Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

Tallow, hunkered down, just breathed and listened. Trying to recapture the scents he experienced when he first entered the room. Dissipated now, flattened or scattered by ECTs and airflow, but still there in trace enough to reactivate sense memory.

He just wished he could identify them all. He knew, or at least made an educated guess, that there had been herbs in the room. Tallow was a city boy. He didn’t learn until his early teens that herbs did not actually originate in bottles through the power of Science. He thought maybe he recognized sage. Grass. Something that reminded him dimly of root beer. Something else, almost identifiable, its nature dancing just outside of his sight, like an animal slipping behind trees in the forest.

Tobacco, maybe?

The hunter shifted his bag so it rested on his right hip and pushed his right hand into it. He found the grip of his knife easily. The hunter pressed his thumb to the lip of the sheath it lay in. When the time came, he could lift the knife out smoothly with his right hand, already pushing the sheath back. His left hand would grab the sheath and pull as the blade passed upward and free. A disabling strike up the face should his prey be turning to him. The presage to a downward strike under the base of the skull if not. The modern man in him was calculating the blow already. Putting the blade between the C2 and C3 vertebrae would see its tip emerge from between the prey’s teeth. The shock alone could sometimes make a clean kill of the strike. If the prey turned toward him, then the upward slash would make him clutch at his face, creating the space and time for a hard punch between two ribs, driving up through intercostal muscles toward the opposite shoulder and into the heart.

He did not prefer the knife. But perhaps his prey deserved only an animal’s death.

He could gather some of his more prized tools. Hamper the swift theft of more. Create new opportunities to return and rescue other pieces. Buy time for Machen to do whatever he could.

The sugar was working. The street was as quiet as it was likely to get. The hunter started across the road, holding his knife inside the bag.

Tobacco. Or almost tobacco; somewhat related to, if not direct blood of, cigarette tobacco. Tallow almost smiled. Maybe the crazy street guy was right about the additives.

He opened his eyes and studied the main room as best he could in the early-evening light. The suspect had never lived here. That much was obvious. The church analogy that first struck him held firm on a second visit. This was a place, Tallow knew, that the killer came to. A place of worship. It occurred to him now that some of the other scents could easily be old incense. He breathed again, and this time he identified something that might be cedar, or juniper.

The killer never lived here. But Tallow was more certain now that the solution to the entire problem was here in this apartment. That the solution was the apartment.

The hunter reached the other side of the street. He looked both ways again, for pedestrians. There was no one to see him enter the building besides a few drivers, and none of them would pay enough attention to be of use to anyone. The cars didn’t matter. He could barely see them anyway. They flickered in his vision like deer in the deep forest. He let the cars fade away entirely, until the sounds of them became nothing but hooves, birdsong, and heavy weather overhead. The hunter took a breath, held it, and then gently, gently opened the door as if it were the weighted leather flap on the front of a lodge, and purification and the future awaited him within.

Tallow decided that, for all his robotic fulfillment of the basic checklist today, he’d mostly done the right things. If the CSUs did the blow-ups and the matching he’d asked for, then tomorrow he could begin thinking properly about this whole thing.

He had, however, forgotten to call the lieutenant. Given her mood at the start of the day, Tallow figured that not checking in would probably not be the wisest decision he could make. Tallow put hard fencing around his thoughts and made them snake into a serpentine line of some order. He needed to arrange the day’s actions in terms of effect.

Tallow stood, wincing. Apparently he was no longer flexible enough to stay down on his haunches for that long. He shook his legs as he walked. Standing on the landing with his back to the stairwell, he took out his cell phone.

The hunter moved through the ground floor hallway slowly, as if there were brittle twigs beneath his feet. Each step cautious and exact, taken after examination of the immediate terrain.

The lieutenant sounded empty with exhaustion. The sort of exhaustion that comes from a day of being blazingly angry. Her voice had the dry crackle of the worthless embers that remained, and the echo of a space filled with nothing but bitter smoke. She asked Tallow for a report on the day’s activities, but he knew from the sound of her voice that the heart of her had already gotten up and gone home and that he was talking to a propped-up husk left behind to feign engagement.

“I’m at the Pearl Street scene,” Tallow told her. “I’ve spoken to the landlord, and to the guy whose company is in the process of buying the building. The landlord’s been taking anonymous cash payments on the apartment, and that all started when the landlord’s father was running the business. The guy whose company is buying the building, he’s planning to knock the place down as soon as he can. So I’ve made sure that’s not going to happen for now, and I’ll tickle the landlord again at a later date. I’ve touched base at One PP, and I’m seeing the two CSUs I’ve got on the case later tonight for further discussion.”

“Tell me,” murmured the lieutenant, “what do you know now that you didn’t know this morning?”

Tallow thought about that. She sounded used up. It wasn’t the time to share his more recent conclusions. “I know our guy’s a planner. I think he’s going to kill again, and soon. And when he does, we’ll know it’s him.”

“How?”

“I was thinking about this on the drive back from One PP. I have this feeling that our guy chooses his guns very carefully. At least, for some of his kills. The ECT pulled a flintlock out of here today.”

“A what?” The voice of a woman starting to fight her way through smoke.

“A flintlock. Seriously. And the CSUs say that it was clearly restored to the point where it’d fire reliably, and after it was used, it was put up on the wall here to rot. I can buy a revolver off the Internet for thirty bucks if I’m just interested in killing someone. This is something else. I can’t shake this feeling that, for at least some of his kills, he’s selecting weapons for very specific reasons.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not there yet. I’m setting up at One PP tomorrow. They’re finding me some space to work through material as they process it. Oh. Yeah. If their boss calls you tomorrow about that? If you could threaten to undo whatever extra favor you promised them, that’d be really useful.”

“Jesus, Tallow. Anything else?”

“That’s all I have for now, Lieutenant. Like I say, I’m meeting the CSUs in a little while, see what else I can glean from them. Also,” he added, another thought drifting across his mind as if on the breeze, “I need to do some reading tonight.”

The hunter froze in his tracks when he heard the voice. He held his position and listened for a second voice. None. The hunter clenched his jaws, tightened his stomach muscles, physically forcing himself into the present. He was not climbing a wooded slope. He was on stairs. The prey was speaking on a cell phone.

He would have to wait, or the person on the other end of the line would hear his prey’s death. Sometimes that was a suitable outcome. The hunter did not wish it in this instance. It would reduce the amount of time available to him after the killing.