Gun Machine

Thirty-Seven

IT STILL wasn’t much of a case, but they built it anyway.

Bat insisted he had gotten more bandaging than Tallow because he was hurt worse. When informed, not with kindness, that Tallow had also had a calf wound packed and wrapped up, that his hands were bruised for God knew what reason, that half his shoulder was black with bruising and burns, and that he looked a bit as if someone had emptied a nail gun into his face, Bat started bitching about how someone had stolen Fuck You Robot from Tallow’s apartment. With additional poison, Bat further noted that Fuck You Robot must have been the only item of value in Tallow’s apartment, as nothing else had been stolen.

“What are you, autistic?” said Tallow. Scarly laughed and Bat told him never to darken their door with his bullshit again.

Assistant Chief Turkel was, these five days after Tallow had driven his car into the back of the Tombs, on administrative leave. This was, officially, due to the loss of one of his oldest and dearest friends, Jason Westover, and also Jason’s beloved wife, Emily. It had occurred under such tragic circumstances—a murder/suicide pact, among such people, in such a place as Aer Keep!—that Turkel had declared that he was unable to serve while suffering such grief.

Unofficially, Turkel had stood firm for two deeply unnerving days. Turkel had not been aware that Tallow had ridden with the hunter to Beth Israel and had put off his own treatment until he’d found a doctor he could convince to start pumping antipsychotics into the bastard. Two days later, the hunter started making a degree of sense and explained to attending officers that the key and the badge had come from his good friend Al Turkel.

Tallow got himself attached to the team directed to search the less used basement regions of the detention complex. It had turned out that there was an informal system at work in which tired cops between heavy shifts were allowed to grab sack time in disused cells out of sight of the main workings of the complex. Tallow felt faintly aggrieved that no one had ever told him about it.

Three hours of poking around (which was hell on Tallow’s leg) turned up a cell down in the guts of the place that showed signs of more regular use. Someone had been finger-painting on one wall. Swirls. Scarly matched the paint to that recovered from Pearl Street, and they were off to the races.

At this point, Turkel started talking for his life, explaining that he’d been forced at gunpoint to take the shield of a dead detective with no family and give it and the key to the hunter so that he could use a cell at the bottom of the Tombs as a hideout. Tallow thought it must have been very pleasant for the hunter, being able to hide so close to the buried surface of Werpoes. He could probably have pretended he was sitting in a teepee or whatever in the village at night.

Machen, who’d accidentally started the whole thing, was long gone. He’d gotten on a plane to Mexico a little over an hour after his meeting in Central Park, and his whereabouts were currently unknown. The whereabouts of a considerable quantity of Vivicy currency were also being questioned. Tallow doubted very much that he’d ever see Andrew Machen again.

Turkel’s stories crumbled as the hunter kept talking. He talked like a man who hadn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time and was determined to make the quantity up in as short a period as possible. Tallow, Scarly, and Bat could provide evidence in support of enough of it that the administrative-leave story was cooked up, and Turkel was essentially placed under house arrest.

Today, the case had ascended out of Tallow’s hands and into those rarefied Olympian heights at One PP where the police gods decided how to correctly handle the affairs of foolish mortals and limping detectives.

Tallow was due to attend his lieutenant’s office at Ericsson Place to officially sign off on seven days’ leave. A leave that he was assured he would be able to return from. But he was on Baxter Street, parking a new car—new to him, anyway, though it drove like something out of The Flintstones—and then walking across to the Tombs.

“Asshole,” muttered a sergeant as Tallow signed in.

“Where is he?” Tallow said. “Same place?”

“Don’t know who you mean, buddy,” the sergeant said.

Tallow sighed and read the sergeant’s name tag. “Okay. I’ll be sure to give your name to the first deputy commissioner when she asks me later how the Tombs are running today.”

“Fuck you,” said the sergeant. “He’s in the same place. Just got back from court. Asshole.”

“Thanks, Sarge,” said Tallow brightly, and limped off.

