Blaze Tuesday and the Case of the Knight Surgeon (Special Edition)

  Chapter Six

  I followed the rookie down the familiar hallways. This had been my stomping ground back during my days on the force. Nothing had changed in the five years since I'd quit. The walls were still the same grungy cream colour, and the floors were still the same faded linoleum that never quite looked clean and never seemed to wear out. The bullpen was still filled with the ashen faces of exhausted detectives who lived off of stale doughnuts and dime store coffee.

  I didn't miss it, if I was gonna be honest with myself. And I sure as hell didn't miss sitting in the stuffy precinct filling out all manner of forms for every little thing.

  A few friendly detectives saw me as we passed and shouted greetings, or waved at me. I waved back, smiling, but didn't say anything. The last thing I needed was more attention drawn to myself than was already happening. What I really needed was to borrow a phone and call Jackson. We needed that envelope I'd stashed back as soon as possible, if we had any intention of keeping my name cleared of murder, and ultimately figuring out who had wanted Doctor Jones dead.

  I didn't say anything as I was led to the creaky old elevator. The labs were in the basement, as was the precinct's morgue. The Seventeenth was a powerful, important precinct and we'd been lucky enough to have everything we needed right at our disposal. The only thing that never seemed to get an update, aside from the tacky floors, was the ancient crank elevator. It was one of those ones that was essentially a birdcage on wires. I never liked the idea that the only thing keeping me from plummeting to my death was a rickety wire and wood cage and some glorified piano wire.

  I tried to suppress a shudder and the rookie closed the rolling gate and pressed the red button with the 'down' arrow on it. The generators that powered the lift groaned and came to creaky life. I closed my eyes as the car shuddered and began to descend into the basement.

  “You got a name, son?” I asked weakly, trying to hide my nervousness.

  “Yes sir,” the rookie replied.

  “I'm Blaze,” I said. “What's yours?”

  “Jason.”

  I smiled a little, I couldn't help it. The kid was nervous. “Well, Jason, it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm so sorry that you had to be the one to drag Detective Stringer outta that interrogation room.”

  Jason relaxed a little and smiled in return. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “Detective Stringer is pretty volatile, wouldn't you agree?”

  “More like an arrogant braying jackass,” I replied, “but you didn't hear that from me.”

  Jason laughed under his breath. I liked the kid. “Sorry sir,” he corrected himself.

  “No worries,” I assured him. “Stringer and I go way back. He thinks I'm an arrogant jackass too.”

  Jason nodded and we fell into amiable silence again as the lift continued to shudder and groan its way down the shaft.

  “You new?” I asked Jason after a long moment.

  “Yes sir,” Jason informed me. “This is my first year on the force. I just graduated, and I've been with the Seventeenth for eight months.”

  I nodded. “You handle yourself pretty well for a green kid.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Why'd you wanna be a cop anyway?” I pressed. “It's not as glamorous as they make you think. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and if things are still the way they used to be, the coffee 'round here tastes like it was brewed using Satan's sweaty gym socks as a filter.”

  This time, Jason outright laughed. It was a good sound. The kid wasn't as jaded as I had thought.

  “Can I speak freely, sir?” He asked.

  “I'm not your boss and there's no cameras in the elevator so I don't see why not,” I agreed.

  “It was because of you, sir,” Jason told me.

  I thought for half a second I was having a heart attack. “Because of me?”

  “Yes sir. I admired you when I was younger, every time you were mentioned on the television for solving a case or mentioned during a press release or the rare times you were on television making a statement, I was in awe. I always wanted to be like you. And when you quit and exposed the scandal and the corruption of the force, well, I wanted to be heroic like that. I wanted to stand up for what was right and I wanted to help people.”

  I felt the first hint of a prideful blush threatening to creep up on me. No one had ever told me I'd inspired them before. This was a new feeling for me.

  “Well, I hope that you find what you're lookin' for kid,” I said with a pat on Jason's shoulder. “That is a damn good compliment,” I added. “And I respect that.”

  Jason's blush was much more noticeable than mine. He turned away from me quickly as the elevator stopped. He pulled open the doors and stood aside to let me out.

  “Shall I wait here for you sir?” He asked.

  “No thanks,” I replied, thankfully stepping out of the terror-inducing elevator. “I'll take the stairs when I'm ready.”

