Gun Machine (9 page)

“I wanted to hurt her. To scare her. To make her shut up. She’s smart, but she, I don’t know. She’s not worldly. The fight got ugly. And. Well. Like I said. So I told her.”

“You told her.” The hunter kept his voice flat and uninflected. It was not how he felt.

“I told her everything. To frighten her into shutting up. Into not fucking picking at it all the time.” Momentarily unconcerned about keeping his hands in view and moving slowly, Westover almost convulsively passed his right hand across his eyes. His head bobbed, and the hunter could see tendons working in his neck. The hunter waited.

“Well. It worked,” Westover said with a forced, sick laugh. “I scared the shit out of her. She, um. She had a bit of a breakdown. So, no, you
cunt,
she hasn’t looked well for the last year or so. I don’t know if she’s ever going to be well again. And I walk her stupid fucking dog at night because I can’t stand her eyes on me all night every fucking night. All right? So now I want to know what happens after I get you this information. Are you going to keep coming back here to find me? Do I have to give your description to the guards at my apartment building?”

“That,” murmured the hunter, “wouldn’t be the most clever thing you could do tonight.”

“Answer my fucking question.”

The hunter pinned down his sudden need to instill in Westover a new and bloody wisdom about using that tone with him. He pinned it down and placed it in a far copse in the back of his mind, for now, secreted against future opportunities, like a nut stored for the winter. The hunter took a step back and said: “I’ll answer your question. I will continue to protect you, and take your tribute for the hunt, as I have always done. I intend to recover my tools, if at all possible, and to make any investigation into them too difficult for the police to pursue. It is my hope that very soon my work and our relationship will return to normal. The one thing I can comfortably predict is that you and the others will never be satisfied with your places in life, no matter how elevated your perches may be. However, we must take into account the possibility that I may become seen and known.”

Westover cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, trying to keep the hunter’s own eyes in his line of sight. The hunter turned to the side by ten degrees, away from what little light there was, the darkness gathering on him.

“Should that happen,” said the hunter, “should everything I’ve achieved since we first spoke be lost forever and should I lose the freedom of my island? Then you will have to die. And now, so will your wife. Do you understand that?”

“Nobody has to die,” said Westover.

“Somebody always has to die,” said the hunter, and took a second step back that had him swallowed by the trees and gone.

TALLOW, SCARLY,
and Bat tumbled out of the Fetch sometime after eleven. Tallow wasn’t drunk, and he was quite deliberately not completely relaxed, but he felt better about the world than he had when he’d entered the place. Bat and Scarly were, however, in states of reasonably confused refreshment.

Scarly put her hands in her pockets and smiled up at Tallow. “We are going home now. I am going home to my wife, and Bat is going home to his whatever Bat does when no one is looking.”

“Save the phone number for the night before your next day off, will you?” Bat giggled.

“You incredible fuckbag. That’s it. You’re paying for the cab, and the cab will drop me at home first.”

“Whatever,” Bat said, still giggling as he started off down the street. “Let’s find a fucking cab, then. G’night, John.”

“Night.” Tallow smiled and watched them stagger away. Ahead of them, he could see a man in pink denim pants and a knitted cape and hat half limping, half skipping toward the pair, singing something Tallow couldn’t make out. Another street guy. Mismatched sneakers. Obviously mentally ill and, from the way his limbs jerked, probably also physically ill. Scarly must’ve given him her scary glare, because Tallow watched the poor man dance around her and Bat like they were on fire.

Tallow laughed, quietly, and stood there for a moment more, in front of the alley, and looked up at the sky. A few stars had poked their way out through the scattered cloud and light pollution. He wondered, briefly, about those places he’d heard about, where you could see all the stars at night. People had told him about being able to see the Milky Way. He could never imagine how that was even possible.

These were stars enough for him.

He felt a hand yank at the laptop bag in his fist.

The man in the pink pants and knitted cape was next to him, trying to drag the bag away from Tallow with one hand. His mouth was fixed in a snarl, and Tallow smelled ethanol and eucalyptus panted out through the gaps in his teeth. He was shockingly strong. He pulled again, and Tallow felt his fingers give around the handle of the bag.

Which still had his firearm in it.

