Gun Machine

Fifteen

THE HUNTER moved down the block and curled up in the doorway of a small, abandoned retail unit that had previously been a Christian bookstore. Its weathered signage and faded, skewed window posters pleased him. He felt like he was sheltering in the lee of the corpse of some strange dead animal that had made its way to the island from foreign climes and died before reproducing or polluting the ground.

Content, he drew his knees up to his chest and let the modern world collapse back into Mannahatta. The buildings on the other side of the street tumbled away as if gently shoved by heaven’s giant hand, re-forming into the foothills and slopes of shore-side Old Manhattan. Stands of broad pignut hickory arose from the inclines, their catkins unfurling. If he looked closer, with concentration, he could see the long tears in the hickory trees’ bark where black bears had eaten, and detect the scent of rich dark sap where it bled from the exposed wood. Allegheny hawkweed sprang from around their trunks like scattered flakes of amber. The hunter closed his eyes, listening to the calls of ring-billed gulls. He was close to the water here. A short walk would have brought him to the permanent, ever-growing piles of shucked oyster shells on the narrow beach where the catch was always best.

There was the rasp of starved panic grass in the breeze that he always somehow found so soothing. He could close his eyes for an hour. There was time to kill.

When the hunter awoke, the cement under him was chill and damp, and ghosts from the hated future leered at him through cloudy store-window glass. He stood, flexed to pop the stiffness from his spine, and looked up at the sky. He could judge his position and the hour even from the miserly, bare starscape afforded him in modern Manhattan. There was plenty of time for him to make the journey to his night’s last destination.

He started walking, slipping a hand into his bag for his travel notebook. The walk would take him some two and a half hours. He could have done it in less than two hours quite easily, save for the slow emergence of security cameras in the city. The hunter preferred not to be seen. His travel notebook was filled with maps he’d drawn himself indicating the locations of CCTV machines and their estimated fields of vision. The operation of the notebook would have been arcane to anyone else, of course. And that, too, was intended. The hunter’s intent was always to leave no trace on the island. Save for the bodies of his prey. In the unlikely, unlucky event that he was killed in the process of the hunt, there was nothing on his body that would mean anything to anyone. And his only regret in death would be that he would not be correctly buried. There would be no food left by his body to fortify his spirit in its walk across the Milky Way to heaven. There would be no one to cry his name, and indeed no one to close his or her lips in mourning and never speak it again. That, he reflected, wasn’t so bad. No one knew his name to speak it while he was alive now. His name could not die with him because it was already dead, and, in a way, so was he.

It was said that the spirit stayed close to the corpse for eleven days after death. Perhaps he might find a way to kill people even while disembodied. It was a thought that brought a thin smile to his lips as he walked.

He grubbed around in his bag as he progressed past Grand on his way down the Bowery, walking in the glow from the electric showrooms of the many lighting stores fringing the street. He had a few pieces of dried squirrel meat in there, wrapped in plastic and cloth. The hunter, working by touch alone, claimed a small piece and reclosed the wrapping. He bit a morsel off and chewed, slowly and methodically, matching action to footfall. The flavor was somewhere between chicken thigh and rabbit. There was better squirrel to be had farther up the island; the animals in Central Park inevitably took in enough pollution to render their meat blander, and sometimes more bitter, than it really should have been. But it kept him moving, and it kept the saliva flowing, so that he avoided thirst and didn’t deplete his physical reserves.

A little under two hours later, the hunter entered Central Park by Fifth Avenue and East Sixty-First.

He continued moving north. Up by the Seventy-Third Street parallel, paths became dark tangles wending around nighted looming woodland. This was the Ramble. The hunter took one last reckoning by the sparse stars above, gripped the knife in his bag once again, and glided into a stand of American sycamores.

Here and there, he caught glances from men standing alone or in pairs who kept to the edges of the paths, occasionally drifting mothlike to the trail lampposts. The hunter had no issue with the men, whom, more than twenty years ago, he had learned should be called two-spirits. There had been a two-spirit of the Crow Nation whom the hunter admired, a man whose true name translated as “Finds Them and Kills Them.”

When they met the hunter’s eyes, they turned away. He was not here for them. When they met his eyes, they were glad he was not.

Orbiting a great mountain of a Kentucky coffee tree, the hunter saw the one he had come to the Ramble for. The timing was quite exact. Not a tall man, but stocky, giving a sense of size and solidity even without great height. A man who looked like he worked with his hands, and with weights. Military boots that struck the hunter, mired as he now was in the modern day, as somewhat science-fictional. A black running suit, the hunter supposed, though the fabric and cut more suggested stealth fatigues. The jacket unzipped to show a blazingly clean white T-shirt. Thick dark hair that could have been a grown-out Marine cut. Walking with a soldier’s bearing. Walking a dog. An absurd, white fluffy dog that stood less than two feet high. It put the hunter in mind of a wolf that had been crossbred in a laboratory with a cuddly toy.

