Wear Iron (8 page)

“Driver’s licence,” said Hoenikker, matter-of-factly, before taking a few steps towards a small intercom unit on the wall next to the glass window and flipping a switch. “We can hear him now, and vice versa. Rockford? This is Judge Dredd. He’s come to visit you.”

Tellerman just stared for a moment, as if the information was some kind of trap, ready to spring closed around him. When he spoke, it was in a terrified whisper that Rico had to strain to hear.

“Uh, has he been
checked?
Doc? Has he been checked for the
death signals?
We can’t take chances, Doc. He could be a
carrier.
We need to know he’s…” He tried to drop his voice even lower. “One of
us.
”

Rico looked at Hoenikker, then at Tellerman, then Hoenikker again. “I don’t know if he’s worth six thousand creds...”

Hoenikker gave him an icy look and flipped the switch, making sure Tellerman couldn’t hear. “His kidneys are worth that alone—although his lungs are damaged. Ex-smoker, I’m afraid—well, we think.”

Rico didn’t bother hiding the irritation this time. “I’m not going to cut him up,
Doctor
Hoenikker—”

Hoenikker cut him off with a raised hand. “No, you’re going to blow him up. You want someone suggestible enough to do exactly what you tell them to—to the
letter
, I assume—who won’t stand out in a crowd. The price is six thousand—take it or leave it.”

Rico shrugged and nodded, and after a pause Hoenikker flipped the switch back. Rico could hear Tellerman’s quick, nervous breathing.

“Rockford, Judge Dredd is
one of us.
He actually came here to talk to you about the death signals, as a matter of fact. There are some things he wants you to do to help fight them.” Her voice dripped with honeyed sincerity. Once again, he was impressed with the woman.

“That’s right, Rockford,” said Rico, giving the man in the straitjacket one of his brightest, toothiest smiles. “Only you can save us all. You just need to do as you’re told for a while. Can you do that?”

Tellerman swallowed hard, then nodded, eyes flicking left to right wildly as if something beyond the periphery of his vision was coming to eat him. “You’re one of us, Judge,” he whispered, gnawing at a fingernail. “Doc says. You tell me what to do and I’ll do it. We gotta fight them, Judge. Gotta f-fight the death signals. Any minute, one of them death signals could come outta the sky and—”

Rico nodded to the switch, and Hoenikker flipped it. Tellerman continued to rant behind the glass, unheard. “So, does he come with sedatives?” Rico asked. “Because I take your point about suggestibility, but there’s a... jittery quality there that I’m not exactly in love with. He’s going to draw attention if he has to stand in a queue for hours—even assuming he doesn’t freak out, someone’s going to ask him what the matter is.”

“Well...” Hoenikker considered it for a moment. “Right now he’s been without medication for some time. I can start him on a few things to remove the
jitteriness,
as you call it—obviously, we want to calm him down without curing the basic delusions.” Hoenikker gave Rico a quick, almost apologetic smile. “But then, if I could cure those—on our budget, I mean—well, I wouldn’t be selling him in the first place, would I? I’m not a complete monster.”

“Of course not, Doc. None of us are.” Rico grinned, amused despite himself, then reached past her and flicked the switch again. “So, Rocky—can I call you that?” He grinned again, even wider than before. “How would you like to never have to be afraid of the death signals again?”

Tellerman looked at Rico for a long moment, and then started to cry.

Rico almost felt bad for the guy.

Nine

“S
O WHAT THE
hell’s this wacko gotta stay with me for?” Mooney’s voice was shrill and a little slurred. Tellerman, shaved clean now and dressed in a suit and shirt, watched him nervously from the armchair in the main room, his hands fidgeting in his lap. He didn’t say much unless he was prompted to—the pills Hoenikker had left with Rico seemed to have mitigated some of the terror that gripped him, so much so that he’d pass for normal unless you had a conversation with him. Rico figured he’d probably have to be coached a little, but they had time.

“Rocky here had to be signed out in somebody’s name, Buddy-boy. I figured I’d use yours.” Rico shot Mooney an amused glance, then directed his attention back to the plans on the kitchen table. “Don’t worry. He got lost in the system years ago—I doubt anybody outside of you, me and Hoenikker even remembers he exists.”

