Gun Machine

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.”