The man walking the dog had a gun in a shoulder holster under his left armpit. Something snub-nosed and easy to draw fast, judging by the fold of his jacket around it. The weight the man was offsetting suggested a heavier gun than necessary. A .327 Federal or similar, a snub-nosed with the punch of a .357 Magnum, bruising recoil, and a thunderclap muzzle blast. The gun of a man who wanted to exert serious muscle power to keep the gun aimed through the recoil, who considered himself tough enough to shoot without ear defenders or shades. The gun of a man pretending that his personal protection was discreet and concealed and “just in case.”

The hunter swung back around, passing through a thatch of some pea-like shrub that didn’t belong on the island, and darted through a planting of fragrant yellowwood to reach another gray curl of trail paving. He knew precisely where he was going. Central Park had been his foraging ground for a very long time.

He stepped from the pitch-black into enough ambient light that his face could be identified right in front of the man with the dog.

The man stopped walking. He clearly recognized the hunter instantly, looking straight through the years since their last meeting. The dog’s lead was in his right hand. He flipped the lead to his left hand, deftly. The hunter raised his own right hand, showing it as open and empty.

The hunter looked at the dog. The dog met his eyes and wagged his tail. The hunter put out his raised hand, palm down, and slowly lowered it. The dog sat. The hunter lowered his hand a little more. The dog lay all the way down, head on his paws, entirely at peace.

The hunter placed his attention on the man. “You are Jason Westover. Do you know who I am?”

Jason Westover nodded, once, slowly. He turned his left palm to face the hunter and released the dog’s lead.

The hunter took one pace forward, limiting Westover’s available movement space even further. “You are very probably armed. I am most definitely armed. Do not assume that you can move faster than I can. Do not assume that anyone will hear you if you shout. Nor that they’ll care if you do. The Ramble has its own reputation.”

“You planned this,” said Westover flatly. Not a question. The hunter appreciated the implication of respect.

“I have always made a point of being aware of where and when to find you should it be necessary. You have a schedule for walking your dog—”

“My wife’s dog.”

“—your dog that has proved quite inflexible over the last two years. You are often visibly unhappy when doing so. You choose the Ramble, and at this time of night, because you believe the confluence to be inherently dangerous. This is why you are armed. Perhaps you think it helps keep you sharp after a day at your desk. Perhaps you’re looking for trouble.”

“If you’re here to kill me,” said Westover, “then, please, let’s get on with it. If you’re here to talk to me, then say something interesting. If you want my help with some situation, then stop fucking around and ask for it.”

The hunter smiled. Westover visibly, involuntarily shivered but kept his spine straight and his arms in preparatory position by his sides.

“You always did treat me with less overt deference than the others.”

Westover didn’t move.

“No response?” said the hunter, raising an amused eyebrow.

“Nothing you’d be interested in hearing. How bad is it, that you’ve had to contact me directly in the middle of the night?”

The hunter took a breath. “All the things I have done for you. All the work undertaken. Each of those acts has a thing associated with it. Each of those things was stored in a single special place. It was well secured, but, as I’m sure you know yourself, no security is perfect. The place was breached. The things within it are now in the possession of the police.”

Westover frowned, shook his head. “I swear, over the years you’ve only gotten more fucking schizophrenic. I have no idea what you’re even talking about.”

“Think about it,” the hunter whispered.

Westover did. The hunter could almost see Westover’s heart rise into his mouth. “Oh God. You’re crazier than I thought.”

“Is a man crazy for going to church? For tending the earth that gives him food?”

“All right. All right. I can’t do anything about that. I appreciate the warning. Tell me what you need to secure your silence. What can I get you? Plane ticket? Passport?”

The hunter’s hand was still in his bag. He judged Westover’s position. Westover, distracted as he was, remained ready for violence. “I am taking something from my bag. It is not a weapon.”

The hunter extracted the scrap of napkin he’d written on earlier, reached over, and passed it to Westover’s fingers.

“I want,” said the hunter, “to know who that car belongs to, and where the owner lives. That, I’m quite certain, is in your power. I have noticed, not always with pleasure, how broad the reach of your security company has gotten over the years.”

Westover looked at it. “Who is this?”

“A police detective, I believe. I want this information ready for me by this time tomorrow, at this place. I would have called you, but your telephone is no longer in service.”

“I change numbers regularly these days,” muttered Westover, still looking at the napkin. “A cop. Why are you talking to me about this? I’m not the one who—”

“I believe it would be more efficient for you to do this,” said the hunter. “I want to keep that man in reserve, for now. Also, I believe he would refuse me, and that would start us down a short and nasty road. Don’t you think?”

