about his state of mind. Perhaps he was getting old, and his brain was not as plastic as it used to be. Once every couple of months, he’d awake wondering if he might be genuinely ill.
He’d taken ketamine once, as a younger man, and on processing the experience realized that its first effect on him was that he was no longer worried about having taken ketamine. He never invited that loss of perception into his life again, but on those occasional weak days, there was a sick sense in the pit of his stomach that he’d spent weeks unconcerned about being unable to see New Manhattan.
The day had started out badly, and so he walked the trail to his cache, signposts and trees flickering in and out of view, to ensure it was secure. The walk had taken an hour longer than it should have, not least because of the difficulty of seeing and avoiding CCTV cameras. Sometimes his mind transliterated them into Old Manhattan elements, but today, nothing was on his side, including his own brain.
He watched the men and women in blue jackets loading his treasure into vehicles. Years of work disappearing.
He was armed. He could try to stop them. Even if he hadn’t been carrying a gun, he was a hunter. He could take them down bare-handed if necessary, or fashion a weapon from whatever was available. But he would be seen.
His anger built. Parts of New Manhattan dropped out of his sensorium. He could smell oak, pine, and sweet birch. Heard a flock of plovers clatter out of the treetops in fright. Bark crawled over the fasciae of the buildings he faced, under light dappled by forest canopy. He looked down at the ground and had to summon hard strength to force the wet grass under his feet to turn back into dry sidewalk. A red-back salamander, without dewy blades of green to slip through, elided away into mist and was gone.
The hunter stood still and watched them take away the last evidence of his life. Apart from the bodies.
THE PERIMETERS of the 1st Precinct form a shape like a cracked arrowhead pointing out to sea. It totals one square mile of Manhattan. Tallow had to go in the other direction, away from his mile, and that never filled him with joy.
At this moment, Tallow did not feel like he had friends at Ericsson Place. Or, perhaps more correctly, he felt that any aid he’d get there would come from pity. He told himself that pity would lead to half-assed work, but in his gut there was a churn of humiliation and offendedness at the thought. And when he considered going back to the house on Pearl Street to canvass the residents, he felt sick. So he spent ten minutes with his laptop on ACRIS, the online city register, and grabbed the name and office address of the building’s landlord.
It was going to be a long drive uptown. Through the narrow, coldly shaded streets of the deep 1st, just now starting to get that sweetish, sweaty scent of halal gyro and shish from the early phalanx of street vendors setting up their shiny, flimsy carts and their piss pots for their sixteen-hour workdays.
Tallow felt uncomfortable in the driver’s seat. A constant juddering sense of being on the wrong side of the car. He hoped that the long drive would retrain his brain a little.
Past the holes-in-the-wall offering sixty-minute divorces, and the strangely denuded storefronts that Vice continually begged for the budget to surveil for drug traffic. Past Ground Zero, this morning sound-tracked by the gunfire snapping of badly secured plastic tarps in the breeze and the cursing of the mini-entrepreneur suckfish trying to stop their 9/11 picture postcards from blowing off their folding-card tables by the fence.
And then out, into the territories of others.
Tallow drove with the unit’s radio on. He would rather have driven with music, but he’d learned to appreciate police-band chatter as its own kind of sound structure. So he rolled with the waves and eddies of crime and its management as he drove. Officer down in the Bronx, off duty and unluckily walked into a robbery at an auto body shop; reports that when the officer took one and fell, a school safety agent snatched up his dropped gun and returned fire. Mother and daughter found stabbed to death in Sheepshead Bay, reporting officer commenting that they were so holed and smashed that they looked like ragged wet blankets. The body of a missing Bronx man found in the trunk of a stolen car abandoned in Long Island; the detectives who had been looking for him in order to hang an attempted murder around his neck had some choice comments, quickly drowned out by responders to a Midtown location where a guy had apparently doused his pregnant ex-girlfriend in gasoline and set her alight when she didn’t give him whatever he had wanted.
He was in the late West Fifties when traffic slowed to a crawl. As he edged the car along, he saw a heavy woman with gray hair dyed an unconvincing black kneeling in front of one of the sickly trees planted in the sidewalk. Her shins, in faded woolen socks, were resting on the short wrought-iron fencing that framed the square of dirt the tree was struggling to live in. There was something silvery sticking out of the back of her neck. Paramedics and cops were standing around her, clearly so wrapped up in the problem of her that they weren’t bothering with the little crowd of gawkers grabbing cell phone shots. Tallow realized that the slim shaft of metal had gone right through the back of the woman’s neck and out through her throat, pinning her to the slender tree trunk.
Ahead of him, the traffic broke, revealing the paramedics’ rig parked beside a fat Chrysler Town & Country with one wheel on the curb, and a bike and its rider under it. The back wheel of the bike looked like it’d burst, the tire shredded and the rim hanging open like a dented letter
Tallow realized that several of the bike wheel spokes were missing. He counted a few of them scattered back across the sidewalk. He knew where the last one was. Some freak of torsion must’ve flung it through her neck like a loosed arrow.
He considered badging a uniform or a paramedic to get the whole story but in the next second decided he didn’t need it. He drove around the scene and away from a dead woman praying to a tree in New York City.
West 145th in the 500s was far enough away that by the time he finally reached it, Tallow had tension pains locked across his upper back, and posture pain rammed into his lower back. He clambered out of the parked unit like a dying crab. When he tried to straighten up, important-sounding bones crunched frighteningly inside him.
He took a deep breath and got a noseful of sun-warmed dog shit for his trouble.
The landlord’s office was a sliver of closet slipped between a firetrap overstating itself as a hotel and a CARIB & SOUL FOOD vendor with a frontage painted in the shade of green that reminded Tallow of hospitals. There was a rangy kid of sixteen or so in a retro Knicks shirt standing in the narrow doorway smoking a blunt. He had a deep, laid-open scar running down from the corner of his mouth to somewhere under his chin. On profile, it made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. A switchblade handle was outlined in his pants pocket. Chocolate and mint hung on the weed smoke drifting his way from the blunt. Tallow took another look at the kid and shaved a year or two off his age.
“You a cop,” said the kid without looking at him.
For far from the first time, Tallow wondered why this kind of conversation ever had to happen. He would have thought that of all the items of information that got passed from generation to generation or peer to peer, the unfortunate results of idly screwing around with a cop to feel tough would be among the first and would not be forgotten.
“Is that a problem?”
“Not if you going someplace else.”
Tallow heard giggling from inside. The kid had an audience. Tallow wasn’t sure if he was really in the mood for this. He preferred to be easy about these things. Jim Rosato would’ve put the kid’s head into a wall without thinking twice.
Tallow took a few easy steps toward the door. The kid, still not looking at him, moved to block the door, puffing on his blunt. Chocolate and mint. Kids’ flavors.
“You going someplace else.”
More giggling. Tallow walked right up to the kid, who shifted again to block him. Tallow leaned the other way, shuffled, raising his hands and making an awkward show of clumsily trying to get past the kid. The kid couldn’t help but grin as he moved again. Young boys were cracking up inside the office.
Tallow stamped on the kid’s instep. He shrieked and fell backward, scrabbling to clutch his foot.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” Tallow said. “Are you okay?”