  Jason nodded and pulled the sliding doors shut again. He pushed the button and the lift creaked back to life, slowly disappearing from view.

  I smiled to myself. Maybe the force was getting better. I sure hoped it was. Stringer would be retiring soon, and it was good to know that there were fresh faces who weren't corrupted coming in. I straightened my wrinkled shirt and ran a hand through my hair, trying to make myself a little more presentable as I walked through the concrete corridor down to the lab.

  I had to walk past the morgue, and I tried not to stop and peer inside. I hated the morgue, always had. Dead bodies in coolers was a horrifying concept. Like macabre leftovers just waiting for the time when they'd be brought out, reheated and examined.

  I shuddered at the thought and reminded myself to throw out all the leftovers in my fridge back at my apartment when I got home.

  The lab was luckily right next door and I slipped into the glaring fluorescent light of the shiny steel laboratory. The walls were steel. The floors were white linoleum. The lights were disgustingly bright and practically reflected off of every metal surface in the room. A bunch of basic lab equipment that I had no familiarity with filled every available flat surface and coolers with glass doors stood their refrigerated vigil in the corner. It was like whoever had designed this place had just taken the theme of the morgue next door and run with it into the laboratory.

  The lab technician turned around when I entered the room and a smile instantly lit up my face.

  I hadn't expected her to still be here. My one and only crush, the only woman who could ever get between me and Nadia. She smiled brightly when she saw me walk through those doors and I felt my heart skip a beat. God, she made me feel like a teenager.

  Her name was Kali.

  She was a pale little thing, always spending her time under the fluorescent lights in the basement of the precinct. She ran both the lab and the morgue. She was a brilliant woman and an invaluable asset to the precinct. She was curvy, she had definitely got the right amount of extra weight in all the right places. She kept her chocolate-coloured hair cut in a short pixie cut; she always said that the smell of the morgue lingered too much, but was too afraid to go totally bald. She had wide blue eyes that sparkled like a crystal lake on a clear summer morning and a button nose with the faintest splash of freckles gracing it. The woman never wore makeup, and she always dressed sensibly under the white lab coat she insisted upon wearing daily.

  Yeah, I was in love. Sue me.

  “Detective Tuesday!” Kali exclaimed brightly.

  Her voice sent shivers up my spine, and shivers in other parts of my anatomy, too, but it wasn't entirely appropriate to think about those other parts of me, and what she could do to them.

  I smiled brightly in return. “Hey Kali,” I mumbled.

  “What the hell happened to your face?” she asked, motioning to the side of her jaw.

  Oh right. I had forgotten about the beating Stringer had put on me.

  “Got into a fight with a cop,” I said with a shrug.

  She quirked her eyebrow at
me. “Stringer?” she asked.

  I nodded glumly.

  “Did you at least break his self-righteous nose?”

  I barked a laugh. “No, I was under arrest at the time. He might be court marshalled for beating a prisoner though.”

  “Dare I ask?”

  I shrugged. “Got picked up for murder,” I replied gruffly, trying to keep this professional. “They seem to think that just because I was at the scene of a murder out of random happenstance that I was the one who killed the guy,” I shook my head.

  “They must think you're a real dumbass,” Kali drawled in return. “So you're the one they said was at Doctor Jones' house?”

  I nodded. “I was makin' a delivery.”

  “I sure hope you got paid up front.”

  “No refunds,” I agreed.

  We stared at each other for a moment and started to laugh.

  “I'm so happy you're here,” Kali said lightly. “It's been a long and boring day.”

  “Stringer's not breathing down your neck for lab samples and stuff yet?” I asked.

  “He's been calling every ten minutes since the body got here. I mean, Jesus, rigour hasn't set in yet and the guy's body is barely room temperature and already Stringer is demanding things,” she wrinkled her nose in dislike and I felt a tug at the corner of my mouth. She was so damn cute, I couldn't help but wanna smile.

  “He's like that annoying high school teacher, y'know?” she asked. “The one who always wants you to hand in your work and just hovers?”

  I laughed again. “That is the most eloquent way I think anyone has ever described him.”

  Kali smiled and inclined her head in a little bow.

  “So what do you want me for?” I asked.

  “I need a DNA sample,” Kali said with a sigh. “Gotta rule you out as a suspect.”

