Gun Machine (8 page)

“—and we start to see the killer by inference,” said Tallow. “By the shape of the hole he leaves. Okay. Weird way to put it, but I can get behind that.” He flicked ash into the ashtray and smiled at it. “I keep thinking about that flintlock you showed me. Why would the word
Rooster
be scratched into it? Was that a name? I mean, I saw
True Grit
and all, but I didn’t think there were really people called Rooster back then.”

When Bat frowned, his eyes seemed to slide forward out of their sockets by a quarter-inch. “
Rooster
?”

“Sure. There was a badge or, I don’t know, a heraldic device maybe, and the word
Rooster
above it. I like history, but my interests kind of jump around, and that sort of thing’s nothing I’ve ever done a lot of reading about.”

“It didn’t say
Rooster,
” said Bat. “It said
Rochester
. It was kind of blurred and fucked up, but, yeah.
Rochester
.”

“Huh,” said Tallow, and sat back, considering.

“Why were you thinking about that?” Scarly asked. In the periphery of his pensive gaze, he could see she’d almost drained her pint.

“Something you said about the .44. It was like the one Son of Sam used. And the level of restoration you figure the guy lavished on that flintlock to get it to fire reliably. What if the revolver meant to our guy…what if it meant exactly what we think it meant? And if it did…then what did the flintlock mean? Rochester. Rochester.”

“Well,” said Bat, “like I said before, it won’t be hard to fish out of the records. There won’t be too many bodies in the last twenty years with a homemade .45 slug in them. The search will probably pop something in the morning.”

“What kind of history do you like?” asked Scarly, finishing her pint just as a long girl in her twenties approached the table with a tray. The girl, all runner’s legs in purple tights and long fronds of candy-apple-red hair in some nineties anime cut, collected his food plate and Scarly’s glass. “Can I get you anything else?” she asked.

“Another pint of the cream ale, and whatever they want, would be great, thank you.”

“Also your cell number,” said Scarly.

The long girl inclined just a little and tapped Scarly’s wedding ring with one red fingernail.

“Another pint of the stout would be great, thanks,” Scarly said.

“You are fucking disgusting,” said Bat as the girl left. “Don’t you think for a moment about your wife’s feelings?”

“I’m fucking
autistic,
” said Scarly.

They sat in awkward silence until the waitress came back with a tray of drinks. And her number written in pencil eyeliner on a napkin.

“Fuck you,” Scarly crowed.

Bat poured a little of his drink over the napkin. The numbers smeared like dark tributaries in scabland.

“Fuck you!”
Scarly yelled.

“Keep it down,” said Tallow. “I may want to come back here again.”

Scarly made a deflating sound, scrunched up the napkin, and tossed it accurately into the nearby metal bucket. “Doesn’t matter where I get my appetite from so long as I eat at home. You didn’t answer my question.”

“Hm?”

“What kind of history do you like?”

“Oh, lots of different stuff. I like New York history. City history. Yesterday, when all this started, I told my partner we shouldn’t respond to the call because he had bad knees and it was the last of the old walk-up apartment buildings on Pearl.”

Tallow sipped his beer, knowing that he probably shouldn’t have ordered it since he intended to drive home. “And I know that Pearl Street was called Pearl Street because the first paving used on the road was crushed oyster shells. Mother-of-pearl. The Dutch called it that, I think. Hold on a second.”

Tallow leaned to the side and saw that his wi-fi pod was still working. The tablet was still on the table. He poked it out of sleep mode and pulled up another search engine page. “That flintlock. From 1836, you said.”

Bat nodded assent.

Tallow pecked in the words
Rochester NY Murder 1836.
It threw up nothing of interest aside from someone’s thesis on “crime and deviance in early Rochester.”

“It was made in 1836,” said Bat, leaning over and reading upside down. “Doesn’t mean it was used in 1836.”

Tallow replaced
1836
with
1837
and ran the search again, wondering. “It’s just tickling something at the back of my head,” he explained. “Something I read, somewhere…”

Bat laughed. “Would that be your car parked across the street? With the library landfill in the back?”

