Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

It was gorgeous, Tallow had to admit. The voluptuous curve of the thing, and the rich dark wood that had clearly been polished lovingly at some moment in the recent past. The metal had lost its luster now, and there was some light pitting here and there, but, again, you could see where the metal had been pared and deeply cleaned. It did not look its age. On one of its plates was an insignia of some kind, a little too blurred by the years to be clear, and a word that might have been Rooster above it. Not Rooster. It was a longer word, but the incising had grown too shallow.

“You’re not going to test-fire it?”

“Hell no. Pointless, anyway. Our guy would very probably have had to make his own slug. What we need to do is run a query through the computer for any body in the past twenty years that was found with a soft lead bullet pancaked inside it behind a .45-caliber hole. I mean, who knows. What I really want to do is cut the barrel open and get a look inside.”

“Amazing.” Tallow laid the gun down with more reverence than when he had picked it up. “Thank you for showing me. So, you’re shooting the scene, matching the shots to the floor plan, taking them out…”

“Yeah,” Bat said, moving the gun back toward him, loving it with his wide eyes. “Some of them have paint on, as you would have seen. We’re going to process that, see if it gives us anything.”

“But it won’t,” said Scarly.

“Listen,” said Tallow. “Do you have, maybe, a big spare room around here that we could colonize? Like an incident room we could all use. But different.”

“I don’t know what that exactly means,” Bat said, frowning, “but, um, I think there’s space on the next floor down. We just shipped a shitload of evidence barrels out to the Bronx. But I don’t know if we could use that without our boss—”

“My boss just did your boss a solid. And my boss can undo it fast enough, if need be. I want that space.”

“No offense, buddy,” said Scarly slowly, “but don’t you have rooms and shit at Ericsson Place?”

“Sure. But that’s not where the case is going to get solved. It’s going to get solved here.”

Scarly folded her arms. Leaned away from Tallow. Everything about her, in fact, seemed to Tallow to be closing up. “This ain’t getting solved, Detective.”

“You think?”

“If this guy was gonna be caught,” Scarly said, “he would have been caught already. You know what you did when you put a hole in that wall? You interrupted the career of a genuine fucking bogeyman, some crazy-ass ghost-dog serial killer who filled a room with his fucking trophies to jerk off over. He’s never going to go back there. And you know what else? He’s going to start killing again, probably more and more quickly than before, so he can generate another trophy room slash jerking pit. Not only is this not getting solved but more people are gonna get killed because of it, and we won’t catch him after those either because this guy is just too damned good. All you did, Detective, is find the home address of the Devil in New York City, and now he’s moved someplace else.

“Look at these. Look at these photos. He’s arranged this shit. These are patterns. They mean something to him. Look at this one here, this sort of whorl of guns. The ones around it are finished shapes. This one doesn’t have a closed circle. You see that? There are still spaces to be filled. He wasn’t done. Look here: some of these shapes look like cogs. They look like they fit together. The whole fucking room is the trophy. A cross between a church and an engine. And now he’s going to start all over again. Because he has to. This is a life’s work.

“You know what I see when I look at you, Tallow? I see a cop who’s nine parts dead already. I see guys like you shuffle through here all the time. You stopped giving a shit about the job or yourself years ago. Look at you. Your fucking suit doesn’t even fit. And for all your big talk about the bad week you’re having, you’re not even angry. You’re just tired. Five bucks says your partner was carrying you, and ten says your boss laid this case on you because she didn’t want to waste two actual police on it. This case ain’t getting solved by you, and me and the Bat here are collateral fucking damage. You’re already dead, and this guy here? He just got reborn. So, yeah. Thanks a lot. You are not making our lives better. Use someone else’s house to pretend to work the case in, yeah?”

The room went icily, awkwardly quiet. Bat studied the ceiling. Tallow looked at Scarly. She looked at him right back. Neither of them broke the hard gaze for a full minute.

Tallow took out his phone then and checked the time.

“First,” Tallow said, “I want every photo from the scene blown up to one-to-one and matched to the floor plan. If you can score some spare whiteboards, or plasterboard or something, and have them moved downstairs to whatever large empty space you’ve got, that’d be great. I’m going out to the scene, and by eight I’m going to be at the Fetch on Fulton. Meet me there. I’m going to feed you and get you drunk, and you’re going to talk to me.”

“Why?” Scarly said, shaking her head as if she were suddenly disoriented.

“I guess I didn’t make myself clear,” Tallow said. “You two are my new partners. And we’re solving this case. Because you know what? The one crumb of comfort I have today is that when my boss told my partner’s wife he was dead, she also told him that I had killed the thing that did it. There are hundreds of people who got told that their loved ones were dead but never heard that we’d done a damn thing about it. So we’re solving this. Am I clear now?”

Scarly peered at him. “You don’t believe that for a second.”

“Does it matter?” said Tallow, and left.

A short drive got long, Tallow trying to find a clear shot through the tangle of traffic, aiming for the Brooklyn Bridge.

The police radio was on. Tallow let the city keep him company for as long as he could stand it. Guy in Stuyvesant Heights came home, found his tires slashed, walked to the bodega on the corner to find out if anyone saw it happen, got shot through the left eye. Nobody saw anything. The Upper East Side’s “serial groper” had struck again, kicking a twenty-five-year-old woman to the ground and grabbing her crotch before she managed to set off a rape alarm that scared the shit out of him. Lexington and East Seventy-Seventh, and somehow no one saw a thing. And a sudden burst of chatter about a beat cop in the Bronx who had just got pulled by IAB after reports of his whipping a kid’s face with his badge got out. The burst of chatter being cops who claimed to have been right there and hadn’t see a thing.

Tallow snapped the radio off, his mind wandering again to that gun: 1836. His interest in history was persistent but patchy. There just never seemed to be the time to delve into any one topic he was interested in, and he always ended up skimming it and moving on. But 1836. He wondered. Pearl Street had its name because it was once paved by crushed oyster shells—mother-of-pearl. Was it paved in pearly shells in 1836? He wondered if he wasn’t traveling the same route as whoever had brought that gun into Manhattan in 1836. There was a time when Pearl Street was the water’s edge, he knew.

The headlamps of passing cars in the gathering dusk took on the glow of slowed, smeared, time-loose ghost lights in his imagination. He shook the thought off.

Tallow pulled up a short distance, and on the opposite side of the street, from the house on Pearl Street, just in time to see the ECT pull away with their latest hoard from the gunmetal trove in 3A.

Tallow got out and stood on the sidewalk, just looking at the place for a while. It took him that long to realize he had company, of a sort. An older man, leaning against a signpost. A heavy coat, suede or some other skin, roughly patched with mismatched leathers. A hide satchel over his shoulder. Soft shoes, like moccasins, just firm enough to be relatively new but already sooty from street wear. His hair and beard were all rust and snow. Tallow noticed that, for an obvious street guy, he didn’t smell terrible. Still, he thought, there’s all kinds of crazy.