by Warren Ellis
There was silence, and the stink of their fear.
“You never knew me at all, did you? You never understood a thing. Too focused on your own gain.”
Westover opened his jacket.
The hunter’s hand went into his bag, finding the grips of the gun he took from Kutkha.
Westover noted the movement, inclined his head slightly, and slowed his movements down. He withdrew an envelope from the inside pocket of the jacket and extended it to the hunter. “I presume you can drive,” Westover said.
“When I have to,” said the hunter, stepping back into the shadows to disguise any possible outward sign of the revulsion the thought caused him. He felt the envelope; there was something plastic in there, along with the rustle of folded paper.
Westover lowered his voice. “The envelope contains the details you would need to recover at least some of your weapons. The names therein are…expendable.”
Turkel turned away.
“Well,” said the hunter. “I have a busy night ahead. So I’ll leave you gentlemen to the remainders of your evenings. I want to see you here tomorrow night. Just one of you will do. Choose among yourselves. Decide how we’re going to move forward. We’re all still young, and there’s much yet to achieve here on this great island. Don’t you think?”
Turkel was already walking away, his back to the hunter. Machen and Westover followed him. The hunter watched them go, moving position once a minute for five minutes until he was certain they’d all separated and were taking properly divergent routes. He then found a light source that was lonely enough for him to safely open the envelope and study its contents.
The hunter was not happy about traveling in a motor vehicle, but on this night, the speed of travel in a modern conveyance would undoubtedly be useful. He simply had to decide where Detective John Tallow fell on his to-do list tonight.
Thirty-One
“HELP ME,” Emily Westover said.
“What is it?” said Tallow, rising from the table, putting out a palm against the questioning looks he was getting.
“Jason’s downstairs. Said he had to talk to one of the employees. He said he’s going out tonight but he’s not walking the dog.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“He goes out at ten forty-five every night with the dog, walks her around Central Park a bit. Every night. Tonight he says he’s got to go out at ten forty-five but he can’t take the dog.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about, Mrs. Westover.”
“He’s been taking calls from his two friends. I know what this is about.”
“Which friends?”
“I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Mrs. Westover, with all respect, you shouldn’t be on the phone to me either. Now, you just asked for my help. I can’t help you without knowing everything that’s going on.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, you should.” She laughed. Giggled, in fact. The sound made Tallow go cold, for some reason. “I am crazy. But not so crazy that I don’t know I’m crazy, and I think that’s an important distinction. Andy Machen and that creepy bastard Al Turkel. He’s been talking to them. Something serious is happening tonight. Jason told me that I know what it’s about. Which means it’s about what, what, what he did to get where he is. What they did. Do you understand?”
Tallow had walked into the other room. He caught his reflection in a small mirror on the wall and judged himself before speaking.
“Mrs. Westover, what are you afraid of at Werpoes?”
“Him. He lives there.”
“Werpoes is buried and built on, and no one’s hiding in that square.”
“Jason told me to stay away from there.”
Given that the cache on Pearl Street had seemed to catch everyone by surprise, did it make sense for them to believe that CTS lived elsewhere? No. They paid for the Pearl Street apartment, and Westover himself was at least an accessory to providing a security door for the place. But then, CTS could not possibly have lived at the Pearl Street address, and he was unlikely to be sleeping outdoors all the time.
Tallow had missed something. His man CTS had to have more than one hideout. Possibly even several. Had anything gone wrong over the past two decades of his work, he would have needed other places to shelter. Perhaps places that his employers didn’t know about. This would make sense if he expected that one day, one of them would get caught, or get sloppy. Or, perhaps, get an attack of guilt and talk to his wife.
“Mr. Westover told you to stay away from there because he lived in the area.”
“He lives there. Jason doesn’t know exactly where, but…Werpoes. He’s there.”
“Tell me how I can help you, Mrs. Westover.”
“Save Jason. Please.”
Tallow’s words dried up in his throat.
“Please. You saved me. Save Jason. This is all too much for him. Save him. He’s raised this thing, this awful fucking manitou from the dirt of Old Manhattan, and it’s going to kill him. Please, John.”
Tallow’s mind was surging down parallel tracks. He looked for a notepad and pen. The apartment didn’t have a landline phone, so there was no table with scratch paper.
“I’m not sure how to do that, Mrs. Westover.”
He ducked into the kitchen and furiously mimed writing. Talia pulled open a kitchen drawer and produced a notebook and pencil.
“I don’t know. Talk to him. Promise him safety. Reason with him. Something. He wants out, I can see it in him.”
Talia put the pad and pencil on the kitchen table. Tallow wrote as clearly and swiftly as he could, and spun the pad to face Bat and Scarly. They nodded, visibly shifting into professional mode. Bat pulled out a smartphone, thumbed it to mute, and began typing as Scarly quietly got up and left the room.
“I can get there tonight,” Tallow said, “but not right now. Just sit tight. I promise I’ll be there. Don’t say anything to him. It would be best if he had no warning. Okay?”
“You’ll save him.”
“I promise you that I’ll do everything in my power to save him.”
“Thank you,” she said, grinding out the words, audibly wrestling with a sudden appalling need to burst into tears.
