“I’m sure they do. But I think the person I’m looking for prefers
Which was a damned lie, because in the past couple of years he’d done it a lot, and he knew it, and she knew it just from the look in his eye, but Tallow paid full price for the pot and a bag of plant-food sachets, and was happy to do it. He thanked her and left, dodging another weight-lifting display as he went.
Tallow’s next stop was the coffee shop, where he purchased a cardboard tray of six of the morning specialty, an iced coffee, in the grotesque venti-plus, that was made with nothing but too many shots of espresso and seriously chilled cream. The half a dozen drinks came in milkily translucent corn-plastic containers stamped with a cartoon of a naked man plugging himself into main electricity through his genitals and leaping into the air with the joy of voltage. Tallow made a pit in the backseat of the car and placed the tray in it. The tobacco plant sat in the foot well of the passenger seat. It wasn’t yet eight a.m. So far, Tallow had remembered everything except food. He figured he could survive until lunch and pointed the car at One PP.
Tallow walked into Bat and Scarly’s office to find Bat slumped on a chair with his head on the workbench, turned away from the door, while Scarly softly sharpened an old straight razor on a worn strop, watching her partner intently.
“I don’t think he
“I am not asleep.” Bat moaned. “I am merely resting my brain. And if you come near me with that thing I will shave your face off your skull with it. Or possibly just puke in your eyes.”
Tallow laid his laptop bag against his chair, unloaded the plant on the floor next to it, and put the tray of cold coffee on the bench next to Bat’s head. “Do you have space in your fridge for half of these?”
Bat’s head rose slowly on his skinny neck ,like a sedated hen’s. He turned his head at a mechanical crawl, scanning the immediate area, until his eyes detected the coffee.
“Oh my God,” Bat prayed. “I love you. I would let you have sex on me and everything. But I am very tired and would prefer not to have to move.”
Scarly killed a cup lid with feral fingers and chugged a third of a container. Her eyes flexed weirdly in their sockets. “Oh, that’s the stuff,” she said. “That is really the stuff.”
Bat was weakly pawing at the lid of the cup nearest him. Tallow reached over and took it off for him, abstractedly wondering if this was what fatherhood felt like. Bat sipped from it like a sickly Dickensian child. Tallow half expected him to whimper “God bless us, every one.”
“Fuck me,” Bat gasped. “It’s like an angel shat ice cream–coffee rainbows in my mouth.”
“Little bit,” said Tallow as the momentary illusion of parenthood atomized. He opened his own cup and drank. “Did we get anything back on that Bulldog yet?”
“Nope,” said Scarly, bent over and putting three of the cups inside a small fridge that had been hidden by the general crap in the office. “Couple of hours.”
“Okay. Listen,” Tallow said, reaching down and pulling the lieutenant’s papers from his bag, “what do you know about Ruger nine-millimeters?”
“Place the papers where I may see them,” said Bat. “I do not wish to burn precious caffeine molecules by moving.”
Tallow did as he was told. Bat leaned his head over the paper, trying to get gravity to aid him in keeping his eyes open and working.
“Ruger nine. Scarly, what don’t I know about a Ruger nine with a circular lock on the shell casing’s ass?”
“That’ll be the Ruger Police Service. There were Luger works in it to make it a reliable nine. They did all kinds of odd variants for a while, trying to make government sales.” She stood up and looked at Tallow. “Ruger used to have this massive reputation because of the Ruger Super Blackhawk. They used to say it was a great gun for holding up trains, because you’d fire it at the train and it’d stop. Huge goddamn thing with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel, but really accurate and it didn’t break your fingers or wrist when you shot a .44 Magnum load. So it was, you know, a special gun for police by the makers of this immense fucking elephant gun that everyone’s heard of. That was the pitch.”
“So this guy was shot with a police sidearm?”
“One that was marketed to police anyway. Why?”
“Thinking about what we were talking about last night. Is it possible—even just for the sake of argument— that our guy really was matching his weapons to his kills in some sense?”
“Say it is,” said Scarly. “What have you got?”
“A petty thief killed with a junk gun that was probably stolen from its manufacturing plant.”
“Thin,” Scarly observed.
“I know. But now I want to know more about the victim of the Ruger.”
“We can do that here. You want to see downstairs first?”
“Sure. Um, probably a dumb question, but do you have smoke alarms down there?”
“Nothing that can’t be disabled,” said Bat, stirring. “But you probably won’t be able to sneak a cigarette down there without someone noticing.”
Tallow hefted the plant. “No. I want to crush some of these leaves and then try burning them.”
Bat looked at it and admired Tallow’s apparent loss of sanity. “Cool. You bought another lighter then, huh?”
“Oh shit,” said Tallow, who hadn’t.
Bat laughed. “Jesus, John. We can’t let you out of our sight, can we? Relax. This is CSU. We have plenty of things that burn shit. Hell, we don’t have much here that
Scarly snorted. “That’s true. Last month a computer power brick caught fire and set light to Brendan Foley’s legs.”
“And that microwave oven that went up at Christmas.”
Scarly dismissed it with a disgusted wave of her hand. “Fucking Einar rolling in drunk for the eighteenth time with his ‘I hate all your ice-cold American drinks, I come from a very cold country and do not wish to pour more ice in my body.’ You heard what they did to his head?”
“What?”
“Well, the skin grafts took, but, you know, he basically made napalm, so there wasn’t much left under it. So they injected him with this weird sort of facial caulking that swells and firms up under UV light and essentially kind of re-inflated his head. It was cool.”
“Oh! And the old still exploded last summer!”
“Right! Did you see Foley’s legs the other day when he was doing that fucked-up pantsless lap of victory around the main labs? Legs like a dead giraffe.”
“Downstairs?” said Tallow, with just a little pleading in his voice.
Downstairs was cavernous: bare and stained cement, gray pillars holding up a blackened ceiling that had broken-down flotillas of fluorescent light tubes sailing across it in lazy waves. Walking in from the elevator, Tallow saw an arrangement of wheeled whiteboards, and great blankets of clear plastic sheeting on the floor. Getting closer, he could make out big glossy photos under the sheeting and tacked to the whiteboards.
“Oh my God,” said Tallow.
“Yeah,” said Scarly. “We got into work early. Not that
The CSUs had run off copies of all the photos, in a rough ratio of one to one, and arranged them on the floor and on the whiteboards according to the evidentiary floor plans. The plastic sheeting had been rolled out over the photos on the floor so he could walk over them. It was as close as could be gotten to a copy of the whole of apartment 3A, with the whiteboards standing in for walls and partitions.
There was a table over to one side, with papers scattered on it. Tallow set his iced coffee and his potted plant down there, turned, and surveyed the space. Scarly deposited next to that the things she’d brought from upstairs, excavated out of their office. An old mortar and pestle, a foil tray that’d had fossil grains of rice pilaf wiped out of it with a wet nap that was itself not young, and a small chef’s blowtorch. Tallow was learning not to ask certain kinds of question about the way the CSUs operated.
“This is amazing,” Tallow said, and meant it. He wasn’t just taken aback at how well and how completely and
