Gun Machine

  Scarly took a swig of beer and muttered something about eating only once a day, something about a warrior’s diet.

  CSU crazy talk. Tallow pulled another cigarette from his pack with a sigh, and offered the pack to them. Bat considered it with shining eyes, but when Scarly waved it off, he did too. “Okay. Did we get the use of that floor space?”

  “Hell yeah,” said Bat, and with that aspirate Tallow could tell that it wasn’t water but vodka in the long glass. “I don’t know what your boss said to our boss, but once again, it worked like magic. I really kind of want to meet your boss. I think she might be a wizard.”

  Tallow’s hands were still shaking. He tightened his finger muscles until they stopped. It hurt. Tallow was okay with that, so long as his hands did as they were told.

  “Lots of those around,” Tallow said.

  “So,” Scarly said, “we’re doing what you asked for, right now. Got some people making copies and moving whiteboards and shit. I don’t know what it’s going to achieve, but we’re doing it. What we need from you, Detective, is for you to work the cases we give you evidence on.”

  Tallow raised an eyebrow.

  “You asked us what you could do to make our lives better. It’s this. Work these as individual cases. If we deal with a couple of these right off the bat, the pressure’s going to come off us for a while.”

  Tallow shook his head. “How can I close them? It’s all one guy. We close all of them or we close none of them.”

  Scarly drank off some more stout. “You said close. I said deal with. If we’ve got to work with you on this, then I don’t want you getting lost in the woods. When we give you ballistics and shit, I can’t have you staring at the big picture and not seeing the individual cases.”

  “What she means,” said Bat, “is that if we get a couple of these to the point where all we’re missing is the identity of the killer? That’s enough to show we’re making progress.”

  “Oh God. You’re both insane.”

  “What?”

  Tallow took a sharp breath to forestall an explosion. “Everything but the killer? Make the case with everything but the case? You’re—”

  Tallow stopped.

  Scarly waited, and then said, “You told us you like history.”

  “We’re just proposing a methodology here,” said Bat. “We don’t want you sitting in a simulated crazy-killer room trying to do cop voodoo, is what we’re saying. Work up a few of the unsolved to the point where the killer is the only thing missing from the picture. We do that often enough—”

  “—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 insane. 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.

  Fifteen

  THE HUNTER moved down the blo
ck 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.