Tallow killed the call.
Scarly was already at a laptop in the other room.
“That was the wife of one of the people we believe to have hired our killer,” said Tallow to Talia, loud enough for everyone to hear him clearly. “She wants me to induce her husband to confess his involvement and save himself from the fallout. She also believes that Westover, Machen, and Turkel are meeting the killer tonight, in Central Park.”
“Great,” said Talia. “Send in the cavalry. Surround them and catch them in the act.”
“Even if we knew which part of Central Park, which is a big-ass place and lousy to operate in at night, and even if we could summon the manpower, which is doubtful—my captain doesn’t have the juice, my lieutenant doesn’t believe me, and I don’t have any friends—I don’t think that’d work.”
Tallow explained to them why he thought Emily Westover had been told to stay away from Werpoes.
“Christ,” said Talia, finally. “So what do you do?”
Tallow sat down with a heavy sigh, and waited a full thirty seconds before responding.
“I am kind of disturbed to report that I haven’t felt this good in years, and that I know exactly what we’re going to do. I just don’t know if it’s going to work. And I don’t know if I haven’t gone crazy too. The worst kind of crazy, where I don’t know I’m crazy. I hear it’s an important distinction.”
“You’re crazy,” said Bat, not looking up from his phone.
“Thanks, Bat.”
“Do we have to leave soon?” said Bat. “Because I’m going to need to use the bathroom, because death bag.”
“No,” said Tallow. “I want to get all this sorted out first. You need to find what I’m l
ooking for, and you also need to get some gear out of the trunk of Scarly’s car. That’s where I’m guessing you keep it.”
“He keeps all his shit in the back of my car,” said Scarly from the other room. “There’s a pair of his underpants fused to my spare tire.”
“Good. Also, check your weapons.”
This time, Bat looked up at him. Tallow ignored the look. He was running through every eventuality he could conjure up for the next few hours of the future. The one thing he wasn’t planning for, he told himself with a small icy smile, was tomorrow morning.
Thirty-Two
THERE WAS a Spearpoint guard behind the wheel of the car. It was exactly where the note from Westover had told the hunter he would find it, not fifteen minutes’ walk from the Ramble. The hunter spent an additional five minutes surveilling the car from four different positions before satisfying himself it was safe and approaching it.
The hunter walked past the car one last time, and tapped on the driver’s window. The driver tried to pretend he had been ready for it. The car unlocked, and the hunter got into the rear passenger seat.
“Do you know where we’re going?” said the hunter. He disliked the eager, excited gleam he could seein the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Yes, sir. Downtown storage facility B.”
“Then start driving.”
“Yes, sir.” The driver grinned into the mirror.
“You weren’t told not to look at me,” the hunter stated.
“Oh. Yes, sir, I was. Sorry. This is all new to me.”
“You don’t normally drive?”
The car pulled away. The driver kept talking. “I, uh, I think I just got promoted? I usually work security at the Aer Keep. But I sent off a cop today, and I think I got noticed. So Mr. Westover told me, just tonight, that I have new duties and they’re very important.”
The driver was flushed with pride, and his eyes glittered with a new feeling of power and ascendancy. The hunter was displeased.
“Just drive,” the hunter said, leaning forward and putting his face in his hands. The feeling of motion in a car was just a little too alien for him right now.
“Are you all right?” the driver asked.
“I am trying not to look out the windows,” said the hunter. “And in general I would prefer not to be seen. Just drive.”
“Yes, sir. Mustn’t argue with a very important person like you. Must be up to all kinds of important business, to be given a personal driver at this time of night. Well, I’m up for that. You tell Mr. Westover, this is the kind of work I can do just right…”
The drive took too long. The hunter wasn’t able to closely follow the passage of time, but given the steady stream of noise from the driver, it was definitely too long. The ride was making him sick, and, even if he’d been in a more tolerant mood, he was unused enough to being trapped with human noise that the constant talking was driving him to blind rage.
Finally, they stopped in a quiet street. The hunter looked around and saw the broad shutter of the storage facility—essentially a place where a few vans could be offloaded and parked overnight.
“This is the place, sir,” said the driver.
The hunter reached around and punched the driver in the neck with savage force three times, to make him die in a sudden flash of shredding agony.
The hunter waited until he stopped spasming, and then got out of the car and opened the driver’s door to check the body for a gun, holding his breath against the stink of urine and excrement leaking into its pants. The weapon was a heavy, overly styled Beretta. From his library reading, conducted religiously on those days where he could face touching a computer, the hunter guessed it to be a Neos semiautomatic. He cycled it as quickly and quietly as he could: one in the pipe and nine left in the magazine. He’d have to be careful with it. It was the kind of gun that used the hot gases from a bullet’s firing to cycle the gun and load a new bullet. The slide would kick back by a couple of inches of its own accord. He pocketed the stupid gun and closed the door.
The shutter on the storage facility was locked down. There was a pedestrian entrance next to it, in a recess. Inside the alcove was a card-reader lock. The hunter was having serious problems controlling his stomach. There was a security camera over the door. As Westover’s notes had said, its telltale red light was off. Within the envelope was the plastic card the reader wanted. He took a breath and held it, willed his fingers to obey him, and slid the card through the reader’s black lips. The door popped open with a sigh.
