Wear Iron (7 page)

Sure, he could have broken into Mooney’s hab while the fat slob was home, and maybe that would have been easier... but it wouldn’t have been half as fun as seeing the fear in Buddy-boy’s eyes. That was a treat worth waiting for.

“Now, c’mon there, Buddy boy. You’re not going to give me the simple courtesy of a hello? I already had to pour my own drink.” Rico laughed, drained his glass, and tossed it over his shoulder, enjoying the sound of it shattering against the wall.

Mooney was down on his hands and knees, pale as a ghost, scrambling to get it all out of the way so he could do what Rico said and close the door. “H-hello, sir,” he stammered, looking at Rico with eyes like saucers, then looking away, as if eye contact might get him killed. Which, Rico reflected, it might at that. Depending on his mood.

“That’s more like it. So how have you been, Buddy-of-mine? Nice place you’ve got here, by the way. I especially like the view.” He jerked a thumb behind him at the blacked-out windows—he’d set the controls as soon as he’d made his way in. Whatever happened here, he didn’t want any witnesses.

“Aw, jeez,” Mooney whined, getting up on his knees, pressing his palms together as if praying. Rico liked that. “Please, Judge Dredd, sir, I know I ain’t checked in lately—but it’s like I told you, nobody wants to talk to me any more—”

Rico smirked at that. It had been one of his more profitable ideas—leaning on this old rummy to get useful information about his peers. It hadn’t taken much—one cracked rib and Mooney had been happy to play the narc, pumping his booze and poker buddies for all the info they had about upcoming scores. Rico let a heist go ahead for ten per cent of the take—a bargain, under the circumstances. Any crew who didn’t like the deal, Rico fed through the proper channels—he was allotted a certain amount of narc money a month for his ‘informant,’ which naturally he pocketed himself, so either way he came out of it ahead.

As for Mooney, he ran out of poker buddies pretty fast. There might not be honour among thieves, but there is a hell of a lot of gossip, and it tickled Rico to put his ear to the grapevine and listen to Buddy-boy’s fall from grace. In the space of maybe three months, Mooney had gone from being a salt-of-the-earth yegg—
everybody’s pal, a joe you could trust with your life, sure, he’s got a couple of health problems, but you try havin’ the luck he’s had
—to a lousy, scheming, stinking tub of lard, a twitchy, toothless little rodent who pissed in a bag.
We oughtta make him drink that gruddamned bag.
Rico couldn’t help but hope somebody had.

“Some narc you are, Mooney. Why, anybody would think you didn’t want to turn in your friends. Oh, wait—you don’t have any.” Rico laughed, sliding his boot knife out of its sheath on his ankle. Mooney gave a visible start, scrambling back. “Did you just pee yourself there, Buddy-boy? Can you tell when you do that? Does the bag inflate a little, or what?”

“D-d-don’t kill me,” Mooney pled, tears in his eyes. His twitch was going nineteen to the dozen, making him wink and smirk, as if he was being ironic about it. “Please. Ain’t you already done enough?”

Not nearly, Rico thought. There was a lot more fun to be squeezed out of a piece of human flotsam like Bud Mooney. It was almost a shame the wretched little creep still had his uses—Rico had never drowned a man in his own urine bag before, and he had a feeling it’d be a kick.

There was always later.

“Relax, Buddy-boy. I’m not going to hurt you.” He grinned, flipping the knife in his hand. “Not unless you do something that makes me mad. You won’t do anything that makes me mad, will you, old friend? Old pal?”

“Please,” Mooney croaked, eyes ready to pop as they followed the knife. “Anything.”

“That’s the boy,” Rico laughed, slipping the knife back into his boot. He didn’t want to give the asshole a heart attack, after all. “See, before you became... this...”—he waved a hand in Mooney’s general direction, wincing—“I heard you were pretty hot stuff. When it came to the heist game, I mean.”

Mooney blinked, uncomprehending, and Rico leaned forward in the armchair, steepling his gloved hands. “What I’m saying, Buddy-my-buddy, is that I have a job for you. A little planning work.” He stood up, walking back in the direction of the kitchen to fetch another whiskey. All this intimidation was thirsty work. “Come on, up off your knees.”

