Gun Machine (5 page)

Tallow stood. “If I find out, I’ll let you know, sir. Thank you for your time.”

Machen rose again, offered his hand again. “And you’ll stay in touch about the building?”

“Of course. Once we’re done with it.”

Tallow felt a little tremble travel down Machen’s arm, through Machen’s hand, and into his own. “Perhaps,” Machen said, “more frequent updates?”

Tallow smiled and broke the grip. “I’ll do what I can.”

Tallow left the office before Machen could say anything more.

Outside, he whispered to the personal assistant, “You’re going to be fine.”

She beamed at him with relief, a stunning blaze of a smile.

Tallow left.

In the elevator, he reviewed the last minute of the interview. Machen had played the part of a charming, empathetic, understandably reticent but ultimately fair man reasonably well.

Except that if Machen knew Bobby Tagg was dead, then he also knew that Jim Rosato was dead. While Machen would have no reason to know that Tallow had killed Tagg and that Rosato was Tallow’s partner…why, if you were playing nice guy, would you not take the chance to commiserate with a policeman about his dead colleague? That rang wrong.

Why was Machen shaking? He had put down his cell phone, presumably his personal phone, when he stood up. What had just been said to him?

Perhaps he was in fact keeping his distance from the deal. He’d assigned it to underlings to complete. That would make sense, Tallow supposed. Perhaps he’d literally just heard about what happened. Perhaps it’d taken a day for the information to ping from the bottom to the top of Vivicy. Light-propagation delay.

TALLOW KNEW
he could expect a phone call from the lieutenant before the end of the day. He had to show that he had at least covered the basic underpinnings of the investigation, such as ensuring the crime scene wasn’t demolished tomorrow. To be replaced, Tallow now sourly dreamed, by some shimmering half-real wizard’s castle.

Covering the bases meant driving out of the 1st again, to One Police Plaza.

Crime Scene Unit was still, against all logic, located at One PP. Yet it covered the whole of Manhattan. Some of its responsibilities had been delegated to Evidence Collection Teams, one of which he knew had been working at Pearl Street today. But the heavy lifting of forensics was all at One PP. An overworked, under-resourced, and, in Tallow’s opinion (back when he’d cared to voice one), under-vetted department. How anyone had thought problems with CSU and chain of evidence would be solved by creating ECTs was beyond him. They just added more links to the chain and were staffed mostly by people who were both under trained and virulently pissed off with their lives.

CSUs, by contrast, tended to be simply insane. Cops still talked about the CSU supervisor who had sort of accidentally opened fire on his staff during a demonstration, and there was the legendary CSU from twenty years ago who was famous for telling any people who asked how to effectively and untraceably dispose of a body, in return for the price of a bottle of Smirnoff and/or a go on their wives. CSUs were hated, and they hated in return. Their hate was corrosive and shameless. They had simply “lost” the evidence on the shooting of four officers a few years back, and they dared anyone to do anything about it. There was a lot of political noise, denouncements, and public apologies, but in the end, every CSU who had been at One PP before it happened was still there afterward.

Tallow was nervously aware that his name was on the worst cold-case dump CSU had ever seen. He was not looking forward to having them look at him and judge by eye exactly how much his organs might be worth on the black market.

He realized he was standing by his car staring into space and lifting and reseating his Glock in its holster. Tallow scowled at himself and got into the car. And then got out again and got into the driver’s seat, even angrier with himself.

One Police Plaza was in the orbit of Pearl Street. Pearl Street left the 1st Precinct and curled around One PP before heading for the Brooklyn Bridge and then on to the tip of the island. A brown, Brutalist block of a thing that still looked like it’d been helicoptered in by an occupying force to act as a base for some provisional authority. The tangle of fencing, checkpoints, ramps, and bars around it did nothing to dispel the illusion. Invading long-lost cousins in blue, here to force civilization on their barbarous island relatives from behind their monolith perimeter.

But they’d been here too long, and the invaders in their original Brutalist ship had seen some of their number go native. Whenever he went to One PP, Tallow had the notion that everyone there could tell from his spoor that he was a regular police from the 1st; that people weighed him by look and judged that he was not the sort of Major Case guy they make TV shows about. Somewhere else that Tallow didn’t belong.

He found an elevator and descended into the dungeons of the castle of his distant tribesmen.

The elevator doors opened to reveal a very large man brandishing a bloodstained antique phone receiver in a plastic bag and proclaiming “I found this up him!”

“You know,” said Tallow, “I really have no response to that.”

The very large man’s face fell. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”

“I figured. Where can I find your boss?”

“I thought you were her.”

Tallow had to ask. “You found that up someone’s…?”

