Gun Machine

by Warren Ellis

  Tallow walked into Bat and Scarly’s office to find Bat slumped on a chair with his head on the workbench, turned away from the door, while Scarly softly sharpened an old straight razor on a worn strop, watching her partner intently.

  “I don’t think he needs his eyebrows, do you? I mean, they don’t serve an immediate function or anything,” she whispered.

  “I am not asleep.” Bat moaned. “I am merely resting my brain. And if you come near me with that thing I will shave your face off your skull with it. Or possibly just puke in your eyes.”

  Tallow laid his laptop bag against his chair, unloaded the plant on the floor next to it, and put the tray of cold coffee on the bench next to Bat’s head. “Do you have space in your fridge for half of these?”

  Bat’s head rose slowly on his skinny neck ,like a sedated hen’s. He turned his head at a mechanical crawl, scanning the immediate area, until his eyes detected the coffee.

  “Oh my God,” Bat prayed. “I love you. I would let you have sex on me and everything. But I am very tired and would prefer not to have to move.”

  Scarly killed a cup lid with feral fingers and chugged a third of a container. Her eyes flexed weirdly in their sockets. “Oh, that’s the stuff,” she said. “That is really the stuff.”

  Bat was weakly pawing at the lid of the cup nearest him. Tallow reached over and took it off for him, abstractedly wondering if this was what fatherhood felt like. Bat sipped from it like a sickly Dickensian child. Tallow half expected him to whimper “God bless us, every one.”

  “Fuck me,” Bat gasped. “It’s like an angel shat ice cream–coffee rainbows in my mouth.”

  “Little bit,” said Tallow as the momentary illusion of parenthood atomized. He opened his own cup and drank. “Did we get anything back on that Bulldog yet?”

  “Nope,” said Scarly, bent over and putting three of the cups inside a small fridge that had been hidden by the general crap in the office. “Couple of hours.”

  “Okay. Listen,” Tallow said, reaching down and pulling the lieutenant’s papers from his bag, “what do you know about Ruger nine-millimeters?”

  “Place the papers where I may see them,” said Bat. “I do not wish to burn precious caffeine molecules by moving.”

  Tallow did as he was told. Bat leaned his head over the paper, trying to get gravity to aid him in keeping his eyes open and working.

  “Ruger nine. Scarly, what don’t I know about a Ruger nine with a circular lock on the shell casing’s ass?”

  “That’ll be the Ruger Police Service. There were Luger works in it to make it a reliable nine. They did all kinds of odd variants for a while, trying to make government sales.” She stood up and looked at Tallow. “Ruger used to have this massive reputation because of the Ruger Super Blackhawk. They used to say it was a great gun for holding up trains, because you’d fire it at the train and it’d stop. Huge goddamn thing with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel, but really accurate and it didn’t break your fingers or wrist when you shot a .44 Magnum load. So it was, you know, a special gun for police by the makers of this immense fucking elephant gun that everyone’s heard of. That was the pitch.”

  “So this guy was shot with a police sidearm?”

  “One that was marketed to police anyway. Why?”

  “Thinking about what we were talking about last night. Is it possible—even just for the sake of argument—that our guy really was matching his weapons to his kills in some sense?”

  “Say it is,” said Scarly. “What have you got?”

  “A petty thief killed with a junk gun that was probably stolen from its manufacturing plant.”

  “Thin,” Scarly observed.

  “I know. But now I want to know more about the victim of the Ruger.”

  “We can do that here. You want to see downstairs first?”

  “Sure. Um, probably a dumb question, but do you have smoke alarms down there?”

  “Nothing that can’t be disabled,” said Bat, stirring. “But you probably won’t be able to sneak a cigarette down there without someone noticing.”

  Tallow hefted the plant. “No. I want to crush some of these leaves and then try burning them.”

  Bat looked at it and admired Tallow’s apparent loss of sanity. “Cool. You bought another lighter then, huh?”

  “Oh shit,” said Tallow, who hadn’t.

  Bat laughed. “Jesus, John. We can’t let you out of our sight, can we? Relax. This is CSU. We have plenty of things that burn shit. Hell, we don’t have much here that doesn’t burn shit.”

  Scarly snorted. “That’s true. Last month a computer power brick caught fire and set light to Brendan Foley’s legs.”

  “And that microwave oven that went up at Christmas.”

  Scarly dismissed it with a disgusted wave of her hand. “Fucking Einar rolling in drunk for the eighteenth time with his ‘I hate all your ice-cold American drinks, I come from a very cold country and do not wish to pour more ice in my body.’ You heard what they did to his head?”

  “What?”

  “Well, the skin grafts took, but, you know, he basically made napalm, so there wasn’t much left under it. So they injected him with this weird sort of facial caulking that swells and firms up under UV light and essentially kind of re-inflated his head. It was cool.”

  “Oh! And the old still exploded last summer!”

  “Right! Did you see Foley’s legs the other day when he was doing that fucked-up pantsless lap of victory around the main labs? Legs like a dead giraffe.”

  “Downstairs?” said Tallow, with just a little pleading in his voice.

