by Warren Ellis
The hunter clamped down on the thoughts and actions boiling in his gut. “How much?”
“I will not accept more than one hundred dollars for this gun,” said Kutkha, chest swelling with pride in his own magnanimity. “It will come with twenty-four rounds of ammunition.”
“That’s very kind,” said the hunter. “Thank you.”
“The gun will have to come in from New Jersey. I’ll make a call. Be here tonight around seven. It will arrive with my evening shipment. I will take it from the vehicle myself and ensure everything is correct.”
“That is very professional and very timely. Thank you,” said the hunter. “I’ll be here with the money.”
Which he most certainly could have been.
Kutkha did not stand again to shake the hunter’s hand but instead picked up his cell phone and speed-dialed a number, looking at the hunter with the expectation that he was observant enough to know that his audience had concluded. The hunter nodded and left the Russian’s little court. In the hallway, he took his bag from the military man, who watched him walk downstairs to the grotesque, who opened the front door for him and saw him out.
What the hunter knew was that there was the grotesque, the military man, Kutkha, the boy, and at least one additional man upstairs. All but the additional man or men upstairs had seen him. When he returned, there would be at least one other, whichever employee from New Jersey had driven in with his gun and with whatever else Kutkha had previously arranged for his “evening shipment.” Humans, the hunter presumed. In his bag there was the knife and some small tools for living in the forest. A pouch of tinder, a strike, some twine, a few other things. He had the ring on his finger.
He walked to the end of the block, ensured he was out of sight, and began to look for access to the rear of Kutkha’s building.
On the east–west side of the block, five or six doors before a little food store, he found an abandoned hardware store, windows imperfectly whitewashed, the frames in the floors above mostly missing their glass. An official-looking sign had been pasted on the door, but weather had washed many of its words away. There was no one to see him put his knife to the lock and pry the door open. Inside, he closed the door with care and found a standing particleboard display unit to prop against it. The owner had apparently been forced to abandon the place in a hurry. There was still stock here, and many fittings. The hunter crouched in the gloom for a moment, listened, and inhaled. He could faintly detect human feces, but they were old. No one was currently squatting here. He searched what remained of the missing owner’s attempt to live by the cheating laws of exchange in Manhattan. Whatever he took was fair. Mannahatta had been stolen from the Lenape in fraudulent barter. The hunter was no criminal. The spoils of the city on this island were his by right.
The hunter found, among other things, more twine and sliding trays of nuts and bolts that hadn’t been worth the owner’s time to pack and carry. A thought came to him, and he cut himself six feet of twine, gathered a handful of nuts and a few bolts, and looked for the stairway access to the upper floors and ultimately the roof.
Up here, he had an angled view on the rear of Kutkha’s building and clear sight of its weed-choked loading yard and the access alley where cars could reach it. The windows on the upper three floors of the building had makeshift curtains tacked across them inside.
The hunter crouched behind the ventilation unit on the roof, out of direct sight of Kutkha’s building, and began to tie nuts into the length of twine. He knotted the heavy bolts on either end of the string. Experimentally, he spun a foot’s worth of string in his fist, the bolt at the end whipping the twine around in a tight arc. Good enough.
The hunter stood, faced Kutkha’s building, spun the weighted twine until it buzzed, and flung it toward the top floor of that building. He watched it fly and then ducked behind the roof unit and watched from the best stealthy angle he could find.
The bolted twine hit the top window. Not hard enough to break it. With just enough force for it to make a sharp report and clatter down onto the window below on the fourth floor, and again onto the third, before falling away, landing in a thick patch of weeds in the yard.
One curtain was pulled away on the fifth floor. One on the fourth. Two on the third. Little bobbing heads trying to see what had made the noise.
Four more people. Also, whoever they were keeping up there. At least one woman being held. The hunter sighed, rolling back out of sight. This had gotten more complicated than it needed to be.
He wondered if the grotesque ever left his position for lunch. The grotesque did not have the shape of a person who was likely to forget about his lunches.
The shipment from New Jersey was obviously going to come through the access road to the yard, in dying evening light. It was a well-secluded space. Unless you were on an adjacent roof, of course, the hunter thought with a quiet chuckle.
His original plan had been to pay for the weapon, leave, return a few moments later, and kill everybody. There were now too many players, all too scattered, for that to work. The hunter needed to make the thing small again. He needed to isolate Kutkha. He did not want everything to balance on Kutkha having made a point of saying he’d take the gun from the car himself to check it over.
That said, the hunter had to admit to himself, that was the sort of thing Kutkha would do, and he’d done similar things in the past. The man did take steps, if not exactly pains, to act and present himself as a courtly criminal, operating in accordance with some mannered tradition that existed for the most part only in Kutkha’s own head.
The hunter looked at the sun and calculated the phase of the day. He looked along the row of roofs, paused to count off his pulse, and matched his internal drums to a beat in his mind. The hunter then, staying as low as he dared, ran and leaped and ran over the roofs until he reached the corner he’d turned earlier. He committed the time elapsed to hard memory and crawled to the edge of this new roof. He had an oblique sliver of a view to the front door of Kutkha’s building; enough that he’d notice someone leaving.
