Gun Machine

Twenty-Four

TALLOW TURNED the corner into Bat and Scarly’s office to be greeted by a large plastic Japanese robot on the bench waving its arms and shouting “Say hello to my li’l frien’” in an electronically processed voice as a small plastic penis repeatedly jabbed out from its groin on a short metal piston.

Bat emerged from behind the thing. “Don’t judge me,” he said. “I got bored.”

“You don’t have enough to do?” said Tallow, laying the three sandwiches on the bench beside the robot, which turned out to be wired into a flat cream-colored box sitting behind it.

“Hey, you never know when the future might need a giant Fuck You Robot wired to a hot-rodded motion detector. Also we got search results back on that ridiculous fucking flintlock.”

“What did you get?”

“Did you bring food?”

“You hate food.”

“The death bag has a mind of its own. Give me the food.”

“It’s on the bench. Talk to me.”

“There’s a reason why I set Fuck You Robot up.”

“Talk to me or I will shoot you.”

“Victim, Philip Thomas Lyman, resident of Rochester, NY. Funnily enough, he ran a security company, called Varangian. Worked out well for him then. He died in Midtown while on a business trip.”

Tallow picked up one of the sandwiches and left the room, saying only “I’ll be downstairs.”

Tallow paced around the simulation, eating his sandwich without tasting it, studying the fake room from outside, testing structures in his mind. Foundations of fact, scaffolding of speculation. Swapping out rods and plates, reassembling what he knew and what he suspected in different configurations. He finished the sandwich and tossed the wrapper, walking to the table. He pulled a couple of leaves off the tobacco plant, tore them up until the pieces were too small for his fingers to manipulate, and dropped them in the mortar. Tallow smashed the pieces with the pestle, hurriedly, still thinking, wanting to get this done. The oils released by the leaves tickled his nose. The scent wasn’t right. He pushed the pieces out into the tin tray, tipped the tray, took his new lighter, and ignited them, waving and working the flame until the smashed green matter began to smoke.

He carried the tray over to the emulation and laid it down in the middle. The smoke rose. It climbed and twisted like a thin dark tree, and as it passed Tallow, he pushed curls of it up toward the ceiling with his fingertips, and he knew.

Tallow stood in the smoke, and inhaled it, and the scent was close to right, close to the dominant note he’d detected in the apartment on Pearl, and he slowly pivoted around and saw the guns wrapping around the room, forming shapes and partings for future shapes but wrapping, turning, revolving, and flowing around the apartment walls and over the floors.

Tallow knew that he’d met the man who’d fired all these guns.

“What are you doing, John?” asked Scarly. Again, he hadn’t heard the elevator, and it felt like a warning: Be in the world. Don’t get caught.

“Thinking,” he said. “What have you got?”

“The paint. Pain in the ass, you are. The white paint seems to be crushed clamshell and egg. Where the hell do you get clamshells to crush up for caveman paint?”

“Any dumpster on Mulberry Street. And it’s not caveman paint. Anything else?”

“Clay. Blackberry juice, for the purple. That kind of thing.”

“DNA?”

“I’m at least a day away from knowing that. And of course it’s caveman paint.”

“It’s Native American paint. Our man thinks he’s a Native American. Or wants to be a Native American.”

“How do you figure that?”

“All this. And more. And also I met him.”

Scarly stepped into the emulation. “What did you just say?”

“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.

Scarly watched him go and then, mouth set in a little line, went to the top drawer, pulled out a holstered gun, and clipped it to her belt. She shrugged her thin coat on, arched an eyebrow at Tallow as if daring him to say something, and walked past him toward the elevators.

Tallow lifted and reseated his own gun.

“You didn’t tell me to bring a fucking shovel,” Bat said.

“Just get in the back of the fucking car,” Scarly said.

“I would, but I didn’t bring any fucking ropes. Seriously, John, how does your rear fender not just scrape along the fucking street?”

“Bat, just…I don’t know, just give it all a shove.”

“What if there’s a landslide? I might never be seen again. Jesus, what is all this stuff?”

Tallow ran a hand through his hair. “You people work in the Collyer brothers’ toilet, and you give me trouble about this? Push it all to one side. Get in.”

“The Collyer who?”

“Ride in the back or ride in the trunk, Bat.”

“Okay, okay. But I’m telling you, I think I see the Dead Sea Scrolls at the bottom of this, and I’m only getting in here because I’m afraid of what’s in the trunk.”