Tallow then saw, in the man’s other hand, a short green plastic children’s ruler, a wedge snapped off the end to make it into a point, looking like it’d been roughly ground against curb or sidewalk to sharpen it. For a millisecond Tallow noticed and registered a cartoon Indian chief’s face printed on the plastic, just above the man’s grip, smiling and giving the peace sign.

At which point, Tallow stopped thinking. He got his other hand around the back of the man’s neck, used the man’s momentum from his yank at the bag to spin him around and drive him face-first into the alleyway wall. Tallow heard the shattering of the man’s teeth and the crunch of his nose crushing inward. The man made a noise like a snorkel trying to suck air through tar and collapsed.

Tallow heard Bat saying “John?” closer than he’d expected. He turned to see that Bat and Scarly had run back to him.

“My gun’s in the bag,” Tallow said, breathing fast. “I took it off when I went into the bar.”

“Shit,” said Scarly, looking at the pile of man in the alleyway mouth. Tallow wondered why she sounded impressed.

Tallow’s brain kicked back into gear. “You see any CCTV around here? I don’t want to have been seen.”

Bat found the green shank. He didn’t touch it, just poked at it with his shoe. “Jesus, look at this. Why does it matter if someone saw you? The asshole could have killed you.”

“Because my firearm wasn’t secured, because the asshole has no face now, and because I’ve been put on the Pearl Street case to fail. I’m being set up so they can take me off the force for PTSD.” He was suddenly cold, and his heart rate was up like a runner’s, and he was saying too much. It wasn’t good enough. Tallow held a breath and closed everything down, looking at his unconscious assailant.
That was a Jim Rosato move right here,
he thought.

Scarly was already looking up and down the street. “No CCTV coverage. But the longer we stay here chatting like morons, the better the chance of someone else coming out of the bar or just wandering by.”

“Give me your lighter,” said Bat. There was a sharp snap of professional appraisal in his voice that made Tallow hand it over without question.

“It’s just a disposable,” Tallow commented.

“Good,” said Bat, prying the top off with surprisingly strong fingers. “You only touched him at the back of the neck, right?”

Tallow nodded. Bat emptied the lighter fluid over the back of the man’s neck. He then kicked the shank back into the man’s potential reach.

“You’re going to set fire to his neck?” Tallow asked, not completely certain that he wanted to ask that of a CSU or get an answer.

Bat tossed both parts of the lighter as far down the alley as he could. “No. The butane will fuck up any epithelial cells you might have transferred to the back of his neck. Just in case anyone gives enough of a shit to check him over.”

“Go home, John,” said Scarly. “Now.”

And Tallow would have, were he less fascinated by the abrupt transformation of his companions.

“What do you think?” asked Bat, stepping back to survey the picture.

Scarly leaned to one side, squinted. “Kick his head around so it’s facing away from the street. It’ll look more like he’s sleeping rough.”

Bat used his toe to shift the man’s head. The man gurgled. “Fuck it,” said Bat, and kicked him in the temple. The man’s head turned; now he was facing the alley.

“Good enough. Go home, John. And if you take your gun off again for any reason I will shoot you myself and then we’ll make it look like you committed suicide. Am I making myself completely clear here?”

“Yeah,” said Tallow.

She gave him a shove in the shoulder to start him across the street. “We’ll see you in the morning. C’mon, Bat, let’s find that cab.”

Tallow stopped, turned to them, and, with nothing more useful to contribute, simply said “Thank you.”

Bat gave his weird grin. “Hey. We’re partners now.”

Tallow went back to his car and started for home, having decided once and for all that CSUs really were completely insane.

TALLOW PARKED,
pulled a few books out of the back of his unit, and went inside.

His apartment, on his return, smelled oddly musty. As if there had been no living man occupying it for years. He spent minutes walking around his place, looking at the megaliths and barrows of CDs and books like a confused archaeologist happening upon some ancient settlement unseen by human eyes since before God was a boy. He wasn’t sure if he didn’t spend enough time here or if he just didn’t spend enough time fully present here.

He started his laptop, launched his usual music service, and bought a 320k MP3 of “Heart of Glass.” He set it to repeat and let it loop through the room as he found a big atlas that would serve as a desk, rested it atop a thick stack of books, and unpacked the contents of his jacket onto it. The books from the car and the tablet from the bag went next to his notebook and cigarettes. He pulled his chair over and sat in front of it all. And then got up, scowling, to look for a drink and an ashtray. He found a can of iced coffee moldering in the back of his small fridge, and an empty foil food container, still crusted with discolored rice, in the trash. Tallow sat down again, ready to think, and then realized he’d given his lighter to Bat.

