“He checks his modern history,” said Tallow, after thought, “but he doesn’t live it. I know my modern city history, but he lives in deep history. I didn’t see him, and he didn’t see me, because we’re moving through two different cities.”
“When did you have time to get high today?” said Scarly. “And also, why didn’t you smoke us out too? I thought you’d adopted us. Bastard.”
“He didn’t see you?” Bat said warily. “That means he did see you, right? You’ve seen the guy?”
“He thinks so,” said Scarly, quickly. “And we’re keeping that to ourselves.”
To curtail further conversation on that subject for the moment, Tallow snapped on the police radio. All at once, horror tumbled out of it.
A ten-year-old boy shot dead in the South Bronx. The related chatter said the three assailants had been trying to hit his father. The father had been pushing a stroller. The baby inside was dead, preserved and painted, with packs of heroin inside its gutted stomach.
An elderly couple in Queens found dead execution style in their own bed. Someone had stood on the bed and fired down into their heads as they slept. There was fresh semen spattered over the entry wounds. Their son was missing.
One man hacked to death with a sharp spade by his neighbor in Brooklyn, reportedly the conclusion of an argument over a borrowed barbecue grill. The victim had been fixing his car at the time of the attack.
A building worker pulled off a nurse in a barroom toilet in Hell’s Kitchen. The nurse might make it, said the responding cop, but the cop’s own partner might have lost an eye.
One cop down in Briarwood, following the explosive discovery that a small restaurant was holding weapons and at least a kilo of coke in the back. They were stepping on the coke right there in the kitchen and sending out wraps with their food deliveries.
“Fucking hell,” Scarly said.
The serial rapist that some wits were calling One Man One Jar had hit Park Slope again in the early morning. He completed his assaults by inserting a glass jar or bottle into the victim’s vagina and then breaking it. Tension in the voices of police: nobody saw anything, nobody knew anything, nobody gave a shit….
Someone had thrown a container of battery acid and ammonia in the face of a Port Authority cop, out by where Twelfth Avenue met Joe DiMaggio Highway. Attending officers were retching as they talked about how the man’s face had basically turned into warm string cheese and stuck to his own shoulders and chest.
According to eyewitnesses, a man attempted to rob a Chase bank on Fifth Avenue by East Twenty-Seventh, then declared that he was a “disintegrating angel,” went outside, shot a passing postal worker, pressed his gun into his own eye, loudly stated, “Disneyland was shitty too,” and pulled the trigger.
“Man had a point,” said Bat. “Sesame Street used to give me nightmares too. That thing that lived in the garbage can? I swear it was that that made me want to be police.”
Tallow studied Bat in the rearview mirror for additional signs of mental illness. “You’re kidding me.”
“The thing lived in a garbage can, ate shit, and verbally abused people. How many crimes do you want? Turn that goddamn thing off. It’s depressing.”
“I like it,” said Tallow. “You know, there was once a website that played ambient music under the LAPD radio band. I used to try that in the car, with a CD player. It was nice.”
“Are you even allowed to have CD players in units?” Scarly asked.
“Not really. It’s why my partner ripped it out. That and he didn’t like the music. I wouldn’t let him put a satellite radio in so he could listen to his retarded talk shows, so we called it even and just listened to the police band. Like I say, I got to like it. Flows of information.”
“Flows of shit,” muttered Bat. “I’d go insane, listening to that all day. It’s just a river of ‘Hey, this crazy disgusting thing just happened, and hey, here’s another one, and another, and another, has your brain caught fire yet?’ It’s like disaster porn or something.”
Tallow had to admit, if only to himself, that things did sound worse than yesterday. He shrugged it off as he brought the car in for a landing behind the ECT truck on Pearl Street. Getting out, he had to look around to see if there was a man in a heavy suede coat standing in wait nearby. When he’d assured himself there wasn’t, he led the two CSUs toward the building.
The doors banged open before Tallow could reach them, and the two ECTs he’d met yesterday bumped and humped and bitched their way on to the sidewalk with their two-wheeled handcart piled with stackable plastic boxes. “Asshole,” said one to Tallow.
