Gun Machine (7 page)

The hunter withdrew his knife. Thumbed the top of the sheath. His left hand began to pull the sheath away. The hunter smiled at its soundlessness. The moment was beautiful.

Tallow’s head jerked around at a terrible sound.

The hunter stopped as the noise of people and equipment crunching through the building’s front doors thundered up the stairwell. Very swiftly, knowing which steps made more sound than others, he took great light strides down the staircase on his toes, turned the corner, and was halfway down the next before stopping to look.

Two men in overalls were banging through the doors with carts and plastic boxes.

“Would you for fuck’s sake hold the fucking door open? It’s like trying to kick a pig through the eye of a fucking needle here.”

“Yeah, that’s what your mom said.”

“You want to give me shit when we’re going to unpack a roomful of guns? That’s what you want to do here? You want me to test-fire some of those bitches and see if they’re still loaded?”

“You can’t even open a fucking door and you think I’m worried about you operating a gun? I could just stand there and watch you shoot yourself in the fucking face.”

“Hey. Hey, buddy. Little help here?”

The hunter had replaced his knife and now walked down the stairs as if he lived in this building. He strode across the foyer and held one of the doors open wide, allowing the Evidence Collection Team to get their equipment inside. The hunter still had good eyes, and he could read the print and insignias on their coveralls from above.

“Hey,” one of them said to the hunter, “you know if the elevators are working yet? I mean, there’s gotta
be
elevators here, right? It ain’t fucking human otherwise.”

“Sorry,” said the hunter, “I was just visiting a friend, and I always use the stairs.”

“Meh. Thanks anyway.”

“You’re welcome,” said the hunter, and slid past him and onto the sidewalk.

Tallow jogged down a couple of flights of stairs to find two guys trying to drag two container-laden two-wheeled carts up the steps.

“ECT?”

“Yeah. We’re on the ‘fuck you, you don’t get to eat dinner’ shift. You Tallow?”

“Yeah.”

“Then fuck you too, buddy.”

“Thanks.”

Outside, standing by the police truck he hadn’t seen approaching, the hunter drove his two fists into the top of his head, again and again. Everything was wrong. Everything around him was an eye-stinging kaleidoscope of Old and New Manhattans. Trees shuddered and budded streetlights. The mailbox on the other side of the street grew a partially muscled skeleton, the tin under it flexing like lungs to produce an awful whistling scream. The road rolled and cracked as precolonial island terrain tried to force itself up into the low dusk light. His breathing was deep and labored, like a wounded animal at bay. He struck his own head again, and again, squeezing his eyes shut so tightly that pain flared across his forehead and down both sides of his neck.

When the hunter opened his eyes, he was facing the car that the cop in the black suit had arrived in. Shaking, he staggered across the street to it, battling to keep it present in his vision. Not taking his eyes off it, he groped in his bag for a stub of pencil and a scrap of coffee-shop napkin. He commanded his hand to cease trembling, and, with exaggerated care bought with a rising headache and unsettling bleached flares in his eyesight, he wrote down the car’s license plate number, make, and model.

THE FETCH
used to be the Blarney Stone. Or, at least, one of the Blarney Stones. At any given time there seemed to be at least four bars in the Five Boroughs called the Blarney Stone. This one, possibly the most greasily plastic Irish bar of them all, had been sold a couple of years ago. The new owners wanted to retain the PVC Irishness of the place—although, naturally, they had never gotten closer to setting foot on Irish soil than buying a bag of peat from a garden center in Brooklyn—but thought that the place might be one Blarney Stone too many.

So they called it the Fetch. Either because one of them had a genuine interest in folklore or because someone told them it was an Irish Thing, like shamrocks and beating your wife with a bit of tree. Tallow always suspected the latter, as the name was up on a flat sign over the front door and written in the windows in big goofy green letters, slick and cheap as processed ham.

Tallow knew that a fetch was the Irish version of a doppelgänger, a supernatural copy of a living person whose manifestation usually meant imminent death for the original. What a great name, he believed, for a place that people lurched out of at night while seeing double.

He was lucky enough to get a spot across the road. He reached into the alluvial deposits in the back of his car and pulled up a tablet device, an e-reader, and a compact wi-fi router and put them into an old laptop bag whose crushed handles he had seen lolling limply from under the passenger seat. He also slipped the paperwork the lieutenant had given him earlier into the bag. Getting out of the car, he felt a clattering landslip of aches and pains tumble from his shoulders down to his knees. That and finding the evening was warm decided him on the awkward process of popping the belt fastener on his hip holster and wrestling it and the gun into the bag unseen.

Crossing the street, Tallow couldn’t help but peer into the narrow alley to the right of the Fetch. Local legend had it that, in wilder times, bar-fight victims would just be thrown down there like garbage sacks. It was said that the police wouldn’t even run them in because it was crueler for them to awaken in a pile in the morning, all soaked with one another’s beery urine.

There may have been new owners, but there wasn’t new money in the Fetch. Everything in the place seemed to creak—the door, the flooring, the cracked and scabby fake leather on the booth seats—as if all were installed in the husk of something old and tired and hunched.