The hunter lay alone in a holding cell, reading a book. He didn’t have much choice about the lying. His crutches were propped by his bunk, his legs were mostly plaster, and he was in a back brace and a neck brace. The trauma team told Tallow that the hunter had gotten off lightly, considering, and most of the damage had been done by his being put through the door rather than his being hit by the car, due to the walls absorbing most of the kinetic energy when the car struck them. Someone had dressed the hunter in parts of a cheap suit. His shoes were off.

“Hello, Detective,” the hunter said. “Excuse me not standing up. It takes two other people for me to do it, at the moment.”

“Hello.” Tallow still couldn’t bring himself to use the man’s name. It lessened the man, somehow, and Tallow didn’t want him lessened.

“I just returned from the courthouse,” he said, not looking up from his book. “It turns out I’m going to live a long and productive life.”

“I heard,” said Tallow. The fix was already in. In return for cooperation, and to save haggling around the vexing question of whether an unmedicated schizophrenic can be held responsible for his actions across twenty years, the hunter would get life imprisonment without possibility of parole in a maximum-security facility, probably Sing Sing.

“So,” said the hunter, eyes still on his book. “Are we doing more questions today?”

“Just one,” said Tallow. “What were the guns on the wall for? Was it wampum?”

The hunter’s eyes flew to Tallow with delight. “Wampum! You knew it!”

“A wampum belt wrapped around an entire apartment?”

“Very close, Detective, very close. It was wampum. And wampum is information. Just as art is information, and song is information, and music, and dance. You can imagine it—and, hell, now I can imagine it, with the amount of medication swimming inside me—as a giant machine. A great big apartment-size machine, like the early computers that filled a room, running its own code.”

“But it wasn’t finished, was it?” said Tallow. “When I walked around inside it, I could see blank spots. Missing elements.”

“That’s right. I wasn’t done yet. Every piece had to be just right. Every piece had to have its own little bit of machine magic, its own piece of code.”

“What was it for?”

“What do you know about the Ghost Dance, Detective?”

Tallow frowned. “That’s older history than I’m usually good for. I know it was a Native American thing. Something magical about killing all the white people.”

“In one interpretation. The history is more complex than I really have the strength for. But the gist of it is that the Ghost Dance was a complicated ritual dance, rich in information, which, if completed correctly, would lead to several things. The removal of whites and all their evil from North America. The restoration of the native dead. And the renewal and replenishment of the land, free of all the structures imposed by the white man. Do you see where I’m going, Detective?”

“I don’t know,” said Tallow, slowly.

“I was building a ritual machine that, when completed, would do the work of the Ghost Dance. When it finished and ran, or danced or told itself or whatever, it would restore Manhattan to old Mannahatta, the island of many hills, and my people would return.”

“You’re not actually Native American, are you,” said Tallow.

“Not even a little bit,” the hunter agreed.

“And you built a machine out of murder weapons to destroy New York and replace it with the Happy Hunting Ground.”

“In my own defense, I was completely insane.” The hunter smiled.

“So I’ve heard,” said Tallow. “Sing Sing, then?”

“Yes indeed,” said the hunter, wriggling a little on his bunk. “My very own cell. Lots of books and paints. Probably some limited interaction with the state’s other guests, which I imagine will grow somewhat looser before too many years pass. Do you know where the name Sing Sing comes from, Detective?”

Tallow did know this one, but he shook his head anyway.

“It comes from the word Sint Sinck. The Sint Sincks were a tribe of Mohegan who lived on the coast there. Neighbors to the Lenape. Sing Sing is actually built on Native American ground.”

The hunter’s smile widened, to show his teeth.

Fifteen minutes later, Tallow was outside his car, patting his pockets for the keys. There was a crinkling in his jacket, and he withdrew a crumpled pack of cigarettes, untouched for a week. He looked at them and thought for a minute. He selected a cigarette, and tossed the pack in the gutter. He tore off the filter and lit the cigarette.

John Tallow, with his bruised fingertips, pushed a skein of smoke up into the sky for Emily Westover, and another for Jim Rosato.

John Tallow pushed a curl of smoke up toward someone else’s heaven for himself too, and then crushed the cigarette out and left for the 1st Precinct.