Gun Machine

“That’ll be the Ruger Police Service. There were Luger works in it to make it a reliable nine. They did all kinds of odd variants for a while, trying to make government sales.” She stood up and looked at Tallow. “Ruger used to have this massive reputation because of the Ruger Super Blackhawk. They used to say it was a great gun for holding up trains, because you’d fire it at the train and it’d stop. Huge goddamn thing with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel, but really accurate and it didn’t break your fingers or wrist when you shot a .44 Magnum load. So it was, you know, a special gun for police by the makers of this immense fucking elephant gun that everyone’s heard of. That was the pitch.”

“So this guy was shot with a police sidearm?”

“One that was marketed to police anyway. Why?”

“Thinking about what we were talking about last night. Is it possible—even just for the sake of argument—that our guy really was matching his weapons to his kills in some sense?”

“Say it is,” said Scarly. “What have you got?”

“A petty thief killed with a junk gun that was probably stolen from its manufacturing plant.”

“Thin,” Scarly observed.

“I know. But now I want to know more about the victim of the Ruger.”

“We can do that here. You want to see downstairs first?”

“Sure. Um, probably a dumb question, but do you have smoke alarms down there?”

“Nothing that can’t be disabled,” said Bat, stirring. “But you probably won’t be able to sneak a cigarette down there without someone noticing.”

Tallow hefted the plant. “No. I want to crush some of these leaves and then try burning them.”

Bat looked at it and admired Tallow’s apparent loss of sanity. “Cool. You bought another lighter then, huh?”

“Oh shit,” said Tallow, who hadn’t.

Bat laughed. “Jesus, John. We can’t let you out of our sight, can we? Relax. This is CSU. We have plenty of things that burn shit. Hell, we don’t have much here that doesn’t burn shit.”

Scarly snorted. “That’s true. Last month a computer power brick caught fire and set light to Brendan Foley’s legs.”

“And that microwave oven that went up at Christmas.”

Scarly dismissed it with a disgusted wave of her hand. “Fucking Einar rolling in drunk for the eighteenth time with his ‘I hate all your ice-cold American drinks, I come from a very cold country and do not wish to pour more ice in my body.’ You heard what they did to his head?”

“What?”

“Well, the skin grafts took, but, you know, he basically made napalm, so there wasn’t much left under it. So they injected him with this weird sort of facial caulking that swells and firms up under UV light and essentially kind of re-inflated his head. It was cool.”

“Oh! And the old still exploded last summer!”

“Right! Did you see Foley’s legs the other day when he was doing that fucked-up pantsless lap of victory around the main labs? Legs like a dead giraffe.”

“Downstairs?” said Tallow, with just a little pleading in his voice.

Downstairs was cavernous: bare and stained cement, gray pillars holding up a blackened ceiling that had broken-down flotillas of fluorescent light tubes sailing across it in lazy waves. Walking in from the elevator, Tallow saw an arrangement of wheeled whiteboards, and great blankets of clear plastic sheeting on the floor. Getting closer, he could make out big glossy photos under the sheeting and tacked to the whiteboards.

“Oh my God,” said Tallow.

“Yeah,” said Scarly. “We got into work early. Not that he was much use. We rounded up some help and got it done.”

The CSUs had run off copies of all the photos, in a rough ratio of one to one, and arranged them on the floor and on the whiteboards according to the evidentiary floor plans. The plastic sheeting had been rolled out over the photos on the floor so he could walk over them. It was as close as could be gotten to a copy of the whole of apartment 3A, with the whiteboards standing in for walls and partitions.

There was a table over to one side, with papers scattered on it. Tallow set his iced coffee and his potted plant down there, turned, and surveyed the space. Scarly deposited next to that the things she’d brought from upstairs, excavated out of their office. An old mortar and pestle, a foil tray that’d had fossil grains of rice pilaf wiped out of it with a wet nap that was itself not young, and a small chef’s blowtorch. Tallow was learning not to ask certain kinds of question about the way the CSUs operated.