  “I could give you a DNA sample,” I replied with a suggestive smirk and a wink.

  Kali looked at me blankly as she let her eyes wander over my body. “I'm sure you could,” she murmured as she picked up a scalpel from the tray of tools on the work bench. “Hold out your arm.”

  I was pretty sure that my face paled at that moment. It's never a good thing to see a woman holding a scalpel coming at you and my fight or flight reaction was screaming at me to run as she took a small step forward. I let out a nervous chuckle. “Hey, I was kidding.”

  Kali grinned, an evil little grin. “I know. You're far, far too easy,” she teased, setting down the scalpel. “I just need to swab the inside of your mouth,” she explained.

  I bit back the dirty comment threatening to escape. She did, after all, have a scalpel on hand.

  “Didn't technology with this stuff get more I dunno, sophisticated?” I asked, leaning against one of the counters while she grabbed the swab out of the drawer and tore open the seal.

  “It got more advanced in the way we can extract and manipulate DNA,” Kali replied, making the swab pop out of its little plastic container. “But we still need to gather it in the old fashioned way,” she gave me a warning look. It was like she knew what I was thinking. “Open your mouth,” she commanded.

  Damn, I love it when my women get all commanding. It means I have to think less.

  I did as I was told and opened my mouth. She ran the little swab against the inside of my cheek and clicked the lid on it.

  “All done,” she said brightly.

  I nodded and closed my mouth, frowning at the pain in my jaw from where Stringer had hit me.

  “Want an ice pack?” Kali asked, moving across the lab to deposit my DNA sample in the little machine that swirled it around and broke it down into numbers. I had no idea what the machine was actually called, but it made a pleasant humming noise as it worked.

  I was too busy watching Kali work and I didn't hear the question. She turned to look at me, mimicking my casual lean against the other counter, accentuating her curves unintentionally. Or maybe she just did it to tease me. I blinked and shook my head as I realized she was staring at me.

  “Sorry, what?” I asked, embarrassed.

  “For your jaw,” Kali drawled. “Would you like an ice pack?”

  “Oh, yeah, that would be nice,” I stammered.

  Kali smiled and pushed herself away from the counter. “Okay, come on,” she said, curling her fingers. She made a stop in one of the coolers at the far wall and produced one of those weird gel filled pouches. “I wanna show you the body anyway.”

  She tossed me the gel pack. “Your body?” I asked.

  “If you wanna call it that, sure,” Kali replied, leading the way back to the morgue.

  I frowned. “Oh, you mean the dead body.”

  Kali laughed. “I could show you some other body parts,” she admitted. “But they're less sexy than you're thinking of, my friend.”

  “I dunno Kali, any body part you're willing to show off is probably pretty attractive.”

  “I do have some severed feet that washed up in the Hudson last week. They're in jars. It's pretty cool.”

  And just like that, any sexy thoughts I was having about this woman vanished, to be replaced with the creeping sensation that I was indeed dealing with a serial killer disguised as a coroner. She shot me a look over her shoulder and winked at me, intuitively knowing that I had gotten mildly uncomfortable. This woman was infuriating. I loved it.

  “I think I'll pass on that one,” I admitted, gingerly placing the gel pack against my bruised and swollen jaw.

  “Suit yourself,” Kali said amiably as she stepped back into her role as coroner.

  The morgue was all shiny steel, just like the lab. It had the customary row of meat lockers on the one wall and two slabs in the middle of the room. Additional gurneys sat in the corner and the wall next to the door and on the far left side had long bar style counters. The floor was tiled in here and there were recessed drains in the floor. To catch water or blood or a little of both, I never cared to ask. Although, I mused morbidly, it would make cleaning up in here a hell of a lot easier. Pressure washer and you're done.

  Gross.

  Kali grabbed an apron from the counter near the door and pulled on a pair of blue rubber gloves.

  “Not wearing the leather ones, oh wise mad scientist?” I asked as I helped myself to a pair of gloves.

  “I've already done the autopsy,” Kali replied, heading directly for the body fridge. “You missed the mad scientist gear. Now I'm going for practicality and ease.”

  “What a shame,” I said.

  “Next time, I'll call you,” Kali told me. “You can be my assistant.”

  I arched an eyebrow questioningly. “I don't want anything to do with your experiments.”

