Gun Machine

Bat poured a little of his drink over the napkin. The numbers smeared like dark tributaries in scabland.

“Fuck you!” Scarly yelled.

“Keep it down,” said Tallow. “I may want to come back here again.”

Scarly made a deflating sound, scrunched up the napkin, and tossed it accurately into the nearby metal bucket. “Doesn’t matter where I get my appetite from so long as I eat at home. You didn’t answer my question.”

“Hm?”

“What kind of history do you like?”

“Oh, lots of different stuff. I like New York history. City history. Yesterday, when all this started, I told my partner we shouldn’t respond to the call because he had bad knees and it was the last of the old walk-up apartment buildings on Pearl.”

Tallow sipped his beer, knowing that he probably shouldn’t have ordered it since he intended to drive home. “And I know that Pearl Street was called Pearl Street because the first paving used on the road was crushed oyster shells. Mother-of-pearl. The Dutch called it that, I think. Hold on a second.”

Tallow leaned to the side and saw that his wi-fi pod was still working. The tablet was still on the table. He poked it out of sleep mode and pulled up another search engine page. “That flintlock. From 1836, you said.”

Bat nodded assent.

Tallow pecked in the words Rochester NY Murder 1836. It threw up nothing of interest aside from someone’s thesis on “crime and deviance in early Rochester.”

“It was made in 1836,” said Bat, leaning over and reading upside down. “Doesn’t mean it was used in 1836.”

Tallow replaced 1836 with 1837 and ran the search again, wondering. “It’s just tickling something at the back of my head,” he explained. “Something I read, somewhere…”

Bat laughed. “Would that be your car parked across the street? With the library landfill in the back?”

“Yeah,” said Tallow, and stopped. Five results down: The first murder victim in the city of Rochester, NY.

He read it aloud to Bat and Scarly.

“Seriously?” said Bat.

Tallow skimmed the text. “‘In the case of William Lyman, murdered October twentieth, 1837, by one Octavius Barron…with a pistol he stole from the premises of a Mr. Passage, a local baker.’”

Scarly grunted. Her beer seemed to be evaporating alarmingly quickly. “Makes sense. A baker would be fairly well-to-do. You know what that mark on the gun could be? A militia badge. I can see him spending the extra couple of dollars to get it engraved.”

Tallow kept reading. “‘Barron first claimed to have been asleep at home when the murder was committed, but his own mother told the authorities that he was lying.’ Nice. Ah. Listen to this. ‘In his confession, Barron explained that he’d had to beat a homemade bullet into shape and hammer it into the muzzle of the gun.’”

“The fucked-up muzzle,” said Bat, and then thought better of showing interest and threw his hands up. “No. Not buying into this.”

“Go on,” said Scarly, intent.

“Hm. Told a priest he didn’t do it, his accomplices had, and that’s why he wasn’t found with the pistol or the dead man’s pocketbook. The pistol was in fact never found. And this report does expressly call it a pistol. The assumption seems to be that Barron tossed it in the river.”

“I bet you it was found and quietly passed back to Mr. Passage, who probably put it in a trunk for the day the British came back. He was in the militia, and he was a baker, so he knew everyone.” Scarly grinned. “This is good. But would it be the river? It’d be the bay, right? I bet there’d be a Rochester naval militia.”

“Unless they meant the Erie Canal to the Hudson. That might have been open by then.”

Bat, exasperated, waved his hands between them. “Hello? Are you really saying that this gun we found was the mysteeeeeerious lost gun that killed the first murder victim in Rochester? Guys, the guns we’ve processed so far have been married to kills in Manhattan. If you’re looking for connections, then you’re saying that he took his show on the road and we’re going to turn up guns applying to homicides all over the place.”

“Not necessarily,” mumbled Tallow, going through the text on his tablet screen for more information. “Maybe it means he committed a homicide in Manhattan that had connections to Rochester.” He looked up at Scarly. “You know what that might mean about your .44.”

“What?” said Scarly, before her brain caught up to what he meant. She laughed. “Nah. Can’t be.”

“Can’t be what?” said Bat, irritated that he wasn’t keeping up with the increasing altitude of what he had determined was an idiot flight of fantasy.

“Can’t be Son of Sam’s actual gun,” Scarly said, sipping stout.

Bat sat back. “Christ. Of course it can’t. Because—”

“Because,” said Tallow quietly, “Son of Sam’s gun would be in an evidence storage barrel in the Bronx, right?”

“Oh,” Scarly breathed, eyes widening. “Oh. That’s…that’s interesting.”