Gun Machine

Tallow drove with the unit’s radio on. He would rather have driven with music, but he’d learned to appreciate police-band chatter as its own kind of sound structure. So he rolled with the waves and eddies of crime and its management as he drove. Officer down in the Bronx, off duty and unluckily walked into a robbery at an auto body shop; reports that when the officer took one and fell, a school safety agent snatched up his dropped gun and returned fire. Mother and daughter found stabbed to death in Sheepshead Bay, reporting officer commenting that they were so holed and smashed that they looked like ragged wet blankets. The body of a missing Bronx man found in the trunk of a stolen car abandoned in Long Island; the detectives who had been looking for him in order to hang an attempted murder around his neck had some choice comments, quickly drowned out by responders to a Midtown location where a guy had apparently doused his pregnant ex-girlfriend in gasoline and set her alight when she didn’t give him whatever he had wanted.

Because it’s all about what other people want, Tallow thought as he threaded his way through Manhattan and its bodies.

He was in the late West Fifties when traffic slowed to a crawl. As he edged the car along, he saw a heavy woman with gray hair dyed an unconvincing black kneeling in front of one of the sickly trees planted in the sidewalk. Her shins, in faded woolen socks, were resting on the short wrought-iron fencing that framed the square of dirt the tree was struggling to live in. There was something silvery sticking out of the back of her neck. Paramedics and cops were standing around her, clearly so wrapped up in the problem of her that they weren’t bothering with the little crowd of gawkers grabbing cell phone shots. Tallow realized that the slim shaft of metal had gone right through the back of the woman’s neck and out through her throat, pinning her to the slender tree trunk.

Ahead of him, the traffic broke, revealing the paramedics’ rig parked beside a fat Chrysler Town & Country with one wheel on the curb, and a bike and its rider under it. The back wheel of the bike looked like it’d burst, the tire shredded and the rim hanging open like a dented letter C. The rider was in a couple of pieces. Lime Lycra smeared in meat.

Tallow realized that several of the bike wheel spokes were missing. He counted a few of them scattered back across the sidewalk. He knew where the last one was. Some freak of torsion must’ve flung it through her neck like a loosed arrow.

He considered badging a uniform or a paramedic to get the whole story but in the next second decided he didn’t need it. He drove around the scene and away from a dead woman praying to a tree in New York City.

West 145th in the 500s was far enough away that by the time he finally reached it, Tallow had tension pains locked across his upper back, and posture pain rammed into his lower back. He clambered out of the parked unit like a dying crab. When he tried to straighten up, important-sounding bones crunched frighteningly inside him.

He took a deep breath and got a noseful of sun-warmed dog shit for his trouble.

The landlord’s office was a sliver of closet slipped between a firetrap overstating itself as a hotel and a CARIB & SOUL FOOD vendor with a frontage painted in the shade of green that reminded Tallow of hospitals. There was a rangy kid of sixteen or so in a retro Knicks shirt standing in the narrow doorway smoking a blunt. He had a deep, laid-open scar running down from the corner of his mouth to somewhere under his chin. On profile, it made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. A switchblade handle was outlined in his pants pocket. Chocolate and mint hung on the weed smoke drifting his way from the blunt. Tallow took another look at the kid and shaved a year or two off his age.

“You a cop,” said the kid without looking at him.

For far from the first time, Tallow wondered why this kind of conversation ever had to happen. He would have thought that of all the items of information that got passed from generation to generation or peer to peer, the unfortunate results of idly screwing around with a cop to feel tough would be among the first and would not be forgotten.

“Is that a problem?”

“Not if you going someplace else.”

Tallow heard giggling from inside. The kid had an audience. Tallow wasn’t sure if he was really in the mood for this. He preferred to be easy about these things. Jim Rosato would’ve put the kid’s head into a wall without thinking twice.

Tallow took a few easy steps toward the door. The kid, still not looking at him, moved to block the door, puffing on his blunt. Chocolate and mint. Kids’ flavors.

“You going someplace else.”