Gun Machine (20 page)

“No, sir. This room is the point, for him. Let me…”

Tallow stepped into the emulation and looked at where Turkel was standing. “No. Stand over here. Face this wall. And then sit down.”

Turkel frowned at him. “I’ll stand.”

“All right.” Tallow stepped outside the whiteboard perimeter. “Focus on the middle of that wall.”

“…It’s a shape.”

“Yes, sir. Now pan across the room, heading left.” Tallow walked around the emulation, feeling like an animal pacing just outside the reach of campfire light.

“All the way around?”

“Yeah. You’ll see where to stop.”

“Christ. It’s patterned, somehow. It’s like the guns all flow together, almost. There are gaps, but…”

“That’s right, sir. There are gaps. Each of those gaps is a future kill.”

“Oh. Oh Christ. Oh Christ. It wraps onto the floor.”

“And there are more gaps, sir. And the great machinery of it all goes into all the other rooms, and around and back again.”

Turkel’s voice was very quiet. “What is it, Tallow?”

“It’s information, sir. It’s the work of a very methodical, very functional madman who is writing a book out of machines that kill people. It’s an information flow, it’s code, it’s pictograms, mathematics that mean nothing to anyone but him. The work of a serial killer in permanent totem phase, permanently energized, permanently in the moment and permanently laboring to complete his message to history. That’s what’s been set loose in Manhattan over these past twenty years, sir.”

Turkel looked like he was going to throw up.

“How long have you known Andrew Machen, sir?” Tallow said.

“More than twenty years now,” Turkel muttered abstractedly, eyes still tangled in the gunmetal belt of the room. “Why? What?”

“Would you say you’ve known Jason Westover for the same amount of time?”

“What?” Turkel came back to himself a little, and looked around for Tallow. Tallow was circling the emulation. Turkel could glimpse the detective only between gaps in the whiteboards.

“Why do you think Andrew Machen bought the building, sir?”

“What? Where are you? Why would he buy the building?”

“For his little wizards, sir. For his algorithmic traders to continue making invisible maps all over the 1st District and make their money from hiding.”

“You’re talking nonsense. Stand still, damn it. Why would Machen buy—”

“See, that’s what’s been bothering me, sir. But it occurred to me, just five minutes ago, that you’re all so busy making your invisible new maps of the city that…well, none of you can see the others’ maps.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Tallow?” Turkel was, Tallow thought, starting to sound a little unglued. The sound helped Tallow cancel out the internal susurrus of his own fear.

“Andrew Machen didn’t see the maps the killer draws on the city. He bought the building on Pearl according to the needs of his own maps, without a clue that his own hired murderer used that building to store all the guns he ever used. I like to think that it came as quite a shock.”

Tallow stepped into the emulation, behind Turkel. “It’s all maps, sir. This is a map. A map of a room.”

Turkel turned on Tallow, eyes juddering in their sockets, thinking as quickly as he could. “Are you saying Andy Machen hired this man to kill all those people? Are you really saying that? Where’s your evidence? Where’s
anything
to support that?”

“Are we still speaking honestly, sir?”

Turkel took a breath, straightened, and visibly found his courage. “Yes.”

“And no one can hear us.”

“That’s right, Tallow.”

“So you’d like to hear my sense of the case.”

“Fuck you, Tallow. You won’t be on the case long enough for it to make any difference.”

“All right, then,” Tallow said, walking around the assistant chief in a slow circle. “Twenty years ago, you were probably a patrolman, Jason Westover was probably fresh out of the army, and Andrew Machen was, I don’t know, selling old ladies’ gold fillings on the street. And you all knew each other. Maybe coincidental drinking buddies. Maybe childhood friends. Who knows? I’ll find out. And you were all young, and reasonably arrogant, and ambitious, and hungry, and a little bit greedy, and a little bit sick of how slowly things can happen even in the big city. And one night, one of you said, What if we could just kill all the assholes that are between us and the things we want? And each of you laughed, and had another beer. But the idea stuck, didn’t it? You couldn’t shake it off. And you—a policeman, a soldier, and a banker—couldn’t help but start talking about how such a thing could possibly be done. What happened next? Did one of you know a guy? Did you go looking for a guy? Someone you could somehow place total faith in. Someone you could pay to be so dedicated to the job that he would remain, here’s that word again,
invisible
in the city for as long as it took. And it always seemed to take longer than you’d thought, didn’t it? There was always someone else who needed to be helped out of the way of your constant advancement. And you knew the stats, didn’t you, sir? You knew how many unsolved homicides could be hidden inside the annual numbers. But what’s brought us to this place here today, sir, are the things you didn’t know. You didn’t know your man was keeping all the guns and hiding them in an apartment on Pearl Street. Jason Westover certainly didn’t know that the security devices whose disappearances he was turning a blind eye to were going to secure the door of that apartment. And Andrew Machen didn’t know he was actually buying the complete revelation of the entire scheme.”