“But he’s gonna—” Mooney started, before casting a fearful glance at Tellerman. He walked quickly over to the kitchen door and slammed it shut, then turned back to Rico, whispering at a volume a little louder than his natural shouting voice. “He’s gonna blow himself up! They’re gonna know he exists
then,
ain’t they? They’re gonna know and they’re gonna trace him right back to
me—
”

Rico rolled his eyes. He was starting to wish he hadn’t told Mooney about that part. He’d got it stuck in his head. “He’s not blowing himself up, Buddy.” He watched Buddy-boy exhale for a moment. “
I’ll
be the one sending the detonation signal. And if you’ve got a better way to start a riot indoors, I’d like to hear it.” He grinned, enjoying the way Mooney had tensed up again. “Here, take a look, I’ll show you how it’s going to work.”

Carefully, he placed the liquid explosive—disguised as a bottle of soda gum—on the kitchen table, along with a detonator small enough to swallow. “Eat, drink. This is my body, this is my blood. Rocky ingests these before he starts queueing. Friedricks and her squad won’t have the tech to scan for it—the Judges on the gate will, but I’ll be the one who scans Rocky, so that won’t be a problem. Rocky blows on my signal, and that’s when the panic hits. Suddenly we, by which I mean the good men and women of Justice Department, are all looking after the crowds and not looking after the take sitting in the money room. Any questions?”

“Why does it gotta be a human bomb? We could just plant one—”

“They’ll scan for that before the contest. Use your noodle, Mooney.”

“Oh, okay.” Mooney slumped in his chair, visibly sulking—the suicide-bomber aspect seemed to be rubbing him the wrong way, but he’d been up for three days straight and didn’t have an alternative. He unscrewed his hip-flask and took a swallow, grimacing a little at the cleaning-fluid taste of the booze. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the bottle on the table. “Where the hell did you get that stuff, anyway?”

A couple of hours before he’d kept his appointment at the Edmonds Institute, Rico had stopped in with another of his ever-growing list of contacts. Vassily Grochenko, late of Moscow-St-Petersburg—or East-Meg, as they’d called it since the war ended—was an old man with a reedy voice and a permanently sour expression, who’d kept a connection open to the thriving arms trade in what was left of the Euro-cities. He was the man to see about explosives.

“Is so difficult for me here, Rico,” the old man had sighed, nursing the same cup of cold tea that he always seemed to have in his hand whenever Rico dropped into the frozen hole he kept over in Dan Duryea. “I am missing home. The children, when they are buying the guns from me, they are
so
rude.” He’d shaken his head, taking a sip of the tea. “You want your money, yes? Is always money with you. You are Judge—what you spend the money
on,
eh?”

“Oh, this and that. I always need money.” Rico had smiled. “But I don’t necessarily need yours. If you play ball, you won’t need to worry about paying me off ever again.” The old man’s eyes had lit up, and Rico’d known then that he’d be walking out of there with everything he needed.

Vassily had come through, all right, and Rico had been true to his word. Vassily had no worries now. It was a shame to cut off such a neat source of revenue so messily, but Vassily could be a little too chatty for his own good sometimes—besides, old men fell and broke their necks all the time. It probably would have happened anyway. At least that was Rico’s way of thinking.

“None of your beeswax,” he smiled at Mooney, leaning back on the kitchen chair. “Come on, Buddy-boy, I’m due on the streets in ten minutes—I really don’t want to go back out there with your blood on my knuckles. You know how we’re pulling off the riots, and you know when. Let me hear what you’ve got.”

“Okay,” Mooney rubbed a knuckle in his eye socket, scowling. “I managed to scare up the plans for the Herc, no thanks to you. Had to pay a few people a few bribes—creds I don’t exactly have, y’know? If this job don’t work out the way we think it will, I’ll be out on the street.”

Rico nodded sympathetically. There was no danger of Mooney being left on the street, though—the only place he was going was the Resyk belt. But he didn’t need to know that.

“Now, creds are paid in the ticket booths here—they’ll all be automatic. Exact change only. So the cash is all gonna get funnelled through to this room over here”—he tapped another part of the map, a storage room close to the ticket machines—“and once it’s in there, it goes right into money sacks for collection. So there’ll be a couple of schmoes in there working. Plus guards—maybe four or five? Nothing special, mind—just your average rentacops. Not good enough for the Academy, y’know?”

Rico nodded. “Oh, I know.”

Mooney narrowed his eyes, giving him a hard stare. “Are there gonna be any Judges back there, you think? Could mess up the plan if one of the guys has to take on any real opposition.”

Rico considered the question for a moment. “If there are—Muttox is pretty dumb, but I wouldn’t put it past him to think of it—they’ll be needed, either when the panic hits in the stands or when the bodies start piling up outside. They won’t be backstage long.” He sat back, rubbing his ample chin, and for a moment the frown on his face made him seem like a different person entirely. “Way I see it, we’ve got two problems. If I’m reading these plans right, the money room has some kind of in-built security on the door...”