Scarly got in the front passenger seat, which was almost as strange to Tallow as the persistent weirdness of being in the driver’s seat. “Who were the Collyer brothers?” she asked.

“Langley and Homer Collyer. First half of the twentieth century. Two hermits in Harlem, lived on the far-ass end of Fifth Avenue.”

Tallow began navigating the car out of One PP.

“Weirdness ran in the family. Their father used to paddle a canoe to work, down the East River to Roosevelt Island. Somewhere around 1925, pop disappeared, mom died, and the two brothers were left this house. The locals thought they were eccentric and wealthy and started sniffing around the house, snooping, maybe trying to pop a window or two. But the Collyers didn’t actually have a pot to piss in and were kind of crazy to boot. So they boarded up the windows, set up mantraps, and only went out at night. They’d sneak out, find stuff that looked useful or interesting or capable of being turned into a trap or weapon, and drag it home. Which is, you know, not a hell of a lot different from your office, except you get that stuff delivered.”

“So this is what fills your car?” said a hunched Bat from the back, looking like the world’s ugliest bit of origami. “Obscure New York history? Anyway. That doesn’t sound so bad. I’d love to do nothing but collect shit all day.”

Tallow gave a small dry laugh. “So in 1947, the whole block is suffused by this awful stench. The only people who aren’t out complaining about it are the Collyers. So eventually people go in. And discover that every piece of trash that dropped on that block in the last twenty years was picked up and stored by the Collyers. A hundred and thirty tons of it. Twenty-five thousand books, fourteen pianos, most of a car, bits of people, uncountable newspapers and boxes. You could get around in there only through tunnels and crawl spaces. Homer Collyer was found dead of a heart attack brought on by starvation. His eyes had hemorrhaged out fifteen years earlier, and he had been completely paralyzed by untreated rheumatism. Langley Collyer was found in one of the tunnels. It looked like he’d been transporting food to Homer when he’d tripped one of his own traps and been crushed to death by a weighted suitcase and three massive bales of newspaper. He was actually the source of the stench. Blind old Homer had taken another week to die.”

“Presumably wondering where his brother had gotten to with lunch,” said Scarly. “This is why you need to call people when you’re carrying sandwiches and taking a detour, John.”

“Bits of people?” said Bat.

“Human organs in jars, stuff like that. Their father was a doctor, but he was ob-gyn. So I’m guessing it wasn’t all heirlooms. Oh, and, of course, they also found a large cache of guns and ammunition. Had to knock the whole house down in the end.”

“That’ll be what our guy’s second apartment looks like,” said Bat, trying to get his knees out from under his chin.

“What?”

“Well, he wasn’t sleeping in three A, was he? And he’s not going to be sleeping on the streets. He’s got a second apartment, and when we find it, it’ll be full of gun magazines and clippings and shit. This guy knows his weapons and is at the very least capable of research. Otherwise he wouldn’t have found out about the Rochester thing. Hell, he wouldn’t have known anything about Son of Sam.”

“The Native American thing,” Scarly commented.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Bat. “The guy might think he’s Geronimo or whatever, but he can’t escape the evidence of his own eyes a hundred percent of the time. The asshole’s too functional for that. Even the man who thought his wife was a hat knew where he was. Even if he’s as nuts as he can possibly be on this side of the functional line—and that’s, like, even if he spends six hours a day making little war bonnets for his own turds and sends them out into Central Park to attack Custer—then he’s still aware of being in the modern world and he’s going to study it in order to use it properly.”

A bicycle courier darted alongside the car, trying to get his nose on the best angle of attack for the Brooklyn Bridge. Tallow tapped his brakes to let the cyclist go on ahead. He didn’t acknowledge Tallow, but Tallow hadn’t really done it for him.

“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 Tallow 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 easier 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.”

“The Spearpoint map,” Tallow repeated.

“Sure. It’s like… here I am, present in the city. But I’m also a point on a map that’s overlaid on that. Our map. We get all the traffic data. All our people and units are moving points on the map. We have safe areas all over the city; they’re not publicly signposted, so you can see them only if they’re on the Spearpoint map. We have webcam take that ties into the map, through that… what’s it called, Mike?”

“Ambient Security,” Mike muttered from inside 3A.