Turkel convulsed and threw up.

As the man was down on his hands and knees emptying his guts, Tallow had to restrain a very strong urge to kick him in his heaving stomach. Instead, he stepped away from the stink.

Tallow had dropped at least three outright, extemporaneous inventions into his narrative, including the bit about Westover knowing about the security door on 3A. His instinct had told him that these three men were talking, regularly, and a little disinformation could work to his advantage in the long run. If he had a long run.

“What the fuck is going on in here?”

Turkel’s energetic puking had managed to blanket the sound of the elevator doors opening. Tallow knew the voice, and he knew the face he’d see. A woman’s face that had the constant appearance of having just taken a strong shot of Scotch whisky.

“First Deputy Commissioner,” Tallow said.

She was flanked by two plainclotheswomen, and she moved in quick little stamps of steps across the room and past Tallow.

“Not talking to you. Al, get the fuck up off the floor.”

“Food poisoning,” rasped Turkel, coming up on his haunches, rummaging for a tissue.

“Good. Maybe it’ll kill you so I won’t have to. What the fuck are you doing, Al?”

“Wanda—”

“I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re trying to fuck me out of my job. Don’t think I don’t know you, Al Turkel. I should grab the back of your head and fuck your eyes out right there on your knees. You want my four stars, you be a man and take them by fucking gunpoint.”

“Oh my God,” said the assistant chief, “what is happening.”

“What’s happening is you trying to bury the Pearl Street case in the same fucking week it opened, that’s what. Trying to bury it and get away with it, knowing full well that if the commissioner got hauled up by the mayor or God knows who over it, he wouldn’t shit down
your
neck, he’d shit down
mine,
because that’s what a first deputy is for. Queen Shitrag.”

“You’re insane, Wanda.”

“You want to know what’s insane? The captain of the 1st, a man with maybe one ounce of juice left, which he’s been saving to buy himself retirement with full benefits a couple years early, spending it today on this kid”—pointing at Tallow without looking at him and yet pinning him unerringly—“after he got the memo from your desk telling him to bury the fucking case.”

Tallow rocked a little on his heels.

“I don’t have to go to you to manage my borough, Wanda,” Turkel said, clambering shakily to his feet.

“Your borough. My city. What the fuck are you doing?”

“It’s insoluble. It’s just a waste of resources. I’m having all the evidence gathered, and CSU will continue to process it in a nonprioritized work stream until a solid background is developed.”

“Al, you fucking moron. Someone killed a cop with a gun stolen out of evidence that belonged to Son of fucking Sam. What do you think happens when that inevitably fucking leaks? Is it you that’s going to be asked questions? No. Some happy shithead is going to be training a camera on the commissioner just after he’s spent an hour fisting the mayor with handfuls of thousand-dollar bills—or whatever the hell it is the commissioner has to do to keep his job from week to week—training a camera on him and saying, Hey, I hear your department deep-sixed the case of the mass serial killer who stole another serial killer’s gun out of your storage depot and used it to kill a cop, which was just one among the two hundred or so homicides you managed not to notice were connected. Any comment?”

“Wanda,” Turkel said wearily, “aren’t you supposed to be on medication for days like this?”

