Gun Machine

She bit her cheek, turning the pot around in her soil-streaked hands. Her nails were longer and stronger than he would have expected for someone in her job. “Well. It’s a cultivar, like I said, and some people think it has a couple of other tobacco plants mixed up in it. But sure, something pretty much like it would have grown around here. The woman’s tobacco would have been local too. You would have found it on the slopes headed down toward where Pearl Street and Water Street are now, back in the days before the natives sold the place to the Dutch.”

Tallow made a decision. “I’d like to buy this, um, this one with the flowers here.”

“Nicotiana tabacum.”

“Yeah.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t do cop discounts. And women really do prefer roses.”

“I’m sure they do. But I think the person I’m looking for prefers Nicotiana tabacum. And I don’t take cop discounts.”

Which was a damned lie, because in the past couple of years he’d done it a lot, and he knew it, and she knew it just from the look in his eye, but Tallow paid full price for the pot and a bag of plant-food sachets, and was happy to do it. He thanked her and left, dodging another weight-lifting display as he went.

Tallow’s next stop was the coffee shop, where he purchased a cardboard tray of six of the morning specialty, an iced coffee, in the grotesque venti-plus, that was made with nothing but too many shots of espresso and seriously chilled cream. The half a dozen drinks came in milkily translucent corn-plastic containers stamped with a cartoon of a naked man plugging himself into main electricity through his genitals and leaping into the air with the joy of voltage. Tallow made a pit in the backseat of the car and placed the tray in it. The tobacco plant sat in the foot well of the passenger seat. It wasn’t yet eight a.m. So far, Tallow had remembered everything except food. He figured he could survive until lunch and pointed the car at One PP.

Tallow walked into Bat and Scarly’s office to find Bat slumped on a chair with his head on the workbench, turned away from the door, while Scarly softly sharpened an old straight razor on a worn strop, watching her partner intently.

“I don’t think he needs his eyebrows, do you? I mean, they don’t serve an immediate function or anything,” she whispered.

“I am not asleep.” Bat moaned. “I am merely resting my brain. And if you come near me with that thing I will shave your face off your skull with it. Or possibly just puke in your eyes.”

Tallow laid his laptop bag against his chair, unloaded the plant on the floor next to it, and put the tray of cold coffee on the bench next to Bat’s head. “Do you have space in your fridge for half of these?”

Bat’s head rose slowly on his skinny neck ,like a sedated hen’s. He turned his head at a mechanical crawl, scanning the immediate area, until his eyes detected the coffee.

“Oh my God,” Bat prayed. “I love you. I would let you have sex on me and everything. But I am very tired and would prefer not to have to move.”

Scarly killed a cup lid with feral fingers and chugged a third of a container. Her eyes flexed weirdly in their sockets. “Oh, that’s the stuff,” she said. “That is really the stuff.”

Bat was weakly pawing at the lid of the cup nearest him. Tallow reached over and took it off for him, abstractedly wondering if this was what fatherhood felt like. Bat sipped from it like a sickly Dickensian child. Tallow half expected him to whimper “God bless us, every one.”

“Fuck me,” Bat gasped. “It’s like an angel shat ice cream–coffee rainbows in my mouth.”

“Little bit,” said Tallow as the momentary illusion of parenthood atomized. He opened his own cup and drank. “Did we get anything back on that Bulldog yet?”

“Nope,” said Scarly, bent over and putting three of the cups inside a small fridge that had been hidden by the general crap in the office. “Couple of hours.”

“Okay. Listen,” Tallow said, reaching down and pulling the lieutenant’s papers from his bag, “what do you know about Ruger nine-millimeters?”

“Place the papers where I may see them,” said Bat. “I do not wish to burn precious caffeine molecules by moving.”

Tallow did as he was told. Bat leaned his head over the paper, trying to get gravity to aid him in keeping his eyes open and working.

“Ruger nine. Scarly, what don’t I know about a Ruger nine with a circular lock on the shell casing’s ass?”