Gun Machine

Thirteen

IT TOOK a conscious effort for Tallow to keep his hand off his gun as he walked up the apartment building’s stairs. There was no threat here. He told himself that with every step. But every step held memory.

He got to the landing where Jim Rosato and Bobby Tagg had died, and it was there, standing in the space that for him still reverberated with blood and black powder, that Tallow realized his brain hadn’t been working properly all day.

He’d killed a man. He should have been taken off the street no matter what. He should be on paid leave, whatever the caseload was. His sidearm should have been taken from him. He should be talking to counselors. He should be talking to the Internal Affairs Bureau, and probably someone from the DA’s office. No one was going to rule it a bad shooting, and the fact that it was the shooting of a cop killer doubtless made some of the usual complications go away or get “lost” in paperwork. He’d heard of some guys who’d had to wait years for their shootings to be ruled on. In Tallow’s case, he could be fairly sure of a good ruling within a couple of days of the process starting. But regardless of all that, he shouldn’t have been out on the street.

Unless he was being placed in the way of something. Unless he was actually being used to write off this case.

Tallow leaned against the wall, next to the patch where Jim Rosato’s brains hadn’t quite been scrubbed clean from the plaster, and almost laughed.

The lieutenant was hedging her bets. She’d ordered him to solve the case Or Else. But in her back pocket was The only warm body I had to cover the case was a useless detective whose partner had just gotten killed and in any event he had untreated trauma from the shooting. Or even We couldn’t have made the case anyway; Tallow was on administrative leave and shouldn’t have been working it.

Every variation he came up with had the indelible mark of “John Tallow’s all done.”

He wondered when he’d disappointed her so badly that she felt it so easy to hang apartment 3A around his neck and drop it and him both into the Hudson and out of sight. At least out of sight until next year, a nice clean calendar without a couple of hundred unsolved homicides on it.

Tallow had been clanking and buzzing up and down Manhattan all day like a good little police robot and not thinking. He wondered if maybe he did have some real trauma that he wasn’t admitting to himself or not even perceiving.

“I’m an idiot,” he said to himself.

He didn’t hear anyone express a need to argue the point with him.

Tallow stepped forward on to the landing and stood over the place where Bobby Tagg had fallen. Tallow hadn’t even known his name until Carman the landlord told him. Tallow didn’t know a thing about him other than one day his world fell apart and he figured the only way he could force life to make sense again was to walk out into the hallway naked with a shotgun and scream. It doesn’t always take much to make that happen. This time, just a letter shoved under the door.

Tallow’s vision got blurry. He was foggily aware of his jaws clenching, and of an empty feeling in his chest.

He turned his attention to the hole in the wall of 3A, now enlarged to a door-size entrance next to the actual door. It seemed that that door’s elaborate locking mechanism was still giving people trouble. There had been a half-assed attempt to affix police tape across the hole. He crouched down by it so that two of the yellow strips created a frame for him to study the main room through. First, though, he closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. He was there to refresh his sense-memories before the apartment was thoroughly deconstructed. Tallow, accepting in this still moment that he was a killer, wanted to close his eyes and breathe the air of a killer’s temple.

The hunter carefully tore off one end of a paper sugar packet, lifted from the condiment tray of a coffee shop that unwisely left such things outside. He tipped the packet into his mouth and sucked the crystals down.

The hunter slipped the empty paper sleeve back into his pocket and waited. Waited for the sugar to start fires in his muscles. Waited for the street to get just a little quieter.

Tallow, hunkered down, just breathed and listened. Trying to recapture the scents he experienced when he first entered the room. Dissipated now, flattened or scattered by ECTs and airflow, but still there in trace enough to reactivate sense memory.

He just wished he could identify them all. He knew, or at least made an educated guess, that there had been herbs in the room. Tallow was a city boy. He didn’t learn until his early teens that herbs did not actually originate in bottles through the power of Science. He thought maybe he recognized sage. Grass. Something that reminded him dimly of root beer. Something else, almost identifiable, its nature dancing just outside of his sight, like an animal slipping behind trees in the forest.

Tobacco, maybe?

The hunter shifted his bag so it rested on his right hip and pushed his right hand into it. He found the grip of his knife easily. The hunter pressed his thumb to the lip of the sheath it lay in. When the time came, he could lift the knife out smoothly with his right hand, already pushing the sheath back. His left hand would grab the sheath and pull as the blade passed upward and free. A disabling strike up the face should his prey be turning to him. The presage to a downward strike under the base of the skull if not. The modern man in him was calculating the blow already. Putting the blade between the C2 and C3 vertebrae would see its tip emerge from between the prey’s teeth. The shock alone could sometimes make a clean kill of the strike. If the prey turned toward him, then the upward slash would make him clutch at his face, creating the space and time for a hard punch between two ribs, driving up through intercostal muscles toward the opposite shoulder and into the heart.