Inside, there was gray concrete, a single truck in Spearpoint livery, metal steps leading to office space upstairs, and two voices.
“Sophie,” said a man’s voice, “we have people to do paperwork. I just wanna go home. I missed a workout, I missed fucking dinner, I just wanna go home and sleep.”
The hunter approached along the side of the truck. The voices were coming from behind it.
“For Christ’s sake, Mike. It’ll take two minutes. If I don’t do it now, then it’s going to take ten minutes first thing tomorrow when some desk drone decides he—and it’s always a he, Mike—wants to justify his little job. Where are the keys?”
“In the ignition.”
“For Christ’s sake, Mike. You really are a giant asshole-muscle.”
Sophie walked around the rear of the truck toward the driver’s side door and right into the hunter. She gasped, mouth open wide, drawing in enough air for a shout or a strike. The hunter drove his knife through her hard palate and up into her brain and twisted. She died right there, and the only sound she made was the splashing of all the blood in her head falling out of her mouth and onto the concrete floor.
Mike looked around from the rear, smiling. The hunter skewered his eye, thrust deep into his head, put both hands to the grip of the knife, and lifted. Mike hung from the blade, a couple of inches off the ground, dying for a stubborn fifteen seconds. The hunter shucked his skull like an oyster and shook him off the blade. The body collapsed to the floor. A slice of wet gray brain oozed out of his destroyed eye.
The rear of the van hadn’t been closed. It was two-thirds filled with plastic crates. The crates were filled with guns. His guns.
The hunter was still for long moments, entranced by their destroyed beauty. All their true meaning smashed away by idiots who demeaned them, tossing them into ugly boxes like so many farming implements.
But they still had beauty. They could have meaning again. Even this raw amputated chunk of his machine would still have use.
In the envelope was the plastic lump he felt earlier. He took the key out and used it to unlock the shutter, which clattered up into the ceiling. The hunter closed the rear door of the truck and got behind the wheel. This was horrible to him, but it was necessary for the task. This was, as far as the hunter was concerned, now a rescue. He touched the ignition key, still in the small mouth of the car’s workings, with an experimental brush. It buzzed under his fingertips with insect horror. The hunter clenched that fist, and then grasped the key and turned with determined commitment. The truck awoke, a vile, coughing parody of animal life. He summoned his memory of how it worked and gingerly operated the thing, edging it out of the garage and onto the street. There was a sour pleasure at having correctly recalled how to drive, something he hadn’t done in years, if not decades. He parked ten feet down the street, stepped out quickly, pulled the shutter back down, and locked it.
The hunter drove his machine to John Tallow’s house, the black branches of the Mannahatta forest clawing with hate at its glass and tin the whole way.
No car journey in New York City was short, even at this time of night—What was the time? he thought, for he couldn’t see stars, and the dashboard held no clock—but he felt like he’d crossed the awful mathematics of Lower Manhattan in a reasonable period. He found parking on the street within sight of Tallow’s apartment building, and consulted the envelope one more time. Someone—he assumed Westover—had been busy. A rough plan of Tall
ow’s apartment’s floor had been sketched out, with indications for placement and exits. The hunter stuck his head out the window and, with just a few seconds’ difficulty, located north. Applying it to the sketch, he found he should be able to see Tallow’s apartment’s window.
Just as he discovered the correct window, the light inside Tallow’s apartment went off.
The hunter got out of the truck, locked it up, and strolled across the street. He had time, intelligence, and the correct tool for the job in his bag.
As he approached the front of the property, he realized the main entrance was locked. But before he could reach it, a reasonably drunken couple in their twenties arrived and, laughing at their inability to make their fingers hold the key properly, took a useful minute to open the door.
The hunter stepped in behind them, the key to the truck in his hand, the metal protruding, his head down and weaving. “Thanks. Saved me the trouble of having to try that myself.” The couple laughed, too wrapped up in each other to even look at his face as they headed for the elevator. The hunter angled away quickly, went through a fire door to the stairwell.
At Tallow’s floor, he waited behind the fire door that opened onto the corridor for a minute or two. The fire door was propped open by his foot, creating a gap through which he could listen. He was hunting for the sounds of someone preparing to leave his apartment, trying to filter footfall and conversation from out of television noise and what he guessed to be some kind of video game. The same sounds that would make him so ill when he spent too long at the Pearl Street building. Only when he’d covered enough surfaces in gunmetal did the noise grow deadened.
This was the time.
The hunter found Tallow’s apartment. He had two options at this point: silent entry and bringing Tallow to the door. Silent entry was always preferred but sometimes defeated by security measures.
The hunter took the card that opened the Spearpoint garage, flexed it, rubbed a little spittle on its short edge with his thumb, and slipped it into the space between the door and its frame. He worked it, gently and patiently and silently, until he felt the latch start to lift. With slow and precise applications of force, the hunter eased the latch behind the strike plate, maintained as much pressure upon it as he dared, and moved the door open. There were no chains and no dead bolts. John Tallow was evidently a very comfortable and unworried man.