“Nice to see you again too,” Tallow said. “What’s this? Lunch break or shift break?”
“Neither. We’re out.”
“This is our last load,” said the other. “Our expertise has been redeployed to some other fucking location. Our expertise being wiping CSU’s asses.”
Tallow shot a look that tagged both Bat and Scarly, and it said Do not. They showed their teeth like ill-trained dogs being told not to eat the neighbor’s baby. Tallow twisted back toward the ECTs, who were shoving their boxes into the rear of the truck.
“We’re not done here,” said Tallow.
“Oh,” said the first, “we are utterly fucking done here. We got our orders. Why them orders weren’t given two days ago when we started moving your little collection, I do not fucking know. But someone has seen the light, and we are freed.”
The second was already getting into the driver’s seat. “And you are screwed. But we don’t care. What kind of asshole drops that kind of shit on the New York Police Department?”
“Your kind,” said the first, pointing his finger at Tallow and stepping into the truck’s passenger seat.
They drove off.
“What the hell is going on?” Scarly said.
Tallow took out his phone. “I don’t know,” he said, “but my boss can at least find out.”
While he was placing the call, another truck pulled into the space vacated by the ECT vehicle. Tallow looked at it, registered what he was looking at, and canceled the call. The truck bore the Spearpoint logo on the side.
Tallow, in a taut voice, quickly said, “You let me do the talking. You do not say a word.” They caught his tone, nodded, and stepped back.
The driver got out, an athletic woman in a Spearpoint uniform who had cropped hair and a rippled scar down one side of her neck that she did nothing to hide. She wore a strange, brutal-looking gun in a metal holster frame, one that was machined to release the weapon with a glide despite the odd fittings slung under the barrel. She glanced at Tallow as she started toward the back of the truck. “Please move along, sir,” she said, not unpleasantly.
Tallow badged her. “Not just yet. Can I help you with something?”
“Oh!” she said, with a smile. “Yes! We’re here to process a crime scene at this building here?”
“Really,” said Tallow.
“Really,” said the other Spearpoint employee as he got out of the passenger side, a man under six feet in height who very probably knew the names of most of the muscles in his body. He made the simple act of blinking look like he was burning hated fat cells. “There a problem here, Officer?”
Tallow saw that they were both wearing ruggedized touchscreen devices on their belts, Bluetooth earpieces, and odd touchscreen strips pinned to their chests where name tapes would usually have been.
“Detective,” said Tallow. “And you know what? I don’t know yet. I’m used to crime scenes being processed by the Crime Scene Unit and Evidence Collection Teams. So how about you tell me how you came to be here, and we’ll work things out from there?”
The guy opened the back doors of the truck, clearly bothered on some base level that he wasn’t allowed to rip them clean off and then eat them. “Our boss told us to show up here and collect the crap in apartment three A.”
The woman had clearly decided to run defense, and she actually put herself between Ta
llow and her partner, even though Tallow hadn’t moved. “Our boss called your boss, I guess. Everyone knows CSU’s overstretched, right? That’s why you created ECTs, and now ECTs are overstretched. Especially with a job like this one, from what we hear about it. So our boss called your boss and offered the use of…well, us.”
“Well,” said Tallow, “that’s an incredibly kind thing to do. But we have processes we follow in a crime scene that are a bit more complicated than ‘collect the crap,’ which is why this sort of thing isn’t outsourced.”
“We’re trained,” said the man, lifting out a black kit bag. “That’s why the office sent us. We’ve completed courses and gotten certificates. Hell, we’ve probably got more on the ball than your CSUs. You know what those people are like.”
Tallow did move, then, to put himself between the Spearpoint people and his CSUs. “I’m going to need to know who your boss spoke to.”
She looked at her partner, sucking her teeth. He put down a complex chrome dolly, looked back, and shrugged.
