Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

“Borrowed, sir. And I couldn’t live in the actual crime scene. It would’ve slowed down retrieval of the evidence even more.”

“Well, that’s evidence of you at least giving half a shit about department resources, Detective. Tell me: Do you ever think about promotion?”

Tallow just looked at the man.

“It’s just a question, Detective. Did you plan on staying a detective all your life?”

“In all honesty, sir, I don’t plan for a lot. But if you’re asking: No, I don’t really think about promotion.”

“I know cops like you,” said Turkel, lifting his chin and smiling with the warmth of a man who thinks he knows where the power in a room is. “I always thought there were three kinds of cops. Police like you, who think they’re born to the job they’ve got, and they’ll do it until it kills them or they walk away from it. And cops like your lieutenant, who want to be promoted because promotion is there, and they figure getting promoted is the job. Police like that, I have no real use for. Oh, your lieutenant’s a good manager, and I’ll make good use of her, but strictly speaking, she’s not here to be a good police officer. She’s here to be a good candidate for promotion.”

Turkel paused, and Tallow accepted the cue with false graciousness. “And the third kind? Sir?”

“The third kind are police like me. Police who need to be promoted because they see what the real job is. A street cop sometimes finds it hard to see it this way, Detective, but police like me are the real idealists in this job. We’re the people who actually have a vision of how the department can adapt and change and serve the city better. That’s why I wanted promotion. Want it still. Because I want to change and improve your life.”

“My life.”

“The lives of the police under my command. Which is you. But I also have a responsibility to the people of this city. They are, after all, paying us, in a roundabout way. And one day they may be paying us directly. So I have to manage resources. Like this one. What purpose is it serving?”

“It’s what the case is all about, sir,” Tallow said.

“I thought it was about a lot of unsolved homicides you reopened.”

“You really want to talk about this, sir? I mean, really talk about it?”

Turkel put a level gaze on Tallow. “Yes,” he said, after a moment.

“All right, then. It’s about the unsolved homicides, of course it is. To us. But to him, it’s about this room. The killings were the means to this end.”

“I don’t understand,” Turkel said. “The killings were the end. He just had to store the weapons afterward, so they weren’t found.”

“No, sir. This room is the point, for him. Let me…”

Tallow stepped into the emulation and looked at where Turkel was standing. “No. Stand over here. Face this wall. And then sit down.”

Turkel frowned at him. “I’ll stand.”

“All right.” Tallow stepped outside the whiteboard perimeter. “Focus on the middle of that wall.”

“…It’s a shape.”

“Yes, sir. Now pan across the room, heading left.” Tallow walked around the emulation, feeling like an animal pacing just outside the reach of campfire light.

“All the way around?”

“Yeah. You’ll see where to stop.”

“Christ. It’s patterned, somehow. It’s like the guns all flow together, almost. There are gaps, but…”

“That’s right, sir. There are gaps. Each of those gaps is a future kill.”

“Oh. Oh Christ. Oh Christ. It wraps onto the floor.”

“And there are more gaps, sir. And the great machinery of it all goes into all the other rooms, and around and back again.”

Turkel’s voice was very quiet. “What is it, Tallow?”

“It’s information, sir. It’s the work of a very methodical, very functional madman who is writing a book out of machines that kill people. It’s an information flow, it’s code, it’s pictograms, mathematics that mean nothing to anyone but him. The work of a serial killer in permanent totem phase, permanently energized, permanently in the moment and permanently laboring to complete his message to history. That’s what’s been set loose in Manhattan over these past twenty years, sir.”

Turkel looked like he was going to throw up.

“How long have you known Andrew Machen, sir?” Tallow said.

“More than twenty years now,” Turkel muttered abstractedly, eyes still tangled in the gunmetal belt of the room. “Why? What?”

“Would you say you’ve known Jason Westover for the same amount of time?”

“What?” Turkel came back to himself a little, and looked around for Tallow. Tallow was circling the emulation. Turkel could glimpse the detective only between gaps in the whiteboards.

“Why do you think Andrew Machen bought the building, sir?”

“What? Where are you? Why would he buy the building?”

“For his little wizards, sir. For his algorithmic traders to continue making invisible maps all over the 1st District and make their money from hiding.”

“You’re talking nonsense. Stand still, damn it. Why would Machen buy—”

“See, that’s what’s been bothering me, sir. But it occurred to me, just five minutes ago, that you’re all so busy making your invisible new maps of the city that…well, none of you can see the others’ maps.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Tallow?” Turkel was, Tallow thought, starting to sound a little unglued. The sound helped Tallow cancel out the internal susurrus of his own fear.

“Andrew Machen didn’t see the maps the killer draws on the city. He bought the building on Pearl according to the needs of his own maps, without a clue that his own hired murderer used that building to store all the guns he ever used. I like to think that it came as quite a shock.”

Tallow stepped into the emulation, behind Turkel. “It’s all maps, sir. This is a map. A map of a room.”

Turkel turned on Tallow, eyes juddering in their sockets, thinking as quickly as he could. “Are you saying Andy Machen hired this man to kill all those people? Are you really saying that? Where’s your evidence? Where’s anything to support that?”

“Are we still speaking honestly, sir?”

Turkel took a breath, straightened, and visibly found his courage. “Yes.”

“And no one can hear us.”

“That’s right, Tallow.”

“So you’d like to hear my sense of the case.”

“Fuck you, Tallow. You won’t be on the case long enough for it to make any difference.”

“All right, then,” Tallow said, walking around the assistant chief in a slow circle. “Twenty years ago, you were probably a patrolman, Jason Westover was probably fresh out of the army, and Andrew Machen was, I don’t know, selling old ladies’ gold fillings on the street. And you all knew each other. Maybe coincidental drinking buddies. Maybe childhood friends. Who knows? I’ll find out. And you were all young, and reasonably arrogant, and ambitious, and hungry, and a little bit greedy, and a little bit sick of how slowly things can happen even in the big city. And one night, one of you said, What if we could just kill all the assholes that are between us and the things we want? And each of you laughed, and had another beer. But the idea stuck, didn’t it? You couldn’t shake it off. And you—a policeman, a soldier, and a banker—couldn’t help but start talking about how such a thing could possibly be done. What happened next? Did one of you know a guy? Did you go looking for a guy? Someone you could somehow place total faith in. Someone you could pay to be so dedicated to the job that he would remain, here’s that word again, invisible in the city for as long as it took. And it always seemed to take longer than you’d thought, didn’t it? There was always someone else who needed to be helped out of the way of your constant advancement. And you knew the stats, didn’t you, sir? You knew how many unsolved homicides could be hidden inside the annual numbers. But what’s brought us to this place here today, sir, are the things you didn’t know. You didn’t know your man was keeping all the guns and hiding them in an apartment on Pearl Street. Jason Westover certainly didn’t know that the security devices whose disappearances he was turning a blind eye to were going to secure the door of that apartment. And Andrew Machen didn’t know he was actually buying the complete revelation of the entire scheme.”