by Warren Ellis
“Um. No. I won’t be there for a while.”
“I really need your help, Lieutenant. Where are you? I could meet you there, if that’s easier.”
“Oh God,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
Tallow heard her take a deep, shaky breath. “I’m at Jim’s funeral, John.”
“…What?”
Everything tilted, and Tallow’s feet swam for purchase until his back met a wall. He stiffened his legs and pressed his back hard against it.
“I’m sorry, John.”
“I don’t understand.”
“His wife…she wanted a quick funeral. And, well, I’m afraid she told me she didn’t want you to attend. I mean, she’s upset, obviously, and if she’d chosen to wait a week, I’m sure it would have been different.”
All Tallow could think of to say was “We’ve never met. I’ve never met her.”
The lieutenant’s voice sounded somewhat strained as she said, “Yes, she told me that too.”
“What did she say?”
“Don’t, John.”
Tallow let himself slide down the wall until his knees were drawn up and his backside was on the ground. “What did she say?”
“She said that she didn’t want a stranger at her husband’s funeral, and she didn’t want to see the man who should have saved her husband, and she didn’t want to see the man who should have died instead of her husband.”
He’d asked her to say it. He’d badgered her to say it. But he didn’t like her for saying it. And he didn’t like himself for doing it and hating her. He didn’t like anything. He covered his face with his free hand.
“John?”
“I wish people would stop saying that. Sometimes I wish people didn’t know my name.”
“John? What?”
“I was his partner. I was his friend. You tell her…” He caught himself. Gathered up everything in him in one fist and pushed it all down with everything else that was already down there. “No. Don’t tell her anything. Don’t mention me at all.”
“Okay, John,” the lieutenant said, uncertainly.
Yeah, he thought. Talk to me like that. Talk to me like I’m a basket case. Talk to me like I’m an idiot. Talk to me like I’m already leaving the force. He licked his lips like a lizard, his face tightening and hardening into sharp planes, relishing the anger that was starting to whip around inside him. He caught hold of that, too, but he decided to push it out.
“You need to be in your office in one hour. I have Son of Sam’s gun.”
He waited just long enough to hear the start of her reaction, and killed the phone call dead.
Tallow walked to his car, drove out of One Police Plaza, stopped at a store, and bought two lighters.
Homicide at Ericsson Place was empty when Tallow arrived. Everyone was at Jim Rosato’s funeral.
The lieutenant was not in her office. Tallow entered her office, stood there, and waited.
He didn’t move. Stared at the back wall of her office. Pictured the guns from Pearl Street there. Conjured them in his vision and continued to scan them for clues, evidence, sense.
Ten minutes later the lieutenant stalked into the room, angry and angular in a black wool Nehru-collared pantsuit with a sharply darted asymmetrical front closure. He wondered if this, too, was new. He also found that he didn’t care.
“I do not like the way you are talking to me lately, Detective,” she snapped, walking around her desk.
Tallow put down his bag, took out the printout, and tossed it on the desk.
“Did you hear me?”
“Read that.”
“Tallow, do you want to be discharged? Do you want me to take your badge and gun right now and have you marched off the premises?”
“Read. That.”
“Tallow, you—”
“Lieutenant, I have a lot of respect for you. You have a hard job, in all kinds of ways, and you handle the pressure from all sides better than pretty much any boss I’ve ever had in the job. But you hung this around my neck, and you are just counting the days until it pulls me down and both it and me disappear from sight. I can understand that. But until what you put around my neck sinks me, you will treat me like a detective in the New York Police Department and you. Will. Read. That.”
She looked at him for a long time. She then turned her gaze to the printout, but he could see her focus vanish, could see that she wasn’t going to give it more than a glance before dismissing it, throwing it in the trash, and moving on to the far more present task of what to do about John Tallow. He directed his thoughts to anything that might be listening in the sky over Ericsson Place right then.