He did not prefer the knife. But perhaps his prey deserved only an animal’s death.

He could gather some of his more prized tools. Hamper the swift theft of more. Create new opportunities to return and rescue other pieces. Buy time for Machen to do whatever he could.

The sugar was working. The street was as quiet as it was likely to get. The hunter started across the road, holding his knife inside the bag.

Tobacco. Or almost tobacco; somewhat related to, if not direct blood of, cigarette tobacco. Tallow almost smiled. Maybe the crazy street guy was right about the additives.

He opened his eyes and studied the main room as best he could in the early-evening light. The suspect had never lived here. That much was obvious. The church analogy that first struck him held firm on a second visit. This was a place, Tallow knew, that the killer came to. A place of worship. It occurred to him now that some of the other scents could easily be old incense. He breathed again, and this time he identified something that might be cedar, or juniper.

The killer never lived here. But Tallow was more certain now that the solution to the entire problem was here in this apartment. That the solution was the apartment.

The hunter reached the other side of the street. He looked both ways again, for pedestrians. There was no one to see him enter the building besides a few drivers, and none of them would pay enough attention to be of use to anyone. The cars didn’t matter. He could barely see them anyway. They flickered in his vision like deer in the deep forest. He let the cars fade away entirely, until the sounds of them became nothing but hooves, birdsong, and heavy weather overhead. The hunter took a breath, held it, and then gently, gently opened the door as if it were the weighted leather flap on the front of a lodge, and purification and the future awaited him within.

Tallow decided that, for all his robotic fulfillment of the basic checklist today, he’d mostly done the right things. If the CSUs did the blow-ups and the matching he’d asked for, then tomorrow he could begin thinking properly about this whole thing.

He had, however, forgotten to call the lieutenant. Given her mood at the start of the day, Tallow figured that not checking in would probably not be the wisest decision he could make. Tallow put hard fencing around his thoughts and made them snake into a serpentine line of some order. He needed to arrange the day’s actions in terms of effect.

Tallow stood, wincing. Apparently he was no longer flexible enough to stay down on his haunches for that long. He shook his legs as he walked. Standing on the landing with his back to the stairwell, he took out his cell phone.

The hunter moved through the ground floor hallway slowly, as if there were brittle twigs beneath his feet. Each step cautious and exact, taken after examination of the immediate terrain.

The lieutenant sounded empty with exhaustion. The sort of exhaustion that comes from a day of being blazingly angry. Her voice had the dry crackle of the worthless embers that remained, and the echo of a space filled with nothing but bitter smoke. She asked Tallow for a report on the day’s activities, but he knew from the sound of her voice that the heart of her had already gotten up and gone home and that he was talking to a propped-up husk left behind to feign engagement.

“I’m at the Pearl Street scene,” Tallow told her. “I’ve spoken to the landlord, and to the guy whose company is in the process of buying the building. The landlord’s been taking anonymous cash payments on the apartment, and that all started when the landlord’s father was running the business. The guy whose company is buying the building, he’s planning to knock the place down as soon as he can. So I’ve made sure that’s not going to happen for now, and I’ll tickle the landlord again at a later date. I’ve touched base at One PP, and I’m seeing the two CSUs I’ve got on the case later tonight for further discussion.”

“Tell me,” murmured the lieutenant, “what do you know now that you didn’t know this morning?”

Tallow thought about that. She sounded used up. It wasn’t the time to share his more recent conclusions. “I know our guy’s a planner. I think he’s going to kill again, and soon. And when he does, we’ll know it’s him.”

“How?”

“I was thinking about this on the drive back from One PP. I have this feeling that our guy chooses his guns very carefully. At least, for some of his kills. The ECT pulled a flintlock out of here today.”

“A what?” The voice of a woman starting to fight her way through smoke.

“A flintlock. Seriously. And the CSUs say that it was clearly restored to the point where it’d fire reliably, and after it was used, it was put up on the wall here to rot. I can buy a revolver off the Internet for thirty bucks if I’m just interested in killing someone. This is something else. I can’t shake this feeling that, for at least some of his kills, he’s selecting weapons for very specific reasons.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not there yet. I’m setting up at One PP tomorrow. They’re finding me some space to work through material as they process it. Oh. Yeah. If their boss calls you tomorrow about that? If you could threaten to undo whatever extra favor you promised them, that’d be really useful.”

“Jesus, Tallow. Anything else?”

“That’s all I have for now, Lieutenant. Like I say, I’m meeting the CSUs in a little while, see what else I can glean from them. Also,” he added, another thought drifting across his mind as if on the breeze, “I need to do some reading tonight.”

The hunter froze in his tracks when he heard the voice. He held his position and listened for a second voice. None. The hunter clenched his jaws, tightened his stomach muscles, physically forcing himself into the present. He was not climbing a wooded slope. He was on stairs. The prey was speaking on a cell phone.

