by Warren Ellis
THE HUNTER watched from the rooftop on the corner. The military man had a cursory glance around the block, and then went back inside Kutkha’s place.
The auto repair shop across the street closed for a late lunch. The hunter found the access alley behind the hardware store, walked around the block, broke into the auto repair shop, and took a few things they wouldn’t immediately miss, including a jacket and a ball cap that had been stuffed into a bag at the back. They stank of machine guts, but he wanted to be less obvious in his comings and goings over the next few hours, so he put them on in order to walk his wrapped spoils back to the hardware store.
In the cool shade of the abandoned store, the hunter began to make tools.
He carefully twisted long lengths of twine together and set them to soak in the can of gasoline he’d taken from the auto shop.
The dead thing was nothing but raw material now. The hunter cut many thin slices of its clothing off, having looked at it and determined there were plenty of polymers in the weave of its orange suit. The hunter soaked the strips in its blood. Once they were sodden, the hunter stuffed them into two of the three empty water bottles he’d found in the store’s back room, along with the handful of Styrofoam packing beans he’d gathered from the floor.
The hunter couldn’t find a decent hacksaw in the place, and it might have made too much noise in any case. He crept around the house in search of the weakest-looking copper pipes and spent patient minutes prying two of them from the walls as quietly as possible. He spent a short while grinding the tip of a bolt, and then used it to punch breathing holes down the lengths of both pipes. He then fed a length of twine down each of the pipes. He had to keep himself aware of the passage of time. This kind of work warmed and entranced him so wonderfully that he could have lost days to it. The preparation of tools was beautiful to him, even improvised tools such as these. The tying of a knot around a nut was an act of devotion and a preservation of sacred crafts as much as the creation of a prayer tie from tobacco leaves. He mixed gasoline with the blood and fabric and Styrofoam, and looped the free end of the twine around the far end of the pipe so as not to lose it when he dropped the knotted end of the twine into the bottle. He pushed three or four inches of the near end of the pipe into the bottle and made a seal with duct tape lifted from the auto shop. One end of the twine was inside the bottle, weighted by its nut; the other was still looped around the end of the pipe. He repeated the process with the second bottle.
He hefted one of his copper spears experimentally. The length was good. He then searched for things to weight the standing ends of the bottles, to give more predictability to the lift.
The front door of Kutkha’s property was still a problem. Having weighted the bottles to his liking, the hunter prowled the building for more ingredients.
He came across an old broom, its shaft splintered, its imitation-horsehair brush balding and brittle. It solved a problem farther down his list. He slowly split it all the way in half—he didn’t want the crack of breaking it sharply—and with his knife began to feather the top end of the wood into tinder as he walked the empty building.
Within ten minutes, the hunter had found a half-empty hand-sanitizer dispenser, a mostly full bottle of drain cleaner, a folded tube of strong glue, and a disposable lighter that looked to have five millimeters of butane in the bottom. The hunter took off his gloves and squirted a tiny drop of the sanitizer onto a fingertip. He sniffed it, and then rubbed it swiftly with his thumb. Alcohol based. Heaven alone knew what the attendant scent was supposed to be, he thought sourly. He knew he had a scattering of nails and pins downstairs. He took his knife again and dug into the walls of the room he was in until he found the lighting circuit’s wiring and pulled several feet of it free of the plaster.
Downstairs, he put his tinder down and took up the gun he’d removed from the dead thing on the floor. It was a version of a Beretta 92, some newer iteration that he hadn’t seen. It was a little lighter in his hand than he had been expecting given the make. Some parts were plastic, he saw on closer inspection. Unmistakably a Beretta 92, though, nine-millimeter and workmanlike. The slide was strong and smooth. He extracted the gun’s magazine and pulled a bullet from it. The hunter sliced the top off the third bottle, poured the dregs of the gasoline can into it, unscrewed the dispenser arm from the hand sanitizer, and squirted that on top of the gasoline. He went foraging for nails. To his great pleasure, ten minutes’ diligence saw him collect a substantial number of aluminum clout nails. In the bottle they went.