The lieutenant’s eyes skidded off the page, and she pulled the paper off her desk, preparing to crumple it. She glared at him, and then looked at it again, her hand closing.
She stopped. Squinted at something on the page. Slid both sets of fingers around the sides of the page, holding it still and straight.
The lieutenant laid the page back on the desk like it was ticking.
“John?”
He was John now. She was jolted. It simply remained, he thought, to see where she was induced to jump to. His career could be over in the next two sentences, he knew.
“Yes.”
“Are we sure this isn’t CSU playing a prank?”
“Yesterday I met the CSU who did the test. A piece of the gun blew back and took off a chunk of his earlobe. They completed the processing a little over an hour ago. I think it’s fair to say that their fear wouldn’t easily be faked for the sake of a prank.”
“Who else has seen this?”
“The pair of CSUs. Me. You.”
She gave him a look that said she was reevaluating him. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Do you want to sit down?”
“Standing is fine.” Tallow let a little bit of ice into his voice when he said it. She caught it.
“About the funeral, John—”
“Forget the funeral. What about this?”
She pushed her hair back, worried, eyes darting around the page on her desk. “Tell me what you think it means.”
“I think it means the owner of apartment three A on Pearl Street has or had a contact inside the Property Office and induced that person to steal this gun for a specific homicide. Knowing how incredibly identifiable this gun is, he then dug his own bullet or bullets out of his victim. So we have a gun we can reasonably assume was used for homicide by our man, but no victim to apply it to. It’s my opinion that he used this gun because he believed it had some historical, thematic, or personal connection to the kill.” At which moment, Tallow made a leap of intuition. Or a crazy guess. “Just like we’ll find that Marc Arias, killed in Williamsburg in 2007, will prove to have some connection with the police.”
The lieutenant’s eyebrows shot up. “How do you figure that?”
“He was killed with a Ruger Police Service, a gun they made to sell to police forces, I’m told with not much success. Marc Arias is going to turn out to be a guy connected to the police. Probably not a full-serving officer.”
Tallow knew he was taking a huge, huge chance at this point. Tallow also knew that his brain was moving at speed, and thinking felt like it hadn’t for years. He felt like a runner whose morning start had been hard and harrowing but who had hit the zone where the running was sweet and swift.
She turned to her computer. “You know what the police staffing the Property Office used to be called? The Rubber Gun Squad. Back in the day, they used only police who were on restricted duty or under disciplinary action.”
He watched her input a search string into the networked database. He watched her eyebrow arch again as the Real Time Crime Center component spit back results instantly. She read it off the screen to him.
“‘Marc Arias, in 2007, was a discharged officer of the NYPD whose last posting within the force was…staff at the Property Office.’”
&n
bsp; “Lieutenant, you shoved this into my hands when I still had my friend’s blood on my clothes and told me to work the case. I’m working it. But I’ve reached the stage where I’m going to need your help. Are you going to help me, or do I stay out there on my own?”
“Don’t make it sound like you were the lone cowboy on the high desert there, John. But,” she said, holding up a hand as his mouth opened, “I take your point. And while I think this is a little bit thin, and could be entirely coincidental, the fact remains that the gun should be in storage, not in an apartment on Pearl Street.”
“What do we do about that, Lieutenant?”
“I need to speak to someone farther up the chain of command, and very quietly. This is not a news item that needs to be out in the world.” She picked up her desk phone. “Get out of here, John. I’m going to try to get the captain’s next free five minutes, and then ruin his day.”
“I can go upstairs with you, help explain all this and how we got here.”
“Go back to work, Detective. You don’t have experience in explaining things to the captain in baby talk so that he can explain things to the assistant chief for Manhattan South and not sound like a senior citizen with a kilo of Vicodin in his system. Which he essentially is. This is my job now. You go do yours.”
“Okay,” Tallow said, picking up his bag and leaving her office. As he was passing through the doorway, the lieutenant said, in a small voice, to his back:
“I really am sorry about earlier. The funeral.”
