Gun Machine by Warren Ellis Page B

what he says. I haven’t looked at the gun since he fired it. An old Charter Arms Bulldog .44. Cheap-ass gun gussied up to look like a serious gun. Wouldn’t be surprised if a chunk of the hammer had flaked off and blown back.”
    Tallow tried the cup again, and this time it didn’t burn. He sipped the coffee. Corpse mud and cloying sweetener. He drank more anyway. “Why do I know that brand? I can’t put my finger on it, but it…” He grimaced.
    “Son of Sam.” Scarly smiled. It might have been the first time he saw her smile. “Son of Sam used a .44 Bulldog.”
    “How would you remember that? You a gun freak?”
    “I’m a CSU. We’re all gun freaks. And Son of Sam is still an open case around here. Of which some grim asshole reminds us every six months. Like it’s our fault or something. I wasn’t even fucking born when he was arrested.”
    “You’re kidding me. I thought the new DA closed the case.”
    Scarly laughed harshly. “And give up a stick to beat NYPD with? Listen, you, me, and anyone else without a brain tumor knows Son of Sam was a lone gunman. But if you’re crazy, and you squint at it, and you’ve maybe got something the size of a golf ball sitting on the part of your brain that you use to put your underwear on properly in the morning—then, hell yes, you see evidence of a magic devil cult helping the guy blow complete strangers away before going home to hump Rosemary’s Baby or whatever Satanic people did for fun in the 1970s.”
    Bat swept back in, cradling a gun in a clear plastic bag. “You’re going to love this.” He grinned.
    Bat laid the package in front of Tallow.
    “What the hell?” said Tallow.
    “I know, right?” Bat was delighted.
    “It’s a flintlock. ”
    “It is in fact an Asa Waters Model 1836 flintlock pistol, which sold new at a hefty nine dollars. The last flintlock sold to the U.S. government, in fact; a .45-caliber, muzzle-load. Based on the kind of naval boarding pistol that you could load with shrapnel, nails, or any other thing that was lying around.”
    Tallow picked it up, turned it around in his hands. “It’s not in great shape.”
    Bat frowned. “You’re not getting it. Everything we know right now suggests that every gun in that apartment was used to kill someone. So what you’re looking at is a pistol nearly two hundred years old that our guy restored to where it’d make a reliable murder weapon and then put it up on the wall to rot. He found it God knows where, rusting out and probably near water, and got it to the point where it’d work. In fact, I’d lay odds that all that damage and scoring up around the muzzle? I bet that wasn’t him.”
    It was gorgeous, Tallow had to admit. The voluptuous curve of the thing, and the rich dark wood that had clearly been polished lovingly at some moment in the recent past. The metal had lost its luster now, and there was some light pitting here and there, but, again, you could see where the metal had been pared and deeply cleaned. It did not look its age. On one of its plates was an insignia of some kind, a little too blurred by the years to be clear, and a word that might have been Rooster above it. Not Rooster. It was a longer word, but the incising had grown too shallow.
    “You’re not going to test-fire it?”
    “Hell no. Pointless, anyway. Our guy would very probably have had to make his own slug. What we need to do is run a query through the computer for any body in the past twenty years that was found with a soft lead bullet pancaked inside it behind a .45-caliber hole. I mean, who knows. What I really want to do is cut the barrel open and get a look inside.”
    “Amazing.” Tallow laid the gun down with more reverence than when he had picked it up. “Thank you for showing me. So, you’re shooting the scene, matching the shots to the floor plan, taking them out…”
    “Yeah,” Bat said, moving the gun back toward him, loving it with his wide eyes. “Some of them have paint on, as