As the dead thing stiffened and then softened on the other side of the room, the hunter worked with his knife on the bullet and the wiring and other things, and his heart grew light.
It was late afternoon before he had completed his construction to his satisfaction. The hunter then turned, methodically, to the preparation of tinder. Moving as quietly as he could, he broke up the particleboard display stand and began to arrange its pieces. He feathered and shaved more tinder, ensuring he could easily reach it even as he began to gather more wood to it.
It would make a grand fire. A fire that would cook the dead thing down to a pile of black sticks, with the remains of its polyester clothes melted over them.
The hunter stopped then, took his last piece of squirrel meat, and took his time chewing it, considering every angle of what he had done and what he was going to do.
The sun came low. The hunter stood his weapons by the back door and went up to the roof to look around and wait. He had a reasonably good view from the rooftop at the corner of the block. He knew how to reach the side road and Kutkha’s backyard from the hardware store’s access alley.
The sun ticked down. The street grew silent.
The military man opened the front door, threw out two garbage sacks, and closed the door again with an audible click.
The hunter moved.
Five minutes later, and acutely aware of the passage of time, the hunter was unseen at the front door of Kutkha’s property, pushing a nail into the wooden footboard of the front door, kicking a garbage sack—What a gift! he thought—in front of the door, and lowering a filled water bottle containing improvised partitions onto the bag. He extended the wires that hung out of the bottle and wound the end of one of them around the nail in the lower door frame. He pushed in another nail next to the door lock, wound the other wire around that, checked his work, and moved quickly away.
In the dark of the hardware store, the hunter struck sparks. The pyre around the dead thing caught immediately. He took more tinder out of the back door with him in one of the small storage trays. Outside, he heard a car. The hunter stopped moving and listened, intently. He heard the car move down the access road, turn, negotiate the passage into the backyard, and stop.
The hunter struck sparks into his tinder and got fire. He lit the tips of the soaked twine where they stuck out of the ends of the two pipes and slid through the door in the fence that separated him from the access road. With five steps he remained out of sight of the backyard but had a clear line of sight to the rear of Kutkha’s building.
He hefted his first spear and hurled it over the fence and through a third-floor window. He snatched up the second while the first was in flight, calculated a correction and the extra force, and flung the spear through a fifth-floor window. He could see little flickers of light through the breathing holes down the spears as the gasoline-soaked wicks burned toward the bottles. There was a flat report from the third floor, like a giant striking the ground with a cupped hand. Homemade napalm—clotted blood, plastics, and gasoline—erupted, and he was rewarded with shrieks from the third floor. A fifth-floor window blew out as the second napalm bomb went off.
The hunter drew the Beretta and moved into the backyard.
There was a large seven-seater car parked there. The hunter made out the small faces of four small people in the rear of the vehicle, and saw that the doors were locked. Two men stood by the left wing of the car, their backs to the hunter.
He shot the first through the back of the neck. The bullet careened around the man’s face and tore through the right joint of his jaw as it exited, so that the lower jaw swung around as if on a hinge toward the hunter.
He shot the second through the back of the head and heard the smack of a chunk of brain the size of a baby’s hand hit the wall of the building.
Kutkha had a briefcase in his hands. Behind him was the idiot boy. Beside him was the military man, already moving for a concealed weapon.
The hunter shot the military man through the forehead. For a long second, the man refused to die. His eyes flashed with outrage. He opened his mouth as if to speak his mind at the intrusion, and half a pint of bright red blood fell out of it. His legs gave way and he fell to the ground in a coiling motion, like a clubbed snake.
The hunter snapped his gun down and shot Kutkha in the groin, accurately castrating him. He shoved the screaming Russian away and shot the boy twice in the brain, smiling as he told himself the second shot was in case he missed the brain the first time.
The third and fifth floors of the building were now fully ablaze. The shrieking had one or two voices fewer in it.
