Gun Machine

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 Tallow’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.

The hunter drew the Colt Official Police from his bag. The grips met his hand with a warm and ineffable feeling of rightness. Everything was perfect.

Thirty-Three

JASON WESTOVER opened the door to his apartment to discover he had visitors. Tallow watched Westover recognize him. Tallow watched Westover recognize the Glock aimed at him.

“Good evening, Mr. Westover. If you wouldn’t mind carefully taking off your gun and your other weapons and laying them on the floor in front of you, I’d be obliged.”

Tallow watched Westover’s eyes flicker across to Emily, sitting down and getting over another crying jag, with Scarly standing over her, and Bat standing behind that sofa with his hand on the butt of his sidearm.

“There’s no angle to play, Mr. Westover. Please do as I ask.”

Westover met Tallow’s eyes. Westover was a man who wore his pride like a shell. Pride in his own discipline, tough-mindedness, and practicality. All of that was in his gaze.

Tallow just looked at him.

Westover paled, and slowly took out a gun and a knife and laid them on the polished walnut flooring.

“That’s good,” said Tallow. “Now, why don’t you sit on the sofa with your wife and tell me where you’ve been tonight?”

“I’d rather stand,” said Westover with quiet venom.

“Fine. Tell me where you’ve been tonight.”

“Why don’t you go home, Detective Tallow?” said Westover with a thin smile.

“Do I appear tired to you?” said Tallow, centering the Glock’s aim on Westover’s heart. “Let me help you get started. You met Andrew Machen, and Al Turkel, and a certain other man whom Al Turkel discovered and presented to you some twenty years ago.”

Westover’s smiled broadened into something supercilious and infantile. He planted his feet and put his hands behind his back like a soldier standing at ease.

“Hands in front, please,” said Tallow. “Don’t test me, Mr. Westover. Nobody who’s tested me this week has come off well. Including Assistant Chief Turkel.”

Westover raised an eyebrow.

“Oh,” said Tallow. “He didn’t tell you? He tried to close this investigation. He wasn’t banking on the fact that this investigation has become the only thing in life I’m really interested in. So I arranged for the first deputy commissioner to take him out behind the barn for a bit. Al Turkel’s career is stopped dead. I’ve hung too much of this case around his neck. He might survive, but he’s completely compromised. Tomorrow, he’s going to be sat down in a small room and talked to by some very clever and fairly violent people. He mentioned none of this, right?”

Westover was motionless. Processing.

“I’m here tonight, sir, because your wife called me. She called me and begged me to save you.”

“It’s true,” Emily Westover rasped, throat worn ragged by the crying.

“You can’t save me,” said Westover to Tallow. “You can’t even save yourself. You certainly can’t save me.”

“Of course I can,” Tallow said. “You haven’t been listening. The NYPD have a rogue cop running an entire district. He’s had other police killed. You were just starting your security firm when all this began. You had some of the money and materials Turkel needed to make his scheme work, but you couldn’t possibly defend yourself against such a man.”

Westover’s eyes narrowed.

“Turkel’s got a fat neck,” said Tallow. “Plenty of space left to hang stuff around it. I certainly have no problem with telling people you were forced into the whole thing.”

“Why?”

“She asked me to save you. Look at her. She’s been one of the walking wounded ever since you decided to hurt her by telling her what your little life was built on. She’s smarter than you. She has more imagination than you. So she feels fear and guilt more acutely than you. And I think you knew that. You knew it and you did it to her anyway. And she still begged me to save you. Do you get what that says about you? Even a little bit?”

Jason Westover could not make himself look away from Emily Westover. Emily Westover could look only at Jason Westover.

Westover whispered, “What do you want?”

Tallow lifted his phone out of his breast pocket and looked at the clock on the lock screen. “We’re running out of time.” He used the killer’s real name and said, “Where is he now?”

Westover looked down, turned away. “On his way downtown, by car.”

So that’s how it is, thought Tallow, and said, “Driving, or being driven?”

“Driving. I loaned him a vehicle.”

“What’s downtown for him?”

“I don’t know. He said he had a place to hide. Wouldn’t tell us where it was.”

“Nowhere near Collect Pond Park?”