He would have to wait, or the person on the other end of the line would hear his prey’s death. Sometimes that was a suitable outcome. The hunter did not wish it in this instance. It would reduce the amount of time available to him after the killing.

The hunter moved to the next staircase. He would be ready.

The lieutenant was awake now. “Reading? John, I told you, I need you to not disappear into your head.”

“Look,” said Tallow, “tomorrow I go over the unsolved homicides we already have matched to weapons. But tonight I want to be able to just think about this thing. I haven’t been able to catch my breath until now. I’m going too fast. I’m not even supposed to be working this case.”

There was a pause. Tallow grimaced. He had told himself he wasn’t going to let that slip out. But now it was done, and he supposed the response might be interesting.

“John,” she eventually said. “You know how shorthanded we are. And I made some calls. IAB and the DA’s office are on board with the idea of you continuing work, and I have the promise of a good signature under a letter explaining that all relevant parties decided it was better to allow you to continue working this case.”

“I don’t know how legal that is, Lieutenant.”

“If all the right police say it’s legal, then it’s legal, John. And all the related paperwork and data entry will shortly be lost, so nobody will have cause to question it. I know you’ve had the worst week it’s possible to have, but I need you to be right where you are now. Okay?”

For twenty seconds, Tallow concentrated on keeping his breathing regular and easy. Even over a cell phone connection, a bright listener can hear the respiratory tell of someone getting angry.

“Okay, Lieutenant. I’ll be by tomorrow, once I’ve got more from CSU.”

The lieutenant gave a guarded “All right, John.” And then: “Anything else you want to tell me?”

“No,” Tallow said.

The hunter heard the electronic noise of the cell phone call ending. He continued to move. Carefully craning his neck around, he could just make out the prey’s shoulder. He was standing with his back to the stairs. The hunter would be at a height disadvantage. Perhaps a strike through the base of the spine, paralyzing the prey. It would buy time for a more precise killing strike. He could pick a blow that would create the least blood spill.

The hunter withdrew his knife. Thumbed the top of the sheath. His left hand began to pull the sheath away. The hunter smiled at its soundlessness. The moment was beautiful.

Tallow’s head jerked around at a terrible sound.

The hunter stopped as the noise of people and equipment crunching through the building’s front doors thundered up the stairwell. Very swiftly, knowing which steps made more sound than others, he took great light strides down the staircase on his toes, turned the corner, and was halfway down the next before stopping to look.

Two men in overalls were banging through the doors with carts and plastic boxes.

“Would you for fuck’s sake hold the fucking door open? It’s like trying to kick a pig through the eye of a fucking needle here.”

“Yeah, that’s what your mom said.”

“You want to give me shit when we’re going to unpack a roomful of guns? That’s what you want to do here? You want me to test-fire some of those bitches and see if they’re still loaded?”

“You can’t even open a fucking door and you think I’m worried about you operating a gun? I could just stand there and watch you shoot yourself in the fucking face.”

“Hey. Hey, buddy. Little help here?”

The hunter had replaced his knife and now walked down the stairs as if he lived in this building. He strode across the foyer and held one of the doors open wide, allowing the Evidence Collection Team to get their equipment inside. The hunter still had good eyes, and he could read the print and insignias on their coveralls from above.

“Hey,” one of them said to the hunter, “you know if the elevators are working yet? I mean, there’s gotta be elevators here, right? It ain’t fucking human otherwise.”

“Sorry,” said the hunter, “I was just visiting a friend, and I always use the stairs.”

“Meh. Thanks anyway.”

“You’re welcome,” said the hunter, and slid past him and onto the sidewalk.

Tallow jogged down a couple of flights of stairs to find two guys trying to drag two container-laden two-wheeled carts up the steps.

“ECT?”

“Yeah. We’re on the ‘fuck you, you don’t get to eat dinner’ shift. You Tallow?”

“Yeah.”

“Then fuck you too, buddy.”

“Thanks.”

Outside, standing by the police truck he hadn’t seen approaching, the hunter drove his two fists into the top of his head, again and again. Everything was wrong. Everything around him was an eye-stinging kaleidoscope of Old and New Manhattans. Trees shuddered and budded streetlights. The mailbox on the other side of the street grew a partially muscled skeleton, the tin under it flexing like lungs to produce an awful whistling scream. The road rolled and cracked as precolonial island terrain tried to force itself up into the low dusk light. His breathing was deep and labored, like a wounded animal at bay. He struck his own head again, and again, squeezing his eyes shut so tightly that pain flared across his forehead and down both sides of his neck.

When the hunter opened his eyes, he was facing the car that the cop in the black suit had arrived in. Shaking, he staggered across the street to it, battling to keep it present in his vision. Not taking his eyes off it, he groped in his bag for a stub of pencil and a scrap of coffee-shop napkin. He commanded his hand to cease trembling, and, with exaggerated care bought with a rising headache and unsettling bleached flares in his eyesight, he wrote down the car’s license plate number, make, and model.