  Downstairs was cavernous: bare and stained cement, gray pillars holding up a blackened ceiling that had broken-down flotillas of fluorescent light tubes sailing across it in lazy waves. Walking in from the elevator, Tallow saw an arrangement of wheeled whiteboards, and great blankets of clear plastic sheeting on the floor. Getting closer, he could make out big glossy photos under the sheeting and tacked to the whiteboards.

  “Oh my God,” said Tallow.

  “Yeah,” said Scarly. “We got into work early. Not that he was much use. We rounded up some help and got it done.”

  The CSUs had run off copies of all the photos, in a rough ratio of one to one, and arranged them on the floor and on the whiteboards according to the evidentiary floor plans. The plastic sheeting had been rolled out over the photos on the floor so he could walk over them. It was as close as could be gotten to a copy of the whole of apartment 3A, with the whiteboards standing in for walls and partitions.

  There was a table over to one side, with papers scattered on it. Tallow set his iced coffee and his potted plant down there, turned, and surveyed the space. Scarly deposited next to that the things she’d brought from upstairs, excavated out of their office. An old mortar and pestle, a foil tray that’d had fossil grains of rice pilaf wiped out of it with a wet nap that was itself not young, and a small chef’s blowtorch. Tallow was learning not to ask certain kinds of question about the way the CSUs operated.

  “This is amazing,” Tallow said, and meant it. He wasn’t just taken aback at how well and how completely and how intelligently they’d done it. He was genuinely shocked that they’d done it at all. Tallow had expected to be down here all morning doing it himself, and he hadn’t been looking forward to meticulously matching photos to floor plans and codes, let alone scavenging CSU offices for tacks and adhesive. Walking around the perimeter of the space, he knew immediately that he couldn’t have done it as well as this. Laying this broad plastic sheeting over the photos on the floor was inspired, and Tallow wouldn’t have thought of that at all.

  “What’s the plant for?” asked Bat, bending down and peering at it suspiciously. “I don’t trust plants. Food things come from them.”

  “It’s a tobacco plant. I had the idea that I could smell a kind of tobacco in the apartment.”

  Bat turned his judgmental squint on Tallow. “This is your much strong cop voodoo.”

  “Well,
” said Tallow, “we live in hope. But this is really incredible. Thank you so much.”

  “You’re welcome.” Scarly grinned. “Would you like to be alone with your plant now?”

  Tallow walked into the middle of the simulated living room. “For a couple of hours. Until you get the ballistics back on the Bulldog. Then I’m going to want to talk about paint chips.”

  “You wanna decorate?” Bat asked, raising his voice. Tallow was fairly sure he’d spent the past thirty seconds threatening the plant in a menacing whisper.

  “I saw paints on things in the apartment. I want to know more about those paints.”

  “You sound,” said Scarly, “like a man developing a case.”

  “I’m—no. Not yet. I’m a man telling himself a story, right now…”

  Tallow found his voice trailing off as he looked around. He didn’t see Scarly and Bat exchange a clever glance, just heard Scarly say “We’ll come and get you” as they both left for the elevator. They were already gone when he turned to thank them again.

  He did a first walk of the emulation. There had never been a bed in this apartment, and the kitchen had been ripped out by his man long ago. There was nothing but guns. Looking down, he found the flintlock at the center of a large swirl of weapons. A goat’s eye in the middle of a gunmetal sun.

  The CSUs really had done an incredible, ingenious job. Everything was positioned correctly. Walking back into the living room, Tallow got a new perspective. The arc behind the front door had to be, and was, clear of weapons, otherwise the door wouldn’t open. If Tallow stood in the arc, he could see a space close to the middle of the room that could be reached by stepping into what were now obviously two gaps in the gun coverage, each big enough to accommodate a foot.

  He tried it. Reached the central space. Sat down in it, cross-legged. The position had him facing the broad wall adjacent to the door. He sat and stared at the wall, hands in his lap. Scanned the mosaic of photos. Fought to see something in them beyond arrangements of guns mounted by a very careful lunatic who had been killing people in Manhattan and getting away with it for ten or twenty years.

  Not a thing. Not a thing yet, he told himself, and went to retrieve his coffee. There was no way he could re-create the lighting, he knew, which was a shame. It really had had that churchlike effect on Tallow, standing in that apartment on Pearl Street for the first time. Maybe he could just play a CD of classically inspired ambient music, he thought, and smiled a little at it. Maybe find out the name of whatever Muzak they played in the lobby at Vivicy.

  Tallow sat back down in the virtual space on the floor of the simulated apartment, gazed at photographs of murder weapons, and tried to understand where he really was and what they really were.

  Twenty

  THE HUNTER awoke gently from a peaceful sleep at the break of dawn, its rosy fingers softly touching his face as he slept beneath a great Central Park cypress by the water. He sat up, cross-legged, silent, breathing deeply as the rising sun warmed him. The hunter then stood, pulled some leaves from the cypress, crushed them in his hand to release their oils, and rubbed them under his armpits to minimize his odor.

