Wear Iron (12 page)

All it took was pressing a fingertip into the right pouch on his belt. Rocky had gone up in Muttox’s face, spraying him like a water balloon across the stands, along with a nice clutch of bystanders. Now that whole section of the crowd was a big, beautiful, gory mess, and chaos reigned—it wasn’t like Muttox would have been particularly effective at controlling things, but with him splattered all over the ad hoardings, it really was headless chicken time.

With a mighty effort, Rico somehow kept his face straight as he watched two of the contestants barge their way off the stage and try to force themselves through the screaming crowd, trampling and smothering them with their bellies. What a way to go. And meanwhile, on stage, the largest of the contenders—Dale ‘The Whale’ Tucky, known in Texas City as the man with the biggest heart in competitive eating—had died of a massive coronary, brought on by the stress.
So much for that theory,
Rico thought. A couple more of the fatties had taken advantage of the confusion to start in on their first round of food—when the referee tried to stop them, the larger of the two punched him in the eye.

It really was Christmas.

Now it was all up to Strader and his people. If they didn’t screw this up, Rico would be fifty million creds richer by sundown—assuming he let them live to enjoy their share.

He wondered if now was a good time to check in on his investment.

Eighteen

S
TRADER OPENED THE
money room door to the sound of the secret knock.
Shave and a haircut, two creds—
an oldie but a goodie.

“Prowse is back at the ambulance. We’re parked near the fire door—holy Jovus, what the hell happened here?” Ramirez stared at the bodies as he pushed the hover-stretcher into the room. Without taking his eyes off them, he handed Strader the paramedic’s uniform they’d stolen for him when they’d heisted the getaway vehicle. It didn’t quite fit, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “Didn’t they know to keep quiet?”

Strader shrugged, pulling off his black shirt. “One of them died, the other didn’t like it. It doesn’t matter. Come on, grab the bag—”

“Wait.” Ramirez was looking down at the skin-bag, the dead fat man Strader had painstakingly built out of rubber and money. The belly was still unzipped, thick wads of green poking out through it. Idly, Ramirez popped a cube of sugar onto his tongue, crunching down on it. “There’s room for more.”

Strader shook his head curtly as he shrugged the bulky paramedic jacket on, irritated that the lean-faced man had even brought the subject up. Technically, he was right—there was space left for more money, if there’d been any more money—but that was neither here nor there. “Doesn’t matter. There is no more. I packed up every bit of paper that came through here—even the
tens,
for Grud’s sake. Now, can we get moving before—”

“What about that?” Ramirez cocked his head, pointing a thin finger at the coin bins. Without another word, he started grabbing handfuls of coins from the five-cred bin, shovelling them into the empty spaces in the skin-bag.

“What the hell are you—” Strader couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He grabbed hold of Ramirez’s shoulder, trying to pull him away, and Ramirez shrugged him off. The thin man had and aggrieved look on his dour little face.

“Watch where you’re puttin’ them hands, man. Don’t come here to be pawed by you.”

Strader just stared, dumbfounded. “Ramirez—those are
five-cred coins
—”

“So? There’s room.” He honestly didn’t seem to understand what Strader was talking about. Dear Grud, where had he come from? Was this his first ever job? “More the merrier, right?”

“Listen to me. The weight—”

“Hover-stretcher can take it. And we can take our time—the Jays are gonna be busy for a while, right? I mean, it’s crazy out there. Like, all-out war.” He shot Strader a look of total contempt and carried on ladling great handfuls of heavy, clattering metal into the bag. “Don’t help me or nothin’. Cheez.”

Slowly, the skin-bag grew fatter, the seams bulging until it seemed barely human even by the grotesque standards of the contestants. When Ramirez finally decided he’d packed enough in—somewhere in the region of five thousand creds, Strader figured; chickenfeed—they could barely get the thing onto the stretcher, which dipped dangerously at one corner. “There, see?” Ramirez said, looking angrily at Strader. “Now we got a bonus. No thanks to you.”

