More stages. The music leaking out onto the street from the open coffee-shop door. Brooklyn glo-fi, a couple of summers old, kids on the edge of Park Slope imagining California beaches. Two girls on the other side of the window, in fauxhawks and sleeveless hoodies framing unfinished sleeve tattoos. The more unfinished of the two was the better one. That girl had less money but a finer eye for an artist.
Behind them, a printer rattled on a trestle beside the countertop, an automated print vendor coughing out a POD paper, the New York Instant, or an aggregation of social-network capture.
Stages. A bus growled by, the dynamic display strip down its side scarred by a black rash of dead pixels. Advertising some CGI thing starring three different versions of Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of them from his twenties and another from his thirties. A car jumping impatiently behind it, sparkling new and fresh off the lot but proudly sporting 1950s fins. Candy-apple red and spikily sporty, driven by a man closing on fifty in a candy-striped shirt with sleeves carefully furled to show a maintained forest of gray forearm hair.
Stages. Jim Rosato was dead. Nothing was getting rid of the copper taste that kept jabbing Tallow’s tongue, as if he’d aspirated some of Jim’s atomized blood when the shotgun blasted half his partner’s head off. Tallow had blocked everything, and now the screens were down, he couldn’t help but see Jim’s death on high-definition replay.
Tallow choked on smoke.
“I knew you’d be here. Mind if I sit down?”
His eyes snapped up. The lieutenant was standing by the opposite side of the table. She had a coffee in her hand. Tallow wondered how long he’d been sitting there replaying Jim’s death and not noticing anything else at all.
“Please,” he said.
She had a manner of moving like an intricate folding machine when she sat or stood, a slow precise compression, her head and shoulders remaining quite still. Her black suit creased perfectly. She flicked out legs in boot-cut pants. Her father was a tailor who knocked her out bespoke clothes at cost. Tallow knew to avoid her on the days she wore a new suit, because the collection of it was a traditional event in which she was berated by her father at length for becoming “top pig.”
The lieutenant was watching Tallow with those sharp glacial eyes, clever glass scanning him with mechanical precision.
“I spoke to Jim’s wife,” she said, prying the lid off her coffee with clear-polished nails.
“I left something out when I talked to you,” Tallow said. “His knee gave out when he was taking position. All that jogging. Didn’t want you to mention it to her.”
“You can leave that out of your typed statement too,” she said, with an attempt at a smile. The lieutenant had strong, handsome features. When she smiled, Tallow thought he could see a little girl peeking out from behind that hard face, from under the efficient cap of black hair. “Your shooting’s going to be ruled good, of course. I spoke to people. You’ll still have to go through a formal interview and appearance, but no one’s going to give you any trouble.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
Her eyes flickered over Tallow’s face, looking for something. When she didn’t find it, she let out a disappointed breath and raised her coffee to her lips.
Tallow took a last draw on his cigarette. Turned to face the road and accurately flicked the stub across the sidewalk and down a drain. Swilled some coffee to wash the taste of the thing out of his mouth. The lieutenant was watching him again.
“You haven’t talked to me about the apartment you knocked a hole in.”
Tallow sucked his cheeks in, trying to force coffee-flavored saliva over the foul taste on the back of his tongue. “Not a lot to tell. Never seen anything like it. I’m presuming it’ll make an interesting news story when it gets out.”
Tallow became aware that she was watching him again. “What is it, Lieutenant? Am I doing something wrong?”
“You seem further inside your head than I’d like. More than usual. I want to know that you’re dealing with what happened today, John.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s what bothers me. I partnered you with Jim all those years ago because you were complementary kinds of crazy. You kept each other in check. I need you to not crawl back inside your own skull and watch the world with binoculars from deep cover. You’ve been bad enough for the past year as it is.”
“I don’t follow.”
She stood up. “Yes, you do. You’re at the age where the rush of the job has passed and the grind of the job is taken in stride, and this is the time when you’re wondering if it wouldn’t be so bad if you just stopped giving much of a shit and rolled along doing as little as possible. I’m resting you for forty-eight hours, mandatory. Come back as a detective I can use.”
She paused, and then tried to fly that smile again. “I’m sorry about Jim.” The smile didn’t take. She left.
Tallow waited five minutes, turning another cigarette around in his fingers. Put it back in the pack. Pocketed the pack and the lighter. Walked into the coffee shop, found the bathroom, and vomited coffee and his past two meals into the toilet with a thin scream.
JIM ROSATO once commented that Tallow’s apartment was where he unpacked his head.
One bedroom was stuffed with books, magazines, and paper. Its door was missing, like a failed levee, and the flow of print coursed into the living room, cresting under the table that two old laptops and an external drive lived on. Two tall speakers jutted from the surface of it all like lighthouses. The other bedroom was halfway bricked up by CDs, cassette tapes, and vinyl. A store clothes rack filched from a dumpster stood in the corner of the living room as his wardrobe, but most of the clothes that should have hung from it were slumped under it on the floor.
Tallow elbowed into his apartment with the day’s magazines under his arm. Not the sheaf it would have been at the top of the month even five years ago. A lot of his favorite stuff had migrated to the web. A lot more had just disappeared over the horizon of the digital dawn, never to be seen again.
He didn’t open them, just put them down on whatever stable surfaces he could find. Took his jacket off, wriggled out of the shoulder rig. Hung the rig on the clothes rack, dropped the jacket on the floor. Sat in one of his two chairs.
Tallow tried to think about the apartment full of guns. How a place like that would come to be. But all that would stay in his head was his partner and only real friend having a handful of his brain torn out by a shotgun.
Forty-eight hours. Tallow knew he was going to go crazy in here.
TALLOW’S SLEEP was studded with unremarkable nightmares of a coppery shine. The cell phone on his bedside stack of books woke him.
The women in Tallow’s life had all informed him that he habitually awoke with a form of Tourette’s. For the first hour of the day, he was incapable of summoning reserve, patience, or social skills.
Tallow assaulted the cell phone and answered it with “The fuck what.”
“Come into the office.”
“Fucking mandated forty-fucking-eight fucking hours woke me the fuck up for.”
“CSU just got done with a sampling of your guns. I’m sorry, John, I know I told you forty-eight hours, but I need you in here now.”
“Fuck. All right. Yes. Shit. Give me an hour.”
“Thirty minutes. And be human when you get here. I’m cutting you a degree of slack right now, but I will take a big steaming shit all over your personal record if you talk to me like that again.”
“Yes. All right. Lieutenant goes away now. I wake up. Yes.”
“Thirty minutes, Detective.”