  “Who said I do all my experiments in the morgue?” she asked suggestively as she pulled open the refrigerated drawer.

  What a cocktease.

  I smiled and shook my head, walking carefully across the floor. “You want some help with that?” I asked.

  “I'm leaving him here,” Kali told me, patting the body bag. “No need to drag him out of the cooler and back onto my slab,” she shrugged. “You wanna unzip him, or shall I?”

  “You can do the honours,” I told her with a wry smirk.

  “That's still illegal in New York,” Kali pointed out, grinning wickedly. “Besides, he's not my type.”

  I felt my stomach drop. “What?”

  Kali snorted. “He's dead, Blaze,” she said dryly. “Ergo, not my type. Lord, you have a dirty mind. When was the last time you got nookie?”

  I rolled my eyes but didn't answer.

  “That long, huh?” Kali mused, unzipping the black body bag that contained Doctor Jones' remains. She gave me a look, tilting her head to look up at me. It was a look of amusement and disbelief. “You're still married to the job, aren't you?”

  I shrugged. “I tried,” I countered. “I hired a hot as hell redheaded secretary and she started sleepin' with Jackson. That was totally not my fault.”

  Kali laughed at my expense. “At
least you still have Nadia,” she mused.

  Kali was the only one I had told about my affair with my firearm. She managed to pry it out of me one day while we were having a cup of coffee after an extremely long shift while working a horribly brutal mass murder case. Good to her word, though, she'd kept it a secret.

  “Okay, so this is, as you know, Doctor Terry Jones,” Kali introduced me to the corpse. “He was almost sixty, according to his driver's license,” she continued. “He had no clockwork modification done to his body. The tox screens are currently running, but I surmise that he was sober when he died. No drugs, no alcohol.”

  I nodded, pressing the ice pack against my face in a weak attempt to hide my discomfort at being around a dead body. The leftover analogy was still weighing heavily in my mind. God, I didn't wanna die in a way that would require an autopsy. That would be embarrassing.

  Kali wasn't paying attention to me at the moment, thankfully. She was in coroner mode and she went about it with an elegant efficiency that left no room for banter. It was, as she once said, her way of respecting the dead.

  “So the cause of death was a broken neck,” Kali explained. “You can see by the bruising on his neck here,” she pointed out. It was pretty gross. The flesh around his neck had swollen and turned the most horrid shade of blackish purple I had ever seen. And I'd seen my share of victims who had been beaten. This was just worse, and I wasn't quite sure why.

  “Do you know if the break happened before, or after he fell down the stairs?” I asked.

  “I'm getting to that part, Blaze,” Kali chided. “Just be patient.”

  I nodded. “Sorry.”

  “There are several contusions on his skull,” she continued, pointing out the bumps as she turned his head. It was gross, his neck moved easily because of the break, flopping around as she pulled, boneless. “Several fractures, too. Had his neck not broken he likely would have haemorrhaged and died of blunt force trauma,” she set Doctor Jones' head back down against the drawer. She pointed at his eyes. “There's no broken blood vessels in his face,” she opened his eye, letting me see his eyeball.

  I had to work very hard to suppress a shudder at that. The glassy iris staring lifelessly at me was almost too much.

  “No blood in his eyes either,” she said. “This means that the trauma to his head was post mortem.”

  I nodded, letting this information sink in. “Yeah, there was no blood pooling when I found him.”

  Kali nodded. “Makes sense then, that his neck was broken before he fell down the stairs.”

  Shit.

  “That's not good,” I muttered.

  “Why not?” Kali asked.

  “It means that I'm definitely a murder suspect now,” I replied.

  Kali frowned and looked at me. “Why? What happened?”

  I shrugged. “Long story,” I said. “But it ends with me in the dead doctor's house with him dead at the base of the stairs and me running after a suspect who was nowhere to be found and my fingerprints and DNA on his shirt and neck from where I turned him over and checked for a pulse.”

  Kali stared at me for a long moment. I wasn't sure what she was thinking, but a frown tugged on her lips. I could see the worry in her eyes.

  “I didn't do it,” I offered weakly.

  Kali nodded. “I know,” she said. “The DNA will show that you only touched him to check his pulse,” she looked up at me. “Besides, I don't think you'd even know how to break someone's neck.”

