Gun Machine

“How long have you been waiting outside the elevator?”

“Don’t judge me.”

“I really need to see your boss.”

“Why?” He waved the phone handset. “What could be more important than this?”

“Okay. How about you tell me who’s handling the Pearl Street cache?”

“Oh. That.” Tallow was fairly sure he hadn’t just admitted to sexually tampering with kittens, but you wouldn’t have known it from the look in the large CSU’s eyes. “You’re that guy.”

“I am in fact that guy.”

“I’d move into a hotel if I were you, guy. Don’t tell anyone which hotel. And buy armor.”

“I’m going to need body armor now?”

“Maybe like a suit of armor. And a human shield. You’re on Scarly’s shit list until you’re literally a fossil and the sun’s turned into a red giant.”

“Oh God. All right. Who’s Scarly and where do I find them?”

Down a dirt-smeared corridor lined with wooden doors to offices barely big enough to rate the term. Latex paint in some dismal government shade of green was peeling off every vertical surface he looked at. Tallow followed the raised voices coming from the open door at the end.

Scarly was a birdlike woman in her midtwenties in the process of yelling “Of course I don’t care if you’re bleeding! I’m fucking autistic!” at an ill-looking man with five years on her whose appearance wasn’t improved by the absence of a chunk of left ear. As she continued to berate the man, she scratched involuntarily at her forearm, exposed by a T-shirt she’d lost weight since buying. The forearm was wrapped in plastic that was fixed on by duct tape.

“You know what, Scarly?” the bleeding man said, flapping his arms. “There’s a letter in my apartment that says that if I’m found dead at work it’s going to be your fault and you probably did it deliberately.” He wore a lab coat that he’d dyed black, which gave him the look of a sickly, oil-covered seabird trying to take flight.

Tallow knocked on the doorjamb, scanning for a second what seemed to be the feculent office of a crazy hoarder who really enjoyed the scent of month-old used burger packaging.

Scarly rounded with an acid “What do you want?”

“It’s the police, Scarly,” the other man said, pressing a grimy towel to his ear. Tallow could smell the chemicals on the towel from the door and winced at the thought of that residue cocktail leaking into the man’s bloodstream. “They’ve come to take you the fuck away.”

“Of course it’s the police, you moron. We’re all police. We work in the police shop.”

“Detective John Tallow, 1st Precinct.”

“You,” said Scarly. “I hate you so much my dick is hard.”

The other rounded on Tallow too. “You. This is your fault.” He took the towel off his ear and turned his head to show it to Tallow, bobbing up and down. “You did this to me.”

Tallow sagged in the doorway. “How did I do that to you?”

“Because I had to test-fire some fucking archaeological handgun that Wilkes fucking Booth probably discarded as too old and rusty to kill Lincoln with, and the chamber jammed and the firing pin shot out of the back of the fucking gun and ripped off a chunk of my fucking ear! A handgun that you found. Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?”

Tallow just looked at him. Looked at him until the other man was silent and unsure. Tallow could feel the woman’s eyes on him, but he kept his gaze on the man with the ruined ear. And then Tallow said, quite quietly, “I don’t know. I was half deaf from gunfire in the field and wearing my partner’s brains on my face at the time. I am very sorry that I was not thinking of you. Now, I’m supposed to be on leave, because I saw my partner get his head blown off and I killed the man who did it. You should probably also be aware that I knew that man was dead before I took careful aim and shot him through the brain. But I’ve been ordered to conduct this investigation, without a partner. And it hasn’t been a cool day for me so far, and I am sick of threatening people and staring people down and trying to get people to behave like useful humans. So what I’m saying to you is that if I lose my temper, which I try very hard not to do but obviously I’m not having a great week, then whatever happens afterward will be explained away as the actions of an officer suffering from PTSD. I am really not available for any of the usual CSU bullshit. I understand my lieutenant has already begun to make amends to you for the situation. Therefore, while I am very sorry about your ear, I have to tell you that if anyone decides to make my life more difficult…”

Tallow took a breath, and smiled. “Well. I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you people. Your name’s Scarly?” he said, turning to the woman.

“Scarlatta,” she said.

“Hello. I’m John. And your name?”

“Bat.” On Tallow’s chill look: “Hey. Parents in the eighties. What’re you going to do?”

“Go back in time and kill them before they breed,” Scarly suggested.

“She’s not really autistic, by the way,” Bat said. “She just thinks people will bug her less if she says she is. And, um, we’re sorry about your partner.”