“Okay,” she said, and tapped the right end of the glass strip on her breast. She dipped her head, touched a finger to her earpiece, and said, “Ops, please.”
“Oh my God,” breathed Bat. “She has a Star Trek comm badge.”
“No, she doesn’t,” said Tallow. “There were similar things being tested for use in hospitals a few years back, with voice control but a more basic technology set. I read about it in a magazine. We’re just looking at the more up-to-date version.”
“I want one,” said Bat.
“You can take it off her corpse once I’m done with her,” Scarly hissed.
“Behave yourselves,” Tallow whispered.
The woman finished a short conversation and gestured at Tallow. “We’ve been cleared to operate through a Captain Waters at the 1st Precinct?”
Tallow swallowed the groan the name elicited, took a breath, and summoned a smiling mask. “That’s my boss’s boss. We’ll head up to the apartment with you. Not,” he said with his hands up, “to keep an eye on you. We were here to review the scene again.”
She smiled with some relief and, on some impulse of reaching for a friend, stuck out her hand. “Cool. I’m Sophie.”
He shook her hand, matching the strength of her grip closely. “I’m John. These are my colleagues Scarlatta and Bat.”
“Bat?” She grinned at the CSU, who was studying her chest for technological purposes. “What’s that short for?”
“Batmobile,” he said.
“Behave yourself, damn it,” said Tallow, moving to open the apartment building doors.
Sophie began to pick up the kit bag and grimaced. “Jesus, Mike. Did you put your car in here?”
“Hey, it’s not my problem if you don’t train as hard as I do.”
Sophie lifted the kit bag. Watching her, Tallow realized that although it was not too heavy for her, Tallow himself wouldn’t have been able to get it off the sidewalk. Mike loaded collapsed plastic boxes on to the dolly, and Tallow held the doors open for them.
“Mike,” said Mike, not looking at Tallow.
“John,” Tallow said. “Nice gun.”
Mike stopped as he got into the building’s hallway and reappraised Tallow. “You noticed that, huh?”
“I did. I don’t recognize the make or the fittings.”
“You wouldn’t, pal. These are made only for Spearpoint.”
“You have custom guns?” said Scarly, interested despite herself.
Mike enjoyed noticing Scarly. “Sure. You want to see?”
“Mike,” Sophie warned.
“Just being friendly,” said Mike, standing the dolly up and drawing the weird gun.
“It’s a SIG?” Scarly said, uncertain, bobbing up and down to consider the thing from different angles.
“SIG Sauer X911. Made exclusively for Spearpoint. See, it’s badged on top and on the grip there. And check out the grips. That’s African blackwood. That shit’s so hard they have to machine it with tungsten carbide. And tungsten carbide, that’s the shit they use for mining drills.”
“But what’s that you’ve got slung under the barrel, on the rail?”
“Camera. When I clear the safety? The camera switches on, and it streams video back to the local Spearpoint ops room. And I swing this section around, and see? Switches on when it reaches the upright, and that’s a night-vision screen right in front of the sights. The camera, it knows when it’s dark, and switches to night vision all on its own. Laser sight in the front top there, see?”
“Jesus. This is insane. But doesn’t all this make the thing nose-heavy?”
“All superlight materials. If anything, it helps the accuracy. I tell you, I’ve seen a new model being tested? A prototype? Fires rocket bullets.”
“You’re kidding me. Like the old Gyrojet?”
“I dunno about that. But I’ve seen this baby being test-fired, and it’s recoilless. Fires a .50-cal rocket bullet with no recoil.”
“When you’re done showing off the toys,” said Sophie, trying to ignore that Bat was standing very close to her.
“I would very much like to marry your chest,” Bat said.
“Bat. Back off. Now,” snapped Tallow. And then, to Sophie, “He means your communications devices. Bat likes electronics.”
“It’s still not very appropriate,” Sophie said, moving away from Bat.
