Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

The captain moved to the door, with some visible pain. Tallow opened it for him. The captain looked at him levelly.

“I can’t cover your ass, John. I will leave this room and go back to approving the requisition of paper clips or some damned thing. Being the captain of the 1st doesn’t even make me the most important office-supplies manager in the area. That’ll be some Master of the Universe down on Wall Street. I’ve got no juice with anyone and a bunch of senior staff just waiting for me to cardiac out on the crapper one morning. I can see where you’re taking this. All I’m going to say to you is, you better damn well have it.”

Tallow said, “Captain, how did Beverly Garza die?”

The captain smiled, very thinly. “She was run down. Hell of a thing for the chief of Transit, right? But I’ll tell you something. The pathologist swore up and down that he’d found gunshot residue on what was left of her head. Like someone shot her and then drove over her. CSU even turned up a mashed bullet on the scene. Nothing ever came of it, mind.”

“Did you know her well?”

“Because I remember it so well, you mean? No. It stuck in my head because of that bullet. A .357, fired from a restored single-action revolver. The old night-shift boss at CSU, it was his personal project for six months. I remember it because he came up with the weirdest match. He thought it came from a Pinkerton pistol. The kind the railroad police used in the 1800s. But the old boss at CSU, he really wanted to come up with something. Now him, he was close to Beverly. Not me. I’m not close to anyone. Never was.”

The captain left, no energy left for an acknowledgment to the lieutenant.

“Close the door, John,” she said. He did.

“Sit down, John,” she said.

“I’d rather stand.”

“Sit down.”

“You have really shitty chairs, Lieutenant.”

She burst out laughing. “What did you just say to me?”

“Seriously. They hurt my ass. That’s why you got them. So no one stays in your office too long.”

“You incredible asshole,” she said, still laughing. “How did you even…?”

“The first time I had to sit on one for more than five minutes. It took the rest of the day for my backside to turn the right way out again.”

“Are you waiting for me to fetch you a nice soft pillow, Detective?”

Tallow sat.

“Where are you going with this? Exactly how much more trouble have you made for me today?”

“Not as much as I think I just made for myself.”

“Oh, the assistant chief made it pretty clear that he’s going to look for ways to fuck you, yeah.”

“That’s actually not what I’m worried about,” he said, and then paused. Tallow measured the fabric of his case in his head, and cut off the section he intended to show her. She didn’t need to see the whole thing yet, he decided, and in fact, it might be counterproductive.

“Okay,” he said, taking a breath. “By the end of today, with a little luck, I’ll have more evidence to back up the idea that Spearpoint Security has an involvement in these killings.”

“You said their security door on the apartment was probably a fluke.”

“Probably. However, our man killed one of Spearpoint’s competitors. Maybe that’s a fluke too. But I bet you, I bet you the price of a nice ass cushion for this chair, that the assistant chief is on his cell right now, calling his good friend Jason Westover. And kindhearted Jason Westover will be wondering how quickly he can contact our man.”

The lieutenant folded her arms. “You have no evidence that Westover knows our guy.”

“No,” Tallow agreed. “What I have is Spearpoint appearing in the conversation around the case too many times. What I have are too many questions. Why is this company Vivicy buying the building? Westover met his wife through Vivicy. His wife has a fixation with Native American culture, to the point where she freaks out in the street when she sees a homeless man looking like the worst-dressed Indian tracker in the cheapest Western you ever saw on TV at two in the morning. Our man has a fixation with Native American culture. I…”

Tallow stopped for a moment, looking for the words under the lieutenant’s gaze. He then said, “Things hide in rain.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Sometimes the rain is so heavy that we look up at all the raindrops when we should be looking at the shape of the puddle that forms from them. All of this has been rain. It’s been rain for twenty years, and everyone was looking at the raindrops falling while all of these people have been moving invisibly. They weren’t even traveling through streets we’d recognize. And the rain was so heavy, all over the city, that no one ever looked down and saw the footprints filling with water. I’m starting to see the shape of them now. I just need to be able to see the maps.”

“Put your feet back on the ground for me, John.”

Tallow ran his fingers through his hair. “Nothing is coincidence. We’ve walked right into a net, like a woodland mantrap. If our man had tossed his gun in the river after every kill, we would never have known a thing. I think our man is a directed killer. Hired may not be the right term. And he is so good, so good, that one or all of the people who directed him knew that his unsolved kills would eventually be subsumed in the annual unsolved count in an incredibly dense and crime-heavy metropolitan location. They knew that, so long as no one blundered into their very fine net, the whole operation would be invisible. The only thing we had on our side, it turned out, was that the killer was crazy and kept all his guns.”

“Why? I want to know why he kept all those guns. Is it just some weird serial-killer-trophy thing?”

“Not to him. That apartment is visual language, the codification of a statement in pictures. Exactly what statement, I don’t know, that’s in his head. But when we’ve been taking guns out of there to process? We’ve been unweaving his life’s work. Like unpainting a masterpiece or unpicking a tapestry.”

“John. Seriously. How much closer are we to finding this guy? Because the captain just told you he can’t cover for you, I sure as hell can’t cover for you, and the assistant chief knows he has a way to pull you off the case and put you in your apartment for the rest of your life. And I’ll be honest with you, I’ve thought about that more than once myself. If the assistant chief thinks he can make this whole thing go away—and you can be damn sure he’s thinking about that, very hard—then he will. So I need a call from you. You’ve got no DNA, no nothing but some circumstantial tangle, a handful of processed guns, and some brilliant, fascinating, but mostly crazy-ass speculation. Tell me. How much closer are we to finding him?”

John Tallow closed his eyes, and took a breath.

“Probably not as close as he is to finding me, Lieutenant.”

THE HUNTER watched from the rooftop on the corner. The military man had a cursory glance around the block, and then went back inside Kutkha’s place.

The auto repair shop across the street closed for a late lunch. The hunter found the access alley behind the hardware store, walked around the block, broke into the auto repair shop, and took a few things they wouldn’t immediately miss, including a jacket and a ball cap that had been stuffed into a bag at the back. They stank of machine guts, but he wanted to be less obvious in his comings and goings over the next few hours, so he put them on in order to walk his wrapped spoils back to the hardware store.

In the cool shade of the abandoned store, the hunter began to make tools.

He carefully twisted long lengths of twine together and set them to soak in the can of gasoline he’d taken from the auto shop.