Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

The hunter angled left at the next intersection, firing another bullet without looking. The shell plowed into the front of the car, caromed around elements of the engine, and came out low by the driver’s seat. Tallow yelled as a chunk of his right calf tore away. He swore and kicked his leg out to try to shake the pain. His face was wet. He wiped the sweat off it as quickly as he could, before it ran into his eyes, and saw blood on his fingers as they closed around the steering wheel again. He swore twice. The blood was making the wheel slick and hard to grip. His leg was full of burning grit, and smoke was leaking out of the car’s hood.

Tallow had to drive across traffic to stay in pursuit. He missed a sideswipe by inches and had to mount the sidewalk again, clipping some signage as he barreled the wrong way down the next street, praying that no one would be driving toward him.

Ambient Security updates petered out. The storefronts were thinning out. The hunter was out of sight. Tallow had to trust to his knowledge of the city, everything he’d learned over the past few days, and his instinct. There was nothing else left.

The hunter had made it. He knew he was only seconds ahead of Tallow. He fumbled in his bag for the key, held in a loop stitched into the vessel’s bottom. There was no one around: this face of the building, the rear, was always quiet at this time of night, and he had means of entry should he be challenged. But he needed the key. He only ever carried two. One for Pearl Street and one for this place. Both given to him. Both kept close and with care. He freed the key.

Tallow brought the wallowing car around on the rear side of the Manhattan Detention Complex. There were three entranceways, each just big enough to take a wagon from Correction, all covered in green shutters. On the far left of them, a single doorway in a recessed alcove. No police around. There was no traffic back here at night, as a general rule, and a patient man would wait out what little motion there was before going to that door.

The hunter was there, getting a key into the lock. If Tallow pulled up now, he had a clear shot. But a clear shot at distance, when his eyesight and his grip were both compromised. He’d have to aim for the chest if he wanted to guarantee a hit.

Tallow wanted to kill him.

For one second, he was at the top of the stairs in the Pearl Street tenement looking at the man who had killed his partner and becoming a mindless thing with a gun that just killed people.

The alcove was narrow.

Tallow gunned the car into it anyway.

The hunter turned and saw a burning black stampede with glowing eyes and smoke twisting off it and something covered in blood riding it toward him and he screamed to heaven.

The car rammed into the alcove at its best speed, crushing both its headlights, collapsing the ends of the grille, tearing off great swathes of the front fenders, and slamming the prow into the hunter, smashing him through the door.

The air bag enveloped Tallow in plastic clouds.

Tallow wanted to lie in it forever. He couldn’t. The hunter had a gun. All he could think was that the hunter had a gun. He beat back the air bag and got the driver-side door open. It took some force, and he had to put his shoulder to it, which hurt. He stepped out of the car and fell right over. His calf wasn’t doing some piece of work essential to standing up. Tallow grabbed hold of the door, pulled himself upright, and braced himself before pulling the Glock.

The hunter was lying on his back in the debris of the door, motionless.

“No,” said Tallow.

Tallow clambered over the remains of the front of the car, cutting his thigh on a jutting length of bodywork and barely even noticing it. He wasn’t worried about the hunter’s gun anymore. All he could think was Don’t you dare die .

The hunter wasn’t moving. And then there was a painful, juddering intake of breath. And then another.

Tallow could hear sirens now. Moments later, there were voices within earshot, and the clicking of guns. Tallow held up his badge, told them who he was, and told them he needed medics here five minutes ago.

“This man does not get to die. He doesn’t get to escape.”

Tallow stepped away. The hunter’s gun was in sight, which pleased him. So was the hunter’s bag. Tallow picked it up and looked inside it.

Folded in the bottom of the bag was a small black wallet containing a New York Police Department detective’s badge.

IT STILL wasn’t much of a case, but they built it anyway.

Bat insisted he had gotten more bandaging than Tallow because he was hurt worse. When informed, not with kindness, that Tallow had also had a calf wound packed and wrapped up, that his hands were bruised for God knew what reason, that half his shoulder was black with bruising and burns, and that he looked a bit as if someone had emptied a nail gun into his face, Bat started bitching about how someone had stolen Fuck You Robot from Tallow’s apartment. With additional poison, Bat further noted that Fuck You Robot must have been the only item of value in Tallow’s apartment, as nothing else had been stolen.

“What are you, autistic?” said Tallow. Scarly laughed and Bat told him never to darken their door with his bullshit again.

Assistant Chief Turkel was, these five days after Tallow had driven his car into the back of the Tombs, on administrative leave. This was, officially, due to the loss of one of his oldest and dearest friends, Jason Westover, and also Jason’s beloved wife, Emily. It had occurred under such tragic circumstances—a murder/suicide pact, among such people, in such a place as Aer Keep!—that Turkel had declared that he was unable to serve while suffering such grief.

Unofficially, Turkel had stood firm for two deeply unnerving days. Turkel had not been aware that Tallow had ridden with the hunter to Beth Israel and had put off his own treatment until he’d found a doctor he could convince to start pumping antipsychotics into the bastard. Two days later, the hunter started making a degree of sense and explained to attending officers that the key and the badge had come from his good friend Al Turkel.

Tallow got himself attached to the team directed to search the less used basement regions of the detention complex. It had turned out that there was an informal system at work in which tired cops between heavy shifts were allowed to grab sack time in disused cells out of sight of the main workings of the complex. Tallow felt faintly aggrieved that no one had ever told him about it.

Three hours of poking around (which was hell on Tallow’s leg) turned up a cell down in the guts of the place that showed signs of more regular use. Someone had been finger-painting on one wall. Swirls. Scarly matched the paint to that recovered from Pearl Street, and they were off to the races.

At this point, Turkel started talking for his life, explaining that he’d been forced at gunpoint to take the shield of a dead detective with no family and give it and the key to the hunter so that he could use a cell at the bottom of the Tombs as a hideout. Tallow thought it must have been very pleasant for the hunter, being able to hide so close to the buried surface of Werpoes. He could probably have pretended he was sitting in a teepee or whatever in the village at night.

Machen, who’d accidentally started the whole thing, was long gone. He’d gotten on a plane to Mexico a little over an hour after his meeting in Central Park, and his whereabouts were currently unknown. The whereabouts of a considerable quantity of Vivicy currency were also being questioned. Tallow doubted very much that he’d ever see Andrew Machen again.

Turkel’s stories crumbled as the hunter kept talking. He talked like a man who hadn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time and was determined to make the quantity up in as short a period as possible. Tallow, Scarly, and Bat could provide evidence in support of enough of it that the administrative-leave story was cooked up, and Turkel was essentially placed under house arrest.