The hunter moved quickly to the heavy back door of the building, resting the gun in his left jacket pocket—it was too hot to push into his waistband now. He took a handful of short wires from his right pocket and pushed them roughly into the lock. He shot the last of the tube of epoxy glue into the lock after them, filling it as best he could. He drew his gun again and waited for thirty seconds, keeping one eye on the screaming, bucking Kutkha.
Someone inside tried to open the back door. But he couldn’t get it to unlock. He heard scrabbling. Then nothing.
The hunter moved to Kutkha and stood on his neck as he picked up the briefcase. It was unlocked. Inside was money and, in two plastic bags, the Police Service and twenty-four rounds. The Police Service was a curiously lovely weapon. He stroked it through its plastic. It would serve wonderfully. It was the perfect tool for the next job.
He decided to take a brick of banknotes too. They had their uses.
“Why?” Kutkha gurgled. “Why? We do business.”
“I regret that, in this instance, I cannot allow myself to have been seen, Kutkha.”
There was a loud explosion. Someone had opened the front door to the building, actuating the hunter’s improvised explosive device. Drain-cleaning fluid had mixed with aluminum nails, alcohol gel, some water, and a little gasoline, lit by black powder and butane. The hunter did wish he could have seen this one. The fireball, and the hot rush of unburned caustic gas, the flaming gel, and the hail of burning nails. It must have been beautiful, the bloom in the evening shade. The garbage sacks would be burning now too. No one was getting out of the building.
Kutkha was crawling to the military man’s corpse. Kutkha would have known where that one carried his gun. The hunter put his foot back on Kutkha. Kutkha sobbed, desperately. “We are the same blood! My tribesmen walked to America and became your tribesmen! We are the same!”
“No,” said the hunter. “No, we’re not.”
He shot Kutkha in the back of the head. The angle was off. The top of Kutkha’s head came away, and the damp matter inside the case jolted out onto the ground and skittered nine or ten inches away like a sea creature.
The hunter realized he was being watched. Four pairs of bright eyes inside the car.
The hunter sighed, drew his knife, and cut two swatches off of Kutkha’s absurd shorts. He walked back into the access road and retrieved his tinder tray. The tinder was still burning, the plastic of the tray blackening and bubbling.
He carried it to the car, opened the fuel cap, fed the two strips of fabric into it, and lit them with the tinder. He tossed the tinder tray and the Beretta under the car and walked away, refusing to perceive the little fists hammering on the car’s window glass, the muffled voices, the eyes.
The hunter was most of the way down the access road when the car went up. The hardware store was already burning. There were sirens, but they would not be here in time. They never were.
He walked to the shore, and sat by the water, and watched the Great Kill glisten in the dark as the houses of his enemies burned at his back.
Twenty-Seven
TALLOW DROVE his unit out of Ericsson Place, bone weary, abstractly disappointed, and feeling a lot less anchored than he’d let on to the lieutenant. He had no evidence. Just a theory that got wider and more sprawling and ungainly and borderline insane as the days went on. He tried to focus on one thing—other than his driving—and settled on the moments in which he thought he met the man who lived in apartment 3A. Tallow tried to summon up every detail of his experience of the man. The color of his hair and beard. His scent. His body language. The way he took the cigarette from Tallow. The way he pinched off the filter and put the filter in his pocket.
“The bastard,” Tallow muttered to himself. It may have just been the act of a man who disliked a filter on his tobacco. But, Tallow thought, wouldn’t it have been nice to go back and pick that filter up, with a nice clean print on the treated paper that covered it.
Tallow swerved, mounted the sidewalk with one wheel, stamped on the brake, and very narrowly avoided causing a pile-up. He didn’t even hear the chorus of car horns Dopplering past him.
The man pulled off the filter. But he smoked the damn cigarette. He had to have left a butt. As careful as he might have been with the filter, he couldn’t have just pinched off the burning end and pocketed the cigarette butt too. Could he? No. He didn’t smell strongly. That would have stank, in his pocket, and Tallow didn’t make him as the kind of man who’d want you to smell him coming. He had to have crushed out the butt. Or tossed it and hoped it’d burn out.