Westover nodded. “Okay. I can do that. Not as tricky as it used to be, in fact. What will you do with the information?”

“My ultimate goal would be recovery of as many of my tools as possible,” the hunter said. “I don’t wish to start all over again. But I will if I have to. Removal of this man may help disrupt the police process. Or it may just be a new beginning for me. So…I haven’t decided yet. Nor have I decided how it would be done. The information you find will help me with that too.”

“How?”

“I told you, Mr. Westover, back when we started down this path together. Never ask me about my methods. You don’t need to know. And I don’t want you to know. It is not for you.”

Westover pocketed the napkin. “All right,” he said once more. “Tomorrow night. You’ll have a name, an address, and whatever other details on the man I can have pulled. What happens then?”

The hunter took stock of Westover again for a few seconds. “Why don’t you have a dog walker?”

“What?”

“You’re a wealthy man, Mr. Westover. I know that very well. I did, after all, help that happen. And I’ve kept my eye on all of you, over the years. Also, I spend a lot of time here in Central Park, and I know full well that wealthy people in this city pay people to walk their dogs. So why don’t you have a dog walker? Is it just the illicit little thrill of the notion that one day someone will try to mug you and you’ll gun them down? Or is it something else?”

Westover shifted on his feet. “I want to know what happens then. I want to know what I personally have to protect against, and what I have to prepare for.”

“Answer me first.”

“It gets me away from my wife for a while. Simple as that. As to the other thing: I run a security company. I wouldn’t do that job well if I were not aware of my personal security.”

“Why would you want to get away from your wife? She hasn’t looked well over the last year or so. I would have thought you would want to take care of her at night. Unless you pay someone to do that.”

Interesting, thought the hunter. Westover’s right hand wanted to go, in that instant, not to the gun but to the small of his back, above the top of his pants. The hunter was fairly sure he hadn’t missed the tells of a second gun. A knife, then. Probably something almost weightless, like titanium or surgical steel. Probably something short. Probably a folding blade. The look on Westover’s face. He instinctively went for something that had to be used close in, with savagery. With punching, ripping, stabbing motions. With hate.

Westover’s lip curled. “My wife. She is. Was. A smart woman. She developed questions, over the years, about the success of my business. There was a bad night. Over a year ago. We were fighting. I wanted to—”

Westover looked over into the trees and the night, biting his lip. His eyes were oddly bright in the ambient glow from the trail lights.

“I wanted to hurt her. To scare her. To make her shut up. She’s smart, but she, I don’t know. She’s not worldly. The fight got ugly. And. Well. Like I said. So I told her.”

“You told her.” The hunter kept his voice flat and uninflected. It was not how he felt.

“I told her everything. To frighten her into shutting up. Into not fucking picking at it all the time.” Momentarily unconcerned about keeping his hands in view and moving slowly, Westover almost convulsively passed his right hand across his eyes. His head bobbed, and the hunter could see tendons working in his neck. The hunter waited.

“Well. It worked,” Westover said with a forced, sick laugh. “I scared the shit out of her. She, um. She had a bit of a breakdown. So, no, you cunt, she hasn’t looked well for the last year or so. I don’t know if she’s ever going to be well again. And I walk her stupid fucking dog at night because I can’t stand her eyes on me all night every fucking night. All right? So now I want to know what happens after I get you this information. Are you going to keep coming back here to find me? Do I have to give your description to the guards at my apartment building?”

“That,” murmured the hunter, “wouldn’t be the most clever thing you could do tonight.”

“Answer my fucking question.”

The hunter pinned down his sudden need to instill in Westover a new and bloody wisdom about using that tone with him. He pinned it down and placed it in a far copse in the back of his mind, for now, secreted against future opportunities, like a nut stored for the winter. The hunter took a step back and said: “I’ll answer your question. I will continue to protect you, and take your tribute for the hunt, as I have always done. I intend to recover my tools, if at all possible, and to make any investigation into them too difficult for the police to pursue. It is my hope that very soon my work and our relationship will return to normal. The one thing I can comfortably predict is that you and the others will never be satisfied with your places in life, no matter how elevated your perches may be. However, we must take into account the possibility that I may become seen and known.”

Westover cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, trying to keep the hunter’s own eyes in his line of sight. The hunter turned to the side by ten degrees, away from what little light there was, the darkness gathering on him.

“Should that happen,” said the hunter, “should everything I’ve achieved since we first spoke be lost forever and should I lose the freedom of my island? Then you will have to die. And now, so will your wife. Do you understand that?”

“Nobody has to die,” said Westover.

“Somebody always has to die,” said the hunter, and took a second step back that had him swallowed by the trees and gone.