  “Ha ha.” I said sarcastically. “Very funny.”

  “You carry a gun on you at all times,” she pointed out. “If you were gonna kill someone I assume you'd just shoot them.”

  “Probably,” I admitted. “Unless I was gonna murder someone,” I pointed out. “Ballistics and all, right?”

  “You do realize that you're not helping sell your innocence, right?”

  I waved my free hand nonchalantly. “I'm innocent, the evidence will prove that,” I stopped and stared at her. “You believe me right, Kali?”

  She nodded wordlessly.

  “You don't seem very sure.”

  She looked up at me. “No, I'm positive that you're innocent, Blaze,” she assured me. “I'm just wondering about this whole thing.”

  “No defensive wounds?” I asked.

  Kali's blue eyes widened with surprise. “None at all,” she agreed. “How did you know that?”

  I smiled. “Lucky guess.”

  She snorted in disbelief. “So that suggests what, then?”

  “It suggests that he was caught completely by surprise and that he likely knew his attacker,” I replied.

  “But he didn't fight back at all,” Kali said. “Look!”

  She unzipped the body bag a little farther, revealing the Y incision she had made in the late doctor's chest and subsequently sewn back up. She lifted one of the doctor's arms and spread out his hand for me to look at.

  “There's no defensive wounds, no aggressive wounds. There's nothing there,” she explained. “No bruising to suggest he'd thrown a punch. No marks on his arms to suggest that he even tried to defend himself against his attacker.”

  “There was a tear in his shirt though,” I said, suddenly intrigued by the body.

  “I saw that, too!” Kali agreed, setting his arm back down gently and tucking it into the body bag like a mother tucking her child into bed. It was a mildly disturbing thought, but it showed how much she really did care for her corpses. It showed that she still cared about the people they had once been. “Like someone had grabbed him and shaken him maybe?”

  “A threat?” I asked.

  Kali shrugged. “I dunno, Blaze. You're the detective. I only deal with the dead.”

  I stopped and looked at her. I forgot sometimes, that she didn't deal with the living. She was like a little angel of death. Or an avenging saint or something else entirely too poetic to describe the morbid little thing she was. She wasn't socially awkward, she just didn't work the psychological factor in cases like this. She never had. Although she did sometimes have the most brilliant moments of clarity about the mentality of a murderer and sheer fragility of the human body, for someone who only worked with humans after they'd expired.

  “Anything else that you can tell me about this?” I asked.

  Kali shrugged. “I dunno, Blaze. It doesn't make a lot of sense. No defensive wounds at all makes me wanna call this a suicide, but the fact that his neck was broken before he fell means it had to have been a murder.”

  “How was his neck broken?” I asked.

  She pointed to a distinct pattern in the bruises on his neck. The bruises ran up the side of his face. I stared at them. They didn't make sense to me.

  “I don't understand what I'm looking at,” I admitted.

  Kali smiled again, happy to be showing me something. “I can't demonstrate on him,” she said. “Can I borrow you for a second?”

  I hesitated, almost afraid to let her touch me.

  “I'll take off my gloves if you're so grossed out by the fact that I was just touching a dead guy,” Kali said, as though she had read my mind. She pulled the gloves off with an intentional snap and set them against the late doctor's chest.

  I couldn't help but smile at how well she knew me.

  “You trust me, right?” she asked, moving up behind me.

  “Yeah,” I muttered, feeling her press herself against my back. Dammit, maybe she was right. Maybe I did need to get myself a woman.

  She breathed warm on my neck. She was a little shorter than I was, and it was more obvious now.

  “Do you want me to crouch or something?” I asked.

  “I'm five foot eight, Detective,” she shot back. “You're two inches taller than I am. I think I can handle pretending to kill you.”

  I grinned and tried to relax. “Okay, Doc, show me what you've got.”

  “Okay,” she said into the back of my head. “To break a neck you need to apply pressure and speed and wrench the bones apart,” she explained. “
Fractures aren't as common in someone breaking a neck by hand, not everyone can generate that much force. Really, you just need to mess everything up enough to stop the lungs or heart by screwing up the nerves and other vital bits inside the spinal column.”

  I loved the way she told me things in layman's terms.

  She reached up and placed her hands against my face and the back of my head, the way you always see in the movies.

