Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

The hunter moved to the next staircase. He would be ready.

The lieutenant was awake now. “Reading? John, I told you, I need you to not disappear into your head.”

“Look,” said Tallow, “tomorrow I go over the unsolved homicides we already have matched to weapons. But tonight I want to be able to just think about this thing. I haven’t been able to catch my breath until now. I’m going too fast. I’m not even supposed to be working this case.”

There was a pause. Tallow grimaced. He had told himself he wasn’t going to let that slip out. But now it was done, and he supposed the response might be interesting.

“John,” she eventually said. “You know how shorthanded we are. And I made some calls. IAB and the DA’s office are on board with the idea of you continuing work, and I have the promise of a good signature under a letter explaining that all relevant parties decided it was better to allow you to continue working this case.”

“I don’t know how legal that is, Lieutenant.”

“If all the right police say it’s legal, then it’s legal, John. And all the related paperwork and data entry will shortly be lost, so nobody will have cause to question it. I know you’ve had the worst week it’s possible to have, but I need you to be right where you are now. Okay?”

For twenty seconds, Tallow concentrated on keeping his breathing regular and easy. Even over a cell phone connection, a bright listener can hear the respiratory tell of someone getting angry.

“Okay, Lieutenant. I’ll be by tomorrow, once I’ve got more from CSU.”

The lieutenant gave a guarded “All right, John.” And then: “Anything else you want to tell me?”

“No,” Tallow said.

The hunter heard the electronic noise of the cell phone call ending. He continued to move. Carefully craning his neck around, he could just make out the prey’s shoulder. He was standing with his back to the stairs. The hunter would be at a height disadvantage. Perhaps a strike through the base of the spine, paralyzing the prey. It would buy time for a more precise killing strike. He could pick a blow that would create the least blood spill.

The hunter withdrew his knife. Thumbed the top of the sheath. His left hand began to pull the sheath away. The hunter smiled at its soundlessness. The moment was beautiful.

Tallow’s head jerked around at a terrible sound.

The hunter stopped as the noise of people and equipment crunching through the building’s front doors thundered up the stairwell. Very swiftly, knowing which steps made more sound than others, he took great light strides down the staircase on his toes, turned the corner, and was halfway down the next before stopping to look.

Two men in overalls were banging through the doors with carts and plastic boxes.

“Would you for fuck’s sake hold the fucking door open? It’s like trying to kick a pig through the eye of a fucking needle here.”

“Yeah, that’s what your mom said.”

“You want to give me shit when we’re going to unpack a roomful of guns? That’s what you want to do here? You want me to test-fire some of those bitches and see if they’re still loaded?”

“You can’t even open a fucking door and you think I’m worried about you operating a gun? I could just stand there and watch you shoot yourself in the fucking face.”

“Hey. Hey, buddy. Little help here?”

The hunter had replaced his knife and now walked down the stairs as if he lived in this building. He strode across the foyer and held one of the doors open wide, allowing the Evidence Collection Team to get their equipment inside. The hunter still had good eyes, and he could read the print and insignias on their coveralls from above.

“Hey,” one of them said to the hunter, “you know if the elevators are working yet? I mean, there’s gotta be elevators here, right? It ain’t fucking human otherwise.”

“Sorry,” said the hunter, “I was just visiting a friend, and I always use the stairs.”

“Meh. Thanks anyway.”

“You’re welcome,” said the hunter, and slid past him and onto the sidewalk.

Tallow jogged down a couple of flights of stairs to find two guys trying to drag two container-laden two-wheeled carts up the steps.

“ECT?”

“Yeah. We’re on the ‘fuck you, you don’t get to eat dinner’ shift. You Tallow?”

“Yeah.”

“Then fuck you too, buddy.”

“Thanks.”

Outside, standing by the police truck he hadn’t seen approaching, the hunter drove his two fists into the top of his head, again and again. Everything was wrong. Everything around him was an eye-stinging kaleidoscope of Old and New Manhattans. Trees shuddered and budded streetlights. The mailbox on the other side of the street grew a partially muscled skeleton, the tin under it flexing like lungs to produce an awful whistling scream. The road rolled and cracked as precolonial island terrain tried to force itself up into the low dusk light. His breathing was deep and labored, like a wounded animal at bay. He struck his own head again, and again, squeezing his eyes shut so tightly that pain flared across his forehead and down both sides of his neck.

When the hunter opened his eyes, he was facing the car that the cop in the black suit had arrived in. Shaking, he staggered across the street to it, battling to keep it present in his vision. Not taking his eyes off it, he groped in his bag for a stub of pencil and a scrap of coffee-shop napkin. He commanded his hand to cease trembling, and, with exaggerated care bought with a rising headache and unsettling bleached flares in his eyesight, he wrote down the car’s license plate number, make, and model.

THE FETCH used to be the Blarney Stone. Or, at least, one of the Blarney Stones. At any given time there seemed to be at least four bars in the Five Boroughs called the Blarney Stone. This one, possibly the most greasily plastic Irish bar of them all, had been sold a couple of years ago. The new owners wanted to retain the PVC Irishness of the place—although, naturally, they had never gotten closer to setting foot on Irish soil than buying a bag of peat from a garden center in Brooklyn—but thought that the place might be one Blarney Stone too many.

So they called it the Fetch. Either because one of them had a genuine interest in folklore or because someone told them it was an Irish Thing, like shamrocks and beating your wife with a bit of tree. Tallow always suspected the latter, as the name was up on a flat sign over the front door and written in the windows in big goofy green letters, slick and cheap as processed ham.

Tallow knew that a fetch was the Irish version of a doppelgänger, a supernatural copy of a living person whose manifestation usually meant imminent death for the original. What a great name, he believed, for a place that people lurched out of at night while seeing double.

He was lucky enough to get a spot across the road. He reached into the alluvial deposits in the back of his car and pulled up a tablet device, an e-reader, and a compact wi-fi router and put them into an old laptop bag whose crushed handles he had seen lolling limply from under the passenger seat. He also slipped the paperwork the lieutenant had given him earlier into the bag. Getting out of the car, he felt a clattering landslip of aches and pains tumble from his shoulders down to his knees. That and finding the evening was warm decided him on the awkward process of popping the belt fastener on his hip holster and wrestling it and the gun into the bag unseen.

Crossing the street, Tallow couldn’t help but peer into the narrow alley to the right of the Fetch. Local legend had it that, in wilder times, bar-fight victims would just be thrown down there like garbage sacks. It was said that the police wouldn’t even run them in because it was crueler for them to awaken in a pile in the morning, all soaked with one another’s beery urine.