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?”
Westover scowled. “He wouldn’t go there.”
“Really? And yet you told your wife to avoid that area.”
“He sleeps somewhere around there. That’s all I know.”
“So your meeting was to provide him with a car and…?”
“Money. And to pursue the idea of providing him passage out of the NYC area.”
“I see,” said Tallow, who was experiencing the air in the room as thick and choked with the tangle of lies being puked out by both of them. Westover wasn’t going to say one true thing to him. Or, worse, he was going to salt his lies with lonely little grains of truth, and Tallow would have to sift everything through the imperfect sieve of what he knew to be correct. He needed to get one useful thing out of Westover.
“Tell me about this Ambient Security thing of yours. Does it work on mobile devices?”
Westover frowned, genuinely thrown by the new track of the conversation. “Sure. Why?”
“Give me twelve hours’ access to it.”
“Show me your phone,” said Westover. Tallow did. Westover appraised it. “Isn’t that a little pricey for a cop?”
“I don’t buy a lot of clothes,” said Tallow.
“No. No, I imagine not. Hold on, let me get my phone.” Westover stepped to a nearby merchant’s chest made from artfully distressed wood. Or, thought Tallow, possibly wood actually salvaged from an ancient shipwreck. Tallow looked up at the sound of a clicking.
Scarly had her gun on Westover. “If anything other than a phone comes out of that drawer, sir, I will put two in you, right in front of your wife.”
“It’s all right,” Tallow said. “Mr. Westover’s on our side now. Isn’t that right?”
“Right,” said Westover, coming away from the drawer with a phone held out for Scarly’s benefit. “Switch your Bluetooth on, Tallow.” After a few moments of tapping and fiddling, an app had been copied to Tallow’s phone, and a registration code and password entered into it.
“There,” said Westover. “On the standard setting, it’s going to give you live feeds from whichever Ambient Security cams surround your GPS location. Tap that, and you go to the Forward setting, grabbing the live feed from the cameras ten to twenty yards ahead of your location.”
“What’s that for?”
“Pursuit,” said Westover, looking at Tallow like he was an idiot. “Do you not understand what my company does? We’re going to take your job, Tallow.”
“I believe I’ve had the company lecture on that once or twice,” Tallow murmured.
“Right. With Ambient Security, I can outsource and crowd-source the very concept of criminal pursuit in this city. The red button launches a speakerphone call to a live operator in the ops room. I don’t need a bunch of cops and cars on the ground. I could chase and take down a speeding car with one operator using the Forward setting and a drone.”
“Very clever. I’ll be sure to tell the first deputy tomorrow. You’ll need another advocate in the department once Turkel’s gone, after all.”
“Huh,” said Westover, bluntly surprised. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Thanks. So what do you need access to
Ambient Security for?”
“Well,” said Tallow. “I want to take a drive to Collect Pond Park before I head home, have a look around, and I figured that with this, I wouldn’t have to get out of the car.” He threw Westover a crooked, friendly grin and watched Westover relax just a little. “Also, I wanted to see if you’d cooperate. Ensure you’re on board with all this.”
“And there it is on your phone.”
“And there it is on my phone. Just rescind my access to it in twelve hours, and I’ll call that a sign of everything going well.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” said Tallow. “Time for me to go home. Officers.” He meant Bat and Scarly by this, and they responded by marching dutifully to the door.
“Mrs. Westover.” Tallow gave her the kindest, warmest smile he could find.
“Thank you,” she said brokenly, and then looked down at her hands.
“We’ll see ourselves out,” Tallow said, and they left.
In the elevator, Tallow tossed his cell to Bat. “Westover put a password on that app. Change it.”
“Why?” asked Bat, nearly fumbling it.
“Because if he knows the password he can rescind the app’s access to Ambient Security.”
“He could also just deactivate the registration code.”
“He could, but it’d take him longer, because his own access to Ambient Security is on that code.”
“That,” said Scarly, “didn’t go as well as it could have. Did it?”
“No,” Tallow admitted. “No, he’s decided it’s a game to be played all the way through. Stupid. I feel sorry for his wife.”
“I’m not sure I do,” said Scarly. “Except that she’s got all the classic symptoms of an untreated psychotic break. That, I feel bad about. Everything else, not so much.”
“None of it’s her fault, Scarly.”
“You think? The way I see it, when she didn’t up and leave him the minute he explained all that, it became her fault.”
“You’re forgetting,” Bat muttered, tapping away at the phone. “If she’d up and left him, the next thing that happened, the absolute next thing, would have been him giving her name and general description to CTS. I wonder what kind of gun CTS would have chosen for her.”
Scarly gathered breath for an outburst, which Tallow expected would involve judging and autism, but then she leaned against the elevator wall and deflated. “Yeah.”
“Oh well,” said Tallow, as the elevator opened up on the ground floor of Aer Keep. “It’s getting late. Time I went home, I guess.”
Thirty-Four
THE HUNTER pushed the door just a little farther open, and stepped into the dark room.
An inhuman voice shrieked “Say hello to my li’l frien’,” there was a sharp flurry of detonation flashes, and the hunter felt multiple impacts on his chest and face. The lights came on, harsh and bright, blinding the hunter. He fired the Colt in front of him, but the hideous metallic din didn’t stop, and now it was screaming “Fuck you fuck you fuck you.”
The hunter staggered back into the hallway, wiping his face. His vision was blasted and hazy, but he could make out vivid orange paint on his fingertips. The metal screaming wouldn’t stop. The hunter ran for the fire door, fearing neighbors would be brought to the corridor by the noise. The hall creaked and tilted in his vision, becoming a dark tunnel, and he could see the sounds, suddenly, as pistoning metal tentacles, fucking their way through the wall and the floor after him.
