Gun Machine

“The notes just say former soldier,” Scarly said. “No idea if he was a vet or discharged before he was posted or what. Sloppy job. I’ll bet it was just one person who decided to process him out properly, because he had repeat client written all over him. Probably the same CSU who would’ve been made to scrape the blood off him. I’d really like to pull up his service records.”

“Can we do that from here?” Tallow asked.

“Probably,” said Scarly. “But not right now. We’ve got enough to think about, and getting that information would take hours, and we have places to be.” She shook herself all over, as if trying to awaken from a chill dream or trying to get cold rain off her skin. “Come on. Move.”

“Move where?” said Bat.

“To the car, Bat. John can follow in his. We’re going back to my place, where my wife is going to feed us.”

Tallow felt immediate revulsion at the idea. “I don’t want to impose.”

“John. This is a direct instruction. You are coming to our apartment and eating with us.”

“I can grab something—”

“John,” said Scarly, “I have been instructed. If I arrive without you, I will be punished. You don’t want me to be punished, do you?”

Tallow was about to respond when he saw Bat, standing behind Scarly, shaking his head in short fast motions, very much communicating the sense of No, John, no, don’t mention that thing I told you at the bar that is making you want to say But you like being punished, Scarly, don’t do it there will be consequences terrible consequences.

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Tallow said, backing up to the door.

“John. We’ve been working late, and we still have a lot to talk about. So Talia offered to make dinner. It’s not like we’re trying to induct you into a cult.”

“And,” Bat said, “we also have stuff to do tonight. Right, John?”

Scarly looked at Bat like he was a criminal. “Stuff? We have stuff to do yet?”

“John has a scheme,” said Bat, smug in the warm glow of knowing something Scarly didn’t.

Scarly stepped to John and screwed a surprisingly hard finger into Tallow’s chest. “So it’s settled. Bat rides with me. You follow us. Talia feeds you. And you tell me what you’re hiding from me.”

“I’m not hiding anything.”

“It is not acceptable that Bat has knowledge of something that I did not already know first. Or at least that I could convincingly claim to have once known and then forgotten because I am so much more important than him.” She was coming back to herself now. “Also I’m fairly sure he stole my Twine unit, and there’s a jar of—never mind. You explain later. We go now.”

“But—”

“There is no but. There is only go.”

Tallow wanted to crawl somewhere and make himself die. The idea of this dinner was entirely antithetical to his life as he’d constructed it. The idea crept out like a spider and set off an autonomic repulsion. He just didn’t want to be part of…

Tallow caught the thought in his head and made it pause before finishing. The thought went: I just don’t want to be part of people’s lives.

He had to turn that sentence around in his head, to view it from all angles and look for the traces that might suggest to him when it had formed into such concrete.

You’re just utterly fucking nuts, said Bat in Tallow’s memory. Tallow knew he wasn’t. He could study that statement dispassionately and know that he was not crazy and it was right and good to stay the hell out of people’s lives. He didn’t need to see what they had, and they didn’t need him hanging around. It occurred to him that he was never going to make anyone else understand this. He played people’s arguments and shot them all down with logical efficiency.

It took one long second more before it occurred to him that that was actually probably what a crazy person would do.

“All right,” said Tallow, “I’d like to meet your wife. Where are we headed?”

Tallow congratulated himself, very quietly, on having left all his options open. Perhaps he could just say hello and then leave. He told himself he wasn’t committed to dipping himself into their lives.

The worst of the traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge was over, and, in convoy, they had a relatively straight shot off the island.

So preoccupied was Tallow with the looming threat of meeting other people and the worrying insight that perhaps he was indeed utterly fucking nuts that it took at least five minutes for it to leak into his perception that he’d snapped the radio on by reflex.

Multiple assaults in the Bronx after the head of a local Catholic school, fired after being found with a one-terabyte external drive stuffed with child pornography, escaped jail time.