Gun Machine

“I think I met him. Yesterday. He was standing opposite the Pearl building when I went there to take another look at the scene. ECT wasn’t there, it was a shift break, and the follow-up team was late. He bummed a smoke off me. Talked to me about Native American things. About tobacco, and smoke. It was him. The reason I was late back with the food is that I met a woman who I think is sort of sideways connected to the whole thing. Homeless guy walks past with feathers in his hat like a comedy Indian, she freaks out, and I hear her say, at least once, ‘I thought it was him.’”

“John, if you met this guy, seriously, he could have killed you. Hell, I don’t know why he didn’t kill you.”

“You don’t see it yet, Scarly? He couldn’t kill me. He didn’t have the right weapon. Look at all this. All this is the evidence of a man who matches his weapons to his kills according to some compulsive, insane logic. He killed a guy running a rent-a-cop agency in Rochester with the gun that committed the first murder in Rochester. We have his cache. He didn’t expect to meet me on the street. He didn’t have the right weapon to kill me.”

“That’s a hell of a guess.”

“It feels right.”

“I mean about the weapon.” Scarly scowled. “He might have just decided you were an animal or an obstruction and knifed you.”

Tallow sucked a stray strand of onion out of his left back teeth. “You are a little ray of sunshine, Scarly.”

“You want to get with a sketch artist? Try a digital composite?”

“You’re the one who called him a ghost. No. We have to hope he left some DNA in the paint.” Tallow took another scan of the emulation. “This is about ghosts. And maps. I’m going to need a map. A big-ass map of Lower Manhattan. And some more books.”

“Is this working for you?” said Scarly, taking her own turn around the room.

“It’s helping.”

“I wish I’d seen the real place.”

“Me too. You might have been able to identify some of the scents, if nothing else. And I still don’t know how that door worked.”

Scarly stepped to the photographs of the rear of the apartment’s front door. “Yeah,” she said. “Bat looked at these. He thought he might be able to puzzle it out if he could see it properly but that the photos didn’t have enough information.” She looked back at Tallow, eyes narrowed. “You really think you met the guy?”

“I really do.”

“Fuck. Don’t tell anyone else, all right? You don’t want to be the guy who talked to his suspect and let the asshole walk.”

“No,” said Tallow, bumping back to ground level with a chill shudder. “No, I guess I don’t.”

Scarly walked past him to the elevator, punching his arm as she went. “Fucking correct.”

“Thanks for having my back.”

“You’re all right, John. Also, you bring good food. Even if it was a little late. Come on. We’ll collect my pet retard from his robot-fondling session and you can drive us over to Pearl Street. We can take a look at that door. That is some high-end security shit, and if nothing else, I’d like to know how it works.”

The words high-end security echoed in Tallow’s head. One of the invisible supports in the last arrangement he’d conjured got a little more substantial.

They went to collect Bat, who was hunched over the bench looking at some paperwork and hugging himself.

“We got some more ballistics processing back. John, do you know of a guy called Delmore Tenn?”

“Del Tenn?” said Tallow. “Sure. He was once assistant chief for Manhattan South. Years back. There was some accident, he pensioned out…I want to say his kid got killed? Something like that. The poor bastard fell apart.”

“Yeah,” said Bat, not taking his eyes off the paper. “Stray bullet from a gang firefight. His daughter was shot through the head. But they never found the gun.”

“Oh no,” said Tallow.

“A Kimber Aegis handgun. There was some weird rifling on it, like someone had been fucking around with the barrel. Would have been a snap to match bullet to gun. If they’d ever found the gun.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“You know what the worst thing is?” Bat said, his voice getting muted and flat. “The kid’s name was Kimberly. No one would have thought twice about it at the time. Would have made a sick joke, at most. Kim getting killed by a Kimber.”

Tallow didn’t have anything to say.

Bat wrapped his arms tighter around his body. “What the hell are we into? What’s fucking happening?”

Scarly walked around him to rescue a light coat that had slumped by the bench. “We’re going to take a look at the apartment on Pearl.”

Bat wanted to protest, or perhaps explain, but he visibly lost the energy for it even as he opened his mouth. Instead, he got up, went to a set of drawers with a wobbly column of paper and files balanced atop it, opened the second drawer, and took out a holstered gun. He silently clipped the holster onto his belt, picked up a grimy field bag from behind the bench, and then shouldered past Scarly and Tallow on his way to the elevator.