Gun Machine

Thirty-Three

JASON WESTOVER opened the door to his apartment to discover he had visitors. Tallow watched Westover recognize him. Tallow watched Westover recognize the Glock aimed at him.

“Good evening, Mr. Westover. If you wouldn’t mind carefully taking off your gun and your other weapons and laying them on the floor in front of you, I’d be obliged.”

Tallow watched Westover’s eyes flicker across to Emily, sitting down and getting over another crying jag, with Scarly standing over her, and Bat standing behind that sofa with his hand on the butt of his sidearm.

“There’s no angle to play, Mr. Westover. Please do as I ask.”

Westover met Tallow’s eyes. Westover was a man who wore his pride like a shell. Pride in his own discipline, tough-mindedness, and practicality. All of that was in his gaze.

Tallow just looked at him.

Westover paled, and slowly took out a gun and a knife and laid them on the polished walnut flooring.

“That’s good,” said Tallow. “Now, why don’t you sit on the sofa with your wife and tell me where you’ve been tonight?”

“I’d rather stand,” said Westover with quiet venom.

“Fine. Tell me where you’ve been tonight.”

“Why don’t you go home, Detective Tallow?” said Westover with a thin smile.

“Do I appear tired to you?” said Tallow, centering the Glock’s aim on Westover’s heart. “Let me help you get started. You met Andrew Machen, and Al Turkel, and a certain other man whom Al Turkel discovered and presented to you some twenty years ago.”

Westover’s smiled broadened into something supercilious and infantile. He planted his feet and put his hands behind his back like a soldier standing at ease.

“Hands in front, please,” said Tallow. “Don’t test me, Mr. Westover. Nobody who’s tested me this week has come off well. Including Assistant Chief Turkel.”

Westover raised an eyebrow.

“Oh,” said Tallow. “He didn’t tell you? He tried to close this investigation. He wasn’t banking on the fact that this investigation has become the only thing in life I’m really interested in. So I arranged for the first deputy commissioner to take him out behind the barn for a bit. Al Turkel’s career is stopped dead. I’ve hung too much of this case around his neck. He might survive, but he’s completely compromised. Tomorrow, he’s going to be sat down in a small room and talked to by some very clever and fairly violent people. He mentioned none of this, right?”

Westover was motionless. Processing.

“I’m here tonight, sir, because your wife called me. She called me and begged me to save you.”

“It’s true,” Emily Westover rasped, throat worn ragged by the crying.

“You can’t save me,” said Westover to Tallow. “You can’t even save yourself. You certainly can’t save me.”

“Of course I can,” Tallow said. “You haven’t been listening. The NYPD have a rogue cop running an entire district. He’s had other police killed. You were just starting your security firm when all this began. You had some of the money and materials Turkel needed to make his scheme work, but you couldn’t possibly defend yourself against such a man.”

Westover’s eyes narrowed.

“Turkel’s got a fat neck,” said Tallow. “Plenty of space left to hang stuff around it. I certainly have no problem with telling people you were forced into the whole thing.”

“Why?”

“She asked me to save you. Look at her. She’s been one of the walking wounded ever since you decided to hurt her by telling her what your little life was built on. She’s smarter than you. She has more imagination than you. So she feels fear and guilt more acutely than you. And I think you knew that. You knew it and you did it to her anyway. And she still begged me to save you. Do you get what that says about you? Even a little bit?”

Jason Westover could not make himself look away from Emily Westover. Emily Westover could look only at Jason Westover.

Westover whispered, “What do you want?”

Tallow lifted his phone out of his breast pocket and looked at the clock on the lock screen. “We’re running out of time.” He used the killer’s real name and said, “Where is he now?”

Westover looked down, turned away. “On his way downtown, by car.”

So that’s how it is, thought Tallow, and said, “Driving, or being driven?”

“Driving. I loaned him a vehicle.”

“What’s downtown for him?”

“I don’t know. He said he had a place to hide. Wouldn’t tell us where it was.”

“Nowhere near Collect Pond Park?”

Westover scowled. “He wouldn’t go there.”

“Really? And yet you told your wife to avoid that area.”

“He sleeps somewhere around there. That’s all I know.”

“So your meeting was to provide him with a car and…?”

“Money. And to pursue the idea of providing him passage out of the NYC area.”

