Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

“Hm?”

“What kind of history do you like?”

“Oh, lots of different stuff. I like New York history. City history. Yesterday, when all this started, I told my partner we shouldn’t respond to the call because he had bad knees and it was the last of the old walk-up apartment buildings on Pearl.”

Tallow sipped his beer, knowing that he probably shouldn’t have ordered it since he intended to drive home. “And I know that Pearl Street was called Pearl Street because the first paving used on the road was crushed oyster shells. Mother-of-pearl. The Dutch called it that, I think. Hold on a second.”

Tallow leaned to the side and saw that his wi-fi pod was still working. The tablet was still on the table. He poked it out of sleep mode and pulled up another search engine page. “That flintlock. From 1836, you said.”

Bat nodded assent.

Tallow pecked in the words Rochester NY Murder 1836. It threw up nothing of interest aside from someone’s thesis on “crime and deviance in early Rochester.”

“It was made in 1836,” said Bat, leaning over and reading upside down. “Doesn’t mean it was used in 1836.”

Tallow replaced 1836 with 1837 and ran the search again, wondering. “It’s just tickling something at the back of my head,” he explained. “Something I read, somewhere…”

Bat laughed. “Would that be your car parked across the street? With the library landfill in the back?”

“Yeah,” said Tallow, and stopped. Five results down: The first murder victim in the city of Rochester, NY.

He read it aloud to Bat and Scarly.

“Seriously?” said Bat.

Tallow skimmed the text. “‘In the case of William Lyman, murdered October twentieth, 1837, by one Octavius Barron…with a pistol he stole from the premises of a Mr. Passage, a local baker.’”

Scarly grunted. Her beer seemed to be evaporating alarmingly quickly. “Makes sense. A baker would be fairly well-to-do. You know what that mark on the gun could be? A militia badge. I can see him spending the extra couple of dollars to get it engraved.”

Tallow kept reading. “‘Barron first claimed to have been asleep at home when the murder was committed, but his own mother told the authorities that he was lying.’ Nice. Ah. Listen to this. ‘In his confession, Barron explained that he’d had to beat a homemade bullet into shape and hammer it into the muzzle of the gun.’”

“The fucked-up muzzle,” said Bat, and then thought better of showing interest and threw his hands up. “No. Not buying into this.”

“Go on,” said Scarly, intent.

“Hm. Told a priest he didn’t do it, his accomplices had, and that’s why he wasn’t found with the pistol or the dead man’s pocketbook. The pistol was in fact never found. And this report does expressly call it a pistol. The assumption seems to be that Barron tossed it in the river.”

“I bet you it was found and quietly passed back to Mr. Passage, who probably put it in a trunk for the day the British came back. He was in the militia, and he was a baker, so he knew everyone.” Scarly grinned. “This is good. But would it be the river? It’d be the bay, right? I bet there’d be a Rochester naval militia.”

“Unless they meant the Erie Canal to the Hudson. That might have been open by then.”

Bat, exasperated, waved his hands between them. “Hello? Are you really saying that this gun we found was the mysteeeeeerious lost gun that killed the first murder victim in Rochester? Guys, the guns we’ve processed so far have been married to kills in Manhattan. If you’re looking for connections, then you’re saying that he took his show on the road and we’re going to turn up guns applying to homicides all over the place.”

“Not necessarily,” mumbled Tallow, going through the text on his tablet screen for more information. “Maybe it means he committed a homicide in Manhattan that had connections to Rochester.” He looked up at Scarly. “You know what that might mean about your .44.”

“What?” said Scarly, before her brain caught up to what he meant. She laughed. “Nah. Can’t be.”

“Can’t be what?” said Bat, irritated that he wasn’t keeping up with the increasing altitude of what he had determined was an idiot flight of fantasy.

“Can’t be Son of Sam’s actual gun,” Scarly said, sipping stout.

Bat sat back. “Christ. Of course it can’t. Because—”

“Because,” said Tallow quietly, “Son of Sam’s gun would be in an evidence storage barrel in the Bronx, right?”

“Oh,” Scarly breathed, eyes widening. “Oh. That’s…that’s interesting.”

Tallow turned his gaze on Bat. “Our guy’s been killing people and going undetected for twenty years, even when he did something as crazy as go to Rochester and recover a lost gun and restore it to the point where he could efficiently kill someone with it. Do you really think he did that without any help at all?”

“Dude. You’re saying some cop fished Son of Sam’s own gun out of an evidence barrel and gave it to a crazy asshole who used it for one of his umpty-hundred kills. That’s crazier than he is.”

Scarly huddled into the table, her face more animated than Tallow had ever seen it. “No. No, I’m liking this. So you think this is a crew?”

“No. It’s too single-minded to be anything more than one guy making the plans and committing the homicides. I’m thinking he had some kind of network. Maybe not a big one. But people who owed him favors, people he paid, people he could somehow trust just enough to get him the things he needed. Maybe, yeah, maybe someone did get him a gun he liked out of an evidence barrel. You didn’t stop to think for a minute how someone could commit several hundred homicides in Manhattan over God knows how many years and not get one of them hung around his neck? Not one? ”

Tallow had come to that junction on his train of thought only about thirty seconds ago, but he didn’t feel the burning need to tell Bat that. It didn’t matter. Tallow felt like he was thinking well again. He felt like his brain had kicked in since that afternoon’s visit to Pearl. It occurred to him that this might be his most energetic thinking in years.

“So some kind of network. Some people who could find him the right tools for the job. Like a flintlock from Rochester. If the search on that kill is going to be so easy, Bat, then I’ll bet you ten dollars right here that the kill on that gun is going to have some special relationship with the first recorded murder in Rochester.”

“I’ll take that,” said Bat with a curl of the lip. It revealed very narrow, keen teeth and gray gums. “What about the Bulldog .44?”

Tallow looked at Scarly. She gave him a twisty grin of complicity.

Scarly said, “I’ve got ten that says that if you didn’t manage to massively fuck up the ballistics through your ricockulous magic trick of making it shoot backward, then it’s Son of Sam’s gun, and we have a much bigger and scarier case than even we thought.”

Bat laughed, a short yap that said more about discomfort than joy. “So I’m twenty bucks richer and I didn’t even have to buy the drinks first. Win. You’re both nuts, by the way.”

“All right,” said Tallow as Bat chugged a quarter of his vodka. “You tell me why our guy had a flintlock in his cache.”

“How the hell should I know? I’m not some lunatic who built a church out of guns.”

Tallow smiled. “And that’s why I wanted the storage space. I take your points about not getting lost in the forest and ignoring the trees. But cop voodoo can be strong too. We need to be in that apartment, as best we can, and understand why he kept those guns and what he was thinking. That apartment was part of his plan too. Scarly referred to him as a serial killer. If that’s true, then he must almost permanently be in totem phase. Totally high on the adrenaline of being surrounded by his trophies.”