Wear Iron (10 page)

He was a stickler.

“Other Dredd...” There was laughter from Shift One at that, as Koslowski turned her attention on him. Rico felt his face redden a little at the jibe. “You’re still with Muttox. But I expect you to co-ordinate with your clone here—I figure Ike and Mike should maybe think alike for once.” More laughter. Rico smiled curtly, pretending to appreciate the joke at his expense, but inside his blood was boiling.
Co-ordinate
with Little Joe—the word stuck in his throat like a fishbone.

Rico spent the rest of the briefing holding back the mounting fury building inside him, but the second Koslowski dismissed the two shifts—giving them a good ten minutes to check ammo and belt pouches and synchronise their chronometers before they all rode down to the Herc and the action began—he’d marched up to Joe, fuming, and demanded an explanation. “What the hell are you doing here? This is
my
sector, Joe—all you’re doing here is getting in my way, the way you’ve been doing ever since the Academy. Nobody’s going to help you pick up your scores this time,
little
brother. You can forget about riding on my shoulder pads.”

A couple of the street jocks around them grinned, watching the new kid with the attitude problem having an argument with himself, and that just made Rico angrier. It was humiliating, that’s what it was—not to mention it could be the spanner in the works that wrecked the whole scheme. Was that what Joe was planning? How much did he know?

It was no use looking in the man’s face. The sour, tight-lipped frown that had always struck Rico as equal parts contempt and self-righteousness was plastered all over his big chin—
their
chin, Fargo’s chin. Rico occasionally had nightmares that one day his own face would be permanently fixed in an expression like that.

After a moment’s pause, Joe spoke, with a trace of sardonic humour. “Figured you could use a hand, Rico. I put in a transfer to your sector for a month or so—just to make sure you’re okay. You let that jewellery store thief slip past you, after all. The one you said wasn’t on Trudeau Street.” He locked eyes with his brother, unblinking. “I worry about things like that.”

“You stay with your team, I’ll stay with mine,” Rico hissed. “We’ll get on famously.” He turned on his heel and stormed away, not wanting to prolong the situation any further—he’d already been made a laughing stock in the briefing room. It was Joe who was the joke, dammit—Little Joe, the stick-up-the-ass, ever-saluting, never-smiling lawbook on legs—not
him.
Never
him.

A thought occurred. He didn’t like his brother. In fact, he kind of hated him. He pretty much never brought Little Joe up in company. Did any of his team actually know, he wondered?

Did any of them know there was another him?

He grabbed the radio from his belt and tried to dial Mooney’s number.

Twelve

C
OREY
C
LEVELAND WAS
looking forward to his work for the first time in months.

It was a selfish thing to admit, even to himself—unemployment was at a record high, and there was all kinds of scaremongering talk going around that the new advances in robotics would take away what few jobs there were left.

But to be a money-counter with no money to count—to come to the Herc on a weekend and sit there while the sorting machine gave a few desultory belches, crapping out a ten-cred note here, two fives there... and then to spend the rest of the shift watching on the monitors as they panned around the empty seats, to have to watch the rot set deeper and deeper into this wonderful place... it was more than a soul could bear. And for what? Wages had been slashed—they were paid five creds a week less than welfare.

It was love of the Herc that kept Corey coming back. Love of the days when he’d been part of a team who’d made people happy, before that awful business with Mr Donald, before the Herc had fallen ill and started to die.

Well, maybe now those days were coming back.

Corey couldn’t say he was a fan of the new competitive eating craze—it was kind of disgusting in a lot of ways, especially since the competitors weren’t known for eating with their mouths closed. But he hadn’t been a huge fan of Inferno either, when it came down to it—he hadn’t watched the games on the monitors, while the cash trickled in from the beer and mechandise sales, he’d watched the crowds, the audience, the joy and excitement on their faces. That was always what he’d come into work for—and those times were about to come again.

“Morning, Phil,” he grinned, waving to the other money-counter, Phil Hartsdale. Phil was a dour man in his middle fifties with a heart condition, a broken marriage and a daughter he never saw—none of which made the job any less depressing. Phil nodded, barely raising his head, and shuffled through the front door as if today was no different from any other. Corey made a private resolution, then and there, that he wouldn’t be letting Phil get to him today—today was going to be a special day for the Herc, and for the money room. Of that he was sure.

