Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

Tallow pointed in the other direction, and Bat followed his finger.

“The Tombs,” Bat said.

“Yeah. The Manhattan Detention Complex is built over Werpoes and the Collect Pond. So’s the criminal court. The original Tombs complex was actually rotted out by the remains of the pond—the draining job was so bad that even when they in-filled the basin, the whole patch turned to marsh, and the damp crept up into the Tombs. So here’s what I’m wondering—”

“Why your brain started receiving an NPR program on massively uninteresting history?”

“I’m wondering why Jason Westover’s wife warned me not to go near Werpoes. Also, Bat, I’m going to remember that the next time you tell me my history-fu is much weak, because I did all the reading on this for that reason. The strong intimation was that our guy haunted Werpoes. But look around. The Tombs, the court, a park that a fat Chihuahua couldn’t hide in, office buildings…where’s a guy who stored his most prized possessions in a crumbling walk-up on Pearl Street going to live around here?”

“Lots of police too,” Bat commented.

“Including us,” said Tallow, pushing the car forward.

Scarly was in the office-cave she shared with Bat, lit by her computer monitor. “I made him,” she said, without looking up. Her expression was oddly blank, in a way that made Tallow’s stomach turn in some weird involuntary presage to fear.

Bat tumbled into the room, all flapping arms and nodding head. “You made him? You made who? Who’s been made?”

“Our guy,” she said flatly.

“I don’t believe it,” said Bat.

“Our guy became a customer of the NYPD right at the top of the introduction of DNA collection. His sheet’s in the database. I got a match. I made him.”

Bat looked over her shoulder at the screen and said something like “Shiiiiiiiiit.”

“John,” said Scarly, “you want to look at this.” It was spoken like a threat.

Tallow didn’t want to.

Tallow wanted to blow it off, tell them to get on with it, drive back into the 1st, get a coffee, and let the world go by. Not even watch the world go by. He remembered the days when the world was just a moving backdrop behind a stage occupied solely by himself, whatever comfortable chair he had found, and whatever thought or tune or paragraph it amused him to rotate in his head for the length of his shift. It seemed twenty years ago. He knew it was just last week, but he was unable to summon last week with any clarity. It seemed like an image of childhood summer—or, perhaps more apt, a photo of last week blurred and filtered and glazed by a digital application that stamped the patina of faded memory over it.

Tallow walked over and looked at the screen.

There was the man he met outside the apartment building on Pearl Street.

Twenty years younger, at least. Not quite so calm. Lean, but not quite as hard. Blood on his face. Not his blood.

There was a name on the screen. The name didn’t seem to matter.

Tallow realized he could hear his pulse. As he swallowed and closed his eyes, Scarly’s voice rose over the booming in his ears.

“…ex-soldier. The doctor who looked him over has a note on the sheet saying he was probably schizophrenic. There’s also a handwritten annotation on the scan of the paper. CTS?”

Tallow actually smiled. “You haven’t spent too much time in emergency rooms.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s ER medical slang. CTS means Crazier Than Shit.”

“Great.”

Tallow leaned in. His man had gotten pulled in on an assault charge, but the victim seemed to have somehow dematerialized. So all they had was a lunatic veteran wearing someone else’s blood and cluttering up a holding cell. Given the general state of overcrowding and the general sense that there were more important things in the world to give a shit about, a supplementary note was written indicating that the arresting officers were wrong and that it was very probably his own blood that CTS was wearing, and since there was no visible crime or victim, the individual in question should be processed and tossed onto the street.

“The notes just say former soldier, ” Scarly said. “No idea if he was a vet or discharged before he was posted or what. Sloppy job. I’ll bet it was just one person who decided to process him out properly, because he had repeat client written all over him. Probably the same CSU who would’ve been made to scrape the blood off him. I’d really like to pull up his service records.”

“Can we do that from here?” Tallow asked.

“Probably,” said Scarly. “But not right now. We’ve got enough to think about, and getting that information would take hours, and we have places to be.” She shook herself all over, as if trying to awaken from a chill dream or trying to get cold rain off her skin. “Come on. Move.”

“Move where?” said Bat.

“To the car, Bat. John can follow in his. We’re going back to my place, where my wife is going to feed us.”

Tallow felt immediate revulsion at the idea. “I don’t want to impose.”

“John. This is a direct instruction. You are coming to our apartment and eating with us.”

“I can grab something—”

“John,” said Scarly, “I have been instructed. If I arrive without you, I will be punished. You don’t want me to be punished, do you?”

Tallow was about to respond when he saw Bat, standing behind Scarly, shaking his head in short fast motions, very much communicating the sense of No, John, no, don’t mention that thing I told you at the bar that is making you want to say But you like being punished, Scarly, don’t do it there will be consequences terrible consequences .

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Tallow said, backing up to the door.

“John. We’ve been working late, and we still have a lot to talk about. So Talia offered to make dinner. It’s not like we’re trying to induct you into a cult.”

“And,” Bat said, “we also have stuff to do tonight. Right, John?”

Scarly looked at Bat like he was a criminal. “Stuff? We have stuff to do yet?”

“John has a scheme,” said Bat, smug in the warm glow of knowing something Scarly didn’t.

Scarly stepped to John and screwed a surprisingly hard finger into Tallow’s chest. “So it’s settled. Bat rides with me. You follow us. Talia feeds you. And you tell me what you’re hiding from me.”

“I’m not hiding anything.”

“It is not acceptable that Bat has knowledge of something that I did not already know first. Or at least that I could convincingly claim to have once known and then forgotten because I am so much more important than him.” She was coming back to herself now. “Also I’m fairly sure he stole my Twine unit, and there’s a jar of—never mind. You explain later. We go now.”

“But—”

“There is no but. There is only go.”

Tallow wanted to crawl somewhere and make himself die. The idea of this dinner was entirely antithetical to his life as he’d constructed it. The idea crept out like a spider and set off an autonomic repulsion. He just didn’t want to be part of…

Tallow caught the thought in his head and made it pause before finishing. The thought went: I just don’t want to be part of people’s lives.

He had to turn that sentence around in his head, to view it from all angles and look for the traces that might suggest to him when it had formed into such concrete.

You’re just utterly fucking nuts, said Bat in Tallow’s memory. Tallow knew he wasn’t. He could study that statement dispassionately and know that he was not crazy and it was right and good to stay the hell out of people’s lives. He didn’t need to see what they had, and they didn’t need him hanging around. It occurred to him that he was never going to make anyone else understand this. He played people’s arguments and shot them all down with logical efficiency.