Gun Machine

“This is amazing,” Tallow said, and meant it. He wasn’t just taken aback at how well and how completely and how intelligently they’d done it. He was genuinely shocked that they’d done it at all. Tallow had expected to be down here all morning doing it himself, and he hadn’t been looking forward to meticulously matching photos to floor plans and codes, let alone scavenging CSU offices for tacks and adhesive. Walking around the perimeter of the space, he knew immediately that he couldn’t have done it as well as this. Laying this broad plastic sheeting over the photos on the floor was inspired, and Tallow wouldn’t have thought of that at all.

“What’s the plant for?” asked Bat, bending down and peering at it suspiciously. “I don’t trust plants. Food things come from them.”

“It’s a tobacco plant. I had the idea that I could smell a kind of tobacco in the apartment.”

Bat turned his judgmental squint on Tallow. “This is your much strong cop voodoo.”

“Well,” said Tallow, “we live in hope. But this is really incredible. Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome.” Scarly grinned. “Would you like to be alone with your plant now?”

Tallow walked into the middle of the simulated living room. “For a couple of hours. Until you get the ballistics back on the Bulldog. Then I’m going to want to talk about paint chips.”

“You wanna decorate?” Bat asked, raising his voice. Tallow was fairly sure he’d spent the past thirty seconds threatening the plant in a menacing whisper.

“I saw paints on things in the apartment. I want to know more about those paints.”

“You sound,” said Scarly, “like a man developing a case.”

“I’m—no. Not yet. I’m a man telling himself a story, right now…”

Tallow found his voice trailing off as he looked around. He didn’t see Scarly and Bat exchange a clever glance, just heard Scarly say “We’ll come and get you” as they both left for the elevator. They were already gone when he turned to thank them again.

He did a first walk of the emulation. There had never been a bed in this apartment, and the kitchen had been ripped out by his man long ago. There was nothing but guns. Looking down, he found the flintlock at the center of a large swirl of weapons. A goat’s eye in the middle of a gunmetal sun.

The CSUs really had done an incredible, ingenious job. Everything was positioned correctly. Walking back into the living room, Tallow got a new perspective. The arc behind the front door had to be, and was, clear of weapons, otherwise the door wouldn’t open. If Tallow stood in the arc, he could see a space close to the middle of the room that could be reached by stepping into what were now obviously two gaps in the gun coverage, each big enough to accommodate a foot.

He tried it. Reached the central space. Sat down in it, cross-legged. The position had him facing the broad wall adjacent to the door. He sat and stared at the wall, hands in his lap. Scanned the mosaic of photos. Fought to see something in them beyond arrangements of guns mounted by a very careful lunatic who had been killing people in Manhattan and getting away with it for ten or twenty years.

Not a thing. Not a thing yet, he told himself, and went to retrieve his coffee. There was no way he could re-create the lighting, he knew, which was a shame. It really had had that churchlike effect on Tallow, standing in that apartment on Pearl Street for the first time. Maybe he could just play a CD of classically inspired ambient music, he thought, and smiled a little at it. Maybe find out the name of whatever Muzak they played in the lobby at Vivicy.

Tallow sat back down in the virtual space on the floor of the simulated apartment, gazed at photographs of murder weapons, and tried to understand where he really was and what they really were.

Twenty

THE HUNTER awoke gently from a peaceful sleep at the break of dawn, its rosy fingers softly touching his face as he slept beneath a great Central Park cypress by the water. He sat up, cross-legged, silent, breathing deeply as the rising sun warmed him. The hunter then stood, pulled some leaves from the cypress, crushed them in his hand to release their oils, and rubbed them under his armpits to minimize his odor.

Walking quietly around the park, he gathered cattail shoots from the water’s edge, lamb’s-quarter leaves, hen of the woods mushroom flesh, a little mountain mint, and wood sorrel, and he returned to his spot under the cypress to eat it with a piece of squirrel meat. He was always careful never to take too much from one plant. He was a hunter, and that meant he never knew when he might have to rely on foraging to live. The moment he allowed himself to believe that the movement of seasons was perfectly repeating and broadly predictable, he would be creating the conditions for his own death.

Having eaten, the hunter began to walk. He exited Central Park at East Seventy-Second Street.