“I see,” said Tallow, who was experiencing the air in the room as thick and choked with the tangle of lies being puked out by both of them. Westover wasn’t going to say one true thing to him. Or, worse, he was going to salt his lies with lonely little grains of truth, and Tallow would have to sift everything through the imperfect sieve of what he knew to be correct. He needed to get one useful thing out of Westover.

“Tell me about this Ambient Security thing of yours. Does it work on mobile devices?”

Westover frowned, genuinely thrown by the new track of the conversation. “Sure. Why?”

“Give me twelve hours’ access to it.”

“Show me your phone,” said Westover. Tallow did. Westover appraised it. “Isn’t that a little pricey for a cop?”

“I don’t buy a lot of clothes,” said Tallow.

“No. No, I imagine not. Hold on, let me get my phone.” Westover stepped to a nearby merchant’s chest made from artfully distressed wood. Or, thought Tallow, possibly wood actually salvaged from an ancient shipwreck. Tallow looked up at the sound of a clicking.

Scarly had her gun on Westover. “If anything other than a phone comes out of that drawer, sir, I will put two in you, right in front of your wife.”

“It’s all right,” Tallow said. “Mr. Westover’s on our side now. Isn’t that right?”

“Right,” said Westover, coming away from the drawer with a phone held out for Scarly’s benefit. “Switch your Bluetooth on, Tallow.” After a few moments of tapping and fiddling, an app had been copied to Tallow’s phone, and a registration code and password entered into it.

“There,” said Westover. “On the standard setting, it’s going to give you live feeds from whichever Ambient Security cams surround your GPS location. Tap that, and you go to the Forward setting, grabbing the live feed from the cameras ten to twenty yards ahead of your location.”

“What’s that for?”

“Pursuit,” said Westover, looking at Tallow like he was an idiot. “Do you not understand what my company does? We’re going to take your job, Tallow.”

“I believe I’ve had the company lecture on that once or twice,” Tallow murmured.

“Right. With Ambient Security, I can outsource and crowd-source the very concept of criminal pursuit in this city. The red button launches a speakerphone call to a live operator in the ops room. I don’t need a bunch of cops and cars on the ground. I could chase and take down a speeding car with one operator using the Forward setting and a drone.”

“Very clever. I’ll be sure to tell the first deputy tomorrow. You’ll need another advocate in the department once Turkel’s gone, after all.”

“Huh,” said Westover, bluntly surprised. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. You’re right. Thanks. So what do you need access to Ambient Security for?”

“Well,” said Tallow. “I want to take a drive to Collect Pond Park before I head home, have a look around, and I figured that with this, I wouldn’t have to get out of the car.” He threw Westover a crooked, friendly grin and watched Westover relax just a little. “Also, I wanted to see if you’d cooperate. Ensure you’re on board with all this.”

“And there it is on your phone.”

“And there it is on my phone. Just rescind my access to it in twelve hours, and I’ll call that a sign of everything going well.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” said Tallow. “Time for me to go home. Officers.” He meant Bat and Scarly by this, and they responded by marching dutifully to the door.

“Mrs. Westover.” Tallow gave her the kindest, warmest smile he could find.

“Thank you,” she said brokenly, and then looked down at her hands.

“We’ll see ourselves out,” Tallow said, and they left.

In the elevator, Tallow tossed his cell to Bat. “Westover put a password on that app. Change it.”

“Why?” asked Bat, nearly fumbling it.

“Because if he knows the password he can rescind the app’s access to Ambient Security.”

“He could also just deactivate the registration code.”

“He could, but it’d take him longer, because his own access to Ambient Security is on that code.”

“That,” said Scarly, “didn’t go as well as it could have. Did it?”

“No,” Tallow admitted. “No, he’s decided it’s a game to be played all the way through. Stupid. I feel sorry for his wife.”

“I’m not sure I do,” said Scarly. “Except that she’s got all the classic symptoms of an untreated psychotic break. That, I feel bad about. Everything else, not so much.”

“None of it’s her fault, Scarly.”

“You think? The way I see it, when she didn’t up and leave him the minute he explained all that, it became her fault.”

“You’re forgetting,” Bat muttered, tapping away at the phone. “If she’d up and left him, the next thing that happened, the absolute next thing, would have been him giving her name and general description to CTS. I wonder what kind of gun CTS would have chosen for her.”

Scarly gathered breath for an outburst, which Tallow expected would involve judging and autism, but then she leaned against the elevator wall and deflated. “Yeah.”

“Oh well,” said Tallow, as the elevator opened up on the ground floor of Aer Keep. “It’s getting late. Time I went home, I guess.”