Corey stopped briefly in the men’s room, checking his fade—they were back in style, and he’d had his cut specially for the occasion—and making sure his tie was straight. Sure, they were going to be locked in a windowless room for the duration, until the bank truck came to take the money away to the vaults at six-thirty, but that wasn’t an excuse not to look your best. When he caught up to Phil, at the door to the money room, the older man was stabbing fruitlessly at the keypad with his finger.

“Damn thing’s busted,” he muttered, voice deep and heavy as lead. “Tried putting the code in—nothing. Won’t read my card, ether.” He shrugged. “Maybe I should get somebody.”

“Aw, crem,” Corey sighed. He was anxious to get in there, to fire up the machines and run the checks, to get started on the best working day of his life, and the darn alarm was on the fritz again. Always the way. “Have you tried the handle at least, Phil?”

Phil took hold of the handle and gave it a desultory quarter turn. The door hissed smoothly open.

“Well, there you go,” Corey said, relieved. “Guess your code worked after all, huh?” He tapped his ID card against the sensor on the keypad, hearing no familiar beep but pushing the door open and striding in anyway. “I figure probably it’s just the thing that beeps that went wrong. Like the acknowledgement signal that lets you know you put your code in right or—” He froze in mid-sentence, his eyes widening.

There was a man with a gun in the money room.

He was dressed all in black, with silver hair and bright green eyes that didn’t seem to blink. Corey didn’t recognise the make of pistol—he didn’t know much about pistols, he’d never run with that kind of crowd—but it was semi-automatic, it had a silencer and the barrel seemed very big as Corey stared down it.

“Come in. Nice and quiet, both of you.” The man with the gun spoke softly, gently, as if talking so a skittish bird that might take off at any moment. “I don’t want to use this. But if I have to, I will. Do you want that?”

Corey opening his mouth to answer, and the man made a little beckoning gesture with the gun. Corey shuffled forward obediently, his hands automatically rising to shoulder level. Phil followed behind, his hands doing the same.

“Close the door.”

Corey heard the click as the heavy metal door locked into place, and he felt his stomach sink. Unless someone took a good look at the busted keypad—noticed the lights weren’t flashing—he didn’t think anyone was going to figure out what was happening in here now. Nobody would come to help—nobody would even know. His eyes moved over to the wall by the sorting machines, the alarm button that was there for emergencies—the man was standing between it and him, but if he darted forward suddenly, maybe caught him a good sock on the jaw, he could probably—

“What’s your name?”

Corey blinked. The man was smiling at him now—all sympathy. “Corey,” he said, slowly. “Corey Cleveland.”
Dope!
A voice in his head screamed.
Give a false name!
But it was too late for that.

“Phil Hartsdale,” muttered Phil, in a stoic, defeated voice, as though all this was as pre-ordained as the sun rising. The man with the gun nodded, and reached behind him with his free hand, tugging something from the pack on his back. Two wide loops of plastic.

“Corey and Phil,” he said, smiling reassuringly. “You can call me John. And now we all know each other’s names, we’re less likely to do something stupid, aren’t we? Because I’d hate to have to use this thing.” He moved the gun from Corey to Phil, from Phil back to Corey. “If I have to use this thing, it won’t spoil my plans at all, Corey. I want you to understand that. I’ll feel bad, but that feeling will pass. It makes no difference to the plan if you’re alive or dead.” He shot Phil a quick, appraising glance—then focussed completely on Corey, singling him out. “Do you understand that, Corey?”

Corey swallowed hard, and nodded. He understood. The man with the gun had seen him thinking, had read his intentions on his face, and now he was the main threat. And suddenly, it came to him very clearly that if the man with the gun pulled the trigger right now—if he sent a wad of lead through Corey’s skull and made his wife a widow and his children orphans—Phil would simply accept it. Phil would not fight back, or try to avenge him, or resist in any way. If Corey died now, he’d die for nothing.

“I need you to say it, Corey.”

Corey shot Phil an angry, judgemental look. “I understand,” he muttered.