Tallow broke step for only a moment, and then continued off the floor and out of the building before all Jim Rosato’s friends and coworkers returned from gently laying him to rest in the warm and welcoming soil of the mainland.
Twenty-Two
THE HUNTER needed to obtain a weapon.
There were an unpleasant number of conditions placed on his forthcoming work. He needed the weapon by tomorrow. He was well aware of having a limited sum of money at his hideaway here in the south of the island. He could not bear to take the subway. And he knew that the response to his next hunt would be immediate and difficult.
The hunter kept walking west. The modern man in him understood that he was entering the part of New Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen by most, and Clinton by real estate agents’ store-window ads, but he allowed Old Manhattan to wash up in his vision for a little while, and he contentedly followed the stream that the first Dutch on the island called the Great Kill.
His hand went into his bag, locating and producing first a pair of thin leather gloves, and then a ring. The ring was not the most beautiful piece of handcrafting he’d ever seen, or even that he’d ever made. It was wrapped wire, wide enough to accommodate the gloved index finger of his right hand, and in the crude but tight setting was a piece of quartz he’d found by the mouth of the Harlem River Ship Canal. The hunter had worked it carefully. It stood out just enough from the wire claws of the ring setting and was cut to such a sharp point that it made a functional punch weapon of last resort. The hunter had on one occasion used it to strike open a jugular vein, and on another to destroy a larynx.
The hunter slipped the gloves on, and then the ring.
Draining Mannahatta from his sight with reluctance, he began to pick his way through warehouses, gray-mud parking lots, and auto repair shops. It was, he felt, as desolate as this end of the island got.
He found the location he wanted: a five-story building whose frontage was a boarded-up pizzeria. The side door, which opened onto the stairs going up to the higher floors of the building, was, as ever, slightly ajar. One presented oneself in front of it, at which event the door would creak open to reveal a large man with a badly concealed gun standing in its lee.
And so it was that the door swung to show, in the gloom, a grotesque in a grubby orange tracksuit, dark hair growing patchily out of a head that appeared to have at some point fallen in, or been held in, farming machinery. It was as if his face were once a soft thing that someone had swirled with a finger before it had set.
“I want to see Mr. Kutkha,” the hunter said.
“Ain’t no Kutkha here,” the grotesque said, predictably.
“Tell him a previous customer and distant old tribesman has come to visit.”
“Got a name?”
“Tell him you asked for a name and that I told you I’m a human being.”
The grotesque shrugged and walked up the short flight of stairs backward, keeping his hand on the gun shoved in the back of his waistband. At the landing, still keeping his deep-set eyes on the hunter, he relayed the information.
The hunter presently heard a laugh like bones being rattled in a tin, and then a harsh, snapping voice shouting “Let him in, let him in!” The grotesque summoned the hunter up with a paw whose shape was lost to flab. On the landing, the hunter saw a second man, shorter than the grotesque, with a military haircut. His body was overtrained in the manner of the modern physical narcissists, speaking of a man who knew the names of most of his muscles. This one held out a hand for the hunter’s bag, which he passed over easily. The hunter was silently directed to the door of the largest room on this floor, a room that hummed with the sound of machines. It did not quite smother a sudden composition of sounds from the next floor up: screams like a cat being dismembered, a deep thump that shook the ceiling, the noise of someone trying to cry while unable to draw breath.
The hunter showed no outward sign of having heard it. He allowed the man with the military haircut to pat him down.
The first thing the hunter noticed upon entering the room was a boy of sixteen, low-browed and broad-nosed, standing beside the door with the expression of a soundly beaten puppy. The hunter could not see the boy’s hands, and so he moved to kill the boy.
Kutkha’s voice stopped him. “Boy! You do not stand there when a true man enters a room! Do you want to die?”