Mooney nodded. “Right. Not exactly a bank vault, but there’s a lot of alarms there. It’d take a good half hour’s work to get through without setting them off—and once we do, the folks inside will have had time to call the Jays.”

“Problem two is moving the cash. That many creds—we’re looking at maybe six hundred pounds of weight.” Rico checked the time on the chronometer on his glove, then quietly drew the Lawgiver from his boot holster.

“W-what’s that for?” Mooney blinked, the colour draining from his face.

“Like I mentioned, Buddy-boy. I’m back on duty in eight minutes. If it gets to seven minutes and you’ve not given me something I can use...” Rico shrugged. “You’re not going to like the last sixty seconds all that much.”

“You don’t gotta threaten me, Rico,” Mooney muttered, reaching in his pocket for something. “I’ve got answers. Hold on a sec, I gotta find this—it’s mixed up with my prescriptions—”

“That’s my Buddy-boy,” Rico smiled. He sat back, waiting patiently for Mooney to produce whatever he was going to from his pocket. Eventually, the fat man smoothed a clipping from a trashzine out onto the table—some kind of advert. Rico cocked his head, looking at the image of a blow-up rubber doll staring back at him. “Buddy, Buddy, Buddy... if this is a suicide method, it’s kind of roundabout.”

“It ain’t a blow up doll!” Mooney snapped, then flinched, as if expecting the bullet. “Sorry. But I know what it looks like. Listen, what these are—they’re woman suits. Like, rubber woman suits for perverts to wear—over their clothes, even. Like a gimp suit, but flesh-coloured, and... y’know.” He reached up, miming a pair of breasts in the air with his sausage fingers. “Y’know, like that. They even got hair.”

Rico raised an eyebrow behind his visor. “The world is a strange place, Bud. Thanks for reminding me. You’ve got five more minutes.” He tilted his gun, flicking idly at the dial that selected which bullet it fired. “Ricochet’s fun. You ever fired a ricochet in between someone’s ribs? If you angle it right it’ll bounce about like a pinball—major agony, but the perp won’t actually die for—”

“All right, already!” Mooney was getting angry now. Lack of sleep, Rico figured. “Listen, the guys who make these super-perv suits—they do custom jobs. I ordered a guy—big fat guy. Like the contestants, y’know? Zips up in the front.” He stared at Rico, as if expecting him to get the gist immediately. “Jeez! It’s like a bag, okay? A big bag that looks like it’s a guy!”

“A guy who weighs six hundred pounds.” Rico nodded, satisfied. “Not bad, Mooney.”

“We steal an ambulance from someplace—it’ll have to be a civilian one, I ain’t stealing one from the Judges. But it’s not out of the question one of these big-time eating champions is gonna have private cover, y’know? Anyway, we steal one of those, modify it for a quick getaway if we need one, beef up the suspension a little too. Two of our guys pretend to be paramedics—we’ll need a third guy in the money room, loading the skin-bag up, but after he’s done that our fake medics can lift it up onto a hoverstretcher and carry it out with a sheet over it. Figure in the confusion, anybody looking will think it’s a dead contestant.” Mooney exhaled hard, slumping back in his chair.

“Not just a pretty face, are you? What about that half-hour on the door?” Rico grinned, aiming the Lawgiver right between Mooney’s eyes. He had to admit, he was getting a real kick out of this—he’d have to plan heists a little more often. “Tick-tock, Buddy-mine. Two minutes.”

Mooney shook his head, looking disgusted. “Ain’t no way to run a damn railroad, Rico.” He scowled, taking a long gulp from his flask. “We go in the night before. We time it right—the night watchmen’ll give us a half-hour easy if we don’t get caught on any cameras—and then we leave a guy in there overnight. When the money-counting shmucks come in to fill the bags, he steps out from behind the door and takes care of ’em. Tells ’em to be good little boys, ties ’em up—”

Rico rolled his eyes. “Shoot them.”

“Nobody wants a murder rap—”

“We’re starting a riot—maybe two, if we have to. If we get caught, everyone involved in this is doing life.” Rico smirked, humourlessly. “Well, everyone except for me. I’ll be getting worse.” He checked his chronometer. “Thirty seconds spare. So.” Rico slid the Lawgiver back in his boot holster, then got up from the table. “I count three extra guys—your two paramedics, and whoever we put in the money room.”