“The body’s seventy-eight years old and thin as a whip. You wouldn’t have thought it’d even fit up there without dislodging his heart.” The very large man looked at the phone with a new thought. “Although I guess that would have killed him quicker.”

“Listen, I need to see your boss.”

“She went out for coffee. At some point.”

“How long have you been waiting outside the elevator?”

“Don’t judge me.”

“I really need to see your boss.”

“Why?” He waved the phone handset. “What could be more important than this?”

“Okay. How about you tell me who’s handling the Pearl Street cache?”

“Oh. That.” Tallow was fairly sure he hadn’t just admitted to sexually tampering with kittens, but you wouldn’t have known it from the look in the large CSU’s eyes. “You’re that guy.”

“I am in fact that guy.”

“I’d move into a hotel if I were you, guy. Don’t tell anyone which hotel. And buy armor.”

“I’m going to need body armor now?”

“Maybe like a suit of armor. And a human shield. You’re on Scarly’s shit list until you’re literally a fossil and the sun’s turned into a red giant.”

“Oh God. All right. Who’s Scarly and where do I find them?”

Down a dirt-smeared corridor lined with wooden doors to offices barely big enough to rate the term. Latex paint in some dismal government shade of green was peeling off every vertical surface he looked at. Tallow followed the raised voices coming from the open door at the end.

Scarly was a birdlike woman in her midtwenties in the process of yelling “Of
course
I don’t care if you’re bleeding! I’m fucking
autistic!
” at an ill-looking man with five years on her whose appearance wasn’t improved by the absence of a chunk of left ear. As she continued to berate the man, she scratched involuntarily at her forearm, exposed by a T-shirt she’d lost weight since buying. The forearm was wrapped in plastic that was fixed on by duct tape.

“You know what, Scarly?” the bleeding man said, flapping his arms. “There’s a letter in my apartment that says that if I’m found dead at work it’s going to be your fault and you probably did it deliberately.” He wore a lab coat that he’d dyed black, which gave him the look of a sickly, oil-covered seabird trying to take flight.

Tallow knocked on the doorjamb, scanning for a second what seemed to be the feculent office of a crazy hoarder who really enjoyed the scent of month-old used burger packaging.

Scarly rounded with an acid “What do
you
want?”

“It’s the police, Scarly,” the other man said, pressing a grimy towel to his ear. Tallow could smell the chemicals on the towel from the door and winced at the thought of that residue cocktail leaking into the man’s bloodstream. “They’ve come to take you the fuck away.”

“Of course it’s the police, you moron. We’re all police. We work in the police shop.”

“Detective John Tallow, 1st Precinct.”

“You,” said Scarly. “I hate you so much my dick is hard.”

The other rounded on Tallow too. “You. This is your fault.” He took the towel off his ear and turned his head to show it to Tallow, bobbing up and down. “You did this to me.”

Tallow sagged in the doorway. “How did I do that to you?”

“Because I had to test-fire some fucking archaeological handgun that Wilkes fucking Booth probably discarded as too old and rusty to kill Lincoln with, and the chamber jammed and the firing pin shot out of the back of the fucking gun and ripped off a chunk of my fucking ear! A handgun that
you
found. Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?”

Tallow just looked at him. Looked at him until the other man was silent and unsure. Tallow could feel the woman’s eyes on him, but he kept his gaze on the man with the ruined ear. And then Tallow said, quite quietly, “I don’t know. I was half deaf from gunfire in the field and wearing my partner’s brains on my face at the time. I am very sorry that I was not thinking of you. Now, I’m supposed to be on leave, because I saw my partner get his head blown off and I killed the man who did it. You should probably also be aware that I knew that man was dead before I took careful aim and shot him through the brain. But I’ve been ordered to conduct this investigation, without a partner. And it hasn’t been a cool day for me so far, and I am sick of threatening people and staring people down and trying to get people to behave like useful humans. So what I’m saying to you is that if I lose my temper, which I try very hard not to do but obviously I’m not having a great week, then whatever happens afterward will be explained away as the actions of an officer suffering from PTSD. I am really not available for any of the usual CSU bullshit. I understand my lieutenant has already begun to make amends to you for the situation. Therefore, while I am very sorry about your ear, I have to tell you that if anyone decides to make my life more difficult…”

Tallow took a breath, and smiled. “Well. I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you people. Your name’s Scarly?” he said, turning to the woman.

“Scarlatta,” she said.

“Hello. I’m John. And your name?”

“Bat.” On Tallow’s chill look: “Hey. Parents in the eighties. What’re you going to do?”

“Go back in time and kill them before they breed,” Scarly suggested.

