We should ask Esme (or more likely, Brucebeard) how one usually goes about murdering hopefully maybe corrupt police officers for personal gain in this town.
+1
Also: Ask Piecewise to spar with us, being careful not to hurt us. We've only seen him do slow quiet things-- maybe if given the proper orders, he'll prove faster than we realize? It's worth checking.
+1
We need to know if he can fight
Let's ask him. Be like hey man what actually ARE your combat capabilities? Can you demonstrate upon this undead chicken?
What if his talents are something more than fisticuffs? I don't want to be like hey man show me what you can do, and also please do it on us, and then he accidentally vaporizes us with necromanctic laser vision or something.
According to Esme, the there are numerous ways for handing police patrols but the easiest is generally a bait and switch ambush. Bait them to an area, attack from behind. Guns are best of you can get them and don't care about noise, but anything works as long as its quick and fatal enough. Usually requires multiple people working in unison.
((Isn't piecewise still back at the Library? Hmmm looking back we never explicitly took him, but he wasn't specifically left behind either. We can, for the sake of time, assume you folded him up and stashed him in the bag before coming here. Still, in the future, make sure to say if you wanna take him with. ))
You open the bag and command piecewise out of it. He unfolds in a rather disconcerting way which draws the attention of Bruce and Mary. Mary, standing with a ladle clutched to her chest, stares wide eyed as you shift the skeleton about and get it into position. Once you have it out of the bag and have cleared a little room you ask Piecewise what its combat abilities are. Piecewise answers by holding up its hands. Hmm.
You take a moment to reanimate the chicken as a puppet using another nail; its head flops about on a broken neck, just like the mouse. You place the chicken in front of Piecewise and tell the skeleton to "destroy it or render it inert as quickly as possible". As soon as you give the order, piecewise moves. It doesn't move any faster than a human could, you think, though it does still move very quickly. Quick enough that you don't really realize whats happening until its over. And while the speed of its movements are within human capacities, the precision of them seem completely inhuman. Piecewise doesn't kick the chicken or punch it or anything like that, instead he drops into deep squat and places one hand on the chicken's chest while carefully grasping the head of the nail with his other hand. He pulls the nail free while holding the chicken in place with the other hand. It all happens in a fraction of a second and the chicken just crumples to the ground, not even shoved backwards. Piecewise drops the nail and then slowly stands back up and returns to his normal posture.