Gun Machine

Tallow got himself attached to the team directed to search the less used basement regions of the detention complex. It had turned out that there was an informal system at work in which tired cops between heavy shifts were allowed to grab sack time in disused cells out of sight of the main workings of the complex. Tallow felt faintly aggrieved that no one had ever told him about it.

Three hours of poking around (which was hell on Tallow’s leg) turned up a cell down in the guts of the place that showed signs of more regular use. Someone had been finger-painting on one wall. Swirls. Scarly matched the paint to that recovered from Pearl Street, and they were off to the races.

At this point, Turkel started talking for his life, explaining that he’d been forced at gunpoint to take the shield of a dead detective with no family and give it and the key to the hunter so that he could use a cell at the bottom of the Tombs as a hideout. Tallow thought it must have been very pleasant for the hunter, being able to hide so close to the buried surface of Werpoes. He could probably have pretended he was sitting in a teepee or whatever in the village at night.

Machen, who’d accidentally started the whole thing, was long gone. He’d gotten on a plane to Mexico a little over an hour after his meeting in Central Park, and his whereabouts were currently unknown. The whereabouts of a considerable quantity of Vivicy currency were also being questioned. Tallow doubted very much that he’d ever see Andrew Machen again.

Turkel’s stories crumbled as the hunter kept talking. He talked like a man who hadn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time and was determined to make the quantity up in as short a period as possible. Tallow, Scarly, and Bat could provide evidence in support of enough of it that the administrative-leave story was cooked up, and Turkel was essentially placed under house arrest.

Today, the case had ascended out of Tallow’s hands and into those rarefied Olympian heights at One PP where the police gods decided how to correctly handle the affairs of foolish mortals and limping detectives.

Tallow was due to attend his lieutenant’s office at Ericsson Place to officially sign off on seven days’ leave. A leave that he was assured he would be able to return from. But he was on Baxter Street, parking a new car—new to him, anyway, though it drove like something out of The Flintstones—and then walking across to the Tombs.

“Asshole,” muttered a sergeant as Tallow signed in.

“Where is he?” Tallow said. “Same place?”

“Don’t know who you mean, buddy,” the sergeant said.

Tallow sighed and read the sergeant’s name tag. “Okay. I’ll be sure to give your name to the first deputy commissioner when she asks me later how the Tombs are running today.”

“Fuck you,” said the sergeant. “He’s in the same place. Just got back from court. Asshole.”

“Thanks, Sarge,” said Tallow brightly, and limped off.

The hunter lay alone in a holding cell, reading a book. He didn’t have much choice about the lying. His crutches were propped by his bunk, his legs were mostly plaster, and he was in a back brace and a neck brace. The trauma team told Tallow that the hunter had gotten off lightly, considering, and most of the damage had been done by his being put through the door rather than his being hit by the car, due to the walls absorbing most of the kinetic energy when the car struck them. Someone had dressed the hunter in parts of a cheap suit. His shoes were off.

“Hello, Detective,” the hunter said. “Excuse me not standing up. It takes two other people for me to do it, at the moment.”

“Hello.” Tallow still couldn’t bring himself to use the man’s name. It lessened the man, somehow, and Tallow didn’t want him lessened.

“I just returned from the courthouse,” he said, not looking up from his book. “It turns out I’m going to live a long and productive life.”

“I heard,” said Tallow. The fix was already in. In return for cooperation, and to save haggling around the vexing question of whether an unmedicated schizophrenic can be held responsible for his actions across twenty years, the hunter would get life imprisonment without possibility of parole in a maximum-security facility, probably Sing Sing.

“So,” said the hunter, eyes still on his book. “Are we doing more questions today?”

“Just one,” said Tallow. “What were the guns on the wall for? Was it wampum?”

The hunter’s eyes flew to Tallow with delight. “Wampum! You knew it!”

“A wampum belt wrapped around an entire apartment?”

“Very close, Detective, very close. It was wampum. And wampum is information. Just as art is information, and song is information, and music, and dance. You can imagine it—and, hell, now I can imagine it, with the amount of medication swimming inside me—as a giant machine. A great big apartment-size machine, like the early computers that filled a room, running its own code.”

“But it wasn’t finished, was it?” said Tallow. “When I walked around inside it, I could see blank spots. Missing elements.”