Jack O'Connell: Box Nine

Lenore believes in this gun in the manner that others believe in an ancient dogma, or a concept of family or love.

Lenore adores the fact that this gun is so real, so solid and fixable, locatable in a world that seems to be more transient, transparent, and decomposing every day.

Lenore no longer believes in God. She does not believe in an afterlife. She does not believe in some fixed code of divinely transmitted morality. She does not believe in turning the other cheek. She does not believe that the meek will inherit the earth. She now believes in power and persistence. In logic and rational thought. In seizing what you need without regard to the effect of your actions upon others. She hides these beliefs out of what she feels to be wise self-preservation, out of the fact that if others knew her true convictions, it would become pretty difficult to live the way she wants.

It’s only in relation to her gun that she allows herself to expose and vent the certainties at the core of her brain, the ones she thinks her father had nightmares about. Lenore has killed one person — a twenty-two-year-old Colombian who fired a shotgun at Zarelli from the shattered back window of a speeding Trans Am — and wounded three others in varying degrees of severity, including blowing the full right arm off a longtime smack broker from down the projects who made the mistake of charging her with a razor in a dark stairwell. In each of those incidents, Lenore has felt a burst of emotion that she can’t put a name to, that has no definition in the heart of the average person. She approximates it every time she pulls out her weapon and draws down on a suspect without firing. It’s not the same as actually pulling the trigger, but it’s a step in the right direction and more pleasing than frustrating.

But on those occasions when she has pulled the trigger and sent aluminum or lead barreling into the flesh and bone of some challenging, but ultimately weaker animal, Lenore feels like she’s been momentarily elevated to a state people only dream of. More than anything, she finds it ironic that she ended up a narcotics cop, since the people she’s chronically arresting are in search of a similar feeling, but stupidity or bad luck has brought them to smack rather than the gun. If they only had a clue what they could feel like being on the delivery end of a bullet flying sixteen miles a minute, the streets would be pools of blood and toppling bodies. The air would be continuously filled with duos of muzzleblast and human scream. She finds it funny and appealing to think that just five seconds in the basement shooting range down at the station is about a thousand times better than the best moment she ever had in bed with Zarelli.

Over the past few years, maybe even going back as far as the death of her parents, Lenore has tried to find words that she could hang on her beliefs, her system of looking at the world and her place in it, her particular philosophy. She’s never read as many books as Ike — Ike’s a real reader, loves those mysteries — but she manages to dip into a dozen or more a year. She drops into the library every couple of weeks and checks something out, usually some fat book she can read chunks of, maybe an anthology of essays or something. Unlike her twin brother, she sticks with nonfiction, often philosophy and history. She knows she’s smart enough so that, given enough time and persistence, she can get a handle on almost any line of thought.

What she’s discovered in the course of her reading is that though many people have come close to her vision, no one’s really hit the bull’s-eye. She spent a couple of years on Nietzsche, boned up on a lot of secondary material, even for a time kept a small notebook to clarify positions and meanings. He still holds a warm, important place in her heart, but she feels like she somehow slid past him, as though some hidden factor — her sex, her language, the century she’s living in — has forced them to part like young and bittersweet lovers.

She had a fling with Darwin that she’s happy about, but which faded more rapidly than she would have bet. She tried Hegel and got bogged down, found him a little bloodless. She went through a series of liaisons with a parade of lesser, or at least less familiar, names. Sorel, Péguy, Lagardelle. Machiavelli looked like he could be a lifetime match, but last year she came to the realization that her search for a past correlation to her own system was a pathetic one. The thing to do was simply to act purely within that system. Act was the key word. Action over thought. The justification for her life could be found in the rush of feeling that lingered for a few minutes after she walked out of the shooting bunker.

Over a strong black coffee last week, coming home after a forty-eight-hour dead-end shift, she daydreamed that if only the technology existed, her brain could be monitored to find out exactly what happened at the moment she squeezed on the trigger of the Magnum and the bullet exploded out the barrel and into the body of some panicking importer. And that if it could be determined exactly what kind of chemical got secreted, just what synapse got fired, then the process could be synthesized so that she could make it happen at will. She smiled at the thought, thinking that there was probably no way that her body could really tolerate that kind of ongoing stimulation for any extended period, but that even if the feeling proved fatal, it would be the best of all possible ways to die.

For a while, after she first made detective, Lenore was the only woman in the narcotics department. This was before Peirce, and long before Shaw. Because of this, she’d often be the first person inserted into a new investigation. She could play the new hooker in town so well that Zarelli used to say to her, “I don’t know, you make me wonder.” So she logged a lot of those first couple of plainclothes years, out on Goulden Avenue, jammed into imitation-leather mini-skirts, these neon-red or lime-green cheap satin halter tops, and break-your-ankles six-inch stiletto heels. Today she would say that she knows the residents and practitioners and hawkers and brokers and generally bent mothers of the Goulden Ave block, maybe better than any cop in the city.

The area is commonly known as Bangkok Park, probably because the number of vices for sale rivals that of the memorable Asian city. Ninety percent of all the drug trade in Quinsigamond takes place in the square mile of Bangkok Park. And so in this day and age, you have to expect to find extensive, cutting-edge weaponry inside every doorway. It used to be that, just like most other medium-sized urban centers, you only had to worry about distribution and use. But you can’t beat back the tide of progress that big drug money will ignite and now there are actually good-sized production centers right here in the city. So far, the department has found two. The first was a small lab in the basement of an abandoned brownstone on the corner of Watson and West. But the second was in a bricked-off section of the old Verner Warehouse on Grassman. Richmond and Shaw found it by accident while tailing a courier back from the Zone, Quinsigamond’s try at a cut-rate East Village. The courier got wise to them at some point inside Bangkok, and managed to lose them by ducking into the labyrinth of the old Verner building. Richmond and Shaw hunted around, realized they’d blown the tail, but inadvertently stumbled onto this huge state-of-the-art setup. This was top-of-the-line, shipped-in equipment, half a million anyway, and it told Lenore just how bad things were getting.

It was after the Verner discovery that she started thinking about the Uzi.

While everyone else in the department thinks of the job as little more than a futile effort that brings them a paycheck, Lenore pretends she’s something of a zealot. She’s got everyone convinced that she defines each day as a nonstop conflict between darkness and light, and this is why she’s never been hesitant to draw her piece and fire away. Her fake attitude creates a problem for Zarelli, especially since the night she told him to dig some Lifesavers out of her purse and he saw the vial filled with speed. Now, every once in a while, he throws the speed in her face like it was some moral paradox that she’s not clear on. In those instances, she grabs control of the argument by letting fly a derisive, condescending laugh and explaining, with a show of really strained patience, that there’s no paradox whatsoever, since the issue is one of dominance. She completely dominates the drug and if she ever sees, in the briefest of moments, an erosion of her control, she’ll kick and be as clean as day one. Lenore feels this is the core of truth in her act. She monitors herself. She’d like to do without the drug, but life is so goddamn crazy right now. The hours are unreal, and everyone has their limit.