Tallow went to the bar and did what he always did. Looked at all the taps and then ordered a pint of cream ale. Looked at the food menu, front and back and specials, and then ordered a cheeseburger and onion rings in beer batter. Tallow asked the bartender if he knew if there was a spare table outside in the smoking area, which there was, and asked for his food to be taken to him. The bartender’s bored assent was smothered by a yell from the guys in the back of the bar, where there was a big flat-screen TV that justified the old window lettering that called the place a sports bar. A cheer shot through with shouts of something like
“Oshidashi!”

Tallow frowned, dimly recognizing the word. “
Oshidashi
?”

The bartender’s face broke open into a big yellow grin. “Sumo. It’s saving my life.”

“How?”

“Got the big-ass TV. Got the satellite feed. But those guys, there just ain’t enough football and baseball in the world to keep them docile. And soccer just don’t do it. There ain’t enough happens in soccer. It’s like watching twenty-two hair models kick a ball around for what seems like six months and then one of them falls over and the ball goes in the goal. And then I found this channel does big-ass edited-highlights sumo specials. So I say to the guys: You got these two big-ass guys, none of this kiddie wrestling shit, they look like two linebackers been locked in a Burger King for five years, they run at each other like two eighteen-wheelers in loincloths, they beat the
shit
out of each other, and the winner gets a plate of fucking money right there in the ring. Two days later, the guys are crack whores for sumo. I got big Irish guys yelling at the TV in Japanese and they’re not giving me shit anymore. Saving my life. Gimme like twenty minutes for your burger, okay?”

Tallow went through the bar and out into the smoking area, shaking his head. The smoking area was an old service yard that’d just been stuffed with tables and chairs, probably from a garden center in Brooklyn, and a couple of metal buckets for cigarette butts. He didn’t intend to stay out here all night, but a smoke before and after some food sounded good. It sounded better, in fact, than the idea of eating, but he knew from experience that if he didn’t force something in there now, he’d wake up feeling sick and empty.

It was warm. He took his jacket off, fished the cigarette pack and lighter out of it, chose a table at the far end of the yard, and folded the jacket over the chair before sitting down. His back was to the rear fence. He wanted to stay facing the entrance to the smoking area so he could keep an eye out for the CSUs.

The cream ale was the color of maple syrup topped with an inch’s fall of apple blossom. It tasted much as he’d expected it to. He lit a cigarette, and although he paused at how it already tasted much like cigarettes had when he was a heavy smoker, it still tasted much as he’d expected it to. He smiled slightly, briefly, and pushed curls of the smoke up toward the darkening sky. He began to relax, just a little bit.

Tallow looked for an ashtray, and found it: an old seven-inch record that had been melted to form a cup. The spindle hole looked like it’d been plugged with Silly Putty. Tallow frowned at it. Clamping the cigarette between his lips and squinting one eye against the smoke, he turned the ashtray around in his hands. He figured it’d only been suffering this abuse for a few weeks, but it was still no way to treat a record. He didn’t find the telltale gouge of a record yanked out of an old jukebox that could justify turning a piece of music into a bad flowerpot. Someone had just decided that, hell, it’s only a bit of vinyl.

He found a tissue in his left pants pocket, wadded it, moistened it with a little beer foam, and gently sponged away at the record label. Someone had stubbed out a cigarette hard in the middle of what some wiping revealed to be a butterfly motif. That and the exposed white
C
meant the label was Chrysalis. A fossil brand. Chrysalis Records had gone away long ago, a pretty little butterfly that got eaten by a business spider that got eaten by a corporate bird that got eaten by a big multinational cat. Tallow kept cleaning, determined to solve this one little mystery, exposing as much of the ravaged pale blue paper as he dared. He tossed his cigarette into the nearest metal pail. It was distracting him. He wanted to do this. It felt like archaeology to him. He immersed himself in it, making small passes with the tissue until he could see the type above the spindle hole.

Tallow could feel himself actually grinning. The record was “Heart of Glass” by Blondie. He hadn’t heard it in years. He remembered when he first heard it, as a kid, and had giggled because Debbie Harry said “pain in the ass.”

He remembered that, and a lyric about being lost in illusion, and nowhere to hide.

Tallow was pretty sure he didn’t have that album on CD and resolved to buy the MP3 when he got home, as tribute to the record’s sacrifice. He replaced the ashtray on the table. He knew he’d
use
the damn thing as an ashtray, and it was too late to save the record now, but it didn’t sit right with him. You just don’t do that to a record. Then again, he thought, chances are that no one in the vicinity of the record that day owned a device to play it on. Tallow himself didn’t know anyone apart from himself who possessed a turntable for home use.

That said, Tallow had to tell himself, he didn’t actually know that many people.

His food arrived. He looked at the label he’d unearthed, smiled, and took a bite of his burger. It tasted a bit better than he’d expected.

