Tony the Crooked Cop

Knight Errant patrol, and the second Tony in that family. He will not fix a charge. He will be four blocks away.

Antonio Zamora, Tony to everybody, an ork in his early thirties, goblinized at fourteen into a family that took it in stride, and eight years in a Knight Errant uniform since. Patrol, not investigations, and the patrol is the useful part: he knows where the contract line runs, what happens on each side of it, and which twenty minutes of a shift nobody is looking at.

Zamora on the badge, Salas on his mother's side, and the two Tonys are named for the same grandfather. The second checks badges on the Melrose lot gate, they are cousins who see each other at funerals, and nobody in that family has ever found the arrangement confusing. Vinnie got to this one through Johnny Shoe Shiner, because the Salas name is on the Mafia's short list and always has been, and Vinnie introduces him the way he introduces everybody: I got a guy.

He wears a corporation's badge, so the number in your commlink sits under corporate rather than under anything to do with law. There has been no government police in this city since 2057 and he has never worked for one.

What the crew knows#

• He takes cash and he delivers. A citation written by his own shift, gone. A call logged and never followed up. A response that arrives late, or at the wrong address first, or not at all. A crew walked past a scene as though they had a reason to be there. He does all of it, routinely, and he does not pretend any of it is a favor.
• He sells his own absence and his own calendar too: which district is contracted this quarter and which lapsed, where the line runs to the meter, response times by hour, which addresses generate calls, who is on which shift, and a twenty-minute window where his car is somewhere else for a reason that will survive being asked about.
• He is most useful on his own shift, in a district his employer is paid to cover. That is where he is not doing you a favor, he is just deciding, and the answer comes back the same hour.
• One district over, or on somebody else's rotation, he is a phone call rather than a car. He knows who is working it and how they take a conversation, and he will make the introduction. It costs him something to spend, so it is slower, and he will tell you roughly what it cost afterward.
• Off the coverage map entirely he is mostly information. Nobody is contracted for those blocks, so there is no response to shape and no citation to lose. What he can still do is tell you exactly that, which is worth knowing before a job rather than during one, and he does not argue about that part of the work any more.
• The further from patrol the thinner he gets. A case already opened, a corporate security review, a name in an Ares file: he can usually find out that it exists and whose desk it sits on, and moving it is above him. He is honest about the difference and does not take money for the second kind.
• He is a competent, unfrightened cop who has decided which rules are worth his pension. Treating him as bought is the fastest way to find out where the line is.

Contact#