The hunter was very good at waiting. The roof became the gently curved crown of a foothill, and he was looking down into a gladed trail, the patchy blacktop so easily turning into shade-dappled ground that he smiled, broadly and genuinely, at its simple beauty. There were deer mice popping across the grass here and there, and the shadow of a sharp-shinned hawk orbited his head for a short and exquisite minute. There were patches of bladderpod, as lovely a pale violet as a summer evening sky, whose seeds were sacred. All was sacred, in this waiting time. Life was perfect.
The sun had just stepped to its noon summit when the hunter flinched from the wrenching uchronic sight of a twenty-first-century grotesque in a food-spattered orange running suit walking through a pre-seventeenth-century Mannahatta woodland trail. He almost threw up from the perceptual shock.
The grotesque followed the path the hunter himself had taken. He turned the corner of the block. His only possible destination was the food store. The hunter, blinking back history, watched the man’s walking speed, and as he turned the corner, the hunter ran for the roof he had come from, beating out the time in his head.
The hunter was on the ground floor and prepared within four minutes. He prayed it was enough. He moved the display stand and opened the front door. The street was still entirely clear. It wasn’t, after all, a part of town you went to unless you had to. He stood behind the door, put it ajar, and waited again. This time, he was tensed. The grotesque couldn’t possibly have bought food and made it back around the corner in four minutes. The creature just didn’t move that fast. The street had to stay clear. Performing this hunt was risk enough.
The grotesque dawdled past the hunter’s door.
The hunter counted off two more steps, to give himself more space to work in, and opened the door and moved.
A double loop of twine went around the grotesque’s neck, and a vicious wrench pulled a complex knot swiftly tight. The hunter wound the twin
e into his left hand and yanked the creature backward. The hunter gave him credit for trying to reach for his gun with his right hand even as he tried to get his left hand under the loop. The hunter pulled him in close and drove his own right hand into the grotesque’s temple. The hunter felt the bone give like struck eggshell under the quartz spike.
The prey’s legs turned to mush. The hunter summoned all his strength and dragged the prey backward into the dark of the store. He pressed the prey into the wall face-first long enough for him to close the door as silently as he could.
The prey kicked.
The hunter was off balance and had not yet reached out for his knife, which he’d placed on the display stand. He fell backward with the prey on top of him, bucking like a wounded bull. In past years, the hunter could have throttled his prey by main force. But he had no ego about his age and was fine with jabbing his knee into the prey’s back to increase the power he could put into the strangulation. In this position, the more the prey struggled, the quicker he choked himself against the twine.
The prey’s heels skittered on the floor, and dug in. He paid for it. But the hunter realized the prey was making the space for what could be a successful grab at the gun in the back of his waistband. The gun the hunter had not yet had the opportunity to take.
The hunter heaved and threw the prey onto his belly. Still on his back, the hunter punched him four or five more times in the side of the head. Blood began to pump weakly from a jagged hole in the prey’s temple, and he began to moan and flop. The hunter took the gun. He resisted the temptation to beat the prey to death with it. He had plans for the weapon and didn’t want to damage it.
Instead, he stood and placed the gun on the display stand. He took his knife and turned to the prey on the floor.
The prey was up and going for him. One of its eyes had filled with blood. It couldn’t speak beyond moans and croaks, and the foam in its mouth was red. It had urinated in its clothes. One of its giant hands, trembling spastically, went for the hunter’s face and found purchase.
The hunter drove his knife in and up under its ribs. It made a sound between a choked scream and a whistle. The hunter drove the blade in again. The prey suffered a violent bowel movement. The hunter drove his blade in a third time, higher and harder, and felt down the length of it the resistance of meeting and splitting thick, dense meat.
The hunter twisted the blade.
The prey’s open mouth became a still pool of blood.
It died, and dropped, and leaked, and was no longer interesting.
Twenty-Three
TALLOW DROVE around the 1st for a while, until he was certain his brain was still ticking along smoothly. It was pushing noon. He knew he should attempt food. It also occurred to him that he should continue to hand-tame his feral CSUs.
People who didn’t know John Tallow well were often surprised when he exercised some spending power, and even more surprised when they found out he lived on the island. Sometimes people assumed he was on the take in some mysterious fashion that didn’t require his energy or interest. The simple fact was that Tallow didn’t spend a lot of money, ever. He even did most of his laundry in the kitchen sink with cheap soap powder. He didn’t go out much. He didn’t eat much. He got his reading and his music inexpensively or free through the Internet.
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline from his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable.
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour.
He pulled up at a sandwich place he knew just before the lunchtime rush started, tucking his car in behind a brand-new SUV-type thing that, with its broad beam, gold, chrome, and huge tires, could have been a hyper-evolved version of a lunar rover. The place itself was little more than a hole-in-the-wall on a rolling six-month lease, and the selection was “minimalist,” but the food was terrific, skilled, and considered. Tallow took out his phone and called Scarly.
