Gun Machine

the few genuine eccentrics the local crime scene had produced in recent times, and while no one would be caught saying he actually liked him, he was certainly appreciated by most of those who dealt with him. Therefore, there was a little flurry of jokes tossed around as to how his place of business had caught fire.

A few minutes later, there were reports of bodies at the site. A lot of bodies. The jokes turned to ash and blew down the radio waves and away. Smoke signals.

Twenty-Eight

THE HUNTER had time to kill.

He was experiencing a thing that he’d come to think of as the exhaustion of revulsion. The overwhelming, existential disgust that the modern world caused to roil and pustulate and burst inside him simply wearied him over extended periods. Being constantly, on some level, physically repelled and sickened by the alien world he had to interact with just drained him. He felt septic, and tired, and somehow old.

The exhaustion frightened him. It made him weak, mentally. He slipped deep into Mannahatta as he walked, so deep that he began to lose the ability to perceive modern light sources. Night gathered quickly, and traffic became the running of amber-eyed wolves. The hunter moved between the trees as best he could, holding his palms in his armpits to occlude the scent of fear in his sweat. No man was at one with the wolves. Wolves ate even mighty hunters, for there was no honor or code among predators, and everyone’s guts steam the same way when torn open on a cold night.

A car ripped out from the forest and almost gored the hunter on its chrome.

The hunter spun and clung to a red maple as the car sped past him and dissociated into a pack of silvered wolves racing away into the dark trees.

The hunter squeezed his eyes shut, and then slowly opened them in an experimental manner. He was rewarded with a blurry view that was perhaps 80 percent modern Manhattan, and with a pulsing headache. He could live with that: the pain would sharpen him for a time, before its persistence began to dull him further. Maybe it’d fade before then.

Food would help. He didn’t dare risk Manhattan food. He had once, in a desperate circumstance, scavenged a half-eaten burger left in a brown bag atop a trash can. The meat was loaded with enough salt that he could feel his kidneys spasm as he chewed, and it had the signature flavor of having been cut from an animal whose own droppings had been a considerable part of its diet. The bun that wrapped it was, he supposed, some alien cousin to corn bread, except he could taste ammonia and chalk in it. Half an hour later, he threw up everything that had been in his stomach, painfully and protractedly. He threw up in colors he’d never seen himself produce before, and he was fairly sure, twenty minutes into the vomiting, that he saw the blackened stub of a baby tooth he’d swallowed when he was six. He’d lived off the fruits of this island of many hills for too long and just couldn’t metabolize the machine-processed muck the new people survived on.

Now the hunter rummaged through his pockets and his bag and came up with half a handful of cracked black walnuts and six hackberries wrapped in a scrap of newspaper, all foraged from Central Park. He began walking again, eating as he went, chewing each bite thoroughly and methodically before letting himself swallow it down, alternating the rich, smokily vinous walnut pieces with the candied bursts of the hackberries. The morsels would give him the strength to get to Central Park and gather more food to get through the rest of this night.

He was abstractedly aware that he was crying as he walked but chose not to consciously acknowledge it. It was a thing off in the distance of his mind, in his peripheral vision, that he could decide not to focus on. Present, but not immediate: the sound of his own voice screaming in heartbreak that he was insane, hopelessly insane, and should find help, or jump in front of a car, because he was living like a demented animal and how did this happen to him and why is everything wrong and why are the streetlights smoking and why are the telephone poles breathing and please and please and please—

At a street crossing, the hunter noticed the modern people looking at him strangely. He ignored them. From the rattled expressions on their faces, anyone would think he’d been walking around crying and shouting. And that, he said to himself, is not what a hunter does.

He glided across the street to the fenced perimeter of Central Park and slipped between its bones like a knife.

Twenty-Nine

IT TURNED out that Scarly and Talia lived in the indeterminate urban foam around Park Slope: close enough to the district to reduce the cultural stress of two women living together, far enough from its declared boundary to make an apartment affordable. There was, to Tallow’s amazement, both a public parking lot opposite their building and empty parking spaces in front of the building. As a Manhattanite used to at least a five-minute walk from parked car to apartment building, Tallow felt a little cheated, as if Heaven had been just across the bridge the whole time and no one had told him.

He parked behind Scarly and Bat in front of the apartment building, a wide red-brick home a scant four floors high.

Scarly and Talia made their home on the fourth floor, and Talia was waiting at the open apartment door for them. She was as tall as Tallow, and in infinitely better condition. She had an almost surreal copper-wire mane tied with rubber bands that made the back of her head look like a telephone cable trunk. She wore a gray wife-beater that showed off heavy, finely worked musculature, and black tactical pants that completed a picture of an off-duty SWAT officer. Her bare feet, as she stood on the rug by the front door, were callused to the extent that Tallow would guess her main training was in kickboxing. She wore no makeup; her skin was pale to the point of translucence; and she greeted Scarly’s hug and kiss with guarded affection, one eye on Tallow the whole time.

“Thanks for this,” Scarly said.

“No problem. Welcome home.”

Bat came up, and Talia endured a peck on the cheek and a “Hey, Tallie.” She smacked the back of his head, not completely fondly, sending him scuttling indoors.

Tallow stuck his hand out, making direct eye contact.

Talia pursed her lips, tested his gaze, and then shook his hand with brisk force. He matched it, and said, “I’m John.”

There was the twitch of a smile at one corner of her lips, and she nodded as if to say You’ll do. Tallow had put a little thought into creating his first impression on her, and although, looking into her eyes now, he doubted that Talia was unintelligent enough to completely fall for it, he was content that she seemed to acknowledge the effort.

“Talia,” she said. “C’mon in, John.”

The apartment stood in stark contrast to the troll cave Scarly worked in. There was nothing in the apartment that was not beautiful, or useful, or both. Spare and spacious, but warm, a carefully and tastefully curated space rather than a chill minimalist plain. There was a sweet, rich cooking aroma in the air.

Ahead of them, walking to the kitchen, Scarly dropped her coat on the floor by a sofa.

“Scarlatta,” Talia snapped.

Scarly froze, backtracked, picked up the coat, folded it, and laid it on the sofa.

“I’ll let you get away with putting it there instead of in the closet because we have guests. You’re not at work now.”

“Well,” said Scarly in a small voice, “I sorta am.”

Talia turned and raised an eyebrow at Tallow.

“If I’m not welcome,” said Tallow, “then, seriously, I’m okay with leaving. I felt like I was imposing anyway. It’s fine, really.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Talia. “What I want to know is where you get these magic powers that make Scarlatta happy, or at least compliant, about working one second more than her scheduled hours.”

Talia stepped over, put one palm on Tallow’s back, and began to propel him through the apartment. “I want you to sit at my table, John, and teach me of this magic, because I may be able to use it to make my wife pick up after herself and—who knows?—maybe even wash things. Although that might be testing even your wizardly abilities. And then after that, perhaps you might explain to me a little bit about this case that is causing me to feed