“But...” Mooney blinked, rising shakily to his feet, as Rico cracked a few cubes of ice into a fresh glass. “Wait, what are you saying? You want to be the finger on this?” Rico frowned—his turn to look confused—and poured what was left of Mooney’s whiskey while he waited for the explanation. “When a guy on the inside of a place brings the job, y’know? Like, maybe there’s some shnook working in a bank, and he wants fifty thou to fly down to Cuidad Barranquilla, and he notices how the manager keeps the vault combination in a drawer in his desk so he don’t forget it, and—”

“Let’s not write a screenplay here, Mooney.”

“—right, right. Anyway, a guy works in a place sees a weakness, and brings it to a crew in exchange for a share of the job—that guy we call the finger. Finger usually makes ten per cent.”

“Ha ha ha.” Rico grinned, taking a sip of the whiskey. “Try again.”

“Uh, thirty? Forty?” Mooney mopped his brow with his sleeve. “Look, Judge Dredd—you know I ain’t gonna say nothin’ about what share you get, but... well, you want much higher than forty, there might not be enough cash left over to make it worthwhile. For the other guys, I mean.”

“On this, there will be.” Rico smiled, leaning back against Mooney’s refrigerator. “Take is one hundred million—cash. Mostly large bills.”

Mooney’s eyes grew wide again, but this time it wasn’t through fear. Rico could almost see the cred signs in them. “Y-you robbin’ a casino or what?”

Rico snorted. “Gambling’s illegal, Bud. Why, you know of any illicit casinos around here? Maybe you’ve been holding out on me?” Mooney opened his mouth to protest, and Rico shook his head with a grin. “Relax, Mooney. You’re too jumpy, you know that? One day you’re going to jump right out of your skin. No, I’m talking about a stadium—the Herc.”

Mooney blinked. “The—wait, you mean this speed-eating thing? The Munch-Off?”

Rico drained his glass. “We’ve got one advantage. I happen to know for a fact that every available Judge in a mile radius of the Herc is going to be stopping two riots that day—one outside the building, one inside. That’s to start you off—I want you to work from there and give me a foolproof plan that gets every single cred of that money out of the Herc and into our pockets before the dust settles. You’ve got three days.”

“Three days?” Mooney swallowed hard, looking down at his shoes. Rico was amused to note his bag made a taut bulge against his pants-leg—full to bursting. He supposed he must have made an impression.

“Three days. Work your magic, Buddy-boy.” He pushed past Mooney, heading for the door.

“W-what if I can’t?” Mooney whined, trembling. “What if I don’t have what it takes any more? Or if I—if I can’t get hold of the floor plan or something?”

Rico paused at the door, looking back at the fat man with cold contempt. “Come on, Bud,” he said, as if talking to a child. “You know the answer to that one.”

Eight

“T
HIS IS ALL
highly irregular,” murmured Doctor Hoenikker, chief of staff at the Noel Edmonds Institute for the Criminally Insane, as she idly picked the excess varnish from around her fingernails. It wasn’t said with any kind of reproach—just as a simple statement of fact, like
it’s a nice day,
or
I run an asylum,
or
you’re a bent Judge offering me money, and it’s not enough.

Rico sighed, popped open the pouch on his belt and withdrew another thousand-cred bill. “Final offer, Doc,” he said, trying to keep the edge of irritation out of his voice. Hoenikker was a pain in the ass, and this was costing him two grand more than he’d figured it would, but this was still the cheapest way to get what he wanted in the time available.

“Oh, I think I could go higher. But it’d be a risk.” Hoenikker leaned back in her office chair, looking at him critically, head cocked to one side. “You strike me as rather an unstable young man. I wouldn’t want you to harbour feelings of resentment against me or the facility.”

“You probably wouldn’t at that.” Rico grinned, showing teeth, and handed the money over.

Hoenikker calmly folded it into the inside pocket of her white coat before standing and briskly walking to the door. “Come with me, please. I think the sort of person you’re looking for will be down on sub-level four—the paranoids.”

That sounded about right. Rico smirked and followed along.

One of the very few victories the ACLU had won against the Justice Department was to secure a guarantee from Chief Judge Fargo that those deemed not guilty by reason of insanity would not be placed in the nascent Isolation Cube system. Instead, they were housed in private, non-judicial facilities such as Noel Edmonds.

There was talk, at the Council level, of going back on this pledge—creating a separate stream of ‘psycho-cubes’ to house Mega-City’s growing criminally insane population. Dr Justine Hoenikker, a practical, level-headed woman in her middle fifties who hadn’t survived a nuclear war and risen to the top of her field by being anyone’s fool, knew that the days of the facility—and her own as its head—were numbered.