After the first few bites, he reached down into the laptop bag propped next to his chair, flicked on the wi-fi pod—he knew the machine well enough to do it by touch—and pulled out the tablet device. He tapped the search string
tobacco prayer
into the web browser and, as he worked through his meal, got a shallow education in Native American tobacco use from a handful of horribly designed websites using color schemes that should have earned the sites’ creators a night in the cells. Crazy street guy was right about the use of tobacco, it turned out. Two of the web pages he looked at featured large flashing links to quit-smoking sites and help lines, declaiming that the casual and heavy use of tobacco was un–Native American.

Tallow washed the last of the burger out of his teeth with a mouthful of ale and, on the ground that he wasn’t Native American, casually lit his second cigarette. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, his body had decided that it was actually hungry, and now he was a sated and sedate mammal.

He let his head lean back, and he blew smoke at the sliver of moon in the evening sky and two pigeons swimming along the light breeze. He relaxed.

And then, as certain as if he were going to throw up:
Oh God, I’m going to cry
.

Tallow sat up straight, eyes wide, breathing gone jerky and ragged, chin creasing and mouth twisting, unable to feel his feet on the ground. He watched his right hand tremble around the cigarette, his head too distant from it to make his fingers obey him. He clenched his left hand into a fist, hard enough that after half a minute he could feel white blazing crescents in his palm from his fingernails. Tallow gathered it all and tried with every internal guard he could muster to push it all down into that awful gaping hollow sensation in his chest.

He was almost to the end of his cigarette before declaring victory. The more he pushed it down, the more he started to feel angry. Tallow had unclenched for maybe a minute. All he’d been trying to do was relax before reviewing the day so far. He was angry at everything and nothing, because he couldn’t find anyone to conveniently blame for the fact that he apparently didn’t get to relax for one minute before losing it. If he tried to live like a normal human for a minute, he’d end up bawling like…

…like a trauma victim.

“No,” said Tallow, and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, directly onto the gray putty covering the spindle hole.

“No what?” said Bat.

“Nothing. Thinking out loud. Thanks for coming.”

Bat and Scarly stood in front of his table. He hadn’t seen them coming, which made him angrier at himself for no rational reason. Scarly held a pint of stout, and Bat a long glass of ice water. A slice of something that was either a bad lime or a really bad lemon was stuck to the inside of the glass. Tallow waved at them to sit down.

“Is this your regular bar?” Scarly asked.

“I guess,” Tallow said. “Two or three times a week for the past few years. Why?”

“The bartender didn’t know you. I had to describe you to him, and he guessed that you were, well, you. The guy out back.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. Just seems weird that for a place you’ve been using two or three times a week for the past few years, the bartender didn’t know your name or say, you know, Oh yeah, that guy.”

“I keep to myself. Will you let me pay for those drinks?”

“You can pay for the next round. One pint is going to be less than a fucking Band-Aid on the gaping wound of the day I’ve had, Detective.”

“Okay. How about some food? Can I buy you some food? Bat?”

Bat winced. “My stomach is like this sort of bag of horror that I put food into and that then empties the food out largely unchanged three hours later. Me and food don’t get along. I don’t, as a rule, eat food.”

Scarly took a swig of beer and muttered something about eating only once a day, something about a warrior’s diet.

CSU crazy talk. Tallow pulled another cigarette from his pack with a sigh, and offered the pack to them. Bat considered it with shining eyes, but when Scarly waved it off, he did too. “Okay. Did we get the use of that floor space?”

“Hell yeah,” said Bat, and with that aspirate Tallow could tell that it wasn’t water but vodka in the long glass. “I don’t know what your boss said to our boss, but once again, it worked like magic. I really kind of want to meet your boss. I think she might be a wizard.”

Tallow’s hands were still shaking. He tightened his finger muscles until they stopped. It hurt. Tallow was okay with that, so long as his hands did as they were told.

“Lots of those around,” Tallow said.

“So,” Scarly said, “we’re doing what you asked for, right now. Got some people making copies and moving whiteboards and shit. I don’t know what it’s going to achieve, but we’re doing it. What we need from you, Detective, is for you to work the cases we give you evidence on.”

Tallow raised an eyebrow.

“You asked us what you could do to make our lives better. It’s this. Work these as individual cases. If we deal with a couple of these right off the bat, the pressure’s going to come off us for a while.”

Tallow shook his head. “How can I close them? It’s all one guy. We close all of them or we close none of them.”

Scarly drank off some more stout. “You said
close.
I said
deal with.
If we’ve got to work with you on this, then I don’t want you getting lost in the woods. When we give you ballistics and shit, I can’t have you staring at the big picture and not seeing the individual cases.”

“What she means,” said Bat, “is that if we get a couple of these to the point where all we’re missing is the identity of the killer? That’s enough to show we’re making progress.”

“Oh God. You’re both insane.”

“What?”

Tallow took a sharp breath to forestall an explosion. “Everything but the killer? Make the case with everything but the case? You’re—”

Tallow stopped.

Scarly waited, and then said, “You told us you like history.”

“We’re just proposing a methodology here,” said Bat. “We don’t want you sitting in a simulated crazy-killer room trying to do cop voodoo, is what we’re saying. Work up a few of the unsolved to the point where the killer is the only thing missing from the picture. We do that often enough—”