The hunter hurled himself through the fire door and down the stairs. He had to stop at the next landing and throw up. The vomit spread through the floor and the walls, turning the stairwell into a wet red digestive tract. He kept running down the stairs, almost slipping twice on his own vomit where it coated the soles of his shoes.
The hunter burst into the hallway, still half blind, trying not to scream, feeling bruises bloom and stiffen his flesh where the thing had attacked him. Through the glass of the front door he saw a tall flapping creature, some black-winged half-human thing moving its long awful limbs and shouting words he couldn’t decipher.
On the run, the hunter put two bullets through the glass and into the thing’s chest, smashed through the door by main force and momentum, and didn’t even break stride over the body on the ground as he sprinted off into the night.
Thirty-Five
PACKED INTO Tallow’s car, he and the CSUs were five minutes away from Tallow’s apartment when he said, “Kill the lights.”
Bat took out his own phone and thumbed something into it.
“This is what you did with my Twine unit.” Scarly sulked. “That cost me a hundred bucks.”
“What?” said Tallow.
“The thing I wired into your lighting circuit. That lets me turn your lights off over the Internet.”
“That cost a hundred bucks?”
“Yes. And I had to wait for it.”
“Damn,” said Tallow. “I hope he doesn’t shoot it.”
“You’re not funny. I am also not thrilled about my paintball gear being cannibalized for this idiot stunt.”
“Hey. Your office is filled with dangerous junk. Paintballs, dyes, detonator caps, God knows what else. You planned to use it all one day, right?”
“Well,” said Scarly. “Actually, some of it’s stuff that Talia won’t let me keep at home.”
Tallow blew stale air out of his lungs, wound down the window, and tried to get a chestful of something sweeter. “Our guy does two things. He kills people and he hides in plain sight. I want him marked. If he can’t hide, he loses power. If we can take that from him, we finally, finally have an edge on him. We just have to be patient tonight.”
“And lucky,” said Bat.
“That too,” said Tallow. “But both Turkel and Westover are pretty sure I’m going to get hit tonight. I wonder where Machen is.”
“Jerking off inside his money bin,” said Scarly.
Tallow found a parking space on the street that had the front of his apartment building in sight. The lights in Tallow’s apartment were off. He pulled into the spot and turned the engine off. “Okay. I’ll take the rear exit. Scarly will take the side escape. Bat can take the front.”
“Why do I get the front?” Bat whined.
“Honestly? Because this is our guy, and our guy doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy who usually takes the front door. He’s a hunter. I’m expecting him to come in and out of the back exit, with the fire escape as a secondary measure.”
“So now you’re saying I can’t handle CTS?”
“Make your mind up, Bat. Either you’re upset because he might come out the front, or you’re upset because I think Scarly is probably a better shot than you are.”
“I can be pissed about both. I am very clever and a good multitasker.”
“Get out of the car and check your gun, Bat.”
“I already checked it.”
“Check it again.”
Tallow got angry at himself, at the nerves in his own voice. Bat didn’t meet his eyes.
They got out of the car. Tallow locked it up and lifted and reseated his Glock, and they walked toward his apartment building.
“Wow,” said Scarly. “You live in a shitbox.”
“Take the side,” said Tallow, just as his apartment window shattered and a gunshot smacked the air with a flat report.
“Move,” Tallow said, and broke into a run. He was authentically terrified. He tried to count off imaginary time. He trusted that Fuck You Robot’s motion sensor had lit off the explosive caps behind the dye-filled paintballs, and that the one gunshot was an instinctive squeeze of the trigger as the things hit his man. He would have quickly worked out that Tallow wasn’t in the apartment and would be heading down. Tallow attempted calculations: How fast could someone run down that narrow stairway? Would his man have tried the elevator? Not while he was covered in fluorescent orange paint, probably, but if he made it into the elevator before anyone came out to see what the noise was—but
it was a gunshot, and people tended not to come out from behind their doors to look for actively firing guns…
Tallow got to the rear exit, lit by a single overhead lamp and surrounded on two sides by cheap mesh fencing. Someone exiting that door could come only one way—right now, that was straight toward Tallow. He flattened his back against the wall next to the door, drew his Glock, and waited.
He counted off a minute. He was straining his hearing listening for the sound of another egress being used, but his own pulse in his ears was drowning out all other noise.
Tallow was jerked around by a double gunshot and a crash of glass.
“Oh no,” he breathed, and then he ran. He was certain that the sound had come from the apartment building’s front.
Tallow felt like he was moving through molasses, like he was in one of those nightmares where you could barely move even though something terrible was happening. By the time he got around the front corner of the building, Scarly was already at the smashed main entrance, and Bat was on his back with two seared holes in his shirt.
Tallow looked around. Someone was running down the street away from him, past his own car. As the man passed under a streetlight, Tallow could discern a thin cloud of orange powder around his head.
Scarly was tearing Bat’s shirt open. “You stupid bastard,” she was saying. “You stupid bastard.”
Both rounds were buried in the Kevlar vest under Bat’s shirt, one of the ones Tallow had insisted they retrieve from Scarly’s car trunk earlier.
Bat coughed blood and then groaned. The groan made him convulse. Tallow guessed he had some broken bones. Scarly took out her phone. “I’m calling it in. Go and kill that fucker, John.”
Tallow took off after the hunter. Reaching his car, he looked down the street to see where his man was running. Tallow then unlocked and got into his car, jammed his phone into the dash and launched Ambient Security, and twisted the ignition. He made the car sweep around in a wide circle, tilting with the anger of its turn, and then Tallow rammed the accelerator down.