Gun Machine

“The guy’s barely in his body, Jim. Listen to him. His voice is doing scales and he’s repeating himself in the same sentence. We might just want to wait until someone with crazy-person skills arrives.”

“Read him one of your history books. Maybe he’ll pass out and fall on his shotgun.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, shite. We don’t know yet if that shot he took hit anyone.” Rosato pushed on, flexing his fingers around his gun, holding it down by his leg.

They quietly ascended. The voice got louder. Rosato made the landing before the third floor, raised his gun, and took a step up before declaring, in a sharp steady bark, that he was police. And then he took another step up.

His knee folded under him.

Naked shotgun man stepped to the top of the stairs and fired down.

The blast tore off the upper left side of Jim Rosato’s head. There was a wet smack as a fistful of his brain hit the stairwell wall.

From his vantage, three steps back and to the right, Tallow could see Rosato’s eye a good five inches outside Rosato’s head and still attached to his eye socket by a mess of red worms. In that single second, Tallow abstractedly realized that in his last moment of life, James Rosato could see his killer from two different angles.

Rosato’s eyeball burst against the wall.

The thick air pulsated with shotgun reverberations.

The sound of Jim Rosato’s killer racking another shell seemed to go on forever.

Tallow had his Glock in a two-handed hold, fourteen in the clip and one in the pipe. He’d taken first pressure without knowing it.

Jim Rosato’s killer was a bodybuilder gone to burgers and long days on the sofa. He was trembling all over. Tallow could see the dim echoes of his muscle under the flab. The top of his head was bald and seemed too small to contain a human brain. His cock sat atop his pouchy balls like a gray clit. The name Regina was badly tattooed over his chest, stretched by his hairy tits. John Tallow could not in that moment see any reason why he should not just fucking kill him, so he put four hollow points through Regina, and a stopper through the shitbag’s stupid tiny head.

The stopper sent Jim Rosato’s killer falling backward. A thin stream of piss described the arc of his drop. He hit the floor, retched out one autonomic attempt at a breath, and died.

John Tallow, standing still, made himself breathe. The air was thick and bitter with gunshot residue and blood.

Nobody else was in the corridor. There was a hole in a wall behind the dead man. Maybe he had randomly shot a wall to get people’s attention. Maybe he was just crazy.

Tallow didn’t care. He called it in.

People wondered why John Tallow didn’t put a hell of a lot of effort into being a cop anymore.

Two

JOHN TALLOW stood while the medics scraped up and lifted and bagged and took away his partner of four years, and then he sat on the stairs silently so that they had to lift Rosato’s killer over him to get him down and out of the building.

People said things to him. Gunfire in close quarters had temporarily dulled his hearing, and he wasn’t that interested anyway. Someone told him that the lieutenant was driving out to tell Rosato’s wife the bad news. She liked to do that, the lieutenant, to take that weight off her people. He’d known her to do it three or four times in the past few years.

After a while, he became aware that someone was trying to get his attention. A uniformed police. Behind him, the Crime Scene Unit techs were moving around like beetles.

“This one apartment,” the uniform said.

“What?”

“We checked all the apartments, to make sure everyone was okay. But this apartment here, there’s a shotgun hole in the wall and no one’s answering the door. Did you check this one apartment?”

“No. Wait, what? That hole’s kind of low. I don’t think it can have hit anyone.”

“Well, maybe the occupant’s out at work. Though that’d make him kind of unique in this building so far.”

Tallow shrugged. “Force the door, then.”

“The door’s tight. Can’t imagine what kind of lock’s behind it, but it don’t want to give.”

Tallow got up. He knew buildings like these weren’t Fort Knox. But if the uniform said the door wasn’t giving, it was pointless to repeat the effort. The door wasn’t the thing. The hole was. He got down on one knee by the hole. The internal walls in these places weren’t worth the name. Plasterboard partitions, for the most part. When this building was crammed with people, way back when, it must’ve been like living in a hive.

The hole was a foot across. Tallow peered through it. No light in there. Tallow shifted his position to let in ambient light from the hallway. The uniform watched him frown.

“Give me your flashlight,” Tallow said.

Tallow twisted it on and played it through the hole. Things glinted in the dark, as if he were shining the flashlight into the teeth of an animal deep in a cave.

“Get a ram,” Tallow said.