Gun Machine

Six

DRIVING BACK from Ericsson Place, Tallow started running the numbers. New York City took anything up to two hundred unsolved homicides a year. There were something under ten thousand unsolved homicides since 1985.

Of the three samples the lieutenant had told him about, the earliest associated homicide was 1999.

He didn’t know how many guns were at the site. Two hundred? More than two hundred. Tallow told himself to start with two hundred. In a space of more than a decade, losing two hundred kills in a volume of well over a thousand unsolved…

Tallow had had occasion to visit the Property Office, down in the Bronx, and wander the twilit halls of the subbasement where cold-case homicide evidence was stored in three-foot-tall brown barrels, four stacks high, with reference numbers sprayed on their sides in black paint. Tallow did not intend to live there with the grave goods of the unavenged dead of New York.

Tallow needed to plan.

Being in his apartment at this time of day felt wrong, as if he were in an alien time zone. He stood in front of the big soot-edged mirror in his small bathroom looking at himself and his suit. He took the suit off. Considered. Took off the gray tie, too, and the white shirt, and everything else, piling it under the sink unit with one foot. Tallow subjected himself to a scalding, painful shower, forcing himself under the burning spray and slapping flat palms on the walls to make himself stay there, braced and bunched up. Blasting everything out of him.

Tallow toweled off his stinging skin and went to his bedroom. Under the bed was a suitcase, and in the suitcase was a black suit. The suit he wore to funerals. In the living room, he found an olive shirt and a thin black tie. His old hip holster was in an Amazon.com box half stuffed with CDs (Charly Blues Masterworks issues that he’d forgotten he owned), two levels down in the stack of boxes that stood in the far corner of the room. Tallow put it on, pushed away the suit jacket with the back of his wrist, and slid the Glock into it. Lifted it half an inch and reseated it.

The suit accentuated the fact that his leanness was turning into gauntness the longer he plowed into the wrong side of thirty. He decided that he was okay with that.

Tallow went back out into the world in a funeral suit.