Gun Machine

“Doesn’t matter,” said Bat. “The guy might think he’s Geronimo or whatever, but he can’t escape the evidence of his own eyes a hundred percent of the time. The asshole’s too functional for that. Even the man who thought his wife was a hat knew where he was. Even if he’s as nuts as he can possibly be on this side of the functional line—and that’s, like, even if he spends six hours a day making little war bonnets for his own turds and sends them out into Central Park to attack Custer—then he’s still aware of being in the modern world and he’s going to study it in order to use it properly.”

A bicycle courier darted alongside the car, trying to get his nose on the best angle of attack for the Brooklyn Bridge. Tallow tapped his brakes to let the cyclist go on ahead. He didn’t acknowledge Tallow, but Tallow hadn’t really done it for him.

“He checks his modern history,” said Tallow, after thought, “but he doesn’t live it. I know my modern city history, but he lives in deep history. I didn’t see him, and he didn’t see me, because we’re moving through two different cities.”

“When did you have time to get high today?” said Scarly. “And also, why didn’t you smoke us out too? I thought you’d adopted us. Bastard.”

“He didn’t see you?” Bat said warily. “That means he did see you, right? You’ve seen the guy?”

“He thinks so,” said Scarly, quickly. “And we’re keeping that to ourselves.”

To curtail further conversation on that subject for the moment, Tallow snapped on the police radio. All at once, horror tumbled out of it.

A ten-year-old boy shot dead in the South Bronx. The related chatter said the three assailants had been trying to hit his father. The father had been pushing a stroller. The baby inside was dead, preserved and painted, with packs of heroin inside its gutted stomach.

An elderly couple in Queens found dead execution style in their own bed. Someone had stood on the bed and fired down into their heads as they slept. There was fresh semen spattered over the entry wounds. Their son was missing.

One man hacked to death with a sharp spade by his neighbor in Brooklyn, reportedly the conclusion of an argument over a borrowed barbecue grill. The victim had been fixing his car at the time of the attack.

A building worker pulled off a nurse in a barroom toilet in Hell’s Kitchen. The nurse might make it, said the responding cop, but the cop’s own partner might have lost an eye.

One cop down in Briarwood, following the explosive discovery that a small restaurant was holding weapons and at least a kilo of coke in the back. They were stepping on the coke right there in the kitchen and sending out wraps with their food deliveries.

“Fucking hell,” Scarly said.

The serial rapist that some wits were calling One Man One Jar had hit Park Slope again in the early morning. He completed his assaults by inserting a glass jar or bottle into the victim’s vagina and then breaking it. Tension in the voices of police: nobody saw anything, nobody knew anything, nobody gave a shit….

Someone had thrown a container of battery acid and ammonia in the face of a Port Authority cop, out by where Twelfth Avenue met Joe DiMaggio Highway. Attending officers were retching as they talked about how the man’s face had basically turned into warm string cheese and stuck to his own shoulders and chest.

According to eyewitnesses, a man attempted to rob a Chase bank on Fifth Avenue by East Twenty-Seventh, then declared that he was a “disintegrating angel,” went outside, shot a passing postal worker, pressed his gun into his own eye, loudly stated, “Disneyland was shitty too,” and pulled the trigger.

“Man had a point,” said Bat. “Sesame Street used to give me nightmares too. That thing that lived in the garbage can? I swear it was that that made me want to be police.”

Tallow studied Bat in the rearview mirror for additional signs of mental illness. “You’re kidding me.”

“The thing lived in a garbage can, ate shit, and verbally abused people. How many crimes do you want? Turn that goddamn thing off. It’s depressing.”

“I like it,” said Tallow. “You know, there was once a website that played ambient music under the LAPD radio band. I used to try that in the car, with a CD player. It was nice.”

“Are you even allowed to have CD players in units?” Scarly asked.

“Not really. It’s why my partner ripped it out. That and he didn’t like the music. I wouldn’t let him put a satellite radio in so he could listen to his retarded talk shows, so we called it even and just listened to the police band. Like I say, I got to like it. Flows of information.”

“Flows of shit,” muttered Bat. “I’d go insane, listening to that all day. It’s just a river of ‘Hey, this crazy disgusting thing just happened, and hey, here’s another one, and another, and another, has your brain caught fire yet?’ It’s like disaster porn or something.”