“She’s not really autistic, by the way,” Bat said. “She just thinks people will bug her less if she says she is. And, um, we’re sorry about your partner.”

“Yeah,” said Scarly. “That does actually suck.”

Tallow leaned on the doorjamb, buying a moment to take in their office. One workbench, a chair on either side. Two laptops, one ruggedized, the other with a few gouges in the brushed aluminum. Plastic shelving up on all the walls. Inflatable speakers hung around the room, their wires vanishing into stacks of files, jars of strange powders, boxes, and containers of alchemical and likely illegal things Tallow chose not to recognize. Whatever wall space was not covered by storage was papered over by printouts and clippings, a riot of black-and-white imagery that probably made sense to no one but these two. Food wrappers, disposable coffee cups, and pill packaging formed a small mountain under the worktable. He spotted an old black plastic bucket filled with well-worn paintballing gear in the far corner of the room and wondered if the red on the back of one gun’s butt was paint or old blood.

“You’re not the CSUs who were originally on the job,” Tallow said.

“No,” spit Scarly. “It got handed off to us. Which makes perfect sense, because what you really want on a job like this is as much confusion in the evidence chain as possible. And I guess me and Bat hadn’t eaten our ration of crap for the year. So here I am, with a career-ending job and a working partner with the magical talent of making guns shit themselves in his face.”

“So,” said Tallow, “tell me how I can make your lives better.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I know my boss did something, like I said…”

Bat sniggered. “Yeah. Your boss made some disciplinary paper on our boss fall into a memory hole.”

“But that wasn’t enough to get you two off whatever hook she’d decided you deserved?”

Bat gave Scarly a meaningful glare. “Guess not.”

Tallow pointed at Scarly’s arm. “You were getting a tattoo when you were maybe supposed to be processing the shootings at Pearl?”

Bat made a face. “Her wife insisted. Switched her cell off and everything.”

“You know,” said Scarly, “if I’d known marriage was this much trouble, I never would have joined the protests demanding the right. You straights can fucking keep it.”

A great tiredness draped its boughs across Tallow’s shoulders. “Could we maybe continue this near some coffee?”

They led Tallow to a small conference room a couple of corridors away and persuaded a coffee machine to grind out a tarry paper cup full as he spilled into a worn plastic spoon of a chair and tried to marshal his forces. The CSUs sat opposite Tallow. Scarly dropped a folder of photos on the tabletop and pushed him the cup as Bat finished swabbing his ear and tossed the stinking towel on the table too.

“So. Seriously. Where are we right now?” Tallow asked. Not really wanting the answer. He tried to close a hand around the precious coffee but had to jerk his fingers away, sharply enough that his wrist popped painfully. Tallow wondered if the other end of that coffee machine was slurping water out of a lake in Hell.

“The ECTs are moving the guns in small batches,” Bat said. “We’re making them take so many photos that one of them asked if she was being trained to shoot porno.” He opened Scarly’s folder and fanned out the photos, all from apartment 3A. “They’re coming back here, we’re logging them, matching their locations in the apartment to the floor plans and the previous coverage the other CSU team took. And right now, we’re picking weapons at random to test-fire and do ballistic matches on. When the fucking things don’t explode on firing.”

“And that wasn’t even the oldest one,” said Scarly.

“I refused to test-fire the oldest one we’ve seen so far. Look what the fucking Bulldog did to me.”

“How old?” said Tallow.

“You’re interested?” Bat leaned forward. His large eyes widened disconcertingly, to the point where Tallow worried that they might fall out of Bat’s head and into his coffee. Where they would boil and possibly explode.

“I like history,” said Tallow, gingerly sliding his cup to one side.

“Stay put. I got something to show you.” Bat flapped off into the corridor.

“What was the gun that exploded?” Tallow asked Scarly.

“I think it didn’t explode so much as come apart like rotten cheese. Once our guy used a gun, he put it in his little room and seemed not to touch it again. They all just rusted out on the wall or whatever. There’s paint in some of them.”

“But the firing pin flew out?”

“That’s what he says. I haven’t looked at the gun since he fired it. An old Charter Arms Bulldog .44. Cheap-ass gun gussied up to look like a serious gun. Wouldn’t be surprised if a chunk of the hammer had flaked off and blown back.”

Tallow tried the cup again, and this time it didn’t burn. He sipped the coffee. Corpse mud and cloying sweetener. He drank more anyway. “Why do I know that brand? I can’t put my finger on it, but it…” He grimaced.

“Son of Sam.” Scarly smiled. It might have been the first time he saw her smile. “Son of Sam used a .44 Bulldog.”