Gun Machine (18 page)

Turkel stood, adding, “The pursuit of this entire case is somewhat quixotic, in any event.”

That escaped nobody.

Tallow decided to trip a trap and see what fell.

“By the way, Lieutenant,” Tallow said mildly, “we got another ballistics match. Our man killed Assistant Chief Tenn’s daughter.”

The current assistant chief stopped moving.

The captain blinked slowly, like a lizard taking in the sun, and opened yellowish eyes on Tallow. “Del Tenn’s kid?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“That was a stray bullet from a gang firefight.”

“No, sir,” Tallow said, speaking to the captain but daring to look directly at the assistant chief. “We have the gun in the Pearl Street cache. Our man simply waited for the most opportune time to make the hit. Gunfire, chaos. He hid his kill amid all the others. Just like every other kill he’s made.”

“Damn,” the captain mused, sagging into himself in the chair. “You know what I liked about Del Tenn? He said to me once, ‘Everyone tells me I can keep getting promoted and keep getting promoted till finally I’m not doing a job at all. I guard the south of Manhattan, where I was born and where my father was born. Why would I want another job?’”

“I didn’t know him,” said the lieutenant.

“Lovely guy,” said the captain. “Went to pieces when his little girl was lost. At the funeral he said to me that it was like Manhattan had betrayed him. Never saw him again.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief. “Well.”

Tallow gave him an amiable smile without letting him off the cold hook of his gaze. “Quixotic, sir, yes. But as you can see, we’re putting together a picture of our man. The way he works.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief. “Well.”

“The sort of people he deals with.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief.

“Did you know Assistant Chief Tenn, sir?”

“No, Detective. Well. Not well. Marcus Casson took over from Tenn, and I took over from Casson.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said the captain quietly, as if speaking from a distant cave. “Casson moved on to Transit as a bureau chief. After Beverly Garza died.”

The threads of the net,
thought Tallow,
are so fine as to be invisible, until the light catches them.

“How did she die, Captain?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” the assistant chief said. Tallow was still standing in front of the door.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” he repeated, “I have to get back to my office.”

“Oh,” said Tallow. “Yes, sir. You have to get back to work.” He took a step to the side and opened the door for Turkel. “Thank you for coming over and explaining things to us. Very kind of you. I think we all know where we stand now.”

Assistant Chief Turkel gave Tallow a hard look. Tallow saw a man without empathy. He’d heard of it, could fake it when he needed to, but felt nothing for anything himself. He looked at Tallow as if Tallow were a dead animal on the side of the road.

“You’re working this case on your own, yes?”

“Yes,” said Tallow.

“Shouldn’t you be mandatorily off the street?”

“I was told we didn’t really have the resources for that, sir. The whole system’s out of whack, after all. So I was put where I’ll do the most good.”

“Perhaps,” the assistant chief said, and left. Tallow closed the door.

“John Tallow,” said the captain, “I did not know that you were a smart man.”

“Jury’s out on that,” said the lieutenant.

The captain laughed a whispery laugh, standing with difficulty. “You know,” he said, “if you’d been a smart man all this time, I would have heard about you. But I’ll tell you a thing. When I was a detective, I was partnered with a smart lady. Very smart. So smart that she got promoted, up the chain and away from me. My next partner, God love him, he was so stupid that the squad room had to make up new words to describe him. It was like I didn’t have a partner at all. And it was at that point, John Tallow, that I finally began to learn how to be police. You were probably a smart boy when you were assigned here. But I have a feeling that only just now did you start becoming a smart man.”

The captain moved to the door, with some visible pain. Tallow opened it for him. The captain looked at him levelly.

“I can’t cover your ass, John. I will leave this room and go back to approving the requisition of paper clips or some damned thing. Being the captain of the 1st doesn’t even make me the most important office-supplies manager in the area. That’ll be some Master of the Universe down on Wall Street. I’ve got no juice with anyone and a bunch of senior staff just waiting for me to cardiac out on the crapper one morning. I can see where you’re taking this. All I’m going to say to you is, you better damn well
have
it.”

