Gun Machine

Nine

IT WAS getting harder and harder to find pay phones in Manhattan, and it was getting harder and harder for the hunter to see them.

The hunter did not yet wish to resort to prepaid cell phones. If cornered on the subject, he’d be forced to admit that he was not yet completely conversant with the finer points of their operating parameters. Was it easier to pick a cell phone conversation out of the air than to hurriedly put a tap on a random pay phone line?

Some days, obviously, it all bothered him less. The hunter didn’t realize it, but his opinion of those days changed like the wind. Some days, when he could hear only traffic and machines and the sound of synthetic soles on sidewalk, he wanted nothing more than the condition of living on Lenape Manhattan Island.

The change for the phone flickered in his upturned palm. One moment coins, the next moment seashells. The hunter set his jaw, clamped down on his perception, and the coins stayed coins long enough for him to force them into the thin mouth of the machine. He summoned from a recess in his memory the telephone number of the first man, and dialed it. The phone made a noise that he supposed meant that the number didn’t work. He went to the next alcove in his mind and pulled the number of the second man.

The hunter listened to ringing, and then clicking, and then a woman’s voice telling him his call was being transferred. A recording, he decided. The twenty-first century seemed very far from him today. The line rang again, a different sound.

On the fourth ring, the second man said, “Andrew Machen.”

“Do you recognize my voice?”

An ice-pick pause. Then, through a hard swallow, “Yes, I recognize your voice. How did you—I mean, how can I help you?”

The hunter smiled. They were still afraid of him.

“Mr. Machen, I have been keeping things at a building on Pearl Street.” The hunter gave Machen the building number and the apartment number. “My things have been found by the police. I have watched them begin the process of carrying them out of the building. These things are mine. And in a way, they are yours too. They are the tools of my trade. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

Machen’s breathing had been speeding up as the hunter spoke. Now he was fighting to fill his lungs enough to get through a full sentence. “That building. I’m buying it. My company’s buying it. The police killed someone there. Yesterday. Some shut-in lost his shit when the current owner gave the residents their eviction notices. What have you been keeping there?”

“Think about it. What have I been keeping there? I told you a moment ago.”

“Oh no. Oh no. You can’t have.”

“And now you are telling me that this is your fault. That you have bought the building that contained my things. That you have precipitated their capture.”

“I didn’t know! How could I know? You weren’t supposed to tell us! Hell, you weren’t supposed to keep the fucking guns—”

“You had no rights over them. They were mine. They were sacred. They had done powerful things and were not to be tossed away like used toys the day after Christmas.”

The hunter smiled when he said that to Machen because he had a strong feeling that he had not remembered the existence of Christmas for some weeks.

“Well… what am I supposed to do?”

“Fix it,” said the hunter quietly. “You must understand, Mr. Machen. If the other two men decide that you have become an impediment to their success, you must understand what I will be asked to do.”

The hunter hung up the phone. He went to cross the road but saw a CCTV camera hung from the entrance to a bank on the far corner. So instead, he turned left, down an alley, and melted into an imaginary forest.