Gun Machine

Five

TALLOW’S SLEEP was studded with unremarkable nightmares of a coppery shine. The cell phone on his bedside stack of books woke him.

The women in Tallow’s life had all informed him that he habitually awoke with a form of Tourette’s. For the first hour of the day, he was incapable of summoning reserve, patience, or social skills.

Tallow assaulted the cell phone and answered it with “The fuck what.”

“Come into the office.”

“Fucking mandated forty-fucking-eight fucking hours woke me the fuck up for.”

“CSU just got done with a sampling of your guns. I’m sorry, John, I know I told you forty-eight hours, but I need you in here now.”

“Fuck. All right. Yes. Shit. Give me an hour.”

“Thirty minutes. And be human when you get here. I’m cutting you a degree of slack right now, but I will take a big steaming shit all over your personal record if you talk to me like that again.”

“Yes. All right. Lieutenant goes away now. I wake up. Yes.”

“Thirty minutes, Detective.”

Thirty-five minutes later, he started to run the gauntlet of sympathizers at the front door of Homicide in the 1st Precinct building on Ericsson Place. It took him ten minutes of awkward handshakes and awkward words to get to the lieutenant’s office. Jim had been the popular one. No one really knew what to say to Tallow. But most of them tried. It was painful.

The lieutenant considered him sourly. “I said thirty minutes.”

She was wearing a suit he hadn’t seen before, in a cold slate-gray worsted.

“People kept stopping me. What’s wrong?”

“I could start with you pissing off some CSUs so badly that I had to go into debt to get them to hand the sampled guns off to the night shift so I had a prayer of getting ballistics today. But I won’t.”

Tallow slumped into the one chair on the other side of her desk without being asked. It was hard plastic and did not invite long stays in her office, which was why she put it there. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t just give me shit for that.”

“Don’t,” she snapped. “I’m not happy, John. Did you not detect that?”

“Sorry,” he lied.

“So. CSU ran a sampling of guns from the apartment on Pearl you aired out. Four of them. They came back two hours ago.”

She picked up a thin sheaf of clipped papers, went to read from the top one, and then threw it down on her desk again. “I do not believe the pallet of shit you have delivered to my door, John.”

“What’s wrong with the guns?”

“What’s wrong with them? They all killed people.”

Tallow thought he could detect the beach landing of a major headache at the back of his head. “Can you be clearer, Lieutenant?”

She snatched up the papers again. “Gun one: Bryco Model 38, .32-caliber. Anomalous striation due to deliberate interference with the barrel interior. Implicated in the homicide of Matteo Nardini, Lower East Side, 2002. That’s an unsolved homicide, by the way. Gun two: Lorcin .380 semiautomatic, extensively modified, test-firing matches the bullet dug out of Daniel Garvie, Avenue A, 1999. Unsolved. Gun three: Ruger nine-millimeter, scarred firing pin, Marc Arias, Williamsburg, 2007, unsolved. Would you like to use your imagination for the fourth one?”

“This was a random sampling of guns from the apartment, yes? CSU didn’t just lift a group from one location.”

“Random grab.”

Tallow stood up suddenly. Eyes unfocused, he walked around his chair, put his hands on the back of it, refocused on the lieutenant.

“That’s impossible.”

“No, John. What’s impossible is that yesterday you found something very odd that should have amused another department in this precinct for months on end. Yesterday, it was a curiosity and someone else’s problem.”

“Every single gun…”

“That’s right. On current evidence, you have reopened several hundred homicides and brought them all to my door.”

“Me?”

“Oh yes. You. This is on you, Detective Tallow. You knocked the hole in that wall and just had to stick your head in.”

“Oh, come on…”

“You broke it, you bought it. That’s the rule all over town.”

“You can’t.”

“You watch me. You found a room filled with guns, and every single one of those guns is going to prove to have been used to kill exactly one person. I’m assigning you to follow through on the ballistics and find out how these guns came to be in that room and find the owner or owners and hang every last one of these cases around their necks. Because I’m damned if I’m letting anyone hang them around mine.”

Tallow did not pick up the chair and throw it.

The lieutenant saw his fingers flex. “On top of that, the squad is stretched too thin as it is. And I just lost my best officer to an idiotic shooting incident that should never have happened. So you’re working this alone until further notice. Any questions?”

Tallow just looked at her.

“Good,” she said, offering him the paperwork. Her thumb and forefinger fidgeted on the edge of the sheaf, making it hiss as he reached for it. “Now go home and get changed and then start work, for God’s sake. There’s blood on your jacket.”

Tallow jerked, checked himself over like a leper. There was a dark speckling on his left sleeve. Particles of Jim Rosato on his left side. Jim Rosato was always on his left side. Jim never let him drive.

Tallow had still been awake less than an hour, but he found a way to swallow some words down and left the office very quickly.