Gun Machine (21 page)

“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.”