The man with the gun tossed one of the plastic ties to Phil, still keeping the gun on Corey. “Hands behind your back, Corey.” Corey sullenly obeyed, feeling Phil slide the plastic loop up over his wrists before even being asked. “Now, Phil, I’m going to be checking your work. I want you to know that. Don’t make it too tight if you can help it—you’ll cut off circulation, there’ll be nerve damage—but if you make it too loose, and when I check your work I think there’s a chance he can get loose, you know what I’m going to do?” Phil opened his mouth, then hesitated. “I’m going to shoot you, Phil. And then I’m going to shoot him.”

Phil was already tightening the tie, forcing Corey’s wrists together, palm to palm. Corey let out a yelp of pain, and the man with the gun walked over, held the gun on Phil while he zip-tied his arms the same way—but a little less tight—then checked Phil’s work. “Little tight, Phil. That’s going to pinch. Apart from that, good work.”

“Thanks,” Phil said, quietly. Then he shuffled over into the corner of the room and sat down.

Corey had never hated him more.

Thirteen

T
HE BIG DAY
was here, and Mooney was hating every second of it.

To start with, he’d woken up that morning from dreams of choking to find Rico standing in his apartment, leaning over his bed. If he could have pissed himself without detaching his catheter first, he would have—no doubt.

He sat in his diner opposite the Herc, drinking hot synthi-caf to try and soothe the sore throat he’d woken up with and watching the Judges forcing the mob into a queue. He kept half an eye out for Tellerman, the way he’d been told to, and tried to remember a time when he hadn’t been afraid of Rico Dredd.

I mean, the guy was a baby Judge, fresh outta the Academy—he couldn’t be more than nineteen years old. But there was just... something about the guy. He had a kind of raw presence to him—the guy filled any room he walked into. He could even be Chief Judge one day, Mooney figured.

Y’know, if his head wasn’t so full of crazy it leaked.

Mooney shuddered, unscrewing his hip flask and taking a long swig. He brewed the hooch in a still he kept in the bathroom, next to the toilet—it was pretty much fermented garbage—so he’d learned not to expect too much from it. But it tasted really off today—tainted, almost. Still, he couldn’t afford soymash every day, or even every month, and a little nip from his own supply every so often kept him mostly regular.

Mooney turned his mind back to Rico. How crazy was he, anyway? That was the thing about that guy: you could never really tell if he
was
crazy, or just faking it—to scare you, or get you to underestimate him. He sure seemed to like tormenting Mooney; but then again, at this point Mooney wasn’t exactly liked by anybody he knew, so it seemed almost natural. It wasn’t like Strader thought much of him either, or the two he’d brought in to handle the ambulance. In fact, the only guy in the gang who had any time for Mooney was Tellerman, and as long as he took his meds and nobody mentioned Martian death signals, Tellerman liked pretty much everybody.

And anyway, Tellerman was gonna be dead soon, so he didn’t exactly count.

Mooney stared out of the diner window. Tellerman was somewhere in that queue—the queue that was already snaking back and forth through the paved area in front of the Herc, between the decorative fountains. If he craned his neck, he could see where it snaked around the corner and down the street, to wind between the blocks and through the alleys. He figured at least a hundred thousand people were in that line already—probably more. He could see the Judges moving back and forth, doing random searches—strip searches, sometimes, the perverts—generally making their presence felt. But the Jays were kidding themselves if they thought there wasn’t going to be a riot happening the second the last ticket got sold.

Hell, Mooney thought glumly, he was there to make sure it happened—that was his job in this, according to Rico. He’d explained it all, leaning over Mooney’s bed and grinning like something out of a nightmare: if things looked like they were kicking off a little too slowly, Mooney’s role was to head out there and stir it up. Yell stuff. Throw things.
Incitement,
they called it.

Mooney didn’t see a way he could manage it without getting himself cubed up for a couple of years minimum—except if that happened, he had a nasty feeling Rico would get to him somehow, most likely before he reached the interrogation cube. Mooney knew that folks with dirt on Rico had died in custody before—always before they told the other Jays what they knew. Mostly, he knew because Rico had told him.