Gun Machine

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.