“Yeah,” said Tallow, and stopped. Five results down:
The first murder victim in the city of Rochester, NY.

He read it aloud to Bat and Scarly.

“Seriously?” said Bat.

Tallow skimmed the text. “‘In the case of William Lyman, murdered October twentieth, 1837, by one Octavius Barron…with a pistol he stole from the premises of a Mr. Passage, a local baker.’”

Scarly grunted. Her beer seemed to be evaporating alarmingly quickly. “Makes sense. A baker would be fairly well-to-do. You know what that mark on the gun could be? A militia badge. I can see him spending the extra couple of dollars to get it engraved.”

Tallow kept reading. “‘Barron first claimed to have been asleep at home when the murder was committed, but his own mother told the authorities that he was lying.’ Nice. Ah. Listen to this. ‘In his confession, Barron explained that he’d had to beat a homemade bullet into shape and hammer it into the muzzle of the gun.’”

“The fucked-up muzzle,” said Bat, and then thought better of showing interest and threw his hands up. “No. Not buying into this.”

“Go on,” said Scarly, intent.

“Hm. Told a priest he didn’t do it, his accomplices had, and that’s why he wasn’t found with the pistol or the dead man’s pocketbook. The pistol was in fact never found. And this report does expressly call it a pistol. The assumption seems to be that Barron tossed it in the river.”

“I bet you it was found and quietly passed back to Mr. Passage, who probably put it in a trunk for the day the British came back. He was in the militia, and he was a baker, so he knew everyone.” Scarly grinned. “This is good. But would it be the river? It’d be the bay, right? I bet there’d be a Rochester naval militia.”

“Unless they meant the Erie Canal to the Hudson. That might have been open by then.”

Bat, exasperated, waved his hands between them. “Hello? Are you really saying that this gun we found was the mysteeeeeerious lost gun that killed the first murder victim in Rochester? Guys, the guns we’ve processed so far have been married to kills in Manhattan. If you’re looking for connections, then you’re saying that he took his show on the road and we’re going to turn up guns applying to homicides all over the place.”

“Not necessarily,” mumbled Tallow, going through the text on his tablet screen for more information. “Maybe it means he committed a homicide in Manhattan that had connections to Rochester.” He looked up at Scarly. “You know what that might mean about your .44.”

“What?” said Scarly, before her brain caught up to what he meant. She laughed. “Nah. Can’t be.”

“Can’t be what?” said Bat, irritated that he wasn’t keeping up with the increasing altitude of what he had determined was an idiot flight of fantasy.

“Can’t be Son of Sam’s actual gun,” Scarly said, sipping stout.

Bat sat back. “Christ. Of course it can’t. Because—”

“Because,” said Tallow quietly, “Son of Sam’s gun would be in an evidence storage barrel in the Bronx, right?”

“Oh,” Scarly breathed, eyes widening. “Oh. That’s…that’s interesting.”

Tallow turned his gaze on Bat. “Our guy’s been killing people and going undetected for twenty years, even when he did something as crazy as go to Rochester and recover a lost gun and restore it to the point where he could efficiently kill someone with it. Do you really think he did that without any help at all?”

“Dude. You’re saying some cop fished Son of Sam’s own gun out of an evidence barrel and gave it to a crazy asshole who used it for one of his umpty-hundred kills. That’s crazier than he is.”

Scarly huddled into the table, her face more animated than Tallow had ever seen it. “No. No, I’m liking this. So you think this is a crew?”

“No. It’s too single-minded to be anything more than one guy making the plans and committing the homicides. I’m thinking he had some kind of network. Maybe not a big one. But people who owed him favors, people he paid, people he could somehow trust just enough to get him the things he needed. Maybe, yeah, maybe someone did get him a gun he liked out of an evidence barrel. You didn’t stop to think for a minute how someone could commit several hundred homicides in Manhattan over God knows how many years and not get one of them hung around his neck? Not
one?
”

Tallow had come to that junction on his train of thought only about thirty seconds ago, but he didn’t feel the burning need to tell Bat that. It didn’t matter. Tallow felt like he was thinking well again. He felt like his brain had kicked in since that afternoon’s visit to Pearl. It occurred to him that this might be his most energetic thinking in years.