“I hate this thing,” answered Scarly. “It’s like an ankle monitor you have to fucking pay for. Except for your hand. Shut up. What do you want?”
Tallow felt a little headache start behind his right eye, which twitched. “I wanted to know if you guys want me to bring you some lunch back.”
“Hey. Bat. You want food?” Scarly yelled without holding the phone away from her mouth.
While Tallow shook his head, he could hear Bat moaning in the call’s background. “The bag hurts. Food is a trick on mammals. The bag is death, Scarly. Food is death.”
“He doesn’t want lunch,” Scarly said. “But get him some anyway. Either he’ll eat it and it’ll kill him or he won’t touch it and I’ll just eat it myself. Where are you?”
“A place in the 1st I know. How about a cold sliced steak sub on fresh bread with a red onion marmalade they make with beer?”
“Hell yes. That sounds like real fucking food.”
“Give me twenty minutes.”
“Thanks, John.”
“Death bag,” Bat howled in the distance.
John got out of the car, almost knocking down a tall, stringy man in a tan suede jacket and a guano-speckled bowler hat with three large turkey feathers sticking out of the makeshift duct-tape hatband. “Fucking filth,” snarled the man. His teeth were the color of mud.
Tallow impassively badged him. “Te’bly sorry,” said the man; he touched his fingers to the brim of his hat and shuffled on. Tallow walked to the storefront. He’d read somewhere that in the Five Boroughs there were no fewer than four hundred thousand people reporting serious psychological distress, and God knew how many people on the street who didn’t report to anyone and who slipped through the ragged net of the city’s scarily named Division of Mental Hygiene and the myriad agencies it paid to supposedly get crazy people off the sidewalks and into the system. A lot of people got paid. Any idiot walking the 1st Precinct could tell you how few of them were actually doing the job. If you were crazy enough to store the guns you ritually prepared to kill people, then in New York City you could hide in plain sight. Tallow considered that for all he knew, the stringy man in the bird-shit-spattered bowler could be his guy.
Inside the narrow store, there was a woman in a black, very architectural sort of jacket, turquoise jewelry, and unusual wedge-heeled boots that made her look like she was balancing on thick slices of gold. The two guys who ran the place, always in Williamsburg hipster uniforms of short-sleeved shirts and neatly trimmed beards that looked stuck on with spirit gum, paid, as ever, no attention to anything but the food and the money. Tallow imagined that every night they counted their money and prided themselves on having not made eye contact with anything human. New Agey synth music shot through with glitch and broken beats played softly from an iPod speaker station on the countertop.
The woman wore shades, and her hair was loose and framed her face, but Tallow could still see that she was pale. Not pale like the florist. This wasn’t a woman who took in light. This was a woman who crumbled a little bit under it, whose skin was made dry and drawn by exposure to the world. Roll-on balm wasn’t disguising bitten and blistered lips enough. He decided he was glad he couldn’t see her eyes.
She paid cash, which was taken from a tooled leather cylinder held in the crook of her right arm, no bigger than it needed to be for a billfold, credit cards, phone, and car keys. As she turned, Tallow saw the brooch at her breast, a disc of rough animal hide on a gold mount, a gold image of an elk head in its center, framed by two gold feathers. She saw him looking, brushed it with compulsive fingers, false nails tapping on the gold, and left. He noticed her wedding band looked a little big on her finger.
“Three of the steak sandwiches, please.”
“Coming up,” said Beard Number One, nodding to Beard Numbe
r Two, never once looking at Tallow. Together, they cut and smashed and wrapped the sandwiches in maybe twenty seconds. They’d gotten faster. Judging by the previous customer, Tallow thought word had really gotten around about the place. He imagined the pair training at night, listening to Animal Collective on repeat as they beat sandwiches into shape, racing against the same stopwatch they used to time their beard trimming.
Tallow paid his money, took his sandwiches under one arm, and heard the scream.
The woman in the black jacket was crouching on the sidewalk in front of the SUV and screaming as the man in the bowler hat stood over her waving his arms and wailing like a baby.
Tallow shifted the sandwiches to his left arm and shouted at the man in the hat to get his attention. The man turned and looked. Tallow very deliberately opened his jacket to show the man his gun. The man saw the gun. He stopped wailing.
“I just asked her for a light. She started crying. I figured crying was the thing to do today.”
“Get out of here. I’m not making the offer twice.”
The man ran down the street and away, clutching his hat with both hands.
Tallow sighed, looked around, and rested his sandwiches on the hood of the SUV. Good police never showed their guns unless they had to, he knew, but it was quick and easy and it worked. He’d bitch at himself later. The woman was rocking and sobbing now, wheezing, no air left in her lungs for screaming.
Tallow’s empathy extended to reading a situation and not a hell of a lot further. He had known that Bobby Tagg was in extreme distress and in the midst of a psychological break, but he very probably would not have been able to successfully extend comfort and calm to the man. Jim Rosato was a blunt object of a police, but people just naturally liked him better. It was why, Tallow thought, they’d made a good team.