Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

Tallow bit back his first response and chewed it over a bit. “I was going to say thirteen. But, honestly, we might have been at thirteen even before someone threw our evidence collection to the wolves. I’ve got nothing but connections I can’t prove because, hey, there’s no proof. We don’t even know when our guy’s most recent kill was. Profilers would laugh themselves sick at anything I had to say to them right now.”

Looking in the rearview mirror, Tallow could see Bat fiddling with his tablet device and his wi-fi pod.

“Hey, Bat, you asked the question. At least listen.”

“I am listening. Keep going.”

Tallow found that he didn’t have much farther to go down that road. “So unless you can get some DNA out of that paint, or the next set of processed guns gives us a kill from last week, the evidence isn’t going to put us anywhere useful for a while yet. No. Let me add to that. Unless the guns give us some more kills that could paint in the picture a bit.”

“Do you still want to talk to someone at the Property Office?” Scarly asked.

“My lieutenant wants to work through channels on that. But right now, it’s enough just to know that he has a connection with it. Did you get to smell the air in the apartment, by the way?”

“Got a little bit distracted there, John,” Bat said.

“Yeah, I figured,” Tallow said. “Damn it.”

“I wonder if anyone from Spearpoint had a little accident in the last couple of years,” Scarly said, slowly. “Maybe an installation guy.”

“Oh hell,” Tallow managed to grit out. “You’re absolutely right.”

“So maybe our guy met a Spearpoint installation technician in a bar and said, Hey, for cash in hand and a hefty tip, maybe you could help me out. And a security door just kind of fell out of their depot into the installation guy’s van, and on a quiet afternoon, or a Sunday, he put the door in. But the thing is, the installation guy will have seen our guy. Like the Property Office cop will have seen our guy. And that cop’s dead.”

“Varangian Security,” said Bat from the back. “Founded in Rochester, New York, by Phil Lyman twenty-some years ago, providing private security services in the tristate area, its expansion curtailed by the tragic death of the charismatic Lyman in blah-blah-blah…bought out by and subsumed into Spearpoint Security two years later.”

“What?” said Tallow.

“What what? I’m reading this off Wikipedia. Your tablet screen’s fucked, by the way. It’s like trying to read through a film of old semen. Anyway. Just working the evidence we’ve got, you know? Embracing the crazy.”

Tallow stopped at an intersection. A bus rattled past, the digital ad down its side glittering. Apparently there was another musical based on an old Disney movie opening on Broadway. An animation flicked across the hexels: the prettiest, whitest “Indian” princess you ever saw, attending to the feathers in her hair before looking over her shoulder at Tallow, smiling, and winking.

Tallow drove on.

“While you’ve got the tablet on, Bat, look up Werpoes for me.”

Bat clicked away. Tutted to himself. “Fucking autocorrect. Wempus ? How d’you spell that?”

“God, I don’t know. She said Werpoes. W-e-r—”

“Wait,” said Bat. “Wait. Shit. Pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull the fuck over.”

“Damn it, Bat…” Tallow checked his mirrors and pulled to the roadside within an awkward twenty seconds.

Bat leaned forward and thrust the tablet device in front of Tallow and Scarly. He’d pulled from the web an image of beadwork of some kind, a broad strip of shell art featuring odd patterns and shapes and the occasional rippled angle.

“It’s called wampum,” said Bat. “Wampum belts.”

“Oh fuck,” said Scarly, seeing it immediately.

“It says the Native Americans wove these things out of beads to codify history and law, to mark social events, transmit information…they made them here in Manhattan, before the Europeans came. And when they did come, they saw how the natives prized the wampum and began manufacturing it themselves, as money.” Bat tapped the screen with a jagged fingernail. “These things were art and book and device. John, wampum belts were memory .”

Tallow rubbed his eyes. Looked at the photo of the wampum belt again. He could see the similarities. The photographed belt of beads was finer work, and swirls were harder to execute… but then, whoever had woven this belt wasn’t crazy. The similarities were striking. Their killer had turned the entire apartment into a memory machine, using guns.

They were both looking at him.

“All right,” Tallow said. “We know why he did it now. His motivation beyond totem phase. It’s one more piece of information. But it’s not a case. Let’s get you two back to One PP. I told you before—it’s CSU that’ll solve this thing. And so far I’ve been right.”

“You are a lazy asshole, John,” Scarly said, but she was grinning.

POLICE-CHANNEL FLOW on the drive from One Police Plaza to Ericsson Place:

A dead man found folded into a suitcase that was left in the back of an empty building in Williamsbridge. First guess was that he’d been in there three months.

A dead woman found in front of St. Brigid’s in the East Village. Police on scene commenting that they didn’t know what she’d been drinking, but she appeared to have no stomach.

A dead man found in a Bronx apartment, stabbed to death within the past week, forensics complicated due to the corpse having been partially devoured by rats and a small pet dog.

An unknown individual blew him- or herself up at the Bushwick Inlet. One other fatality: the individual’s arm had somehow been launched laterally at ballistic speeds, went through a parked rig’s window, and broke its driver’s neck.

Tallow killed the radio. He’d taken a slight detour on the way back to Ericsson Place, up Fulton, and now he wanted to concentrate. Driving slowly, he looked at the building frontages across the street from the Fetch.

There was a ripple of fear in his chest as he saw the PROTECTED BY SPEARPOINT SECURITY sticker on the window glass of a cheap shoe store not quite directly opposite the Fetch.

Tallow peered and calculated. The shoe store did not face the side of the Fetch that had the alley adjacent. There was a good chance that any clever camera located in that store window had not seen a thing.

He also noted that there was no police tape across the mouth of the alley, nor were there any notices to potential witnesses posted nearby.

Tallow drove on, well aware that his luck had been tested again.

His cell phone rang just as he was parking at Ericsson Place, and he fumbled it over the wheel trying to do two things at once when his mind was already in seven places at the same time. Tallow managed to keep the phone at his ear on the third try. “Hello?”

“Detective?”

“Mrs. Westover?”

“Yes.” Emily Westover gave a little laugh that disturbed him. “I just wanted to thank you again. You know, for looking after me.”

Tallow listened to the ambience of the call. She was in her apartment. Her voice had that deadened quality that came with thick glazing, the kind that silenced the outside city and absorbed interior sound. There was music of a sort, playing in another room. Native American chants, he realized, but the authenticity was off. It was one of those nineties records where ethnic audio sources were put to muted beats and electronic chill-out washes.

“You’re very welcome, Mrs. Westover. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Don’t go to Werpoes,” she said in a rush.