Gun Machine

Thirty-Two

THERE WAS a Spearpoint guard behind the wheel of the car. It was exactly where the note from Westover had told the hunter he would find it, not fifteen minutes’ walk from the Ramble. The hunter spent an additional five minutes surveilling the car from four different positions before satisfying himself it was safe and approaching it.

The hunter walked past the car one last time, and tapped on the driver’s window. The driver tried to pretend he had been ready for it. The car unlocked, and the hunter got into the rear passenger seat.

“Do you know where we’re going?” said the hunter. He disliked the eager, excited gleam he could seein the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Yes, sir. Downtown storage facility B.”

“Then start driving.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver grinned into the mirror.

“You weren’t told not to look at me,” the hunter stated.

“Oh. Yes, sir, I was. Sorry. This is all new to me.”

“You don’t normally drive?”

The car pulled away. The driver kept talking. “I, uh, I think I just got promoted? I usually work security at the Aer Keep. But I sent off a cop today, and I think I got noticed. So Mr. Westover told me, just tonight, that I have new duties and they’re very important.”

The driver was flushed with pride, and his eyes glittered with a new feeling of power and ascendancy. The hunter was displeased.

“Just drive,” the hunter said, leaning forward and putting his face in his hands. The feeling of motion in a car was just a little too alien for him right now.

“Are you all right?” the driver asked.

“I am trying not to look out the windows,” said the hunter. “And in general I would prefer not to be seen. Just drive.”

“Yes, sir. Mustn’t argue with a very important person like you. Must be up to all kinds of important business, to be given a personal driver at this time of night. Well, I’m up for that. You tell Mr. Westover, this is the kind of work I can do just right…”

The drive took too long. The hunter wasn’t able to closely follow the passage of time, but given the steady stream of noise from the driver, it was definitely too long. The ride was making him sick, and, even if he’d been in a more tolerant mood, he was unused enough to being trapped with human noise that the constant talking was driving him to blind rage.

Finally, they stopped in a quiet street. The hunter looked around and saw the broad shutter of the storage facility—essentially a place where a few vans could be offloaded and parked overnight.

“This is the place, sir,” said the driver.

The hunter reached around and punched the driver in the neck with savage force three times, to make him die in a sudden flash of shredding agony.

The hunter waited until he stopped spasming, and then got out of the car and opened the driver’s door to check the body for a gun, holding his breath against the stink of urine and excrement leaking into its pants. The weapon was a heavy, overly styled Beretta. From his library reading, conducted religiously on those days where he could face touching a computer, the hunter guessed it to be a Neos semiautomatic. He cycled it as quickly and quietly as he could: one in the pipe and nine left in the magazine. He’d have to be careful with it. It was the kind of gun that used the hot gases from a bullet’s firing to cycle the gun and load a new bullet. The slide would kick back by a couple of inches of its own accord. He pocketed the stupid gun and closed the door.

The shutter on the storage facility was locked down. There was a pedestrian entrance next to it, in a recess. Inside the alcove was a card-reader lock. The hunter was having serious problems controlling his stomach. There was a security camera over the door. As Westover’s notes had said, its telltale red light was off. Within the envelope was the plastic card the reader wanted. He took a breath and held it, willed his fingers to obey him, and slid the card through the reader’s black lips. The door popped open with a sigh.

Inside, there was gray concrete, a single truck in Spearpoint livery, metal steps leading to office space upstairs, and two voices.

“Sophie,” said a man’s voice, “we have people to do paperwork. I just wanna go home. I missed a workout, I missed fucking dinner, I just wanna go home and sleep.”

The hunter approached along the side of the truck. The voices were coming from behind it.

“For Christ’s sake, Mike. It’ll take two minutes. If I don’t do it now, then it’s going to take ten minutes first thing tomorrow when some desk drone decides he—and it’s always a he, Mike—wants to justify his little job. Where are the keys?”

“In the ignition.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mike. You really are a giant asshole-muscle.”

Sophie walked around the rear of the truck toward the driver’s side door and right into the hunter. She gasped, mouth open wide, drawing in enough air for a shout or a strike. The hunter drove his knife through her hard palate and up into her brain and twisted. She died right there, and the only sound she made was the splashing of all the blood in her head falling out of her mouth and onto the concrete floor.

