Gun Machine

“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.

“I wanted to hurt her. To scare her. To make her shut up. She’s smart, but she, I don’t know. She’s not worldly. The fight got ugly. And. Well. Like I said. So I told her.”

“You told her.” The hunter kept his voice flat and uninflected. It was not how he felt.

“I told her everything. To frighten her into shutting up. Into not fucking picking at it all the time.” Momentarily unconcerned about keeping his hands in view and moving slowly, Westover almost convulsively passed his right hand across his eyes. His head bobbed, and the hunter could see tendons working in his neck. The hunter waited.

“Well. It worked,” Westover said with a forced, sick laugh. “I scared the shit out of her. She, um. She had a bit of a breakdown. So, no, you cunt, she hasn’t looked well for the last year or so. I don’t know if she’s ever going to be well again. And I walk her stupid fucking dog at night because I can’t stand her eyes on me all night every fucking night. All right? So now I want to know what happens after I get you this information. Are you going to keep coming back here to find me? Do I have to give your description to the guards at my apartment building?”

“That,” murmured the hunter, “wouldn’t be the most clever thing you could do tonight.”

“Answer my fucking question.”

The hunter pinned down his sudden need to instill in Westover a new and bloody wisdom about using that tone with him. He pinned it down and placed it in a far copse in the back of his mind, for now, secreted against future opportunities, like a nut stored for the winter. The hunter took a step back and said: “I’ll answer your question. I will continue to protect you, and take your tribute for the hunt, as I have always done. I intend to recover my tools, if at all possible, and to make any investigation into them too difficult for the police to pursue. It is my hope that very soon my work and our relationship will return to normal. The one thing I can comfortably predict is that you and the others will never be satisfied with your places in life, no matter how elevated your perches may be. However, we must take into account the possibility that I may become seen and known.”

Westover cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, trying to keep the hunter’s own eyes in his line of sight. The hunter turned to the side by ten degrees, away from what little light there was, the darkness gathering on him.

“Should that happen,” said the hunter, “should everything I’ve achieved since we first spoke be lost forever and should I lose the freedom of my island? Then you will have to die. And now, so will your wife. Do you understand that?”

“Nobody has to die,” said Westover.

“Somebody always has to die,” said the hunter, and took a second step back that had him swallowed by the trees and gone.

Sixteen

TALLOW, SCARLY, and Bat tumbled out of the Fetch sometime after eleven. Tallow wasn’t drunk, and he was quite deliberately not completely relaxed, but he felt better about the world than he had when he’d entered the place. Bat and Scarly were, however, in states of reasonably confused refreshment.

Scarly put her hands in her pockets and smiled up at Tallow. “We are going home now. I am going home to my wife, and Bat is going home to his whatever Bat does when no one is looking.”

“Save the phone number for the night before your next day off, will you?” Bat giggled.

“You incredible fuckbag. That’s it. You’re paying for the cab, and the cab will drop me at home first.”

“Whatever,” Bat said, still giggling as he started off down the street. “Let’s find a fucking cab, then. G’night, John.”