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
“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
“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
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.”