“So some kind of network. Some people who could find him the right tools for the job. Like a flintlock from Rochester. If the search on that kill is going to be so easy, Bat, then I’ll bet you ten dollars right here that the kill on that gun is going to have some special relationship with the first recorded murder in Rochester.”

“I’ll take that,” said Bat with a curl of the lip. It revealed very narrow, keen teeth and gray gums. “What about the Bulldog .44?”

Tallow looked at Scarly. She gave him a twisty grin of complicity.

Scarly said, “I’ve got ten that says that if you didn’t manage to massively fuck up the ballistics through your ricockulous magic trick of making it shoot backward, then it’s Son of Sam’s gun, and we have a much bigger and scarier case than even we thought.”

Bat laughed, a short yap that said more about discomfort than joy. “So I’m twenty bucks richer and I didn’t even have to buy the drinks first. Win. You’re both nuts, by the way.”

“All right,” said Tallow as Bat chugged a quarter of his vodka. “You tell me why our guy had a flintlock in his cache.”

“How the hell should I know? I’m not some lunatic who built a church out of guns.”

Tallow smiled. “And that’s why I wanted the storage space. I take your points about not getting lost in the forest and ignoring the trees. But cop voodoo can be strong too. We need to be in that apartment, as best we can, and understand why he kept those guns and what he was thinking. That apartment was part of his plan too. Scarly referred to him as a serial killer. If that’s true, then he must almost permanently be in totem phase. Totally high on the adrenaline of being surrounded by his trophies.”

“Aha!” yelped Bat. “No! Because if you think he’s matching weapons to targets that carefully, then he’s not experiencing trolling phase, is he? He’s not walking around looking for juicy kills. He’s aiming specifically at specific people. So no!” He pulled a face at Scarly. “Wrong!”

“Oh,” commented Tallow. “You’re on board with our idea now, then.”

“Yes. No. Yes. What? Fuck you.”

Scarly cracked up.

“‘Fuck you,
John,
’” Tallow gently said.

Bat put his hands up, laughing. “All right, all right, John. So he’s not a serial killer, and he’s not in totem phase, and we need to work out exactly what his deal is regardless of whether I win twenty bucks or not. You win. Can I have another drink?”

“Sure.” John stood up and pulled twenty dollars from his wallet. Scarly yanked the two tens out of his grip hard enough to leave the ghost of a friction burn on his fingertips.

“I’ll go,” she said, getting up. “What do you want?”

“Better get me two of those energy drinks they keep in the fridge with the bottled beers.”

“Done.” She took off at a clip.

“She’s really married?” Tallow said to Bat.

“Yeah. Talia’s like this Scandinavian Amazon who can break rocks with her boobs. She could fit Scarly in her armpit. Sometimes I think she likes Scarly just because she was the most portable lesbian available.”

“So her wife could kill her. So she plays away from home. Well, that makes sense.”

Bat smiled. “Scarly just wants the phone number. She’ll leave it in a prominent place at home. Talia will see it. Talia will go in
sane
. I mean, anger, screaming, tears, smashing stuff up, the works. And then she will fuck the shit out of Scarly for twelve to twenty-four hours. She’ll fuck Scarly until she can’t walk, ice water in the face if she passes out, punching, kicking, choking, you name it. Like a wolf pissing on its territory, right? Only with more strap-ons. Scarly will come into work afterward—and it’s funny how it always seems to happen when she’s got a day off booked—she’ll come in looking like she’s been dipped in crystal meth and tossed to a Canadian hockey team. Which was what she wanted. Which was what the whole thing was about. It’s the one thing about Talia she can control, and she loves it.”

Tallow thought about this for a few seconds, and then raised the last of his beer. “To the secrets behind a happy marriage in New York City.”