It was a wild and stupid hope.
Tallow rejoined the traffic and pushed hard for Pearl Street.
He parked across the street from the tenement. He pulled gloves, a ziplock bag, and a tweezers from the glove compartment. He stood where he had stood when he met the man. He looked around, and thought, furiously. He’d walked away before the man had finished his smoke. He shifted his feet into the position he believed the man had occupied. Put his hand in his jacket pocket, to simulate keeping the filter. The tweezers acted as his cigarette. He pushed imaginary smoke up from the burning end, as the man had.
He pretended he was finishing the smoke. The cigarette was burning down toward his fingers. That day, Tallow had already crushed his out. Tallow looked in the gutter. There were three butts scattered there among a few dead leaves, a little crushed glass, a penny, and a small potato chip bag, each butt crumpled and twisted by multiple encounters with things much bigger than itself. They all had their filters on. Tallow crouched and looked. One of them was the brand he had been smoking.
Tallow looked around, scanning for places he might jam a cigarette butt into without burning his fingers.
No.
He crouched to the gutter again. Picked up the potato chip bag.
Tallow looked up at the sky, took a deep breath, and quelled the shaking in his fingers.
Over sickeningly slow seconds, disappointment like a snake in his gut waiting to bite through his heart, he untwisted and peeled open the bag. Someone had taken it out of the gutter, folded it, tied it into a knot, stamped on it to make it look more naturally smashed, and tossed it back on the road to be ignored, run over, and swept up.
There was a cigarette butt in the middle of the knot.
Tallow laughed.
He extracted the butt, dropped it into the ziplock, and sealed it. Tallow returned to the car with it and the potato chip bag, which he awkwardly inserted into another ziplock when he got inside.
All I want, Tallow said to him, is proof that you’re not invisible too.
Moving through the main lobby of One Police Plaza, Tallow, still in a mode of hyperfocused noticing, picked up bad air. People were looking at him for the first time since the case had begun bringing him to the place. Tallow picked up
his pace, laptop bag in hand, and walked to the farthest elevator he could find.
He moved through CSU in long strides. Bat was mantled over the bench in his and Scarly’s cave of crap and didn’t even look up as he began speaking.
“Bae Ga,” Bat said. “Twenty-four years old. Originally from Incheon, South Korea. Killed in the Kitchen eighteen months ago. Mathematician. The weapon used was a Daewoo DP-51. Which is a South Korean handgun.”
Tallow laid his bag on the bench with care. “A mathematician. Was he studying here?”
“He was working here. Some kind of financial job, for a company called Stratagilex. Mutual funds or something. I don’t have a good grasp on financial stuff.”
“Get me a name at that company. A boss. And a phone number. Where’s Scarly?”
“Behind you.”
“Jesus. Okay. I have something for you. Bat, you’re just sitting there.”
“It doesn’t fit the pattern, John. It’s a wild result. He faked a mugging on some Korean math whiz and shot him with a matched weapon, but the victim has nothing to do with anything else we’ve seen.”
“I don’t agree,” said Tallow, opening the bag. “Scarly, look at this.”
“What the hell have you got there?”
“I told you I thought I met our guy. I gave him a cigarette. He tore the filter off and put it in his pocket. He smoked the cigarette. He can’t have pocketed the butt, because it’d stink, and he’s careful about that. So he threw the butt into a potato chip bag being blown down the street, because who’s going to be crazy enough to come back and check all the litter for a single cigarette butt that’d eventually be blown far from the site anyway?”
Scarly gave him a hard stare. “Who’d be crazy enough to think we could get anything off a cigarette butt that was probably hot when he threw it into the bag and therefore melted plastic onto it?”
“Me. Look. He left a long butt. He had to, right? There was no filter. And he wasn’t enjoying it so much anyway.”