Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

Interesting, thought the hunter. Westover’s right hand wanted to go, in that instant, not to the gun but to the small of his back, above the top of his pants. The hunter was fairly sure he hadn’t missed the tells of a second gun. A knife, then. Probably something almost weightless, like titanium or surgical steel. Probably something short. Probably a folding blade. The look on Westover’s face. He instinctively went for something that had to be used close in, with savagery. With punching, ripping, stabbing motions. With hate.

Westover’s lip curled. “My wife. She is. Was. A smart woman. She developed questions, over the years, about the success of my business. There was a bad night. Over a year ago. We were fighting. I wanted to—”

Westover looked over into the trees and the night, biting his lip. His eyes were oddly bright in the ambient glow from the trail lights.

“I wanted to hurt her. To scare her. To make her shut up. She’s smart, but she, I don’t know. She’s not worldly. The fight got ugly. And. Well. Like I said. So I told her.”

“You told her.” The hunter kept his voice flat and uninflected. It was not how he felt.

“I told her everything. To frighten her into shutting up. Into not fucking picking at it all the time.” Momentarily unconcerned about keeping his hands in view and moving slowly, Westover almost convulsively passed his right hand across his eyes. His head bobbed, and the hunter could see tendons working in his neck. The hunter waited.

“Well. It worked,” Westover said with a forced, sick laugh. “I scared the shit out of her. She, um. She had a bit of a breakdown. So, no, you cunt, she hasn’t looked well for the last year or so. I don’t know if she’s ever going to be well again. And I walk her stupid fucking dog at night because I can’t stand her eyes on me all night every fucking night. All right? So now I want to know what happens after I get you this information. Are you going to keep coming back here to find me? Do I have to give your description to the guards at my apartment building?”

“That,” murmured the hunter, “wouldn’t be the most clever thing you could do tonight.”

“Answer my fucking question.”

The hunter pinned down his sudden need to instill in Westover a new and bloody wisdom about using that tone with him. He pinned it down and placed it in a far copse in the back of his mind, for now, secreted against future opportunities, like a nut stored for the winter. The hunter took a step back and said: “I’ll answer your question. I will continue to protect you, and take your tribute for the hunt, as I have always done. I intend to recover my tools, if at all possible, and to make any investigation into them too difficult for the police to pursue. It is my hope that very soon my work and our relationship will return to normal. The one thing I can comfortably predict is that you and the others will never be satisfied with your places in life, no matter how elevated your perches may be. However, we must take into account the possibility that I may become seen and known.”

Westover cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, trying to keep the hunter’s own eyes in his line of sight. The hunter turned to the side by ten degrees, away from what little light there was, the darkness gathering on him.

“Should that happen,” said the hunter, “should everything I’ve achieved since we first spoke be lost forever and should I lose the freedom of my island? Then you will have to die. And now, so will your wife. Do you understand that?”

“Nobody has to die,” said Westover.

“Somebody always has to die,” said the hunter, and took a second step back that had him swallowed by the trees and gone.

TALLOW, SCARLY, and Bat tumbled out of the Fetch sometime after eleven. Tallow wasn’t drunk, and he was quite deliberately not completely relaxed, but he felt better about the world than he had when he’d entered the place. Bat and Scarly were, however, in states of reasonably confused refreshment.

Scarly put her hands in her pockets and smiled up at Tallow. “We are going home now. I am going home to my wife, and Bat is going home to his whatever Bat does when no one is looking.”

“Save the phone number for the night before your next day off, will you?” Bat giggled.

“You incredible fuckbag. That’s it. You’re paying for the cab, and the cab will drop me at home first.”

“Whatever,” Bat said, still giggling as he started off down the street. “Let’s find a fucking cab, then. G’night, John.”

“Night.” Tallow smiled and watched them stagger away. Ahead of them, he could see a man in pink denim pants and a knitted cape and hat half limping, half skipping toward the pair, singing something Tallow couldn’t make out. Another street guy. Mismatched sneakers. Obviously mentally ill and, from the way his limbs jerked, probably also physically ill. Scarly must’ve given him her scary glare, because Tallow watched the poor man dance around her and Bat like they were on fire.

Tallow laughed, quietly, and stood there for a moment more, in front of the alley, and looked up at the sky. A few stars had poked their way out through the scattered cloud and light pollution. He wondered, briefly, about those places he’d heard about, where you could see all the stars at night. People had told him about being able to see the Milky Way. He could never imagine how that was even possible.

These were stars enough for him.

He felt a hand yank at the laptop bag in his fist.

The man in the pink pants and knitted cape was next to him, trying to drag the bag away from Tallow with one hand. His mouth was fixed in a snarl, and Tallow smelled ethanol and eucalyptus panted out through the gaps in his teeth. He was shockingly strong. He pulled again, and Tallow felt his fingers give around the handle of the bag.

Which still had his firearm in it.

Tallow then saw, in the man’s other hand, a short green plastic children’s ruler, a wedge snapped off the end to make it into a point, looking like it’d been roughly ground against curb or sidewalk to sharpen it. For a millisecond Tallow noticed and registered a cartoon Indian chief’s face printed on the plastic, just above the man’s grip, smiling and giving the peace sign.

At which point, Tallow stopped thinking. He got his other hand around the back of the man’s neck, used the man’s momentum from his yank at the bag to spin him around and drive him face-first into the alleyway wall. Tallow heard the shattering of the man’s teeth and the crunch of his nose crushing inward. The man made a noise like a snorkel trying to suck air through tar and collapsed.

Tallow heard Bat saying “John?” closer than he’d expected. He turned to see that Bat and Scarly had run back to him.

“My gun’s in the bag,” Tallow said, breathing fast. “I took it off when I went into the bar.”

“Shit,” said Scarly, looking at the pile of man in the alleyway mouth. Tallow wondered why she sounded impressed.

Tallow’s brain kicked back into gear. “You see any CCTV around here? I don’t want to have been seen.”

Bat found the green shank. He didn’t touch it, just poked at it with his shoe. “Jesus, look at this. Why does it matter if someone saw you? The asshole could have killed you.”

“Because my firearm wasn’t secured, because the asshole has no face now, and because I’ve been put on the Pearl Street case to fail. I’m being set up so they can take me off the force for PTSD.” He was suddenly cold, and his heart rate was up like a runner’s, and he was saying too much. It wasn’t good enough. Tallow held a breath and closed everything down, looking at his unconscious assailant. That was a Jim Rosato move right here, he thought.