Gun Machine

and New Manhattans. Trees shuddered and budded streetlights. The mailbox on the other side of the street grew a partially muscled skeleton, the tin under it flexing like lungs to produce an awful whistling scream. The road rolled and cracked as precolonial island terrain tried to force itself up into the low dusk light. His breathing was deep and labored, like a wounded animal at bay. He struck his own head again, and again, squeezing his eyes shut so tightly that pain flared across his forehead and down both sides of his neck.

When the hunter opened his eyes, he was facing the car that the cop in the black suit had arrived in. Shaking, he staggered across the street to it, battling to keep it present in his vision. Not taking his eyes off it, he groped in his bag for a stub of pencil and a scrap of coffee-shop napkin. He commanded his hand to cease trembling, and, with exaggerated care bought with a rising headache and unsettling bleached flares in his eyesight, he wrote down the car’s license plate number, make, and model.

Fourteen

THE FETCH used to be the Blarney Stone. Or, at least, one of the Blarney Stones. At any given time there seemed to be at least four bars in the Five Boroughs called the Blarney Stone. This one, possibly the most greasily plastic Irish bar of them all, had been sold a couple of years ago. The new owners wanted to retain the PVC Irishness of the place—although, naturally, they had never gotten closer to setting foot on Irish soil than buying a bag of peat from a garden center in Brooklyn—but thought that the place might be one Blarney Stone too many.

So they called it the Fetch. Either because one of them had a genuine interest in folklore or because someone told them it was an Irish Thing, like shamrocks and beating your wife with a bit of tree. Tallow always suspected the latter, as the name was up on a flat sign over the front door and written in the windows in big goofy green letters, slick and cheap as processed ham.

Tallow knew that a fetch was the Irish version of a doppelganger, a supernatural copy of a living person whose manifestation usually meant imminent death for the original. What a great name, he believed, for a place that people lurched out of at night while seeing double.

He was lucky enough to get a spot across the road. He reached into the alluvial deposits in the back of his car and pulled up a tablet device, an e-reader, and a compact wi-fi router and put them into an old laptop bag whose crushed handles he had seen lolling limply from under the passenger seat. He also slipped the paperwork the lieutenant had given him earlier into the bag. Getting out of the car, he felt a clattering landslip of aches and pains tumble from his shoulders down to his knees. That and finding the evening was warm decided him on the awkward process of popping the belt fastener on his hip holster and wrestling it and the gun into the bag unseen.

Crossing the street, Tallow couldn’t help but peer into the narrow alley to the right of the Fetch. Local legend had it that, in wilder times, bar-fight victims would just be thrown down there like garbage sacks. It was said that the police wouldn’t even run them in because it was crueler for them to awaken in a pile in the morning, all soaked with one another’s beery urine.

There may have been new owners, but there wasn’t new money in the Fetch. Everything in the place seemed to creak—the door, the flooring, the cracked and scabby fake leather on the booth seats—as if all were installed in the husk of something old and tired and hunched.

Tallow went to the bar and did what he always did. Looked at all the taps and then ordered a pint of cream ale. Looked at the food menu, front and back and specials, and then ordered a cheeseburger and onion rings in beer batter. Tallow asked the bartender if he knew if there was a spare table outside in the smoking area, which there was, and asked for his food to be taken to him. The bartender’s bored assent was smothered by a yell from the guys in the back of the bar, where there was a big flat-screen TV that justified the old window lettering that called the place a sports bar. A cheer shot through with shouts of something like “Oshidashi!”

Tallow frowned, dimly recognizing the word. “Oshidashi?”

The bartender’s face broke open into a big yellow grin. “Sumo. It’s saving my life.”

“How?”