Bat cackled and tapped Tallow’s glass with his.

THE HUNTER
moved down the block and curled up in the doorway of a small, abandoned retail unit that had previously been a Christian bookstore. Its weathered signage and faded, skewed window posters pleased him. He felt like he was sheltering in the lee of the corpse of some strange dead animal that had made its way to the island from foreign climes and died before reproducing or polluting the ground.

Content, he drew his knees up to his chest and let the modern world collapse back into Mannahatta. The buildings on the other side of the street tumbled away as if gently shoved by heaven’s giant hand, re-forming into the foothills and slopes of shore-side Old Manhattan. Stands of broad pignut hickory arose from the inclines, their catkins unfurling. If he looked closer, with concentration, he could see the long tears in the hickory trees’ bark where black bears had eaten, and detect the scent of rich dark sap where it bled from the exposed wood. Allegheny hawkweed sprang from around their trunks like scattered flakes of amber. The hunter closed his eyes, listening to the calls of ring-billed gulls. He was close to the water here. A short walk would have brought him to the permanent, ever-growing piles of shucked oyster shells on the narrow beach where the catch was always best.

There was the rasp of starved panic grass in the breeze that he always somehow found so soothing. He could close his eyes for an hour. There was time to kill.

When the hunter awoke, the cement under him was chill and damp, and ghosts from the hated future leered at him through cloudy store-window glass. He stood, flexed to pop the stiffness from his spine, and looked up at the sky. He could judge his position and the hour even from the miserly, bare starscape afforded him in modern Manhattan. There was plenty of time for him to make the journey to his night’s last destination.

He started walking, slipping a hand into his bag for his travel notebook. The walk would take him some two and a half hours. He could have done it in less than two hours quite easily, save for the slow emergence of security cameras in the city. The hunter preferred not to be seen. His travel notebook was filled with maps he’d drawn himself indicating the locations of CCTV machines and their estimated fields of vision. The operation of the notebook would have been arcane to anyone else, of course. And that, too, was intended. The hunter’s intent was always to leave no trace on the island. Save for the bodies of his prey. In the unlikely, unlucky event that he was killed in the process of the hunt, there was nothing on his body that would mean anything to anyone. And his only regret in death would be that he would not be correctly buried. There would be no food left by his body to fortify his spirit in its walk across the Milky Way to heaven. There would be no one to cry his name, and indeed no one to close his or her lips in mourning and never speak it again. That, he reflected, wasn’t so bad. No one knew his name to speak it while he was alive now. His name could not die with him because it was already dead, and, in a way, so was he.

It was said that the spirit stayed close to the corpse for eleven days after death. Perhaps he might find a way to kill people even while disembodied. It was a thought that brought a thin smile to his lips as he walked.

He grubbed around in his bag as he progressed past Grand on his way down the Bowery, walking in the glow from the electric showrooms of the many lighting stores fringing the street. He had a few pieces of dried squirrel meat in there, wrapped in plastic and cloth. The hunter, working by touch alone, claimed a small piece and reclosed the wrapping. He bit a morsel off and chewed, slowly and methodically, matching action to footfall. The flavor was somewhere between chicken thigh and rabbit. There was better squirrel to be had farther up the island; the animals in Central Park inevitably took in enough pollution to render their meat blander, and sometimes more bitter, than it really should have been. But it kept him moving, and it kept the saliva flowing, so that he avoided thirst and didn’t deplete his physical reserves.

A little under two hours later, the hunter entered Central Park by Fifth Avenue and East Sixty-First.

He continued moving north. Up by the Seventy-Third Street parallel, paths became dark tangles wending around nighted looming woodland. This was the Ramble. The hunter took one last reckoning by the sparse stars above, gripped the knife in his bag once again, and glided into a stand of American sycamores.

Here and there, he caught glances from men standing alone or in pairs who kept to the edges of the paths, occasionally drifting mothlike to the trail lampposts. The hunter had no issue with the men, whom, more than twenty years ago, he had learned should be called two-spirits. There had been a two-spirit of the Crow Nation whom the hunter admired, a man whose true name translated as “Finds Them and Kills Them.”

