A knock on the door interrupted Imam Galim’s late night tea. Resting in his apartment attached to the Qolşärif mosque—the largest mosque not only in Tatarstan’s capital, but all of Russia—he was watching the moon rise over the Kazanka River and the nearby Blagoveshchensk Cathedral . . .
Deirdre stares around her at shelf after shelf of cell phones, earpieces, cell phone covers, holsters, and some strange metallic screen things she cannot explain. She rarely comes into town anymore and it took her twenty minutes to find the mall and fifteen more to find a parking space. She is still wearing her apron and only now notices it. She tears it off and unsuccessfully tries to cram it into her coat pocket on top of her car keys. She stuffs it under the display of luminous cell phone cases . . .
The cop’s fingers were as thick as the sausages he stabbed with the fork and stuffed in his mouth. Probably as greasy, too, Tual thought as he drank coffee in a booth. He watched the cop sitting at the counter . . .
On the few days out of the year when the range was closed he’d get out the duct tape and stick the PVC-and-wadding suppressor on his Ruger .22 pistol. He’d load it with subsonics. He’d open the window, take out the screen, and throw some empty beer cans out in the yard. Then he’d stand back in the dark of his room and make them dance . . .
When Cold-bone described beating his girlfriend unconscious because she threw up on his shoes while giving him a blowjob, Burnadette decided that she wasn’t hungry after all . . .
We had switched from beer to a pair of hot rums dubbing around in a reporters’ bar across from the women’s prison downtown. Outside it was storming in late-October style, the first chilly rain that gnaws like winter, and from our polished stools we watched the people tilt their umbrellas at one another like blind knights as they passed . . .
The train lurched forward like a giant hiccup. Holiday awoke from his hiatus, opening his eyes just enough to make out light and dark shapes. You coulda blindfolded him with dental floss . . .
Cow town? Fuck. You could call it that till the crows came home, still didn’t make it true. Maybe once, long before that pissant reporter had even been born. Shit, nowadays, Denver was further from cow town than anyone on the squad was from ever solving this case . . .