Gun Machine

The guard, to Tallow’s amazement, stepped to him. “It’s not. Just happens to be standing on a piece of it. And it’s my job to keep the laws in here. Pal.”

Tallow stopped walking. The guard took another step toward him. “Listen,” Tallow said, “you know what the difference between you and me is?”

“No difference,” said the guard, “except that in here it’s me telling you what the law is.”

“No,” said Tallow. “The difference is that sometimes you take off that shiny uniform with the Kevlar weave that some liar probably told you was bulletproof, and that great big gun that’s never been fired at anything but a paper target, and you dress like a regular guy and take your days off and go out in the world like you’re a normal person. Right? I’m a New York City police officer. I don’t live like a normal person. I don’t take days off. Ever. So when you see me in the street, the way you’ve been dreaming of doing for the last five minutes, you think about that. You have a good long think about that before you ever take one step closer to me.”

The guard took a step back.

“Enjoy the rest of your shift, sir,” said Tallow, and he got in his car and drove away, as slowly as he could. He would never understand why people wanted to hand him whatever shit was in their baggage.

Twenty-Four

TALLOW TURNED the corner into Bat and Scarly’s office to be greeted by a large plastic Japanese robot on the bench waving its arms and shouting “Say hello to my li’l frien’” in an electronically processed voice as a small plastic penis repeatedly jabbed out from its groin on a short metal piston.

Bat emerged from behind the thing. “Don’t judge me,” he said. “I got bored.”

“You don’t have enough to do?” said Tallow, laying the three sandwiches on the bench beside the robot, which turned out to be wired into a flat cream-colored box sitting behind it.

“Hey, you never know when the future might need a giant Fuck You Robot wired to a hot-rodded motion detector. Also we got search results back on that ridiculous fucking flintlock.”

“What did you get?”

“Did you bring food?”

“You hate food.”

“The death bag has a mind of its own. Give me the food.”

“It’s on the bench. Talk to me.”

“There’s a reason why I set Fuck You Robot up.”

“Talk to me or I will shoot you.”

“Victim, Philip Thomas Lyman, resident of Rochester, NY. Funnily enough, he ran a security company, called Varangian. Worked out well for him then. He died in Midtown while on a business trip.”

Tallow picked up one of the sandwiches and left the room, saying only “I’ll be downstairs.”

Tallow paced around the simulation, eating his sandwich without tasting it, studying the fake room from outside, testing structures in his mind. Foundations of fact, scaffolding of speculation. Swapping out rods and plates, reassembling what he knew and what he suspected in different configurations. He finished the sandwich and tossed the wrapper, walking to the table. He pulled a couple of leaves off the tobacco plant, tore them up until the pieces were too small for his fingers to manipulate, and dropped them in the mortar. Tallow smashed the pieces with the pestle, hurriedly, still thinking, wanting to get this done. The oils released by the leaves tickled his nose. The scent wasn’t right. He pushed the pieces out into the tin tray, tipped the tray, took his new lighter, and ignited them, waving and working the flame until the smashed green matter began to smoke.

He carried the tray over to the emulation and laid it down in the middle. The smoke rose. It climbed and twisted like a thin dark tree, and as it passed Tallow, he pushed curls of it up toward the ceiling with his fingertips, and he knew.

Tallow stood in the smoke, and inhaled it, and the scent was close to right, close to the dominant note he’d detected in the apartment on Pearl, and he slowly pivoted around and saw the guns wrapping around the room, forming shapes and partings for future shapes but wrapping, turning, revolving, and flowing around the apartment walls and over the floors.

Tallow knew that he’d met the man who’d fired all these guns.

“What are you doing, John?” asked Scarly. Again, he hadn’t heard the elevator, and it felt like a warning: Be in the world. Don’t get caught.

“Thinking,” he said. “What have you got?”

“The paint. Pain in the ass, you are. The white paint seems to be crushed clamshell and egg. Where the hell do you get clamshells to crush up for caveman paint?”

“Any dumpster on Mulberry Street. And it’s not caveman paint. Anything else?”

“Clay. Blackberry juice, for the purple. That kind of thing.”

“DNA?”

“I’m at least a day away from knowing that. And of course it’s caveman paint.”

“It’s Native American paint. Our man thinks he’s a Native American. Or wants to be a Native American.”

“How do you figure that?”

“All this. And more. And also I met him.”

Scarly stepped into the emulation. “What did you just say?”