When they met the hunter’s eyes, they turned away. He was not here for them. When they met his eyes, they were glad he was not.

Orbiting a great mountain of a Kentucky coffee tree, the hunter saw the one he had come to the Ramble for. The timing was quite exact. Not a tall man, but stocky, giving a sense of size and solidity even without great height. A man who looked like he worked with his hands, and with weights. Military boots that struck the hunter, mired as he now was in the modern day, as somewhat science-fictional. A black running suit, the hunter supposed, though the fabric and cut more suggested stealth fatigues. The jacket unzipped to show a blazingly clean white T-shirt. Thick dark hair that could have been a grown-out Marine cut. Walking with a soldier’s bearing. Walking a dog. An absurd, white fluffy dog that stood less than two feet high. It put the hunter in mind of a wolf that had been crossbred in a laboratory with a cuddly toy.

The man walking the dog had a gun in a shoulder holster under his left armpit. Something snub-nosed and easy to draw fast, judging by the fold of his jacket around it. The weight the man was offsetting suggested a heavier gun than necessary. A .327 Federal or similar, a snub-nosed with the punch of a .357 Magnum, bruising recoil, and a thunderclap muzzle blast. The gun of a man who wanted to exert serious muscle power to keep the gun aimed through the recoil, who considered himself tough enough to shoot without ear defenders or shades. The gun of a man pretending that his personal protection was discreet and concealed and “just in case.”

The hunter swung back around, passing through a thatch of some pea-like shrub that didn’t belong on the island, and darted through a planting of fragrant yellowwood to reach another gray curl of trail paving. He knew precisely where he was going. Central Park had been his foraging ground for a very long time.

He stepped from the pitch-black into enough ambient light that his face could be identified right in front of the man with the dog.

The man stopped walking. He clearly recognized the hunter instantly, looking straight through the years since their last meeting. The dog’s lead was in his right hand. He flipped the lead to his left hand, deftly. The hunter raised his own right hand, showing it as open and empty.

The hunter looked at the dog. The dog met his eyes and wagged his tail. The hunter put out his raised hand, palm down, and slowly lowered it. The dog sat. The hunter lowered his hand a little more. The dog lay all the way down, head on his paws, entirely at peace.

The hunter placed his attention on the man. “You are Jason Westover. Do you know who I am?”

Jason Westover nodded, once, slowly. He turned his left palm to face the hunter and released the dog’s lead.

The hunter took one pace forward, limiting Westover’s available movement space even further. “You are very probably armed. I am most definitely armed. Do not assume that you can move faster than I can. Do not assume that anyone will hear you if you shout. Nor that they’ll care if you do. The Ramble has its own reputation.”

“You planned this,” said Westover flatly. Not a question. The hunter appreciated the implication of respect.

“I have always made a point of being aware of where and when to find you should it be necessary. You have a schedule for walking your dog—”

“My wife’s dog.”

“—your dog that has proved quite inflexible over the last two years. You are often visibly unhappy when doing so. You choose the Ramble, and at this time of night, because you believe the confluence to be inherently dangerous. This is why you are armed. Perhaps you think it helps keep you sharp after a day at your desk. Perhaps you’re looking for trouble.”

“If you’re here to kill me,” said Westover, “then, please, let’s get on with it. If you’re here to talk to me, then say something interesting. If you want my help with some situation, then stop fucking around and ask for it.”

The hunter smiled. Westover visibly, involuntarily shivered but kept his spine straight and his arms in preparatory position by his sides.

“You always did treat me with less overt deference than the others.”

Westover didn’t move.

“No response?” said the hunter, raising an amused eyebrow.

“Nothing you’d be interested in hearing. How bad is it, that you’ve had to contact me directly in the middle of the night?”

The hunter took a breath. “All the things I have done for you. All the work undertaken. Each of those acts has a thing associated with it. Each of those things was stored in a single special place. It was well secured, but, as I’m sure you know yourself, no security is perfect. The place was breached. The things within it are now in the possession of the police.”