“Fuck you. Your order’s been dissolved.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Can and did. I know you want my job, Al. I know you want the commissioner’s job one day too. And you’re very good. Your mistakes are few, and you’ve risen up through the ranks pretty quickly. But I’ll tell you this for free: You’re thinking like a manager. You think that at your level it’s still all about clearances and hiding the stats you can’t clear. That’s fine for CompStat and promotional reviews. But when you get to my level, Al Turkel, you need to see a bigger map. You’ll take the hit on your stats, or else you’ll be shot dead by the media and the politicians. And in this case, by every other cop in the department, who’ll ask what happens if
they
get inconveniently shot by a gun you don’t want to admit is out in the wild.”

She actually spit on the floor next to Turkel. Tallow began to understand why the first deputy always traveled with security.

“Fuck you,” she said to Turkel. “Be a police officer.”

She turned on her heel and walked back the way she had come, past Tallow. Looking at him as she approached, she said, “You’re John Tallow?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re an asshole,” she said as she stamped to the elevator.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Tallow kept his eyes on Turkel and listened to the first deputy leave. He counted off another minute in his head as Turkel cleaned himself up and pulled himself together, and then Tallow walked to the elevator himself.

Turkel said nothing as Tallow waited. After two minutes more, the elevator returned and the doors bumped and dragged open.

Tallow stepped inside. Turkel, not looking at him, spoke then, slowly and deliberately, with broken glass in his voice:

“I could have stopped this. You remember that, when you go home tonight. I could have stopped what happens next. But now I won’t.”

The doors closed with a jump and shudder. The electronics of the elevator car skipped out for a moment. For a few seconds, it all went dark in there.

Tallow spent fifteen minutes trying to scare up a janitor to clean the emulation, and when he did, he ended up having to bribe him with ten dollars.

“I don’t believe I have to bribe you to do your job,” Tallow said.

“And yet, here you are, paying me to do the job I already get paid for,” said the janitor, snatching the banknote from Tallow’s fingers. “The world of commerce is a mysterious and frightening thing, and not for the likes of you and me to ponder.”

“I could have just told you to damn well do it,” Tallow observed.

“Maybe you could have.” The janitor smiled, pocketing the ten. “I’m sure there’s some way you could have given the order that would have made me do it without your ending up ten bucks lighter. But we’ll never know, will we?”

Tallow’s eyes went glassy as he processed Turkel’s words. “That bastard,” he finally said, and moved.

His phone rang as he walked back to CSU. It was the lieutenant.

“It’s only a reprieve,” he said.

“What is?”

“The assistant chief’s order got rescinded. But all that means is tomorrow he’s going to release another order, one that’s phrased differently, probably through another channel, and that’ll be that. He’s probably working out how to do it right now.”

“Tallow, what the hell is going on over there?”

“I swear to God, I just watched the first deputy commissioner slap Assistant Chief Turkel around right in front of me.”

The lieutenant gave an explosive, surprised laugh. “Oh my God. Was she wearing those crazy flat hiking shoes?”

“She was. Walking around like she was stamping on ants.”

“I love her so much,” the lieutenant said. “I really hope she makes commissioner one day.”

“Turkel knows Machen,” Tallow said. “Machen, whose company is buying the Pearl Street building. Machen, who’s such good friends with Jason Westover that he introduced Westover to his wife. Machen, who tried to hire a Korean math wizard from another company and failed, shortly after which the Korean math wizard was found dead, killed by a Korean handgun.”

“For Christ’s sake, John,” the lieutenant said, “give me some goddamn evidence, not more conjecture.”

“Do you think I’m wrong?”

He heard her take a deep breath. “Not completely, no. But this is getting very big and very chaotic, very quickly, and you’re not helping matters by seeing connections everywhere. Bring me something that can be seen by the naked eye. Because if you’re right about one thing, John, then it’s probably that the assistant chief will find another way to sink the case. It’ll happen because you’ll let him. You won’t have anything concrete, and he’ll latch onto the one thing that looks to him like it can be cleared—”

“Ah, hell,” said Tallow. “And the first deputy handed it to him on a platter. She was yelling at him about the .44 Bulldog.”

“Get me something. Soon. Because the captain just started putting his desk shit in a box, John. He’s done, and just waiting to be told he’s done. He threw himself in the path of one bullet for us. Don’t let them fire another. Because I’m not taking it for you.”