  “The bruises you saw were from this,” she explained, placing her hand against my uninjured cheek and wrapping her arm around my neck carefully to avoid choking me or further harming my already bruised anatomy.

  “That's where the murder placed his hands?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “And he wrenched our victim's neck,” she demonstrated carefully, moving my head in the way that would cause a neck to snap. “I probably couldn't cause a fracture. I'm not strong enough to create the force. I probably couldn't kill anyone this way,” she admitted. “In this case, though, the C2 vertebrae was broken,” she poked my neck to demonstrate. “And under a sub-dermal microscope, the bruises had a very, very interesting pattern.”

  I blinked slowly, thinking about what she was saying.

  “You wanna know what the sub-dermal scan showed?” she asked, letting my head go and taking a slow step away from me.

  I turned to face her. “I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that it shows robotic fingers.”

  “And a couple of cogs,” she finished my sentence with a nod.

  “So it was a murder,” I said, a slow smile creeping across my face as I realized that my name had just been irrevocably cleared. I had never been happier to not have clockwork robotic bits in me than I was just now. “You are brilliant,” I told Kali happily. “I could kiss you.”

  “I wouldn't recommend that,” Kali said with a smirk. “I've been working with dead bodies all day. I probably don't smell all that good,” she ran a hand through her short hair. “But you can take me out to dinner later to repay me for clearing your good name,” she counter offered.

  “Deal,” I said with a nod. “Have you sent your report upstairs yet?” I asked.

  Kali's smile turned brilliant. “Of course!” she told me. “I saw you in the interrogation room. I was talking with Chief Fredricks just before Stringer punched you in the face.”

  “You saw that?” I asked, my ego deflating. I sure wasn't feeling as macho about the whole thing as I had been before.

  “I won't tell Jackson anything you don't want me to,” Kali replied, folding her arms over her chest.

  “Why'd Tyler make me write my statement then?” I asked.

  Kali shrugged. “To have solid proof that Stringer is an ass?”

  I laughed. The woman was a genius.

  “All right, I had better go then,” I said slowly. “I need to get my things back and I should really go and pick up that package I needed to deliver to Doctor Jones before Jackson starts to worry.”

  “All right,” Kali said with a sigh. “You can pick me up from my place on Friday at seven,” she told me. “And you had better take me someplace nice.”

  “Deal,” I agreed, turning and making my way upstairs.

  I practically ran up the concrete stairs. I was the only person in the entire Seventeenth precinct who didn't like the elevator. I didn't trust that contraption and I got mocked for it. Too bad. I was just thankful that they hadn't boarded up the door to the stairwell like they had always threatened to do.

  I pushed open the door and made my way quickly to the evidence room where they were holding my belongings. Stringer and Chief Fredricks were in there. Why they were there was beyond me.

  “Ah, Detective Tuesday,” Chief Fredricks said. “Good timing. I was just signing your belongings out of here,” he explained. “I should hope that everything is in proper order.”

  I eyed Stringer warily. Something didn't feel right. I didn't trust the guy.

  “Can you add your signature, please?” Tyler asked.

  I snapped out of my reverie of all the violent things I wanted to befall Stringer and signed my name on the bottom of the page. I took my things and looked them over. My jacket had all its contents. My wallet still had the cash in it.

  My eyes fell upon the beautiful countenance that was my beloved Nadia, still tucked in her holster. I slipped the familiar leather straps over my shoulder and buckled them around myself. I pulled Nadia out to make sure that she was still loaded and in one piece. I ran my fingers over her carefully, gently, as one would caress a lover and I stopped.

  My fingers touched the anomaly before my eyes registered it. The filigree on Nadia's butt had been scratched. Her beautiful body had been marred by some careless individual.

  I held her close to my face, examining the wound. It was a deep scratch, fresh. It had to have happened in the few hours I'd been detained. I stared at it incredulously. It was too deep to have been an accident. And the angle of the gouge suggested that another metal implement had been used. A screwdriver, I think.

  “Is something wrong?” Chief Fredricks asked.

  “Oh, I think so,” I said, glaring daggers at Stringer. I wanted him dead right then and there. His smug, fake innocence that he was exuding made me want to gag and I knew without a doubt that he'd been the one to deface my precious Nadia. “Someone has damaged my gun.”