Tallow was held in amber for a moment by a sense-memory: He was maybe five or six years old, walking home from school. His mother was waiting on the other side of a road for him. He could see it. A T intersection, where he had to cross the road that was the vertical bar of the T. Spring. The evenings getting longer, and the promise they brought of staying up later and doing more things and using the hours of warm gold light for excitement and joy or even just soft extended times of togetherness with his parents. The promise never seemed to come true enough, but in spring the promise alone was enough to make his heart light. His mother was judging the traffic. She lifted her arms to him. It was safe for him to cross. She’d told him that morning that she was going to the store, and there would be ice cream for him at dinner tonight. He ran to her. When there was a good evening ahead, with the sky still light, it was like you stole a whole extra day from the world.
He tripped. Tallow remembered it exquisitely. He tripped in the middle of the road and came down flat on his chest. If his head hadn’t been so forward with the excitement of running to Mom and starting the evening, he probably would’ve torn his chin open or knocked his teeth out. Instead, he flopped down on his chest, palms smacking the blacktop, both knees hitting. He looked at his mother. His mother was looking at the VW camper van turning into the road. It was blue and white. He could pick the exact shade of blue off a color chart if one were shown to him right now. He could see the crawl of rust on the VW badge on the front of the van. A heavy woman was driving it; she had square-cut graying hair and a thick green sweater.
The fear was there, in his chest, that hollow horror of a sensation. His lungs were gone, vanished. His body told him there was no point in taking a breath because he had no lungs. His thoughts were a shaking procession, a praxinoscope of images and simple calculations and knowledge.
The camper van braked. Tallow’s mother stifled a scream and ran into the road to pick Tallow up. Tallow could move just fine, but his mother gathered him up and took him to the sidewalk, waving and shouting thanks to the smiling woman behind the wheel. Tallow looked at the driver, and she seemed more grateful than his mother. Tallow remembered her stroking her steering wheel, releasing a shudder of a breath. The relief of a woman who had not, after all, driven over a little boy on the way home. Tallow had thought about that, in bed at night, all week. The woman was thanking her van for being good enough to have stopped when she told it to.
Tallow thought about that, himself at five or six years old, staring up at the ceiling where his father had glued plastic stars made from some glow-in-the-dark material in the rough shape of constellations. And he also thought about having known that, either despite the fear or because of it, he could have gotten out of the way of the van. He would go to sleep smiling in absolute certainty that he could have pushed himself up and clear of the van.
He had not been properly scared in a long time, John Tallow hadn’t. Now he was, as vividly and coldly as he’d been that childhood day.
Tallow found Scarly and Bat’s cave. Bat was in it, typing on a laptop.
“Where’s Scarly?”
“Working the cigarette paper,” Bat said, only half engaged. “She doesn’t like me helping with that. The whole process makes me cough, and one time…well, we’d just had some shitty pizza, and I had stuff stuck in my teeth? And we were smoking something for prints, and I was coughing, and she was yelling at me, and I coughed, and this chunk of anchovy flew right out of my mouth and kind of right into hers.”
“So she doesn’t let you help.”
“Not so much. I’m working on trying to pull some DNA off the trim.”
“The quick method?”
“Not that quick,” Bat said. “But I can manage it through the computer from here. With the best will in the world and all the luck there is, we’re looking at at least an hour. And I have no luck and I work in the NYPD, you know?”
“Yeah,” Tallow said. “So, listen, could I borrow you for an hour?”
“What do you need?”
“You. And some of your stuff.”
“You sound like a man with a scheme, John.”
“We’re way past schemes and well into desperate-last-ditch-effort territory. Or maybe lying-in-a-road-as-a- van-drives-toward-you territory.”
“Well, okay. Let me talk to Scarly first?”
“About what?” Scarly said, appearing behind Tallow. Her eyes were bright and her breathing was fast and shallow.
“What did you do?” said Bat, and then, to Tallow, “I know that look. She’s done something. I know it.”
“You’re fucking right,” Scarly said. “I got a print.”
“Holy shit,” said Bat.
“It’s not a great print,” Scarly said quickly, “but it’s a print. And I think it’s good enough that if our guy’s been a previous customer of the NYPD, we should get a match. We got a fucking
“What I’m thinking about right now is getting a print examiner in to confirm the latent if we get a match,” said Bat.
“Don’t piss on my parade, Bat. I got a print off a cigarette butt shoved in a potato chip bag. You should be paying me fucking obeisance right now and ordering me hookers.”
“We don’t need an examiner to sign off on it yet,” said Tallow. “Get the print matched. We’ll know the guy when we see him. I’m damned sure of that. I want to borrow Bat for an hour. We’ll be back. We’re going to lose the case tomorrow, Scarly, so we’ve only got tonight to develop something that looks like a theory backed with evidence. Are you up for that?”
“John, I’ve got a wife. I can’t keep staying out all night.”
“Hey. Scarly. What happened to five seconds ago when you got a fucking print?” Bat commented.
Scarly sagged and glowered at John from under a comically lowered brow. “All right. I admit it. We’re in too deep to stop now. But we’re gonna need to eat, and I need to make sure I’m not going to get my head flushed down the crapper by the wife. Let me make a call.”
“Make your call,” Tallow said. “The print’s being run now?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, good. Bat, I need some of your junk there.”
In the car, Bat said, “You’re just utterly fucking nuts if you think that’s going to achieve anything.”
“I am getting pretty tired of being told I’m crazy.”
“Well, get used to it. I mean, I don’t want to stick my nose all the way into your business, but were you like this before your partner died?”
“I thought Scarly was the autistic one with no social skills.”
“No, no, I’m not unaware of what I’m asking. I realize that’s going to still sting, you know? But it’s a reasonable question. Do you feel like you’re behaving differently than you would if you were working with your partner? Is there maybe just a possibility that…I don’t wanna say you’re traumatized or some I-need-a-hug bullshit, but…”
Tallow sighed. “You’re asking if my seeing Jim get killed has made me a little nuts?”
“Basically,” said Bat. “Only, you know, put more nicely than that.”
A uniformed policeman walked into the road, signaling for the oncoming traffic to stop. Beyond him, a paramedic rig was parked on the sidewalk. There was a man burning on the street corner. Kneeling, engulfed in flame, quite dead, very slowly collapsing in on himself.
A guano-speckled bowler hat, with turkey feathers in the hatband, blew across the street behind the uniformed cop.
Tallow heard a voice in his recent memory say
“You’re asking if
“Yes, I am,” said Bat. “This plan is a crazy man’s plan.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Yes, I am. I didn’t say I didn’t
“Look,” said Tallow, “can you do the thing I’m asking for or not?”
“Yes. In fact, it will be fun. I just think…ah, hell. Injun ninja, no chain of evidence, his history-fu is stronger than yours, it’s not solvable, et cetera and fucking so forth. We’ve said it to you half a dozen times.”
