Gun Machine

Within a few minutes, the hunter was where he wanted to be: in sight of the Aer Keep Tower, a forty-four-floor glass spike sunk deep into the island. There was no strobing superimposition of Old Manhattan in his vision now. Something this viciously contemporary had him fully impaled in the present day.

The building repulsed him on a basic level. Nothing about it came from nature, not its alien glitter nor its computer-generated shape. It was a thing created in a lab. It had no place in his green world. It was the device of an invader.

He walked its perimeter. It was surrounded by high concrete walls, an urban blast bunker against the visual assault of the nearby public school, far too charmless and real for the unprotected eyes of the tower’s inhabitants. The residents’ view didn’t start until higher up, where all the adjacent streets and buildings became nothing but distant pretty toys laid out around their feet. The comfortable perspective of giants.

There was no true pedestrian entrance. The only way in or out was through the underground garage. If you wanted to leave on foot, you had to emerge from beneath the building and walk the driveway to the main gates. The design obviously dissuaded the more adventurous rich from going on a walking safari. Far better to leave in convoys of black SUVs with tinted windows and discuss in gyms and bars how the possession of money made them prisoners of New York City.

Or perhaps not, thought the hunter, surveying the main gates. Perhaps they thought themselves a new wave of colonists, inhabiting an airtight biosphere and exploring the moon of Manhattan.

This was where Jason Westover lived. Jason Westover and his wife.

The hunter watched cars dock and undock from Space Station Upper East Side for a while, calculating his own trajectories.

Twenty-One

THE LONGER Tallow looked at the wall, the more it seemed that the guns on it interlocked somehow.

The gaps in the surface coverage were very much starting to appear as deliberate omissions, spaces awaiting the right shapes. An immense clock awaiting the right cogs, lying in the sleep of potential until the day the correct pieces were placed and all the wheels could finally turn.

A voice said “John.” He was so lost in the gun machinery that it took long seconds for him to both register the voice and understand that it was his name being called.

Scarly was standing by the table. Her face was drawn and he could see her pulse in her throat. She held a sheet of printout. “This isn’t so funny anymore.”

“What?”

“The .44 Bulldog. It’s Son of Sam’s gun.”

“Seriously?”

“Same bullets they dug out of Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti in the summer of 1976. Those bullets went onto the ballistics database back when the DA in Queens declared the case reopened, in the late nineties. John, this is wrong.”

“In all kinds of ways.” Tallow stood up, knees protesting. He assumed, since Scarly was here, that he must have been sitting there for a couple of hours, but he had no sense of the time having passed.

“No, listen,” Scarly said, voice low and urgent. “If someone had been killed with this gun, it would have set off flashing lights. The bullet would have been dug out of the body and processed, and the odds are that it would have matched one of the Son of Sam bullets in the database. There are plenty. Even the bullets that were so deformed they couldn’t be fully matched to the weapon were scanned in and appended to the ballistics compilation on the gun. We don’t have a body for this gun.”

Tallow stretched, and regretted it instantly. Grimacing, he said, “So our guy dug his own bullets out of some poor bastard. Because, I’m telling you, there’s no way that gun is in this apartment without there being a body on it.”

“Our guy has a guy in the Property Office, John. And I don’t mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping a fucking eye on, like Son of Sam’s piece, for fuck’s sake—a guy in there who’ll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he’ll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he’s actually starting to scare me a bit now.”

“A couple of hundred kills to his name didn’t do that?”

“Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night.”

“You know,” said Tallow, “whenever I’m in danger of forgetting you’re a CSU, you always find a way to remind me. On the bright side, doesn’t Bat owe you ten bucks now?”

“Tallow. Listen. I am not going to be the one who tells my boss that our fucking serial handgun ninja got someone to steal a famous gun out of an evidence barrel and did at least one person with it and recovered the bullet and so we have at least one completely fucking unsolvable case on the list.”