Tallow said, “Captain, how did Beverly Garza die?”

The captain smiled, very thinly. “She was run down. Hell of a thing for the chief of Transit, right? But I’ll tell you something. The pathologist swore up and down that he’d found gunshot residue on what was left of her head. Like someone shot her and then drove over her. CSU even turned up a mashed bullet on the scene. Nothing ever came of it, mind.”

“Did you know her well?”

“Because I remember it so well, you mean? No. It stuck in my head because of that bullet. A .357, fired from a restored single-action revolver. The old night-shift boss at CSU, it was his personal project for six months. I remember it because he came up with the weirdest match. He thought it came from a Pinkerton pistol. The kind the railroad police used in the 1800s. But the old boss at CSU, he really wanted to come up with something. Now him, he was close to Beverly. Not me. I’m not close to anyone. Never was.”

The captain left, no energy left for an acknowledgment to the lieutenant.

“Close the door, John,” she said. He did.

“Sit down, John,” she said.

“I’d rather stand.”

“Sit down.”

“You have really shitty chairs, Lieutenant.”

She burst out laughing. “What did you just say to me?”

“Seriously. They hurt my ass. That’s why you got them. So no one stays in your office too long.”

“You incredible asshole,” she said, still laughing. “How did you even…?”

“The first time I had to sit on one for more than five minutes. It took the rest of the day for my backside to turn the right way out again.”

“Are you waiting for me to fetch you a nice soft pillow, Detective?”

Tallow sat.

“Where
are
you going with this? Exactly how much more trouble have you made for me today?”

“Not as much as I think I just made for myself.”

“Oh, the assistant chief made it pretty clear that he’s going to look for ways to fuck you, yeah.”

“That’s actually not what I’m worried about,” he said, and then paused. Tallow measured the fabric of his case in his head, and cut off the section he intended to show her. She didn’t need to see the whole thing yet, he decided, and in fact, it might be counterproductive.

“Okay,” he said, taking a breath. “By the end of today, with a little luck, I’ll have more evidence to back up the idea that Spearpoint Security has an involvement in these killings.”

“You said their security door on the apartment was probably a fluke.”

“Probably. However, our man killed one of Spearpoint’s competitors. Maybe that’s a fluke too. But I bet you, I bet you the price of a nice ass cushion for this chair, that the assistant chief is on his cell right now, calling his good friend Jason Westover. And kindhearted Jason Westover will be wondering how quickly he can contact our man.”

The lieutenant folded her arms. “You have no evidence that Westover knows our guy.”

“No,” Tallow agreed. “What I have is Spearpoint appearing in the conversation around the case too many times. What I have are too many questions. Why is this company Vivicy buying the building? Westover met his wife through Vivicy. His wife has a fixation with Native American culture, to the point where she freaks out in the street when she sees a homeless man looking like the worst-dressed Indian tracker in the cheapest Western you ever saw on TV at two in the morning. Our man has a fixation with Native American culture. I…”

Tallow stopped for a moment, looking for the words under the lieutenant’s gaze. He then said, “Things hide in rain.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Sometimes the rain is so heavy that we look up at all the raindrops when we should be looking at the shape of the puddle that forms from them. All of this has been rain. It’s been rain for twenty years, and everyone was looking at the raindrops falling while all of these people have been moving invisibly. They weren’t even traveling through streets we’d recognize. And the rain was so heavy, all over the city, that no one ever looked down and saw the footprints filling with water. I’m starting to see the shape of them now. I just need to be able to see the maps.”

“Put your feet back on the ground for me, John.”

Tallow ran his fingers through his hair. “Nothing is coincidence. We’ve walked right into a net, like a woodland mantrap. If our man had tossed his gun in the river after every kill, we would never have known a thing. I think our man is a directed killer.
Hired
may not be the right term. And he is so good,
so
good, that one or all of the people who directed him knew that his unsolved kills would eventually be subsumed in the annual unsolved count in an incredibly dense and crime-heavy metropolitan location. They knew that, so long as no one blundered into their very fine net, the whole operation would be invisible. The only thing we had on our side, it turned out, was that the killer was crazy and kept all his guns.”

