Gun Machine

stealth. If he was very careful, if he ensured that he would not be caught in the large open spaces of the building…

The hunter husbanded his smoke before casting it skyward, watching the foot traffic thin out and reading the seconds off his pulse. In his peripheral vision, ancient branches gathered.

Thirteen

IT TOOK a conscious effort for Tallow to keep his hand off his gun as he walked up the apartment building’s stairs. There was no threat here. He told himself that with every step. But every step held memory.

He got to the landing where Jim Rosato and Bobby Tagg had died, and it was there, standing in the space that for him still reverberated with blood and black powder, that Tallow realized his brain hadn’t been working properly all day.

He’d killed a man. He should have been taken off the street no matter what. He should be on paid leave, whatever the caseload was. His sidearm should have been taken from him. He should be talking to counselors. He should be talking to the Internal Affairs Bureau, and probably someone from the DA’s office. No one was going to rule it a bad shooting, and the fact that it was the shooting of a cop killer doubtless made some of the usual complications go away or get “lost” in paperwork. He’d heard of some guys who’d had to wait years for their shootings to be ruled on. In Tallow’s case, he could be fairly sure of a good ruling within a couple of days of the process starting. But regardless of all that, he shouldn’t have been out on the street.

Unless he was being placed in the way of something. Unless he was actually being used to write off this case.

Tallow leaned against the wall, next to the patch where Jim Rosato’s brains hadn’t quite been scrubbed clean from the plaster, and almost laughed.

The lieutenant was hedging her bets. She’d ordered him to solve the case Or Else. But in her back pocket was The only warm body I had to cover the case was a useless detective whose partner had just gotten killed and in any event he had untreated trauma from the shooting. Or even We couldn’t have made the case anyway; Tallow was on administrative leave and shouldn’t have been working it.

Every variation he came up with had the indelible mark of “John Tallow’s all done.”

He wondered when he’d disappointed her so badly that she felt it so easy to hang apartment 3A around his neck and drop it and him both into the Hudson and out of sight. At least out of sight until next year, a nice clean calendar without a couple of hundred unsolved homicides on it.

Tallow had been clanking and buzzing up and down Manhattan all day like a good little police robot and not thinking. He wondered if maybe he did have some real trauma that he wasn’t admitting to himself or not even perceiving.

“I’m an idiot,” he said to himself.

He didn’t hear anyone express a need to argue the point with him.

Tallow stepped forward on to the landing and stood over the place where Bobby Tagg had fallen. Tallow hadn’t even known his name until Carman the landlord told him. Tallow didn’t know a thing about him other than one day his world fell apart and he figured the only way he could force life to make sense again was to walk out into the hallway naked with a shotgun and scream. It doesn’t always take much to make that happen. This time, just a letter shoved under the door.

Tallow’s vision got blurry. He was foggily aware of his jaws clenching, and of an empty feeling in his chest.

He turned his attention to the hole in the wall of 3A, now enlarged to a door-size entrance next to the actual door. It seemed that that door’s elaborate locking mechanism was still giving people trouble. There had been a half-assed attempt to affix police tape across the hole. He crouched down by it so that two of the yellow strips created a frame for him to study the main room through. First, though, he closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. He was there to refresh his sense-memories before the apartment was thoroughly deconstructed. Tallow, accepting in this still moment that he was a killer, wanted to close his eyes and breathe the air of a killer’s temple.

The hunter carefully tore off one end of a paper sugar packet, lifted from the condiment tray of a coffee shop that unwisely left such things outside. He tipped the packet into his mouth and sucked the crystals down.

The hunter slipped the empty paper sleeve back into his pocket and waited. Waited for the sugar to start fires in his muscles. Waited for the street to get just a little quieter.

Tallow, hunkered down, just breathed and listened. Trying to recapture the scents he experienced when he first entered the room. Dissipated now, flattened or scattered by ECTs and airflow, but still there in trace enough to reactivate sense memory.

He just wished he could identify them all. He knew, or at least made an educated guess, that there had been herbs in the room. Tallow was a city boy. He didn’t learn until his early teens that herbs did not actually originate in bottles through the power of Science. He thought maybe he recognized sage. Grass. Something that reminded him dimly of root beer. Something else, almost identifiable, its nature dancing just outside of his sight, like an animal slipping behind trees in the forest.

Tobacco, maybe?

The hunter shifted his bag so it rested on his right hip and pushed his right hand into it. He found the grip of his knife easily. The hunter pressed his thumb to the lip of the sheath it lay in. When the time came, he could lift the knife out smoothly with his right hand, already pushing the sheath back. His left hand would grab the sheath and pull as the blade passed upward and free. A disabling strike up the face should his prey be turning to him. The presage to a downward strike under the base of the skull if not. The modern man in him was calculating the blow already. Putting the blade between the C2 and C3 vertebrae would see its tip emerge from between the prey’s teeth. The shock alone could sometimes make a clean kill of the strike. If the prey turned toward him, then the upward slash would make him clutch at his face, creating the space and time for a hard punch between two ribs, driving up through intercostal muscles toward the opposite shoulder and into the heart.

He did not prefer the knife. But perhaps his prey deserved only an animal’s death.

He could gather some of his more prized tools. Hamper the swift theft of more. Create new opportunities to return and rescue other pieces. Buy time for Machen to do whatever he could.

The sugar was working. The street was as quiet as it was likely to get. The hunter started across the road, holding his knife inside the bag.

Tobacco. Or almost tobacco; somewhat related to, if not direct blood of, cigarette tobacco. Tallow almost smiled. Maybe the crazy street guy was right about the additives.

He opened his eyes and studied the main room as best he could in the early-evening light. The suspect had never lived here. That much was obvious. The church analogy that first struck him held firm on a second visit. This was a place, Tallow knew, that the killer came to. A place of worship. It occurred to him now that some of the other scents could easily be old incense. He breathed again, and this time he identified something that might be cedar, or juniper.

The killer never lived here. But Tallow was more certain now that the solution to the entire problem was here in this apartment. That the solution was the apartment.

The hunter reached the other side of the street. He looked both ways again, for pedestrians. There was no one to see him enter the building besides a few drivers, and none of them would pay enough attention to be of use to anyone. The cars didn’t matter. He could barely see them anyway. They flickered in his vision like deer in the deep forest. He let the cars fade away entirely, until the sounds of them became nothing but hooves, birdsong, and heavy weather overhead. The hunter took a breath, held it, and then gently, gently opened the door as if it were the weighted leather flap on the front of a lodge, and purification and the future awaited him within.

Tallow decided that, for all his robotic fulfillment of the basic checklist today, he’d mostly done the right things. If the CSUs did the blow-ups and the matching he’d asked for, then tomorrow he could begin thinking properly about this whole thing.

He had, however, forgotten to call the lieutenant. Given her mood at the start of the day, Tallow figured that not checking in would probably not be the wisest decision he could make. Tallow put hard fencing around his thoughts and made them snake into a serpentine line of some order. He needed to arrange the day’s actions in