Strader considered punching him in the face. Or shooting him in the head. Or walking out the door and never coming back—if he stripped the paramedic outfit back off, he could slip into whatever madness was happening outside and be lost forever, or at least for a little while. But he knew these weren’t real options. He wasn’t a professional anymore—maybe he hadn’t been since Texas City, or even before that. He was just another gun-happy idiot who thought he was a thief.

The hell with it. At least he had the chance to be a rich idiot. “Come on, let’s get this back to the ambo.”

Nineteen

B
UT THE AMBO
wasn’t there.

It was flipped over on its side a little way up the street, on fire. Prowse was hanging out of the side window, badly burned, with her brains blown out.

Standing nearby, Lawgiver smoking—a lone figure amidst the chaos on the streets—was Rico Dredd. He turned to look Strader in the eye.

He wasn’t smiling.

“Cheez—” Ramirez gasped, letting go of the stretcher. Without both of them to keep it under control, the overloaded stretcher tipped over, spilling the rubber corpse out onto the street. Weakened by the mass of the coins, a seam in one armpit split, tearing a fissure up the side of the thing, spilling a great torrent of creds out into the gutter. “It’s a double-cross—“

Strader didn’t think so. That had always been on the cards, but not like this, not out in the open. But Ramirez was already reaching into the paramedic’s jacket for the squat, black snubnose he kept there—and then he was dead, toppling back onto the mountain of spilled notes, a red geyser bursting from the centre of his forehead.

“I know you from somewhere, creep,” Rico said, his face twisted into an unfamiliar scowl. He really didn’t seem to know who Strader was. Like they’d never met. Strader had never seen Rico’s face look quite like that before—set like stone into a grim, unyielding frown that didn’t seem to move. “Raise ’em.”

Strader didn’t move. He couldn’t. It was impossible, it couldn’t be, but—but he
had
seen that look before. At the jeweller’s. The jeweller’s where Rico said he didn’t think they’d met. That Strader must be thinking of someone else.

Oh, Grud,
Strader thought.

Oh, Grud, there are
two
of them.

Part Four

Twenty

D
REDD HAD KNOWN
something was off from the start.

The ambulance had arrived almost the moment the riot began—about thirty seconds after the bomb went off in the diner. A private ambulance at that; while it was conceivable, even probable, that some eldster in the middle of the violence had hit an aid-call button, the response time was way too fast. Civilian ambulances didn’t have access to the special Department-Only lanes, so they could take up to half an hour longer than a judicial med-team.

So there was that. Then you had the one paramedic staying and keeping the engine running while the other went in through the fire doors. Not exactly standard procedure.

“Something wrong over there,” he’d mentioned to Friedricks.

“You think?” Friedricks was busy. The whole paved area in front of the Kool Herc Infernodrome was a mass of bodies—running, screaming, fighting, doing anything they felt they could get away with. Always the same story—scratch a cit and underneath you’d find a perp. Give them an inch and they’d take whatever wasn’t nailed down. Friedricks hauled a woman off her husband—she’d been trying to drown him in one of the decorative fountains—and cracked her upside the head with a daystick. “I swear to Grud, whoever owns the Herc is doing time for this. I don’t give a damn who rubber-stamped this nonsense—as far as I’m concerned, they should go down too.”

Dredd nodded. “Maybe.” He lashed out with his own daystick, snapping the wrist of a creep with a broken bottle. He had one eye on the ambulance, in the distance. It was still idling, and the driver—a tough-looking woman with a distinctive tattoo on her lower arm—was leaning out of her window, watching the fire doors intently.

Dredd snapped his helmet mic into place. “Control—I need records of paramedics and drivers working for Well-Wish Incorporated—the private medical firm. List any with dragon tattoos on the left arm. And run the plate—” He squinted, focussing, and read the number off, before driving his fist into the face of an old man who’d drawn a sword from his cane. “I’ll wait.”

Morley—a heavyset Judge in his thirties who fancied himself next in line for Koslowski’s job—rolled his eyes. He was trying to get the cuffs on a juve without breaking the kid’s arm, and it didn’t look like he was going to manage it. “You don’t got enough to do, junior? Crem, kid, settle down—”

“Crime doesn’t stop just because we’re busy, Morley.” Dredd brought the end of the daystick down hard on the juve’s right temple—he went out like a light.