“Got the big-ass TV. Got the satellite feed. But those guys, there just ain’t enough football and baseball in the world to keep them docile. And soccer just don’t do it. There ain’t enough happens in soccer. It’s like watching twenty-two hair models kick a ball around for what seems like six months and then one of them falls over and the ball goes in the goal. And then I found this channel does big-ass edited-highlights sumo specials. So I say to the guys: You got these two big-ass guys, none of this kiddie wrestling shit, they look like two linebackers been locked in a Burger King for five years, they run at each other like two eighteen-wheelers in loincloths, they beat the shit out of each other, and the winner gets a plate of fucking money right there in the ring. Two days later, the guys are crack whores for sumo. I got big Irish guys yelling at the TV in Japanese and they’re not giving me shit anymore. Saving my life. Gimme like twenty minutes for your burger, okay?”

Tallow went through the bar and out into the smoking area, shaking his head. The smoking area was an old service yard that’d just been stuffed with tables and chairs, probably from a garden center in Brooklyn, and a couple of metal buckets for cigarette butts. He didn’t intend to stay out here all night, but a smoke before and after some food sounded good. It sounded better, in fact, than the idea of eating, but he knew from experience that if he didn’t force something in there now, he’d wake up feeling sick and empty.

It was warm. He took his jacket off, fished the cigarette pack and lighter out of it, chose a table at the far end of the yard, and folded the jacket over the chair before sitting down. His back was to the rear fence. He wanted to stay facing the entrance to the smoking area so he could keep an eye out for the CSUs.

The cream ale was the color of maple syrup topped with an inch’s fall of apple blossom. It tasted much as he’d expected it to. He lit a cigarette, and although he paused at how it already tasted much like cigarettes had when he was a heavy smoker, it still tasted much as he’d expected it to. He smiled slightly, briefly, and pushed curls of the smoke up toward the darkening sky. He began to relax, just a little bit.

Tallow looked for an ashtray, and found it: an old seven-inch record that had been melted to form a cup. The spindle hole looked like it’d been plugged with Silly Putty. Tallow frowned at it. Clamping the cigarette between his lips and squinting one eye against the smoke, he turned the ashtray around in his hands. He figured it’d only been suffering this abuse for a few weeks, but it was still no way to treat a record. He didn’t find the telltale gouge of a record yanked out of an old jukebox that could justify turning a piece of music into a bad flowerpot. Someone had just decided that, hell, it’s only a bit of vinyl.

He found a tissue in his left pants pocket, wadded it, moistened it with a little beer foam, and gently sponged away at the record label. Someone had stubbed out a cigarette hard in the middle of what some wiping revealed to be a butterfly motif. That and the exposed white C meant the label was Chrysalis. A fossil brand. Chrysalis Records had gone away long ago, a pretty little butterfly that got eaten by a business spider that got eaten by a corporate bird that got eaten by a big multinational cat. Tallow kept cleaning, determined to solve this one little mystery, exposing as much of the ravaged pale blue paper as he dared. He tossed his cigarette into the nearest metal pail. It was distracting him. He wanted to do this. It felt like archaeology to him. He immersed himself in it, making small passes with the tissue until he could see the type above the spindle hole.

Tallow could feel himself actually grinning. The record was “Heart of Glass” by Blondie. He hadn’t heard it in years. He remembered when he first heard it, as a kid, and had giggled because Debbie Harry said “pain in the ass.”

He remembered that, and a lyric about being lost in illusion, and nowhere to hide.

Tallow was pretty sure he didn’t have that album on CD and resolved to buy the MP3 when he got home, as tribute to the record’s sacrifice. He replaced the ashtray on the table. He knew he’d use the damn thing as an ashtray, and it was too late to save the record now, but it didn’t sit right with him. You just don’t do that to a record. Then again, he thought, chances are that no one in the vicinity of the record that day owned a device to play it on. Tallow himself didn’t know anyone apart from himself who possessed a turntable for home use.

That said, Tallow had to tell himself, he didn’t actually know that many people.

His food arrived. He looked at the label he’d unearthed, smiled, and took a bite of his burger. It tasted a bit better than he’d expected.

After the first few bites, he reached down into the laptop bag propped next to his chair, flicked on the wi-fi pod—he knew the machine well enough to do it by touch—and pulled out the tablet device. He tapped the search