“Why? I want to know why he kept all those guns. Is it just some weird serial-killer-trophy thing?”

“Not to him. That apartment is visual language, the codification of a statement in pictures. Exactly what statement, I don’t know, that’s in his head. But when we’ve been taking guns out of there to process? We’ve been unweaving his life’s work. Like unpainting a masterpiece or unpicking a tapestry.”

“John. Seriously. How much closer are we to finding this guy? Because the captain just told you he can’t cover for you, I sure as hell can’t cover for you, and the assistant chief knows he has a way to pull you off the case and put you in your apartment for the rest of your life. And I’ll be honest with you, I’ve thought about that more than once myself. If the assistant chief thinks he can make this whole thing go away—and you can be damn sure he’s thinking about that, very hard—then he will. So I need a call from you. You’ve got no DNA, no nothing but some circumstantial tangle, a handful of processed guns, and some brilliant, fascinating, but mostly crazy-ass speculation. Tell me. How much closer are we to finding him?”

John Tallow closed his eyes, and took a breath.

“Probably not as close as he is to finding me, Lieutenant.”

THE HUNTER
watched from the rooftop on the corner. The military man had a cursory glance around the block, and then went back inside Kutkha’s place.

The auto repair shop across the street closed for a late lunch. The hunter found the access alley behind the hardware store, walked around the block, broke into the auto repair shop, and took a few things they wouldn’t immediately miss, including a jacket and a ball cap that had been stuffed into a bag at the back. They stank of machine guts, but he wanted to be less obvious in his comings and goings over the next few hours, so he put them on in order to walk his wrapped spoils back to the hardware store.

In the cool shade of the abandoned store, the hunter began to make tools.

He carefully twisted long lengths of twine together and set them to soak in the can of gasoline he’d taken from the auto shop.

The dead thing was nothing but raw material now. The hunter cut many thin slices of its clothing off, having looked at it and determined there were plenty of polymers in the weave of its orange suit. The hunter soaked the strips in its blood. Once they were sodden, the hunter stuffed them into two of the three empty water bottles he’d found in the store’s back room, along with the handful of Styrofoam packing beans he’d gathered from the floor.

The hunter couldn’t find a decent hacksaw in the place, and it might have made too much noise in any case. He crept around the house in search of the weakest-looking copper pipes and spent patient minutes prying two of them from the walls as quietly as possible. He spent a short while grinding the tip of a bolt, and then used it to punch breathing holes down the lengths of both pipes. He then fed a length of twine down each of the pipes. He had to keep himself aware of the passage of time. This kind of work warmed and entranced him so wonderfully that he could have lost days to it. The preparation of tools was beautiful to him, even improvised tools such as these. The tying of a knot around a nut was an act of devotion and a preservation of sacred crafts as much as the creation of a prayer tie from tobacco leaves. He mixed gasoline with the blood and fabric and Styrofoam, and looped the free end of the twine around the far end of the pipe so as not to lose it when he dropped the knotted end of the twine into the bottle. He pushed three or four inches of the near end of the pipe into the bottle and made a seal with duct tape lifted from the auto shop. One end of the twine was inside the bottle, weighted by its nut; the other was still looped around the end of the pipe. He repeated the process with the second bottle.

He hefted one of his copper spears experimentally. The length was good. He then searched for things to weight the standing ends of the bottles, to give more predictability to the lift.

The front door of Kutkha’s property was still a problem. Having weighted the bottles to his liking, the hunter prowled the building for more ingredients.

He came across an old broom, its shaft splintered, its imitation-horsehair brush balding and brittle. It solved a problem farther down his list. He slowly split it all the way in half—he didn’t want the crack of breaking it sharply—and with his knife began to feather the top end of the wood into tinder as he walked the empty building.

