Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

Which brought back the image of screaming naked Bobby Tagg and his shotgun.

Tallow didn’t register his having taken out and lit a cigarette until the second drag. He glared at the thing, annoyed with himself. Wasn’t he supposed to have thrown the pack away?

“Tobacco?” said the street guy.

“Um. Yeah.”

“Spare one?”

“Sure,” said Tallow, locating the pack and pushing one cigarette out for the street guy. Tallow saw his fingers, callused and hatched with tiny scars. A man who had worked with his hands, a carpenter maybe, before whatever happened to him happened. Tallow had worked streets long enough to know that it didn’t always take a big thing to send someone to the point where it seemed to him that the best option was to live outdoors and eat out of garbage sacks.

The street guy pulled the filter off the cigarette with a hard, fast pinch. Tallow saw him pocket the filter as he gestured for a light. Tallow flicked his lighter and saw something between disappointment and contempt flick across the street guy’s face before he resigned himself to lighting his smoke off the flame.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

The street guy drew smoke, held it in his lungs, and let it creep out of his mouth and nose. He wafted his hand through the smoke as it rose, cupping it, dancing his fingers through it.

The man licked his lips. “Not the way it used to be. Too many, what’s the word…additives.” The tip of his tongue seemed to be trying to gather residue from his lips. “Honey. Benzene. Ammonia. Can’t you taste them? Even copper.”

“I’m going to quit again soon,” Tallow commented.

“Good,” the street guy said. “Tobacco should be used only on special occasions. Smoking it all day just cheapens its value and reduces its effect.” Exhaling again, he pushed his fingers up into the smoke, as if helping the silver curls up into the sky.

Tallow’s immediate thought was to ask the man what today’s special occasion was. He held the thought. He didn’t have the strength for a conversation with a street crazy. Instead, he stamped out his own smoke, said “Good luck” to the street guy, and started across the road to the building.

“That’s what I’m praying for,” said the street guy to Tallow’s back. “Just a little good luck.”

THE HUNTER drew on his tobacco and sent his prayers to heaven, watching the man in the black suit enter the building that contained his work. At first, the hunter had been furious with himself for not going in as soon as the thieves in the truck drove away with more of his tools. Now he was calmer, knowing that if he’d gone straight in, he likely would have been discovered and possibly even cornered by the man in the black suit, whose walk and jacket draping betrayed the presence of a firearm on his hip. Now the hunter had the upper hand. His prey was in sight and had no sense of being stalked.

The hunter did not, however, have a correct tool for the job. Nothing with resonance. He briefly fantasized about finding the right tool in his bag: an old snub-nosed police .38, perhaps, or some weapon that enjoyed infamy as a cop killer. But all he had was a hunting knife.

He considered that the shoes he’d made in the summer were sufficiently broken in to give him woodcraft stealth. If he was very careful, if he ensured that he would not be caught in the large open spaces of the building…

The hunter husbanded his smoke before casting it skyward, watching the foot traffic thin out and reading the seconds off his pulse. In his peripheral vision, ancient branches gathered.

IT TOOK a conscious effort for Tallow to keep his hand off his gun as he walked up the apartment building’s stairs. There was no threat here. He told himself that with every step. But every step held memory.

He got to the landing where Jim Rosato and Bobby Tagg had died, and it was there, standing in the space that for him still reverberated with blood and black powder, that Tallow realized his brain hadn’t been working properly all day.

He’d killed a man. He should have been taken off the street no matter what. He should be on paid leave, whatever the caseload was. His sidearm should have been taken from him. He should be talking to counselors. He should be talking to the Internal Affairs Bureau, and probably someone from the DA’s office. No one was going to rule it a bad shooting, and the fact that it was the shooting of a cop killer doubtless made some of the usual complications go away or get “lost” in paperwork. He’d heard of some guys who’d had to wait years for their shootings to be ruled on. In Tallow’s case, he could be fairly sure of a good ruling within a couple of days of the process starting. But regardless of all that, he shouldn’t have been out on the street.

Unless he was being placed in the way of something. Unless he was actually being used to write off this case.

Tallow leaned against the wall, next to the patch where Jim Rosato’s brains hadn’t quite been scrubbed clean from the plaster, and almost laughed.

The lieutenant was hedging her bets. She’d ordered him to solve the case Or Else. But in her back pocket was The only warm body I had to cover the case was a useless detective whose partner had just gotten killed and in any event he had untreated trauma from the shooting. Or even We couldn’t have made the case anyway; Tallow was on administrative leave and shouldn’t have been working it.

Every variation he came up with had the indelible mark of “John Tallow’s all done.”

He wondered when he’d disappointed her so badly that she felt it so easy to hang apartment 3A around his neck and drop it and him both into the Hudson and out of sight. At least out of sight until next year, a nice clean calendar without a couple of hundred unsolved homicides on it.

Tallow had been clanking and buzzing up and down Manhattan all day like a good little police robot and not thinking. He wondered if maybe he did have some real trauma that he wasn’t admitting to himself or not even perceiving.

“I’m an idiot,” he said to himself.

He didn’t hear anyone express a need to argue the point with him.

Tallow stepped forward on to the landing and stood over the place where Bobby Tagg had fallen. Tallow hadn’t even known his name until Carman the landlord told him. Tallow didn’t know a thing about him other than one day his world fell apart and he figured the only way he could force life to make sense again was to walk out into the hallway naked with a shotgun and scream. It doesn’t always take much to make that happen. This time, just a letter shoved under the door.

Tallow’s vision got blurry. He was foggily aware of his jaws clenching, and of an empty feeling in his chest.

He turned his attention to the hole in the wall of 3A, now enlarged to a door-size entrance next to the actual door. It seemed that that door’s elaborate locking mechanism was still giving people trouble. There had been a half-assed attempt to affix police tape across the hole. He crouched down by it so that two of the yellow strips created a frame for him to study the main room through. First, though, he closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. He was there to refresh his sense-memories before the apartment was thoroughly deconstructed. Tallow, accepting in this still moment that he was a killer, wanted to close his eyes and breathe the air of a killer’s temple.

The hunter carefully tore off one end of a paper sugar packet, lifted from the condiment tray of a coffee shop that unwisely left such things outside. He tipped the packet into his mouth and sucked the crystals down.

The hunter slipped the empty paper sleeve back into his pocket and waited. Waited for the sugar to start fires in his muscles. Waited for the street to get just a little quieter.