“He’s a CSU,” said Tallow with a smile that wasn’t the evil smile he was smiling inside. “What can you do? You know what they’re like.” Tallow regretted his second of immature relish when he saw her mortified face. She’d tried to be civil to him, and he’d stepped on her. Tallow wished, not for the first time, that he was better with people. He’d never really had to be before he’d been to this place. He discovered then that he hated this building, this airless space with its sheen of human grime.
“Where’s the elevator?” Mike asked, sheathing his weapon. Tallow felt a little better about telling Mike there wasn’t an elevator and watching his face. But then Mike picked up the dolly, boxes and all, with one hand, took the kit bag from Sophie with the other, and started jogging up the stairs with “Third floor, right?”
“There,” said Scarly, “goes a man who has names for all his muscles.”
“I was just thinking that,” Tallow said. “Serious gym rat.”
“No, I mean he’s named all his muscles. That’s a man who calls one of his muscles Steve.”
Tallow waved Sophie on, saying “After you,” and then he grasped Bat firmly by the collar as he tried to follow. “Get it under control, Bat.”
“I just want to touch her groin. Where the belt device is.”
“I will touch you in the groin with my gun if you don’t secure your shit, Bat,” Tallow said, more quietly. “I want both of you to watch their every single move. Make like they’re the crime scene.”
“Do we get to complain yet?” Scarly said.
“When we get up there. But it’s not like you’re complaining, okay? It’s like you’re asking questions, learning their process, wondering if their clever company has good ideas. With me?”
“Okay, John.”
The pair from Spearpoint were looking through the hole in the wall at 3A.
“Goddamn,” Mike said, pulling off the fresh police tape. “This looks like it might be two trips.”
“So,” said Scarly, “what’s your procedure, Mike? I mean, once you’ve processed the guns at the scene and loaded them up. You going to drive them straight over to me at One Police Plaza? We have good coffee.”
“Nah,” said Mike, hands on his knees, bent over and looking into the room. “Too late in the day. We’re going to warehouse them tonight and drive them over tomorrow.”
“You’re going to…” Scarly began. Tallow put a hand on her shoulder. She brushed it off, but she knew what it meant. “…All right. I’m just going to say, that does put more links in the chain of evidence, which means more paperwork for you guys. It’d be a lot eas
ier to drive everything right over to One PP.”
“We have people to do paperwork,” Mike commented absently.
“You have to remember,” Sophie said, uncollapsing a plastic box, “that we’re a lot more deeply staffed than you. Spearpoint’s capitalized to the extent that we can do a job like this for the city pro bono.”
“You’re not billing the city?” Tallow said, genuinely surprised.
“Why would we? Bad business.”
“I would have thought not getting paid was bad business,” Bat said, failing to ingratiate himself by unfolding another box for Sophie.
“That’s not how it works. You don’t crush your competitors by charging more. You undercut, you make yourself useful, then indispensable, and then you offer just one extra service for a little more money. And then another. And then another. And before the mark knows it, she’s giving you all her money and all your competitors are dead.”
Sophie realized what she was saying and gave an apologetic smile. “I know how that sounds, and I’m sorry. But private policing is the way of the future. It’s not like there aren’t already private police here, after all. Big Six Towers Public Safety in Queens. Co-Op City DPS in the Bronx.”
“Aer Keep,” Tallow said.
“Aer Keep! That’s us, you know.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. So Spearpoint trains us in evidence collection, and crowd control, and that kind of thing. You know. Police work. Because it just makes far more sense for us to do it. And, you know, we’re totally accountable, in ways you aren’t. I mean, we can be sued for failure to provide services. You can’t.”
“So that’s how Spearpoint became a big deal? It just killed all its competitors one by one?”
“I’m just saying,” said Sophie, “that it’s the way things are done. And it’s the way of the future. Public services just don’t have the budgets, you know? Look at this.” She pointed to her belt device. “This thing here? Because of this, Ops knows where I am at any time. It’s got a biometric lock, so it only works for me. It’s got environmental sensors. It’s reading my vital signs. It’s listening to the general area for spikes in the noise level. I’m on the Spearpoint net, and I’m on the Spearpoint map.”