Within ten minutes, the hunter had found a half-empty hand-sanitizer dispenser, a mostly full bottle of drain cleaner, a folded tube of strong glue, and a disposable lighter that looked to have five millimeters of butane in the bottom. The hunter took off his gloves and squirted a tiny drop of the sanitizer onto a fingertip. He sniffed it, and then rubbed it swiftly with his thumb. Alcohol based. Heaven alone knew what the attendant scent was supposed to be, he thought sourly. He knew he had a scattering of nails and pins downstairs. He took his knife again and dug into the walls of the room he was in until he found the lighting circuit’s wiring and pulled several feet of it free of the plaster.

Downstairs, he put his tinder down and took up the gun he’d removed from the dead thing on the floor. It was a version of a Beretta 92, some newer iteration that he hadn’t seen. It was a little lighter in his hand than he had been expecting given the make. Some parts were plastic, he saw on closer inspection. Unmistakably a Beretta 92, though, nine-millimeter and workmanlike. The slide was strong and smooth. He extracted the gun’s magazine and pulled a bullet from it. The hunter sliced the top off the third bottle, poured the dregs of the gasoline can into it, unscrewed the dispenser arm from the hand sanitizer, and squirted that on top of the gasoline. He went foraging for nails. To his great pleasure, ten minutes’ diligence saw him collect a substantial number of aluminum clout nails. In the bottle they went.

As the dead thing stiffened and then softened on the other side of the room, the hunter worked with his knife on the bullet and the wiring and other things, and his heart grew light.

It was late afternoon before he had completed his construction to his satisfaction. The hunter then turned, methodically, to the preparation of tinder. Moving as quietly as he could, he broke up the particleboard display stand and began to arrange its pieces. He feathered and shaved more tinder, ensuring he could easily reach it even as he began to gather more wood to it.

It would make a grand fire. A fire that would cook the dead thing down to a pile of black sticks, with the remains of its polyester clothes melted over them.

The hunter stopped then, took his last piece of squirrel meat, and took his time chewing it, considering every angle of what he had done and what he was going to do.

The sun came low. The hunter stood his weapons by the back door and went up to the roof to look around and wait. He had a reasonably good view from the rooftop at the corner of the block. He knew how to reach the side road and Kutkha’s backyard from the hardware store’s access alley.

The sun ticked down. The street grew silent.

The military man opened the front door, threw out two garbage sacks, and closed the door again with an audible click.

The hunter moved.

Five minutes later, and acutely aware of the passage of time, the hunter was unseen at the front door of Kutkha’s property, pushing a nail into the wooden footboard of the front door, kicking a garbage sack—
What a gift!
he thought—in front of the door, and lowering a filled water bottle containing improvised partitions onto the bag. He extended the wires that hung out of the bottle and wound the end of one of them around the nail in the lower door frame. He pushed in another nail next to the door lock, wound the other wire around that, checked his work, and moved quickly away.

In the dark of the hardware store, the hunter struck sparks. The pyre around the dead thing caught immediately. He took more tinder out of the back door with him in one of the small storage trays. Outside, he heard a car. The hunter stopped moving and listened, intently. He heard the car move down the access road, turn, negotiate the passage into the backyard, and stop.

The hunter struck sparks into his tinder and got fire. He lit the tips of the soaked twine where they stuck out of the ends of the two pipes and slid through the door in the fence that separated him from the access road. With five steps he remained out of sight of the backyard but had a clear line of sight to the rear of Kutkha’s building.

He hefted his first spear and hurled it over the fence and through a third-floor window. He snatched up the second while the first was in flight, calculated a correction and the extra force, and flung the spear through a fifth-floor window. He could see little flickers of light through the breathing holes down the spears as the gasoline-soaked wicks burned toward the bottles. There was a flat report from the third floor, like a giant striking the ground with a cupped hand. Homemade napalm—clotted blood, plastics, and gasoline—erupted, and he was rewarded with shrieks from the third floor. A fifth-floor window blew out as the second napalm bomb went off.

