Gun Machine

Thirty-Five

PACKED INTO Tallow’s car, he and the CSUs were five minutes away from Tallow’s apartment when he said, “Kill the lights.”

Bat took out his own phone and thumbed something into it.

“This is what you did with my Twine unit.” Scarly sulked. “That cost me a hundred bucks.”

“What?” said Tallow.

“The thing I wired into your lighting circuit. That lets me turn your lights off over the Internet.”

“That cost a hundred bucks?”

“Yes. And I had to wait for it.”

“Damn,” said Tallow. “I hope he doesn’t shoot it.”

“You’re not funny. I am also not thrilled about my paintball gear being cannibalized for this idiot stunt.”

“Hey. Your office is filled with dangerous junk. Paintballs, dyes, detonator caps, God knows what else. You planned to use it all one day, right?”

“Well,” said Scarly. “Actually, some of it’s stuff that Talia won’t let me keep at home.”

Tallow blew stale air out of his lungs, wound down the window, and tried to get a chestful of something sweeter. “Our guy does two things. He kills people and he hides in plain sight. I want him marked. If he can’t hide, he loses power. If we can take that from him, we finally, finally have an edge on him. We just have to be patient tonight.”

“And lucky,” said Bat.

“That too,” said Tallow. “But both Turkel and Westover are pretty sure I’m going to get hit tonight. I wonder where Machen is.”

“Jerking off inside his money bin,” said Scarly.

Tallow found a parking space on the street that had the front of his apartment building in sight. The lights in Tallow’s apartment were off. He pulled into the spot and turned the engine off. “Okay. I’ll take the rear exit. Scarly will take the side escape. Bat can take the front.”

“Why do I get the front?” Bat whined.

“Honestly? Because this is our guy, and our guy doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy who usually takes the front door. He’s a hunter. I’m expecting him to come in and out of the back exit, with the fire escape as a secondary measure.”

“So now you’re saying I can’t handle CTS?”

“Make your mind up, Bat. Either you’re upset because he might come out the front, or you’re upset because I think Scarly is probably a better shot than you are.”

“I can be pissed about both. I am very clever and a good multitasker.”

“Get out of the car and check your gun, Bat.”

“I already checked it.”

“Check it again.”

Tallow got angry at himself, at the nerves in his own voice. Bat didn’t meet his eyes.

They got out of the car. Tallow locked it up and lifted and reseated his Glock, and they walked toward his apartment building.

“Wow,” said Scarly. “You live in a shitbox.”

“Take the side,” said Tallow, just as his apartment window shattered and a gunshot smacked the air with a flat report.

“Move,” Tallow said, and broke into a run. He was authentically terrified. He tried to count off imaginary time. He trusted that Fuck You Robot’s motion sensor had lit off the explosive caps behind the dye-filled paintballs, and that the one gunshot was an instinctive squeeze of the trigger as the things hit his man. He would have quickly worked out that Tallow wasn’t in the apartment and would be heading down. Tallow attempted calculations: How fast could someone run down that narrow stairway? Would his man have tried the elevator? Not while he was covered in fluorescent orange paint, probably, but if he made it into the elevator before anyone came out to see what the noise was—but it was a gunshot, and people tended not to come out from behind their doors to look for actively firing guns…

Tallow got to the rear exit, lit by a single overhead lamp and surrounded on two sides by cheap mesh fencing. Someone exiting that door could come only one way—right now, that was straight toward Tallow. He flattened his back against the wall next to the door, drew his Glock, and waited.

He counted off a minute. He was straining his hearing listening for the sound of another egress being used, but his own pulse in his ears was drowning out all other noise.

Tallow was jerked around by a double gunshot and a crash of glass.

“Oh no,” he breathed, and then he ran. He was certain that the sound had come from the apartment building’s front.

Tallow felt like he was moving through molasses, like he was in one of those nightmares where you could barely move even though something terrible was happening. By the time he got around the front corner of the building, Scarly was already at the smashed main entrance, and Bat was on his back with two seared holes in his shirt.

Tallow looked around. Someone was running down the street away from him, past his own car. As the man passed under a streetlight, Tallow could discern a thin cloud of orange powder around his head.

Scarly was tearing Bat’s shirt open. “You stupid bastard,” she was saying. “You stupid bastard.”

Both rounds were buried in the Kevlar vest under Bat’s shirt, one of the ones Tallow had insisted they retrieve from Scarly’s car trunk earlier.

Bat coughed blood and then groaned. The groan made him convulse. Tallow guessed he had some broken bones. Scarly took out her phone. “I’m calling it in. Go and kill that fucker, John.”

Tallow took off after the hunter. Reaching his car, he looked down the street to see where his man was running. Tallow then unlocked and got into his car, jammed his phone into the dash and launched Ambient Security, and twisted the ignition. He made the car sweep around in a wide circle, tilting with the anger of its turn, and then Tallow rammed the accelerator down.