Gun Machine

Wolves ate even mighty hunters, for there was no honor or code among predators, and everyone's guts steam the same way when torn open on a cold night.

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 on old straight razor on a worn strop, watching her partner intently. "I don't think he needs his eyebrows, do you? I mean, they don't serve an immediate function or anything," she whispered.

The elevator doors opened to reveal a very large man brandishing a bloodstained antique phone receiver in a plastic bag and proclaiming, "I found this up him!" "You know," said Tallow, "I really have no response to that.

Where's the elevator?" Mike asked, sheathing his weapon. Tallow felt a little better telling Mike there wasn't an elevator and watching his face. But then Mike picked up the dolly, boxes and all, with one hand, took the kit bag from Sophie with the other, and started jogging up the stairs with"Third floor, right?" "There," said Scarly, "goes a man who has names for all his muscles." "I was just thinking that," Tallow said. "Serious gym rat." "No, I mean he's named all his muscles. That's a man who calls one of his muscles Steve.

I partnered you with Jim all those years ago because you were complimentary 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.

He tried to close a hand around the precious coffee but had to jerk his fingers away, sharply enough that his wrist popped painfully. Tallow wondered if the other end of the coffee machine was slurping water out of a lake in Hell.

From his vantage, three steps back and to the right, Tallow could see Rosato's eye a good five inches outside Rosato's head and still attached to his eye socket by a mess of red worms. In that single second, Tallow abstractedly realized that in his last moment of life, James Rosato could see his killer from two different angles.

Bat stood in the open door and said "I am a crime scene unit detective from the New York City Police Department, you heinous fucking mongoloid, and there is nothing I cannot do.

Fuck me", Bat gasped, "It’s like an angel shat ice cream coffee rainbows in my mouth.

She's really married?" Tallow said to Bat. "Yeah. Talia's like this Scandinavian Amazon who can break rocks with her boobs. She could fit Scarly in her armpit. Sometimes I think she likes Scarly just because she was the most portable lesbian available.

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.

There ain't enough happens in soccer. It's like watching twenty-two hair models kick a ball around for what seems like six months and then one of them falls over and the ball goes in the goal.

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.

Tallow turned the corner into Bat and Scarly's office to be greeted by a large plastic robot on the bench waving its arms and shouting, "Say hello to my l'il frien'" in an electronically processed voiced as a small plastic penis repeatedly jabbed out from its groin on a short metal piston. Bat emerged from behind the thing. "Don't judge me," he said. "I got bored.

The ECTs are moving the guns in small batches," Bat said. "We're making them take so many photos that one of them asked if she was being trained to shoot porno.

Tallow was nervously aware that his name was on the worse cold-case dump CSU had ever seen. He was not looking forward to having them look at him and judge by eye exactly how much his organs might be worth on the black market.

Our guy has a property office, John. And I don't mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping an eye on, like Son of Sam's piece, for fuck's sake - a guy in there who'll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he'll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he's actually starting to scare me a bit right now." "A couple of hundred kills to his name didn't do that?" "Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night." "You know," said Tallow, "whenever I'm in danger of forgetting you're CSU, you always find a way to remind me.

Of course I don't care if you're bleeding! I'm fucking autistic!

Detective John Tallow, 1st Precinct." "You," said Scarly. "I hate you so much my dick is hard.

Jim Rosato was recently married, to a Greek nurse. Rosato was half Irish and half Italian, and there was a pool on at the 1st as to which of the two would arrive at work wearing the other's skin as a hat within the year.

The untreated cardboard sleeve around the venti-plus cup, stamped with biodegradable inks, proclaiming the coffee shop's proud independence, the simple black printing on the flecked card making its own statement about authenticity.

He took a deep breath and got a noseful of sun-warmed dog shit for his trouble.

We say, ‘I see what you mean,’ it’s the metaphor for clarity. But sometimes I wish people could see the pictures in my head, instead of my having to describe them with words. Words are clumsy. I wish I could communicate in pictures.

IT TOOK a conscious effort for Tallow to keep his hand off his gun as he walked up the apartment building’s stairs. There was no threat here. He told himself that with every step. But every step held memory.

Lots of cops married nurses, Tallow knew. Nurses understood the life: murderous shiftwork, long stretches of boredom, sudden adrenaline spikes, blood everywhere. Tallow almost smiled as he followed his wincing partner into the apartment building. He made sure the door closed as silently as possible, and only then did he draw his firearm.

ON PLAYING back the 911 recording, it’d seem that Mrs. Stegman was more concerned that the man outside her apartment door was naked than that he had a big shotgun.

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