Westover frowned, shook his head. “I swear, over the years you’ve only gotten more fucking schizophrenic. I have no idea what you’re even talking about.”

“Think about it,” the hunter whispered.

Westover did. The hunter could almost see Westover’s heart rise into his mouth. “Oh God. You’re crazier than I thought.”

“Is a man crazy for going to church? For tending the earth that gives him food?”

“All right. All right. I can’t do anything about that. I appreciate the warning. Tell me what you need to secure your silence. What can I get you? Plane ticket? Passport?”

The hunter’s hand was still in his bag. He judged Westover’s position. Westover, distracted as he was, remained ready for violence. “I am taking something from my bag. It is not a weapon.”

The hunter extracted the scrap of napkin he’d written on earlier, reached over, and passed it to Westover’s fingers.

“I want,” said the hunter, “to know who that car belongs to, and where the owner lives. That, I’m quite certain, is in your power. I have noticed, not always with pleasure, how broad the reach of your security company has gotten over the years.”

Westover looked at it. “Who is this?”

“A police detective, I believe. I want this information ready for me by this time tomorrow, at this place. I would have called you, but your telephone is no longer in service.”

“I change numbers regularly these days,” muttered Westover, still looking at the napkin. “A cop. Why are you talking to me about this? I’m not the one who—”

“I believe it would be more efficient for you to do this,” said the hunter. “I want to keep that man in reserve, for now. Also, I believe he would refuse me, and that would start us down a short and nasty road. Don’t you think?”

Westover nodded. “Okay. I can do that. Not as tricky as it used to be, in fact. What will you do with the information?”

“My ultimate goal would be recovery of as many of my tools as possible,” the hunter said. “I don’t wish to start all over again. But I will if I have to. Removal of this man may help disrupt the police process. Or it may just be a new beginning for me. So…I haven’t decided yet. Nor have I decided how it would be done. The information you find will help me with that too.”

“How?”

“I told you, Mr. Westover, back when we started down this path together. Never ask me about my methods. You don’t need to know. And I don’t want you to know. It is not for you.”

Westover pocketed the napkin. “All right,” he said once more. “Tomorrow night. You’ll have a name, an address, and whatever other details on the man I can have pulled. What happens then?”

The hunter took stock of Westover again for a few seconds. “Why don’t you have a dog walker?”

“What?”

“You’re a wealthy man, Mr. Westover. I know that very well. I did, after all, help that happen. And I’ve kept my eye on all of you, over the years. Also, I spend a lot of time here in Central Park, and I know full well that wealthy people in this city pay people to walk their dogs. So why don’t you have a dog walker? Is it just the illicit little thrill of the notion that one day someone will try to mug you and you’ll gun them down? Or is it something else?”

Westover shifted on his feet. “I want to know what happens then. I want to know what I personally have to protect against, and what I have to prepare for.”

“Answer me first.”

“It gets me away from my wife for a while. Simple as that. As to the other thing: I run a security company. I wouldn’t do that job well if I were not aware of my personal security.”

“Why would you want to get away from your wife? She hasn’t looked well over the last year or so. I would have thought you would want to take care of her at night. Unless you pay someone to do that.”

Interesting,
thought the hunter. Westover’s right hand wanted to go, in that instant, not to the gun but to the small of his back, above the top of his pants. The hunter was fairly sure he hadn’t missed the tells of a second gun. A knife, then. Probably something almost weightless, like titanium or surgical steel. Probably something short. Probably a folding blade. The look on Westover’s face. He instinctively went for something that had to be used close in, with savagery. With punching, ripping, stabbing motions. With hate.

Westover’s lip curled. “My wife. She is. Was. A smart woman. She developed questions, over the years, about the success of my business. There was a bad night. Over a year ago. We were fighting. I wanted to—”

Westover looked over into the trees and the night, biting his lip. His eyes were oddly bright in the ambient glow from the trail lights.