Control was back in his ear. “No records of any dragon tats, Dredd. Plate number comes up as stolen—missing since two days ago.”

Dredd nodded to himself. Friedricks and Morley were trying to stop a young girl being slashed in the face by what looked like her twin sister—their hands were full. A quick glance confirmed the other Judges on the scene were engaged and unavailable for backup.

Which was fine by him.

“You in the stolen ambulance!” he bellowed. “Out and on the ground! Now!” The woman with the tattoo stared at him—white as a ghost—then gunned the engine into gear and tried to peel out, wheels spinning on the roadway, kicking up smoke.

Dredd drew his Lawgiver, aiming to knock out the back tyre and force the vehicle into a controlled skid—but the driver was panicking and the ambulance flipped over instead. Dredd noticed modifications on the underside as it turned—a jury-rigged nitrous-pyrothene booster. Which meant this had to be a getaway vehicle.

Of course, the trouble with those home-made boosters was volatility. They didn’t react well to heavy impacts—like, say, an ambulance turning over.

The vehicle went up like a Roman candle—the fire died down quickly after the initial flash, but not quickly enough for the driver. Her flesh was already charred black when Dredd finished her with a mercy shot to the head.

“I need someone to watch these fire doors—” Dredd called out to Friedricks, but she was barking orders to Morley and a couple of others, locking down a juve gang who’d breezed in from Graham Greene to have a little fun in the middle of the chaos. He was still on his own.

There was a clattering noise as the doors opened—the perp who’d run in earlier and a buddy, pushing a hover-stretcher loaded down with what looked at first like a dead fattie, until Dredd noticed the hand peeping out from under the sheet was made of some kind of latex. One of the perps went for his gun, screaming that it was a double-cross—
why a double-cross?
Dredd wondered, but filed that away for later—and without his hand steadying the overloaded stretcher, it tipped its contents onto the street.

As Dredd returned fire, blowing the gunman away before he could squeeze off his first shot, the fake body burst at the seams, ripping open and disgorging what looked like tens of millions of creds onto the slabwalk. Dredd couldn’t help but wonder where they’d got a bag like that—mostly because whoever made it was guilty of aiding and abetting under the current law. You don’t make a giant hollow fat man without asking what it’s for—not in this city.

The last of the thieves was familiar. The hair and eyes were a different colour—and he was missing a moustache—but the bone structure, and the grey-white stubble on the man’s chin, brought back memories. He’d only seen that face for a second, through a closing door, but... “I know you from somewhere, creep.” That jewellery store robbery in Barry Scott—the morons with the stuttergun. This was moron number three. “Raise ’em.”

Moron Three was frozen in place, eyes wide and glassy, mouth working like a fish. “You,” he mumbled, hands jerking spasmodically up towards his chest. “There are—”

Then a standard execution bullet slammed right through his head.

Dredd turned. Rico was standing there, his own Lawgiver smoking. “Helped you out again, Little Joe,” he grinned. Dredd had never much liked that grin. It seemed flippant.

“He was about to tell me something.” Dredd holstered his weapon, looking around at the rest of the riot. Things were mostly dying down, now—Friedricks showing her natural talent for controlling uncontrollable situations. A shame things hadn’t been in hand a little earlier—it might have turned out differently if he’d had some backup.

“He was about to shoot you in the face, Joe.” Rico prodded the corpse with the toe of his boot, and the jacket fell open, revealing the quick-draw holster Moron Three was wearing up near his chest. “
Wear iron.
That’s the rule with these people. If I hadn’t come along, who knows what he would have done?”

“Or said.” Dredd gave Rico a long, hard look. “You’re meant to be helping with the spectators, Rico. I could have handled this alone.”

“Can I help it if I care about my only brother? Come on, Little Joe, I just saved your life.” Rico slapped Dredd on the back and smirked. “Lighten up a little.”

“Request denied. I’ll be filling out an adverse report when I return to the Sector House.” Dredd looked down at the pile of creds at their feet. The wind was picking up—if they didn’t do something with it soon, it’d blow down the street and the riot would start all over again. “I’ll have some recommendations for the security team here, too. These punks nearly got away with a hundred-million creds—at least.”