Thus, she’d begun using her one significant resource to build up a small but healthy retirement fund. Rico was far from her only customer—she’d offered similar deals in the past to Mega-Mob assassination cartels, off-the-books pharmaceutical laboratories, pimps, organ-leggers and a group called the Mega-City Long Pig Appreciation Society.

Dr Hoenikker’s one significant resource was a plentiful supply of human beings.

“Down here,” she said, leading Rico past a corridor of plasti-steel doors with small, reinforced windows. He could hear the sound of shrieking coming from one of them—as they passed it, Hoenikker retrieved a small communicator from her pocket, flipped it on and dialled a three-digit number. “Jeremy?” Her voice was cold. “G/134 hasn’t taken his medication. I’m assuming he hid the pills under his tongue again. You’re supposed to check for that.” On the other end, Jeremy—whoever he was—made his excuses. “I don’t care, Jeremy. We’ll have to inject him now. Handle it, please.” She flicked off the comm-unit and put it away, shooting Rico a brief look of exasperation. “Twice this week. It’s because he knows more than he should—he thinks that means he can slack off.” She sighed. “As soon as a suitable replacement is lined up, I suppose I’ll have to have him killed.”

Rico found himself impressed. If they did end up shutting down the Edmonds Institute, he’d have to look her up—she’d make a good consigliore.

At the end of the corridor was an elevator. “Those were the workaday patients,” Hoenikker said, as she pressed the button marked S4 and the elevator smoothly whirred into life. “The ones we’re expected to do something about. In the lower sub-basements, I keep the ones that have fallen outside the system—mostly just forgotten, although a couple I made sure to deliberately lose when I noticed how useful they could be. Those are the serial killers, the torturers, the would-be geniuses. I tend to sell them to foreign interests, although there was one I let go to the Mega-Mafia...” She thought for a minute. “Jimmy Jigsaw, I think the papers called him.”

Rico remembered. Jimmy was a psycho who’d ‘escaped’ from Noel Edmonds and started cutting people into one-foot cubes and sewing them back together funny. All the people he’d gone after post-escape had—coincidentally—made an enemy of Don Vito Corelli in some way. Not that anything could be proven. “I remember.”

“Well, never again. Too many hard questions over that one.” Hoenikker gave Rico a stern look. “I’m relying on you to be a little more discreet.”

Rico smiled. He wasn’t planning on being discreet, exactly, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t be caught in the fallout. And if she was—well, there were ways to make sure she didn’t have to answer any of those hard questions.

The elevator doors opened, and Hoenikker led Rico onto another corridor lined with cells—although these ones were fronted with transparent plasteen, with small, barely visible seams where the cells could be opened electronically. For a moment, Rico wondered why the design was different from the cells upstairs, with their steel doors and small windows—then he understood. This floor was designed strictly for window-shopping.

He walked past the cells, taking a look at the inmates. Most of them were in straitjackets or some other means of restraint. Some were male, some were female, some old, some young—there wasn’t an order or system to it that he could detect, beyond the fact that all of them were for sale. None of them seemed to be on their meds—Rico stopped for a moment to watch one woman in her twenties screaming in fury at him through the soundless glass. He tried reading her lips, but all he could make out was the word ‘many-angled,’ over and over again—the rest might as well have been glossolalia for all he knew. He nodded at her. “Something like that. But dialled down a little.”

“Don’t worry,” Hoenikker murmured, giving him a businesslike smile. “I have someone here who should be perfect for your needs.” She stopped, indicating a right-hand cell. “Tellerman, Rockford J—found wandering the ruins a year after the war. Nobody’s quite sure what happened to him—we thought we knew, but it turned out he was just saying what he thought we wanted to hear. He’s pathetically eager to please, under the right circumstances.”

“How do you know his name?” Rico was taking a good, hard look at Rockford J Tellerman. He was a little on the scrawny side, but otherwise in decent shape, and his hair and beard would calm down with a little maintenance. Throw some product on there and he could be a newsreader. Physically, he was perfect—or he would have been, if not for the constant, terrified tremble that wracked him from head to toe. He was scared out of his mind by something—something invisible, that he seemed to be constantly checking for.

The question was, could he be used?