The hunter drew the Beretta and moved into the backyard.

There was a large seven-seater car parked there. The hunter made out the small faces of four small people in the rear of the vehicle, and saw that the doors were locked. Two men stood by the left wing of the car, their backs to the hunter.

He shot the first through the back of the neck. The bullet careened around the man’s face and tore through the right joint of his jaw as it exited, so that the lower jaw swung around as if on a hinge toward the hunter.

He shot the second through the back of the head and heard the smack of a chunk of brain the size of a baby’s hand hit the wall of the building.

Kutkha had a briefcase in his hands. Behind him was the idiot boy. Beside him was the military man, already moving for a concealed weapon.

The hunter shot the military man through the forehead. For a long second, the man refused to die. His eyes flashed with outrage. He opened his mouth as if to speak his mind at the intrusion, and half a pint of bright red blood fell out of it. His legs gave way and he fell to the ground in a coiling motion, like a clubbed snake.

The hunter snapped his gun down and shot Kutkha in the groin, accurately castrating him. He shoved the screaming Russian away and shot the boy twice in the brain, smiling as he told himself the second shot was in case he missed the brain the first time.

The third and fifth floors of the building were now fully ablaze. The shrieking had one or two voices fewer in it.

The hunter moved quickly to the heavy back door of the building, resting the gun in his left jacket pocket—it was too hot to push into his waistband now. He took a handful of short wires from his right pocket and pushed them roughly into the lock. He shot the last of the tube of epoxy glue into the lock after them, filling it as best he could. He drew his gun again and waited for thirty seconds, keeping one eye on the screaming, bucking Kutkha.

Someone inside tried to open the back door. But he couldn’t get it to unlock. He heard scrabbling. Then nothing.

The hunter moved to Kutkha and stood on his neck as he picked up the briefcase. It was unlocked. Inside was money and, in two plastic bags, the Police Service and twenty-four rounds. The Police Service was a curiously lovely weapon. He stroked it through its plastic. It would serve wonderfully. It was the perfect tool for the next job.

He decided to take a brick of banknotes too. They had their uses.

“Why?” Kutkha gurgled. “Why? We do
business
.”

“I regret that, in this instance, I cannot allow myself to have been seen, Kutkha.”

There was a loud explosion. Someone had opened the front door to the building, actuating the hunter’s improvised explosive device. Drain-cleaning fluid had mixed with aluminum nails, alcohol gel, some water, and a little gasoline, lit by black powder and butane. The hunter did wish he could have seen this one. The fireball, and the hot rush of unburned caustic gas, the flaming gel, and the hail of burning nails. It must have been beautiful, the bloom in the evening shade. The garbage sacks would be burning now too. No one was getting out of the building.

Kutkha was crawling to the military man’s corpse. Kutkha would have known where that one carried his gun. The hunter put his foot back on Kutkha. Kutkha sobbed, desperately. “We are the same blood! My tribesmen walked to America and became your tribesmen! We are the same!”

“No,” said the hunter. “No, we’re not.”

He shot Kutkha in the back of the head. The angle was off. The top of Kutkha’s head came away, and the damp matter inside the case jolted out onto the ground and skittered nine or ten inches away like a sea creature.

The hunter realized he was being watched. Four pairs of bright eyes inside the car.

The hunter sighed, drew his knife, and cut two swatches off of Kutkha’s absurd shorts. He walked back into the access road and retrieved his tinder tray. The tinder was still burning, the plastic of the tray blackening and bubbling.

He carried it to the car, opened the fuel cap, fed the two strips of fabric into it, and lit them with the tinder. He tossed the tinder tray and the Beretta under the car and walked away, refusing to perceive the little fists hammering on the car’s window glass, the muffled voices, the eyes.

The hunter was most of the way down the access road when the car went up. The hardware store was already burning. There were sirens, but they would not be here in time. They never were.

He walked to the shore, and sat by the water, and watched the Great Kill glisten in the dark as the houses of his enemies burned at his back.