hour.
He pulled up at a sandwich place he knew just before the lunchtime rush started, tucking his car in behind a brand-new SUV-type thing that, with its broad beam, gold, chrome, and huge tires, could have been a hyper-evolved version of a lunar rover. The place itself was little more than a hole-in-the-wall on a rolling six-month lease, and the selection was “minimalist,” but the food was terrific, skilled, and considered. Tallow took out his phone and called Scarly.
“I hate this thing,” answered Scarly. “It’s like an ankle monitor you have to fucking pay for. Except for your hand. Shut up. What do you want?”
Tallow felt a little headache start behind his right eye, which twitched. “I wanted to know if you guys want me to bring you some lunch back.”
“Hey. Bat. You want food?” Scarly yelled without holding the phone away from her mouth.
While Tallow shook his head, he could hear Bat moaning in the call’s background. “The bag hurts. Food is a trick on mammals. The bag is death, Scarly. Food is death.”
“He doesn’t want lunch,” Scarly said. “But get him some anyway. Either he’ll eat it and it’ll kill him or he won’t touch it and I’ll just eat it myself. Where are you?”
“A place in the 1st I know. How about a cold sliced steak sub on fresh bread with a red onion marmalade they make with beer?”
“Hell yes. That sounds like real fucking food.”
“Give me twenty minutes.”
“Thanks, John.”
John got out of the car, almost knocking down a tall, stringy man in a tan suede jacket and a guano-speckled bowler hat with three large turkey feathers sticking out of the makeshift duct-tape hatband. “Fucking filth,” snarled the man. His teeth were the color of mud.
Tallow impassively badged him. “Te’bly sorry,” said the man; he touched his fingers to the brim of his hat and shuffled on. Tallow walked to the storefront. He’d read somewhere that in the Five Boroughs there were no fewer than four hundred thousand people reporting serious psychological distress, and God knew how many people on the street who didn’t report to anyone and who slipped through the ragged net of the city’s scarily named Division of Mental Hygiene and the myriad agencies it paid to supposedly get crazy people off the sidewalks and into the system. A lot of people got paid. Any idiot walking the 1st Precinct could tell you how few of them were actually doing the job. If you were crazy enough to store the guns you ritually prepared to kill people, then in New York City you could hide in plain sight. Tallow considered that for all he knew, the stringy man in the bird-shit-spattered bowler could be his guy.
Inside the narrow store, there was a woman in a black, very architectural sort of jacket, turquoise jewelry, and unusual wedge-heeled boots that made her look like she was balancing on thick slices of gold. The two guys who ran the place, always in Williamsburg hipster uniforms of short-sleeved shirts and neatly trimmed beards that looked stuck on with spirit gum, paid, as ever, no attention to anything but the food and the money. Tallow imagined that every night they counted their money and prided themselves on having not made eye contact with anything human. New Agey synth music shot through with glitch and broken beats played softly from an iPod speaker station on the countertop.
The woman wore shades, and her hair was loose and framed her face, but Tallow could still see that she was pale. Not pale like the florist. This wasn’t a woman who took in light. This was a woman who crumbled a little bit under it, whose skin was made dry and drawn by exposure to the world. Roll-on balm wasn’t disguising bitten and blistered lips enough. He decided he was glad he couldn’t see her eyes.
She paid cash, which was taken from a tooled leather cylinder held in the crook of her right arm, no bigger than it needed to be for a billfold, credit cards, phone, and car keys. As she turned, Tallow saw the brooch at her breast, a disc of rough animal hide on a gold mount, a gold image of an elk head in its center, framed by two gold feathers. She saw him looking, brushed it with compulsive fingers, false nails tapping on the gold, and left. He noticed her wedding band looked a little big on her finger.
“Three of the steak sandwiches, please.”
“Coming up,” said Beard Number One, nodding to Beard Number Two, never once looking at Tallow. Together, they cut and smashed and wrapped the sandwiches in maybe twenty seconds. They’d gotten faster. Judging by the previous customer, Tallow thought word had really gotten around about the place. He imagined the pair training at night, listening to Animal Collective on repeat as they beat sandwiches into shape, racing against the same stopwatch they used to time their beard trimming.
Tallow paid his money, took his sandwiches under one arm, and heard the scream.
The woman in the black jacket was crouching on the sidewalk in front of the SUV and screaming as the man in the bowler hat stood over her waving his arms and wailing like a baby.
Tallow shifted the sandwiches to his left arm and shouted at the man in the hat to get his attention. The man turned and looked. Tallow very deliberately opened his jacket to show the man his gun. The man saw the gun. He stopped wailing.
“I just asked her for a light. She started crying. I figured crying was the thing to do today.”
“Get out of here. I’m not making the offer twice.”
The man ran down the street and away, clutching his hat with both hands.
Tallow sighed, looked around, and rested his sandwiches on the hood of the SUV. Good police never showed their guns unless they had to, he knew, but it was quick and easy and it worked. He’d bitch at himself later. The woman was rocking and sobbing now, wheezing, no air left in her lungs for screaming.
Tallow’s empathy extended to reading a situation and not a hell of a lot further. He had known that Bobby Tagg was in extreme distress and in the midst of a psychological break, but he very probably would not have been able to successfully extend comfort and calm to the man. Jim Rosato was a blunt object of a police, but people just naturally liked him better. It was why, Tallow thought, they’d made a good team.
Tallow had a sudden sour memory of the lieutenant suggesting that Tallow had been deluded about that.
He crouched down next to the woman. “It’s okay, ma’am. I’m a police officer. He’s gone. Can you tell me what happened?”
She folded her arms over her head and rocked, choking out the words “I thought it was him” over and over again.
Tallow said, “It’s okay, ma’am,” and experimentally put his hand on her shoulder. She shrieked and jerked away with terrified revulsion, almost fell over, and started coughing as well as crying. Being strangled by her own throat muscles and fluids seemed to pull her out of the fugue. She wobbled on her haunches, those strange golden heels pushing around on the sidewalk for purchase. He touched her again, under her forearm this time, softly. She turned her gold-framed black shades to him, and she allowed him to gently guide and support her to a standing position. She started sobbing again, and fell into him. He put an alien arm around her somehow, and looked at the ground. Her cylindrical purse was on the sidewalk, unopened, next to her wrapped sandwich. He strained a bit and put out a foot to the purse, rolled it closer to him.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said to his chest, sounding a million miles away.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“It’s not,” she said, scrabbling for an unconstricted breath. “He just asked me for a light. But I saw the, the feathers, and his clothes, and…” She broke into tears again, but the crying was cleaner now, more flowing, more purging. She was crying herself out, coming back to herself.
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Emily.” Her hands were shaking epileptically, and his arm was providing less emotional support than physical—he realized he was doing most of the work of holding her up.
“Let me get you sat down,” he said, and shuffled her with difficulty toward his car. His spine popped as he reached down to unlock the driver-side door. He swung it open and lowered her sideways onto the seat.
“One second,” he said, and swept up her purse and sandwich, reclaimed his own purchases, opened the rear door, and put his (and he had to ask himself, What was wrong with him that he was treating three sandwiches like fragile treasure?) precious food on top of the laptop bag. When he turned back to her, she’d fumbled her shades off and managed to stuff them in one pocket of her jacket. Emily did not have the eyes of someone who slept