“Right. Ambient Security. For some token fee, store owners get a sticker in their windows that says something like ‘This Property Secured by Spearpoint,’ and a webcam with a wi-fi memory card in it. And what it shoots, we call the take. The take gets beamed back to our servers and skimmed by an algorithm reader, which is a piece of software that’s maybe as smart as a puppy. It sits up and barks when something really unusual happens in its field of vision. But what’s important is that Spearpoint has live cameras all over Manhattan, just sitting behind storefront windows and sending us everything they see. You couldn’t do that.”

“Of course we couldn’t do that,” said Bat. “That’s your actual Big Brother shit.”

“Maybe, if it’s imposed by the state. But in this case it’s a side effect of a transaction for property security. Protection.”

Bat snorted. “Protection racket? But no. The property security is a side effect of getting your own private camera system laid out all over New York.”

“What the fuck?” Mike said.

Tallow stepped into the apartment ahead of the others to find Mike with his fists on his hips, looking at the back of the apartment’s front door. Enough of the guns in the area had been lifted by the ECTs that Tallow didn’t have to tiptoe or stretch to get there now. “Yeah, I said something similar,” Tallow said to Mike. “Any idea how the thing works? It’s got me baffled.”

“Sure,” Mike said. “It’s one of ours. How the hell did it get on here?”

Tallow had been feeling sick ever since he’d met these two. Now his gut was nothing but ice and acid. “Wait. You’re telling me that this is a Spearpoint security system?”

“Sure as hell looks like it. Sophie.”

Sophie was already there, standing behind them. “Yeah. I think that’s the Spartan Wave, the seven version? Couple of years old. Very high end.”

Mike was about as pensive as Tallow presumed he ever got, searching his memory with a degree of manual labor. “Sure. I saw one being installed one time. Some banker guy. We were putting one of these on the back of the door to his panic room.”

“Tell me how it works,” said Bat flatly from the other side of the door.

Mike rubbed some dust from the device. Scarly, in Tallow’s peripheral vision, flinched.

“It’s a magic-card system. What we’ve done is taken the original door here, and gutted it. Steel core, electric strikes—”

“I don’t know what those are,” said Tallow.

“Rods that push out from inside the door into the door frame and lock,” Mike said. “And other stuff, but the important thing is there’s a long-life battery in here that feeds a low-energy sensor. Where your skinny guy is, there, you stand there and wave your key card like a magic wand; the sensor feels it and wakes up the door. Power goes to the magnets and motors, and the door unlocks.”

“So the card has a power source too?”

“Yeah, but it’s like, you seen those sneakers kids wear with the flashing lights in the heels? They run on power harvested from running around. Same thing with the card. Wave it around a bit, and it makes enough juice to work the card and open the door. Without the magic wand? No one’s getting in this apartment. You could fire a rocket launcher at this door and it’d still be giving you the finger when the smoke cleared.”

“Magnets,” said Bat. Tallow stepped away and looked out the hole to see Bat scrabbling around in his field bag, a worn credit card between his teeth. He came up with an old round tobacco tin that he’d done something to. Metal strips and wires were wrapped all around the tin. He opened it and produced a black metal puck with some occult electronics glued to the back. Bat pushed a little red-painted switch on it, and passed the puck from the left edge of the door to the middle. There was a clacking sound. He made several more passes, on both sides and at the top and bottom. Bat then put the deactivated puck back in its tin and put his credit card to the side of the door by the original lock. Within ten seconds, the door popped open.

“What the fuck,” said Mike.

Bat stood in the open door and said, “I am a Crime Scene Unit detective from the New York City Police Department, you heinous fucking mongoloid, and there is nothing I cannot do.”

“I think it’s time to leave,” said Tallow. “It was nice to meet you,” he said to the Spearpoint people, and he went directly to the staircase, not looking at the place on the wall where everything in his friend Jim Rosato’s head had splattered and slid.

Tallow didn’t break step until he reached the car. The CSUs were ten seconds behind him, seething. “Get in,” Tallow said. “I’ll run you back to One PP. And then I’m going to see my lieutenant.”

“You need to see your captain, apparently,” Scarly growled.

“No. I need my lieutenant to handle the captain. Get in.”

They got in. Tallow stamped on the gas. Scarly and Bat exchanged an awkward glance, but neither of them asked Tallow what the hurry was. Instead, Bat said, “How fucked are we? On a scale of one to ten?”