Kutkha was thin like a switch, with a face flaked from flint. He sat with kingly aplomb upon a small, richly buttery sofa, flanked by two tall fans attendant on either side of his seat, with two floor-standing air-conditioning units on the floor before him like kneeling slaves. The hunter knew Kutkha of old: the man complained of being permanently hot, yet he loved clothes, and so he sat there in peculiar long shorts of fine cotton and white silk and an elaborately patterned waistcoat and nothing else, being delightedly hammered by the tundra gales of very new air-conditioning machines.
Kutkha was still cackling at the boy’s frozen horror as he rose to shake the hunter’s hand. “The human being himself! My distant relation!”
And then, to the boy: “A human being, see? He is of the Lenni-Lenape tribe. Do you know what those words mean? The ‘Human Beings!’ He and I, we are of the same blood. Your family?” He spit on the floor. “Your family are shit.”
Kutkha turned back to the hunter. “My brother fucked a Muscovite. What can you do. Some people will fuck livestock if the animals stand still long enough. That family, they continue to send these little sperms up the B to beg me to make nice, come to Brighton Beach, eat kielbasa they made out of fucking dogs, and listen to them talk about how I can give them all my fucking money. Those people have been fucking my people for so long that you could look right into my very fucking DNA with a microscope and see someone from Moscow pissing on my genes and calling it summer rain.”
Kutkha rounded again on the hapless boy. “Do you see? I am Itelmen! My people walked to Alaska and down into America and became his people! He is more my blood than you. You are like the things that fall out of my ass when I eat Italian foods.”
Kutkha returned to his seat. There wasn’t another chair in the room, but the hunter was expecting this. He knew Kutkha. He stood between the air-con units, a supplicant position before the throne. The hunter had harbored some small stone of regret about what would have to happen. It turned to dust in his heart as he stood there like a peasant between the rumbling little machines.
The Russian waved an airy hand at the boy. “You can speak in front
of him. I am not even convinced he knows the language.”
The hunter studied the boy briefly, and then decided to speak. “I need a gun. I would very much like a police gun.”
“How so?”
“A gun associated with the police. With use by the police.”
Kutkha addressed the sullen boy. “He’s a collector, see. Knows what he wants, knows what he likes. A man with an interest in history. You could cultivate that shit. Know where you’ve been and you’ll see where you’re going. You might be of some use to me if you could prove you could think. Or count. You do not have to go back to Brighton Beach and get jerked off by old men in piss-stinking banyas. I’ll say that I can teach you things here in Manhattan that have been long forgotten in Brighton Beach.”
The hunter said, “It doesn’t have to be new. I’d prefer something in working condition.”
“You know.” Kutkha ruminated. “I’m almost positive I have a Colt Official Police. From the 1950s.”
“What does the grip look like?”
“Checkered wood.”
“And the barrel?”
“Six inches, I would say. I remember this because my specialist, he likes history like we do, and he saw this gun and made the little rocking motion that means he is happy, and told me many things about the gun until I had to say to him that I would shoot him to make him quiet again.”
“I’ll take that,” said the hunter.
“A fine purchase. A weapon like that, it’s like a good watch, from the days when they still had mechanical parts that people cared about. I could have maybe found you a SIG, but it’s simply not the same, is it? The Colt comes with the original NYPD holster, but I’ll not sell you that. If you want it, it’s free, but I’ll not take your money for it.”
“Why?”
“It hasn’t been used. It’s a spare holster. And I will tell you a thing that I was told by my specialist, because it amused me. Policemen had to break in those holsters. They looked like leather but were just treated cardboard. So they had to force a Coke bottle into the holster for a week to loosen it enough to get the gun in. If you put the gun in there without breaking it in, you had to cut the gun out again. Or get shot. But breaking it in did so much damage that the holster would fall apart after six months. I am told this: in the 1970s, men of our kind could rip the Colts right out of the holsters. Just tear the holsters, pull the gun, and shoot the policeman. Those were sweeter times, if you ignored the clothes.”