Gun Machine

Mike looked around from the rear, smiling. The hunter skewered his eye, thrust deep into his head, put both hands to the grip of the knife, and lifted. Mike hung from the blade, a couple of inches off the ground, dying for a stubborn fifteen seconds. The hunter shucked his skull like an oyster and shook him off the blade. The body collapsed to the floor. A slice of wet gray brain oozed out of his destroyed eye.

The rear of the van hadn’t been closed. It was two-thirds filled with plastic crates. The crates were filled with guns. His guns.

The hunter was still for long moments, entranced by their destroyed beauty. All their true meaning smashed away by idiots who demeaned them, tossing them into ugly boxes like so many farming implements.

But they still had beauty. They could have meaning again. Even this raw amputated chunk of his machine would still have use.

In the envelope was the plastic lump he felt earlier. He took the key out and used it to unlock the shutter, which clattered up into the ceiling. The hunter closed the rear door of the truck and got behind the wheel. This was horrible to him, but it was necessary for the task. This was, as far as the hunter was concerned, now a rescue. He touched the ignition key, still in the small mouth of the car’s workings, with an experimental brush. It buzzed under his fingertips with insect horror. The hunter clenched that fist, and then grasped the key and turned with determined commitment. The truck awoke, a vile, coughing parody of animal life. He summoned his memory of how it worked and gingerly operated the thing, edging it out of the garage and onto the street. There was a sour pleasure at having correctly recalled how to drive, something he hadn’t done in years, if not decades. He parked ten feet down the street, stepped out quickly, pulled the shutter back down, and locked it.

The hunter drove his machine to John Tallow’s house, the black branches of the Mannahatta forest clawing with hate at its glass and tin the whole way.

No car journey in New York City was short, even at this time of night—What was the time? he thought, for he couldn’t see stars, and the dashboard held no clock—but he felt like he’d crossed the awful mathematics of Lower Manhattan in a reasonable period. He found parking on the street within sight of Tallow’s apartment building, and consulted the envelope one more time. Someone—he assumed Westover—had been busy. A rough plan of Tallow’s apartment’s floor had been sketched out, with indications for placement and exits. The hunter stuck his head out the window and, with just a few seconds’ difficulty, located north. Applying it to the sketch, he found he should be able to see Tallow’s apartment’s window.

Just as he discovered the correct window, the light inside Tallow’s apartment went off.

The hunter got out of the truck, locked it up, and strolled across the street. He had time, intelligence, and the correct tool for the job in his bag.

As he approached the front of the property, he realized the main entrance was locked. But before he could reach it, a reasonably drunken couple in their twenties arrived and, laughing at their inability to make their fingers hold the key properly, took a useful minute to open the door.

The hunter stepped in behind them, the key to the truck in his hand, the metal protruding, his head down and weaving. “Thanks. Saved me the trouble of having to try that myself.” The couple laughed, too wrapped up in each other to even look at his face as they headed for the elevator. The hunter angled away quickly, went through a fire door to the stairwell.

At Tallow’s floor, he waited behind the fire door that opened onto the corridor for a minute or two. The fire door was propped open by his foot, creating a gap through which he could listen. He was hunting for the sounds of someone preparing to leave his apartment, trying to filter footfall and conversation from out of television noise and what he guessed to be some kind of video game. The same sounds that would make him so ill when he spent too long at the Pearl Street building. Only when he’d covered enough surfaces in gunmetal did the noise grow deadened.

This was the time.

The hunter found Tallow’s apartment. He had two options at this point: silent entry and bringing Tallow to the door. Silent entry was always preferred but sometimes defeated by security measures.

The hunter took the card that opened the Spearpoint garage, flexed it, rubbed a little spittle on its short edge with his thumb, and slipped it into the space between the door and its frame. He worked it, gently and patiently and silently, until he felt the latch start to lift. With slow and precise applications of force, the hunter eased the latch behind the strike plate, maintained as much pressure upon it as he dared, and moved the door open. There were no chains and no dead bolts. John Tallow was evidently a very comfortable and unworried man.