Gun Machine

“I met my husband there. Well, kind of. I met him through my boss. They were old friends. And after we were married, Jason said to me: Andy’s kind of an asshole to work for, and the business is doing pretty good now, so why don’t you work for yourself, like me? So now I’m an independent financial consultant, which means I can work from home with my dog and drive downtown for the good sandwiches instead of being one of Andy’s wizards. I don’t have to do the magic for him. But I can’t learn the magic I need to know. Fuck—”

Emily started beating the dash with her fists, screaming Fuck over and over again. Tallow cast around with his eyes, twisted the wheel of the unit, and managed to pull over without causing a pile-up. He reached across the seat and grabbed her wrists. She was still trying to punch the dash even in his grip. He yanked her arms toward himself and yelled, “Look at me!”

She jerked, and her eyes seemed to roll up into her head for a moment before they came back to his. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “Please don’t tell Jason. He worries so much.”

“I’ve already told him all he needs to know. Anything else is between you and him.”

“Yes,” Emily said, but Tallow had the feeling that she meant something else. She sat back, and sat still, dread on her face.

Tallow pulled the car back out into traffic.

“Did Native Americans fish? Here in Manhattan, I mean,” Tallow said.

Emily’s eyes were closed now. “Yes, of course. They caught oysters too. When the Dutch came, they found huge mounds of discarded oyster shells and crushed them to pave—”

“—Pearl Street,” Tallow said. “Right.” He had the sudden strident sense of vast nets around him, so fine that they were invisible until the light caught them. He took out his phone.

“Scarly?”

“Lunch delivery is fail, Tallow.”

“I know. I got into something, I’m going to be a little late. Listen. The paints. Every one of those guns was cleaned before it went up, but he must’ve put the paints on with his fingers. Before you do whatever it is to identify the paints, you’ve got to check them for DNA and anything else you can think of. Okay?”

“On it. Bring food.”

“On it.” Tallow killed the call with his thumb and checked Emily out of the corner of his eye to calculate her alertness. “Emily,” he said, “do you know what Native Americans used for paints?”

She kept her eyes closed. “Ocher. Red ocher, around here, I think. It’s mostly what you find on the East Coast. It’s a clay-based pigment. They used it for all kinds of things, including body painting and staining their hair. Some people say that some of the first Native Americans to meet Europeans were wearing it, and that that’s where Red Indian comes from.”

Tallow knew his history. Not deep history, but certainly city history. He knew there had been mines all over the area. Staten Island, contrary to popular belief, wasn’t built on landfill garbage. The Dutch had mines there early on. His mind was jumping around, looking for fingerholds.

“Anything else?” he said.

“Blue clay. Crushed clamshells for white. They’d sun-dry things, or burn them, to get the colors they wanted. Charcoal, obviously. Tree sap, berries. Why?” She opened her eyes and looked at him.

“Just keeping you talking,” said Tallow. “You had a shock, after all. Where’s your dog?”

“I have a dog walker for during the day. She took the dog out, I went for lunch. My husband walks the dog at night.”

Emily seemed to be sliding into a state of…he wouldn’t say emotionlessness, but certainly distance and apathy. Her voice came from somewhere deep inside her, somewhere dusty that was a long drive away from being present in the world. The same remote point that he had sometimes, in rare self-aware moments, heard his own voice coming from over the past few years.

The past two days had put Tallow back in the world. Two days ago, he would have pretended he wasn’t police in order to safely walk past shrieking Emily and get in the car with his lunch. In the time before two days ago, he did everything differently. Which was to say, he did as little as possible. Cases got taken care of because nothing was hard.

He was back in the world, thinking energetically, engaged with people, and, he realized with a cold empty feeling in his gut, it was this that was making the scattered fragments of this awful, career-ending case slowly push together. His gut got icier and sicker as he kept thinking.

“So who was the man,” Tallow said, quietly.

“What?” She was far away, and fear was suddenly spoiling the scenery out there.

“The homeless guy who scared you. Who did you think he was?”

“Nobody,” Emily whispered, and turned her face from him.

Tallow steered into the Aer Keep. The front gate was a concrete checkpoint that wasn’t shy about its Cold War look. Tallow showed his badge to the security guard there, noting that the woman was wearing the same Spearpoint insignia as the drones at Vivicy. The guard bent over and peered into his car. “Mrs. Westover,” she said, “is everything okay?”