  Walking quietly around the park, he gathered cattail shoots from the water’s edge, lamb’s-quarter leaves, hen of the woods mushroom flesh, a little mountain mint, and wood sorrel, and he returned to his spot under the cypress to eat it with a piece of squirrel meat. He was always careful never to take too much from one plant. He was a hunter, and that meant he never knew when he might have to rely on foraging to live. The moment he allowed himself to believe that the movement of seasons was perfectly repeating and broadly predictable, he would be creating the conditions for his own death.

  Having eaten, the hunter began to walk. He exited Central Park at East Seventy-Second Street.

  Within a few minutes, the hunter was where he wanted to be: in sight of the Aer Keep Tower, a forty-four-floor glass spike sunk deep into the island. There was no strobing superimposition of Old Manhattan in his vision now. Something this viciously contemporary had him fully impaled in the present day.

  The building repulsed him on a basic level. Nothing about it came from nature, not its alien glitter nor its computer-generated shape. It was a thing created in a lab. It had no place in his green world. It was the device of an invader.

  He walked its perimeter. It was surrounded by high concrete walls, an urban blast bunker against the visual assault of the nearby public school, far too charmless and real for the unprotected eyes of the tower’s inhabitants. The residents’ view didn’t start until higher up, where all the adjacent streets and buildings became nothing but distant pretty toys laid out around their feet. The comfortable perspective of giants.

  There was no true pedestrian entrance. The only way in or out was through the underground garage. If you wanted to leave on foot, you had to emerge from beneath the building and walk the driveway to the main gates. The design obviously dissuaded the more adventurous rich from going on a walking safari. Far better to leave in convoys of black SUVs with tinted windows and discuss in gyms and bars how the possession of money made them prisoners of New York City.

  Or perhaps not, thought the hunter, surveying the main gates. Perhaps they thought themselves a new wave of colonists, inhabiting an airtight biosphere and exploring the moon of Manhattan.

  This was where Jason Westover lived. Jason Westover and his wife.

  The hunter watched cars dock and undock from Space Station Upper East Side for a while, calculating his own trajectories.

  Twenty-One

  THE LONGER Tallow looked at the wall, the more it seemed that the guns on it interlocked somehow.

  The gaps in the surface coverage were very much starting to appear as deliberate omissions, spaces awaiting the right shapes. An immense clock awaiting the right cogs, lying in the sleep of potential until the day the correct pieces were placed and all the wheels could finally turn.

  A voice said “John.” He was so lost in the gun machinery that it took long seconds for him to both register the voice and understand that it was his name being called.

  Scarly was standing by the table. Her face was drawn and he could see her pulse in her throat. She held a sheet of printout. “This isn’t so funny anymore.”

  “What?”

  “The .44 Bulldog. It’s Son of Sam’s gun.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Same bullets they dug out of Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti in the summer of 1976. Those bullets went onto the ballistics database back when the DA in Queens declared the case reopened, in the late nineties. John, this is wrong.”

  “In all kinds of ways.” Tallow stood up, knees protesting. He assumed, since Scarly was here, that he must have been sitting there for a couple of hours, but he had no sense of the time having passed.

  “No, listen,” Scarly said, voice low and urgent. “If someone had been killed with this gun, it would have set off flashing lights. The bullet would have been dug out of the body and processed, and the odds are that it would have matched one of the Son of Sam bullets in the database. There are plenty. Even the bullets that were so deformed they couldn’t be fully matched to the weapon were scanned in and appended to the ballistics compilation on the gun. We don’t have a body for this gun.”

  Tallow stretched, and regretted it instantly. Grimacing, he said, “So our guy dug his own bullets out of some poor bastard. Because, I’m telling you, there’s no way that gun is in this apartment without there being a body on it.”

  “Our guy has a guy in the Property Office, John. And I don’t mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping a fucking eye on, like Son of Sam’s piece, for fuck’s sake—a guy in there who’ll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he’ll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he’s actually starting
to scare me a bit now.”

  “A couple of hundred kills to his name didn’t do that?”

  “Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night.”

  “You know,” said Tallow, “whenever I’m in danger of forgetting you’re a CSU, you always find a way to remind me. On the bright side, doesn’t Bat owe you ten bucks now?”

  “Tallow. Listen. I am not going to be the one who tells my boss that our fucking serial handgun ninja got someone to steal a famous gun out of an evidence barrel and did at least one person with it and recovered the bullet and so we have at least one completely fucking unsolvable case on the list.”

  “No,” said Tallow, plucking the printout from her fingers and grabbing his bag. “I’m going to talk to my boss about it first.”

  Tallow waited until he was outside the main building before calling the lieutenant. He dialed her cell phone. It was midmorning, and her movements weren’t predictable at that time of day. Her phone rang. It rang long enough that he was expecting it to switch to voice mail. Then she answered with an uncertain “Hello?”

  His brow creased. “It’s Tallow. Where are you?” He could tell from the background noise that she was outside.

  “Does it matter where I am?”

  Okay, he thought. “Well, I’d like to sit down with you as soon as it’s convenient. I have something on the case that I really need your input on before I take it further. Can I come by the office in a half hour or so and find you there?”