Tallow bit back his first response and chewed it over a bit. “I was going to say thirteen. But, honestly, we might have been at thirteen even before someone threw our evidence collection to the wolves. I’ve got nothing but connections I can’t prove because, hey, there’s no proof. We don’t even know when our guy’s most recent kill was. Profilers would laugh themselves sick at anything I had to say to them right now.”

Looking in the rearview mirror, Tallow could see Bat fiddling with his tablet device and his wi-fi pod.

“Hey, Bat, you asked the question. At least listen.”

“I am listening. Keep going.”

Tallow found that he didn’t have much farther to go down that road. “So unless you can get some DNA out of that paint, or the next set of processed guns gives us a kill from last week, the evidence isn’t going to put us anywhere useful for a while yet. No. Let me add to that. Unless the guns give us some more kills that could paint in the picture a bit.”

“Do you still want to talk to someone at the Property Office?” Scarly asked.

“My lieutenant wants to work through channels on that. But right now, it’s enough just to know that he has a connection with it. Did you get to smell the air in the apartment, by the way?”

“Got a little bit distracted there, John,” Bat said.

“Yeah, I figured,” Tallow said. “Damn it.”

“I wonder if anyone from Spearpoint had a little accident in the last couple of years,” Scarly said, slowly. “Maybe an installation guy.”

“Oh hell,” Tallow managed to grit out. “You’re absolutely right.”

“So maybe our guy met a Spearpoint installation technician in a bar and said, Hey, for cash in hand and a hefty tip, maybe you could help me out. And a security door just kind of fell out of their depot into the installation guy’s van, and on a quiet afternoon, or a Sunday, he put the door in. But the thing is, the installation guy will have seen our guy. Like the Property Office cop will have seen our guy. And that cop’s dead.”

“Varangian Security,” said Bat from the back. “Founded in Rochester, New York, by Phil Lyman twenty-some years ago, providing private security services in the tristate area, its expansion curtailed by the tragic death of the charismatic Lyman in blah-blah-blah…bought out by and subsumed into Spearpoint Security two years later.”

“What?” said Tallow.

“What what? I’m reading this off Wikipedia. Your tablet screen’s fucked, by the way. It’s like trying to read through a film of old semen. Anyway. Just working the evidence we’ve got, you know? Embracing the crazy.”

Tallow stopped at an intersection. A bus rattled past, the digital ad down its side glittering. Apparently there was another musical based on an old Disney movie opening on Broadway. An animation flicked across the hexels: the prettiest, whitest “Indian” princess you ever saw, attending to the feathers in her hair before looking over her shoulder at Tallow, smiling, and winking.

Tallow drove on.

“While you’ve got the tablet on, Bat, look up Werpoes for me.”

Bat clicked away. Tutted to himself. “Fucking autocorrect. Wempus? How d’you spell that?”

“God, I don’t know. She said Werpoes. W-e-r—”

“Wait,” said Bat. “Wait. Shit. Pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull the fuck over.”

“Damn it, Bat…” Tallow checked his mirrors and pulled to the roadside within an awkward twenty seconds.

Bat leaned forward and thrust the tablet device in front of Tallow and Scarly. He’d pulled from the web an image of beadwork of some kind, a broad strip of shell art featuring odd patterns and shapes and the occasional rippled angle.

“It’s called wampum,” said Bat. “Wampum belts.”

“Oh fuck,” said Scarly, seeing it immediately.

“It says the Native Americans wove these things out of beads to codify history and law, to mark social events, transmit information…they made them here in Manhattan, before the Europeans came. And when they did come, they saw how the natives prized the wampum and began manufacturing it themselves, as money.” Bat tapped the screen with a jagged fingernail. “These things were art and book and device. John, wampum belts were memory.”

Tallow rubbed his eyes. Looked at the photo of the wampum belt again. He could see the similarities. The photographed belt of beads was finer work, and swirls were harder to execute… but then, whoever had woven this belt wasn’t crazy. The similarities were striking. Their killer had turned the entire apartment into a memory machine, using guns.

They were both looking at him.

“All right,” Tallow said. “We know why he did it now. His motivation beyond totem phase. It’s one more piece of information. But it’s not a case. Let’s get you two back to One PP. I told you before—it’s CSU that’ll solve this thing. And so far I’ve been right.”

“You are a lazy asshole, John,” Scarly said, but she was grinning.