Mike looked around from the rear, smiling. The hunter skewered his eye, thrust deep into his head, put both hands to the grip of the knife, and lifted. Mike hung from the blade, a couple of inches off the ground, dying for a stubborn fifteen seconds. The hunter shucked his skull like an oyster and shook him off the blade. The body collapsed to the floor. A slice of wet gray brain oozed out of his destroyed eye.

The rear of the van hadn’t been closed. It was two-thirds filled with plastic crates. The crates were filled with guns. His guns.

The hunter was still for long moments, entranced by their destroyed beauty. All their true meaning smashed away by idiots who demeaned them, tossing them into ugly boxes like so many farming implements.

But they still had beauty. They could have meaning again. Even this raw amputated chunk of his machine would still have use.

In the envelope was the plastic lump he felt earlier. He took the key out and used it to unlock the shutter, which clattered up into the ceiling. The hunter closed the rear door of the truck and got behind the wheel. This was horrible to him, but it was necessary for the task. This was, as far as the hunter was concerned, now a rescue. He touched the ignition key, still in the small mouth of the car’s workings, with an experimental brush. It buzzed under his fingertips with insect horror. The hunter clenched that fist, and then grasped the key and turned with determined commitment. The truck awoke, a vile, coughing parody of animal life. He summoned his memory of how it worked and gingerly operated the thing, edging it out of the garage and onto the street. There was a sour pleasure at having correctly recalled how to drive, something he hadn’t done in years, if not decades. He parked ten feet down the street, stepped out quickly, pulled the shutter back down, and locked it.

The hunter drove his machine to John Tallow’s house, the black branches of the Mannahatta forest clawing with hate at its glass and tin the whole way.

No car journey in New York City was short, even at this time of night—What was the time? he thought, for he couldn’t see stars, and the dashboard held no clock—but he felt like he’d crossed the awful mathematics of Lower Manhattan in a reasonable period. He found parking on the street within sight of Tallow’s apartment building, and consulted the envelope one more time. Someone—he assumed Westover—had been busy. A rough plan of Tallow’s apartment’s floor had been sketched out, with indications for placement and exits. The hunter stuck his head out the window and, with just a few seconds’ difficulty, located north. Applying it to the sketch, he found he should be able to see Tallow’s apartment’s window.

Just as he discovered the correct window, the light inside Tallow’s apartment went off.

The hunter got out of the truck, locked it up, and strolled across the street. He had time, intelligence, and the correct tool for the job in his bag.

As he approached the front of the property, he realized the main entrance was locked. But before he could reach it, a reasonably drunken couple in their twenties arrived and, laughing at their inability to make their fingers hold the key properly, took a useful minute to open the door.

The hunter stepped in behind them, the key to the truck in his hand, the metal protruding, his head down and weaving. “Thanks. Saved me the trouble of having to try that myself.” The couple laughed, too wrapped up in each other to even look at his face as they headed for the elevator. The hunter angled away quickly, went through a fire door to the stairwell.

At Tallow’s floor, he waited behind the fire door that opened onto the corridor for a minute or two. The fire door was propped open by his foot, creating a gap through which he could listen. He was hunting for the sounds of someone preparing to leave his apartment, trying to filter footfall and conversation from out of television noise and what he guessed to be some kind of video game. The same sounds that would make him so ill when he spent too long at the Pearl Street building. Only when he’d covered enough surfaces in gunmetal did the noise grow deadened.

This was the time.

The hunter found Tallow’s apartment. He had two options at this point: silent entry and bringing Tallow to the door. Silent entry was always preferred but sometimes defeated by security measures.

The hunter took the card that opened the Spearpoint garage, flexed it, rubbed a little spittle on its short edge with his thumb, and slipped it into the space between the door and its frame. He worked it, gently and patiently and silently, until he felt the latch start to lift. With slow and precise applications of force, the hunter eased the latch behind the strike plate, maintained as much pressure upon it as he dared, and moved the door open. There were no chains and no dead bolts. John Tallow was evidently a very comfortable and unworried man.

The hunter drew the Colt Official Police from his bag. The grips met his hand with a warm and ineffable feeling of rightness. Everything was perfect.