Gun Machine

“Look at these. Look at these photos. He’s arranged this shit. These are patterns. They mean something to him. Look at this one here, this sort of whorl of guns. The ones around it are finished shapes. This one doesn’t have a closed circle. You see that? There are still spaces to be filled. He wasn’t done. Look here: some of these shapes look like cogs. They look like they fit together. The whole fucking room is the trophy. A cross between a church and an engine. And now he’s going to start all over again. Because he has to. This is a life’s work.

“You know what I see when I look at you, Tallow? I see a cop who’s nine parts dead already. I see guys like you shuffle through here all the time. You stopped giving a shit about the job or yourself years ago. Look at you. Your fucking suit doesn’t even fit. And for all your big talk about the bad week you’re having, you’re not even angry. You’re just tired. Five bucks says your partner was carrying you, and ten says your boss laid this case on you because she didn’t want to waste two actual police on it. This case ain’t getting solved by you, and me and the Bat here are collateral fucking damage. You’re already dead, and this guy here? He just got reborn. So, yeah. Thanks a lot. You are not making our lives better. Use someone else’s house to pretend to work the case in, yeah?”

The room went icily, awkwardly quiet. Bat studied the ceiling. Tallow looked at Scarly. She looked at him right back. Neither of them broke the hard gaze for a full minute.

Tallow took out his phone then and checked the time.

“First,” Tallow said, “I want every photo from the scene blown up to one-to-one and matched to the floor plan. If you can score some spare whiteboards, or plasterboard or something, and have them moved downstairs to whatever large empty space you’ve got, that’d be great. I’m going out to the scene, and by eight I’m going to be at the Fetch on Fulton. Meet me there. I’m going to feed you and get you drunk, and you’re going to talk to me.”

“Why?” Scarly said, shaking her head as if she were suddenly disoriented.

“I guess I didn’t make myself clear,” Tallow said. “You two are my new partners. And we’re solving this case. Because you know what? The one crumb of comfort I have today is that when my boss told my partner’s wife he was dead, she also told him that I had killed the thing that did it. There are hundreds of people who got told that their loved ones were dead but never heard that we’d done a damn thing about it. So we’re solving this. Am I clear now?”

Scarly peered at him. “You don’t believe that for a second.”

“Does it matter?” said Tallow, and left.

A short drive got long, Tallow trying to find a clear shot through the tangle of traffic, aiming for the Brooklyn Bridge.

The police radio was on. Tallow let the city keep him company for as long as he could stand it. Guy in Stuyvesant Heights came home, found his tires slashed, walked to the bodega on the corner to find out if anyone saw it happen, got shot through the left eye. Nobody saw anything. The Upper East Side’s “serial groper” had struck again, kicking a twenty-five-year-old woman to the ground and grabbing her crotch before she managed to set off a rape alarm that scared the shit out of him. Lexington and East Seventy-Seventh, and somehow no one saw a thing. And a sudden burst of chatter about a beat cop in the Bronx who had just got pulled by IAB after reports of his whipping a kid’s face with his badge got out. The burst of chatter being cops who claimed to have been right there and hadn’t see a thing.

Tallow snapped the radio off, his mind wandering again to that gun: 1836. His interest in history was persistent but patchy. There just never seemed to be the time to delve into any one topic he was interested in, and he always ended up skimming it and moving on. But 1836. He wondered. Pearl Street had its name because it was once paved by crushed oyster shells—mother-of-pearl. Was it paved in pearly shells in 1836? He wondered if he wasn’t traveling the same route as whoever had brought that gun into Manhattan in 1836. There was a time when Pearl Street was the water’s edge, he knew.

The headlamps of passing cars in the gathering dusk took on the glow of slowed, smeared, time-loose ghost lights in his imagination. He shook the thought off.

Tallow pulled up a short distance, and on the opposite side of the street, from the house on Pearl Street, just in time to see the ECT pull away with their latest hoard from the gunmetal trove in 3A.