faded memory over it.

Tallow walked over and looked at the screen.

There was the man he met outside the apartment building on Pearl Street.

Twenty years younger, at least. Not quite so calm. Lean, but not quite as hard. Blood on his face. Not his blood.

There was a name on the screen. The name didn’t seem to matter.

Tallow realized he could hear his pulse. As he swallowed and closed his eyes, Scarly’s voice rose over the booming in his ears.

“…ex-soldier. The doctor who looked him over has a note on the sheet saying he was probably schizophrenic. There’s also a handwritten annotation on the scan of the paper. CTS?”

Tallow actually smiled. “You haven’t spent too much time in emergency rooms.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s ER medical slang. CTS means Crazier Than Shit.”

“Great.”

Tallow leaned in. His man had gotten pulled in on an assault charge, but the victim seemed to have somehow dematerialized. So all they had was a lunatic veteran wearing someone else’s blood and cluttering up a holding cell. Given the general state of overcrowding and the general sense that there were more important things in the world to give a shit about, a supplementary note was written indicating that the arresting officers were wrong and that it was very probably his own blood that CTS was wearing, and since there was no visible crime or victim, the individual in question should be processed and tossed onto the street.

“The notes just say former soldier,” Scarly said. “No idea if he was a vet or discharged before he was posted or what. Sloppy job. I’ll bet it was just one person who decided to process him out properly, because he had repeat client written all over him. Probably the same CSU who would’ve been made to scrape the blood off him. I’d really like to pull up his service records.”

“Can we do that from here?” Tallow asked.

“Probably,” said Scarly. “But not right now. We’ve got enough to think about, and getting that information would take hours, and we have places to be.” She shook herself all over, as if trying to awaken from a chill dream or trying to get cold rain off her skin. “Come on. Move.”

“Move where?” said Bat.

“To the car, Bat. John can follow in his. We’re going back to my place, where my wife is going to feed us.”

Tallow felt immediate revulsion at the idea. “I don’t want to impose.”

“John. This is a direct instruction. You are coming to our apartment and eating with us.”

“I can grab something—”

“John,” said Scarly, “I have been instructed. If I arrive without you, I will be punished. You don’t want me to be punished, do you?”

Tallow was about to respond when he saw Bat, standing behind Scarly, shaking his head in short fast motions, very much communicating the sense of No, John, no, don’t mention that thing I told you at the bar that is making you want to say But you like being punished, Scarly, don’t do it there will be consequences terrible consequences.

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Tallow said, backing up to the door.

“John. We’ve been working late, and we still have a lot to talk about. So Talia offered to make dinner. It’s not like we’re trying to induct you into a cult.”

“And,” Bat said, “we also have stuff to do tonight. Right, John?”

Scarly looked at Bat like he was a criminal. “Stuff? We have stuff to do yet?”

“John has a scheme,” said Bat, smug in the warm glow of knowing something Scarly didn’t.

Scarly stepped to John and screwed a surprisingly hard finger into Tallow’s chest. “So it’s settled. Bat rides with me. You follow us. Talia feeds you. And you tell me what you’re hiding from me.”

“I’m not hiding anything.”

“It is not acceptable that Bat has knowledge of something that I did not already know first. Or at least that I could convincingly claim to have once known and then forgotten because I am so much more important than him.” She was coming back to herself now. “Also I’m fairly sure he stole my Twine unit, and there’s a jar of—never mind. You explain later. We go now.”

“But—”

“There is no but. There is only go.”

Tallow wanted to crawl somewhere and make himself die. The idea of this dinner was entirely antithetical to his life as he’d constructed it. The idea crept out like a spider and set off an autonomic repulsion. He just didn’t want to be part of…

Tallow caught the thought in his head and made it pause before finishing. The thought went: I just don’t want to be part of people’s lives.

He had to turn that sentence around in his head, to view it from all angles and look for the traces that might suggest to him when it had formed into such concrete.

You’re just utterly fucking nuts, said Bat in Tallow’s memory. Tallow knew he wasn’t. He could study that statement dispassionately and know that he was not crazy and it was right and good to stay the hell out of people’s lives. He didn’t need to see what they had, and they didn’t need him hanging around. It occurred to him that he was never going to make anyone else understand this. He played people’s arguments and shot them all down with logical efficiency.

It took one long second more before it occurred to him that that was actually probably what a crazy person would do.

“All right,” said Tallow, “I’d like to meet your wife. Where are we headed?”

Tallow congratulated himself, very quietly, on having left all his options open. Perhaps he could just say hello and then leave. He told himself he wasn’t committed to dipping himself into their lives.

The worst of the traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge was over, and, in convoy, they had a relatively straight shot off the island.

So preoccupied was Tallow with the looming threat of meeting other people and the worrying insight that perhaps he was indeed utterly fucking nuts that it took at least five minutes for it to leak into his perception that he’d snapped the radio on by reflex.

Multiple assaults in the Bronx after the head of a local Catholic school, fired after being found with a one-terabyte external drive stuffed with child pornography, escaped jail time.

A clerk beaten to death in a sex store on Sunset Park; crosses daubed on the counter and windows in the dead man’s blood, approximately four hundred dollars’ worth of apparently fairly brutal German pornography stolen. Murder weapon presumed to be a fifteen-pound rubber dildo.

In Williamsburg, a seventeen-year-old boy found naked on the street and bleeding out from more than three hundred cuts.

Queens: Landlord hacked an elderly tenant to death with a machete and then attempted to cleanly kill himself. He was still conscious when the emergency services arrived, despite his having turned himself into what one wit called “a human Pez dispenser.”

Five gang members, all under eighteen years old, found stacked on a Watkins Street corner in Brownsville, in broad daylight, all dead, all castrated. Nobody saw anything.

Also in Brownsville, a sixteen-year-old girl slashed the throat of a thirteen-year-old girl, killing her within minutes. The sixteen-year-old had to be restrained from killing herself, since she claimed her intent had been only to scar the decedent in such a way that their mutual pimp would no longer be able to use her for high-end (twenty-dollars-plus) employment.

Man in Prospect Park found masturbating into the barrel of a nine-millimeter handgun. Upon being disturbed, he shot an Urban Park Ranger, a passing jogger, a dog walker, and a nanny before shooting himself through his open mouth up into his brain.

Some laughter over the crackling air: The Hell’s Kitchen building used by a small-time gun dealer who went by the name of Kutkha but was better known as one Antonin Anosov was currently on fire. Many detectives across the Five Boroughs had met Anosov over the years, and there was generally a fond contempt for him. He was one of the few genuine eccentrics the local crime scene had produced in recent times, and while no one would be caught saying he actually liked him, he was certainly appreciated by most of those who dealt with him. Therefore, there was a little flurry of jokes tossed around as to how his place of business had caught fire.

A few minutes later, there were reports of bodies at the site. A lot of bodies. The jokes turned to ash and blew down the radio waves and away. Smoke signals.