Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

There was no true pedestrian entrance. The only way in or out was through the underground garage. If you wanted to leave on foot, you had to emerge from beneath the building and walk the driveway to the main gates. The design obviously dissuaded the more adventurous rich from going on a walking safari. Far better to leave in convoys of black SUVs with tinted windows and discuss in gyms and bars how the possession of money made them prisoners of New York City.

Or perhaps not, thought the hunter, surveying the main gates. Perhaps they thought themselves a new wave of colonists, inhabiting an airtight biosphere and exploring the moon of Manhattan.

This was where Jason Westover lived. Jason Westover and his wife.

The hunter watched cars dock and undock from Space Station Upper East Side for a while, calculating his own trajectories.

THE LONGER Tallow looked at the wall, the more it seemed that the guns on it interlocked somehow.

The gaps in the surface coverage were very much starting to appear as deliberate omissions, spaces awaiting the right shapes. An immense clock awaiting the right cogs, lying in the sleep of potential until the day the correct pieces were placed and all the wheels could finally turn.

A voice said “John.” He was so lost in the gun machinery that it took long seconds for him to both register the voice and understand that it was his name being called.

Scarly was standing by the table. Her face was drawn and he could see her pulse in her throat. She held a sheet of printout. “This isn’t so funny anymore.”

“What?”

“The .44 Bulldog. It’s Son of Sam’s gun.”

“Seriously?”

“Same bullets they dug out of Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti in the summer of 1976. Those bullets went onto the ballistics database back when the DA in Queens declared the case reopened, in the late nineties. John, this is wrong.”

“In all kinds of ways.” Tallow stood up, knees protesting. He assumed, since Scarly was here, that he must have been sitting there for a couple of hours, but he had no sense of the time having passed.

“No, listen,” Scarly said, voice low and urgent. “If someone had been killed with this gun, it would have set off flashing lights. The bullet would have been dug out of the body and processed, and the odds are that it would have matched one of the Son of Sam bullets in the database. There are plenty. Even the bullets that were so deformed they couldn’t be fully matched to the weapon were scanned in and appended to the ballistics compilation on the gun. We don’t have a body for this gun.”

Tallow stretched, and regretted it instantly. Grimacing, he said, “So our guy dug his own bullets out of some poor bastard. Because, I’m telling you, there’s no way that gun is in this apartment without there being a body on it.”

“Our guy has a guy in the Property Office, John. And I don’t mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping a fucking eye on, like Son of Sam’s piece, for fuck’s sake—a guy in there who’ll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he’ll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he’s actually starting to scare me a bit now.”

“A couple of hundred kills to his name didn’t do that?”

“Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night.”

“You know,” said Tallow, “whenever I’m in danger of forgetting you’re a CSU, you always find a way to remind me. On the bright side, doesn’t Bat owe you ten bucks now?”

“Tallow. Listen. I am not going to be the one who tells my boss that our fucking serial handgun ninja got someone to steal a famous gun out of an evidence barrel and did at least one person with it and recovered the bullet and so we have at least one completely fucking unsolvable case on the list.”

“No,” said Tallow, plucking the printout from her fingers and grabbing his bag. “I’m going to talk to my boss about it first.”

Tallow waited until he was outside the main building before calling the lieutenant. He dialed her cell phone. It was midmorning, and her movements weren’t predictable at that time of day. Her phone rang. It rang long enough that he was expecting it to switch to voice mail. Then she answered with an uncertain “Hello?”

His brow creased. “It’s Tallow. Where are you?” He could tell from the background noise that she was outside.

“Does it matter where I am?”

Okay, he thought. “Well, I’d like to sit down with you as soon as it’s convenient. I have something on the case that I really need your input on before I take it further. Can I come by the office in a half hour or so and find you there?”

“Um. No. I won’t be there for a while.”

“I really need your help, Lieutenant. Where are you? I could meet you there, if that’s easier.”

“Oh God,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

Tallow heard her take a deep, shaky breath. “I’m at Jim’s funeral, John.”

“…What?”

Everything tilted, and Tallow’s feet swam for purchase until his back met a wall. He stiffened his legs and pressed his back hard against it.

“I’m sorry, John.”

“I don’t understand.”

“His wife…she wanted a quick funeral. And, well, I’m afraid she told me she didn’t want you to attend. I mean, she’s upset, obviously, and if she’d chosen to wait a week, I’m sure it would have been different.”

All Tallow could think of to say was “We’ve never met. I’ve never met her.”

The lieutenant’s voice sounded somewhat strained as she said, “Yes, she told me that too.”

“What did she say?”

“Don’t, John.”

Tallow let himself slide down the wall until his knees were drawn up and his backside was on the ground. “What did she say?”

“She said that she didn’t want a stranger at her husband’s funeral, and she didn’t want to see the man who should have saved her husband, and she didn’t want to see the man who should have died instead of her husband.”

He’d asked her to say it. He’d badgered her to say it. But he didn’t like her for saying it. And he didn’t like himself for doing it and hating her. He didn’t like anything. He covered his face with his free hand.

“John?”

“I wish people would stop saying that. Sometimes I wish people didn’t know my name.”

“John? What?”

“I was his partner. I was his friend. You tell her…” He caught himself. Gathered up everything in him in one fist and pushed it all down with everything else that was already down there. “No. Don’t tell her anything. Don’t mention me at all.”

“Okay, John,” the lieutenant said, uncertainly.

Yeah, he thought. Talk to me like that. Talk to me like I’m a basket case. Talk to me like I’m an idiot. Talk to me like I’m already leaving the force. He licked his lips like a lizard, his face tightening and hardening into sharp planes, relishing the anger that was starting to whip around inside him. He caught hold of that, too, but he decided to push it out.

“You need to be in your office in one hour. I have Son of Sam’s gun.”

He waited just long enough to hear the start of her reaction, and killed the phone call dead.

Tallow walked to his car, drove out of One Police Plaza, stopped at a store, and bought two lighters.

Homicide at Ericsson Place was empty when Tallow arrived. Everyone was at Jim Rosato’s funeral.

The lieutenant was not in her office. Tallow entered her office, stood there, and waited.