He sat back, absently patting the insides of his thighs, debating the problem. He had decided, he told himself, that he didn’t want a cigarette. It would stink up his apartment. He would exert control and ignore that his feet were now tapping, heel to ball and back again.

He then went to the kitchen, precariously got his cigarette lit off the stove, forced the small kitchen window open, and leaned out of it like an indecisive suicide contemplating the drop, puffing away disgustedly. He was going to toss the pack in the morning. After all, he reasoned, he didn’t even have a lighter anymore, so there was no use in keeping the cigarettes. He would toss them now, but they’d go stale in the pack as they lay in the trash and, again, stink the place up. Tallow was pleased with his reasoning, and smoked.

Sitting back down, he tore open the iced coffee, took a swallow, and decided that if Mother Teresa had ever served iced coffee in the depths of Calcutta, it probably wouldn’t have tasted quite as bad as this. He took a second swallow anyway and turned to the reviewing of his notebook. He woke his tablet and copied some drawings of tobacco prayer ties into the notebook, scratching a reminder to himself to ask Scarly and Bat about the composition of the paints found on some of the guns.

He also copied down what he hoped were the salient details on that historical Rochester slaying. Hands flicking across the tablet, he pulled up a couple of generic summaries of the Son of Sam killings and did the same for those. Right now, both events were part of the same flight of fancy. Tallow knew he was nowhere with the case, but even the consideration of these other cases made him feel like he was still thinking, and if his mind was in motion, then he would be in a condition to trap the real details when they presented themselves.

Tallow went back to the laptop bag. The paperwork the lieutenant had given him this morning was still in there. He hadn’t properly reviewed it yet.

The first processed weapon. A Bryco Model 38, .32-caliber. Basically a Saturday night special, small, cheap, and distributed in bulk. Nothing special about it at all. Except that the report said the inside of the barrel had been interfered with. Tallow made two notes: he wanted to see pictures of the bullet, and he wanted to see inside the barrel. Maybe Bat could cut it open at the same time as he fulfilled his little wish of splitting the barrel of the flintlock.

The dead man associated with the gun: Matteo Nardini, Lower East Side, 2002. Nothing immediately jumped off the paper. Tallow put that sheet to one side.

Next was the Lorcin .380 semiautomatic. Tallow had encountered Lorcins on the street. They were thirty-dollar guns, more for posing with than for using because of their incredible unreliability. For a few years, they’d been known in the department as broke-pimp guns. They were made out of a zinc alloy that would snap like a cracker if you looked at it funny. He remembered one such poverty-stricken pimp who was carried into the precinct house because he’d had the idiocy to open fire on police with a Lorcin, only to have the slide mechanism shunt right off the back of the gun and into his forehead, smacking him unconscious.

The report noted that the weapon had been extensively modified. Again, his guy had taken a gun that no sane person would use for a killing and rebuilt and restored it until it would guarantee a result. Which indicated that, again, the use of this particular gun had meant something to his guy. But a Lorcin? What was he missing about a Lorcin?

“No sane person,” Tallow said to himself, and gave a little joyless half-laugh.

Chewing his lip, he put the make of the gun into the search on his tablet and skimmed the results. One sentence leaped out at him.
A common street handgun, due to legendarily poor security at the manufacturing plant over a number of years.
Tallow knew that—Rosato had once told him that, in fact—but seeing it there put it into a new context for him.

Tallow read down and discovered that Daniel Garvie, found on Avenue A with a bullet in the back of his head in 1999, was a previous customer of the New York Police Department. Convictions for petty theft.

Tallow sat back and told himself a little story.

A stolen gun to kill a thief.

Tenuous.

But it sort of fit the fiction he’d started assembling around the case today.

Gun three: Ruger nine-millimeter, scarred firing pin, Marc Arias, Williamsburg, 2007, unsolved. Tallow wished he knew more about guns. He wished he knew whom the flintlock had killed.

Gun four: a Beretta M9. Didn’t mean a thing to Tallow.

He put the tablet to sleep, and then put the laptop to sleep, and then dropped his clothes like a trail of dead and put himself to sleep.