Hence the brain-shrinking session Dredd had been press-ganged into this morning. It wasn’t enough that they wanted to ensure Rico was the only bad apple; they also wanted to determine how the arrest had affected him, whether Dredd’s judgement had been compromised, whether there’d be any personal fallout. Dredd found it facile and beneath him, but he’d listened and responded as instructed. Truth was, Rico had broken the Law and brought the uniform into disrepute: there could’ve been no other possible outcome. He would’ve been doing a disservice to both himself and all that the badge stood for if he hadn’t imposed the maximum sentence. That Rico was his brother—more than his brother—had stung, there was no question of that; all the pair had been through together since Booth, since the nukes had dropped, had cemented a bond between them that had seen them through the Academy. He’d thought it unshakeable, and thus was cognizant of the tragedy of the situation; that he’d ended the career—and, to all intents and purposes, the life—of the person that had been closest to him. But what he’d done had been right, and that was the moral anchor that he clung to. It had been necessary. Why Rico had chosen to turn his back on all he’d been created to be, they would probably never know; but the important thing was that he was stopped, and he’d been punished for his misdemeanours.
“Well?” Perrineau persisted.
“Justice was done,” Dredd replied.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all that matters.”
10.05 am
IT WAS GOOD to be back on the sked, clear away the cobwebs. He’d spent too long in that stultifying room. He didn’t think Perrineau got the answers that she’d hoped for—in truth, he got the impression she’d found him vexing—and was no doubt already filing a report to Goodman that Joe Dredd’s psychological profile was impossible to catalogue. Whether that would make the old man happy or not, he couldn’t say; but if she’d wanted a case study worthy of doctoral thesis she’d been better off interviewing Rico. He loved the sound of his own voice. Indeed, incredible as it seemed, his clone had attained a level of notoriety akin to a folk hero amongst the easily swayed—which was, to be honest, half the city. He did exude a certain charisma that the criminal meatheads fell for, Dredd had to admit, which probably explained how he’d managed to operate for so long unopposed. Already, journalists were submitting applications to travel to Titan and get a face-to-face with the new inmate; they were more than a little amused by the embarrassment that his arrest had brought on Grand Hall, and keen for juicy copy. Dredd found the whole circus nauseating, though he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. Every psycho and miscreant he’d put away in the cubes had a fan club waiting somewhere in the wings.
He just wanted to be out enforcing the Law, not stymied by bureaucracy or enduring performance reviews; he was already gathering something of a reputation of not doing his fair share of the paperwork. He didn’t attempt to deflect the guilt of that charge: he knew full well it wasn’t his forte. But practical judgement dispensed on the streets was what he believed should be the priority—leave the pen-pushing to those with an aptitude for it. Anyone on the receiving end of this proclamation would roll their eyes when his back was turned, and then contemplate the steadily-mounting stack of arrest sheets. Many felt he received preferential treatment because of his lineage, though they never said so within earshot, and few could argue with his exceptional record. It was his second year as a full-eagle Judge, and he was putting some veterans to shame.
He accelerated as he hit the Siegel exit-ramp, leaning in to Atwood Throughway as he merged with the traffic, feeling at home surrounded by the Lawmaster’s comforting roar. It enveloped him. He flexed his biceps, straightened his back, welcoming the wind whipping past his visor, bringing with it the scent trails of exhaust fumes and factory run-off, burnt rubber and seared hotties, and eased his bike between a pair of hover-trucks. It was moments like this that he felt the most free, furthest from the politics of the Grand Hall. At every opportunity he liked to escape the central sectors and head into the outlying districts; any excuse to experience the metropolis opening up before him. It was what made his job the greatest calling any person could aspire to, this feeling of control.
He cast a glance at the other vehicles racing alongside him, aware that the drivers were conscious of him too, the Judge’s mere presence enough to maintain decent behaviour. He could probably find something on any of them if he pulled them over, but for now he was content to ride and exude the authority that kept them in line. In any case, he had his eye on a dark saloon roadster four cars ahead; nothing especially untoward about its appearance, but it was keeping a steady pace that suggested it was trying not to draw attention to itself. He’d already run the registration through the system and come back with switched plates, the name on the purchase docket almost certainly a fake. His instincts were twitching, but he didn’t want to intervene just yet; instead, he kept his gaze fixed on its smoked windows and followed at a discreet distance, matching its speed.
It peeled off at the next intersection, heading downtown through a dilapidated area of Sector 9—known locally as the Strickland estate—and Dredd had to hold off some to avoid appearing conspicuously in the driver’s rear-view mirror. It was moving particularly carefully, and he got the sense that whoever was inside was looking for an address. It kept pausing at each tenement block, before eventually pulling up on a corner before one of the old pre-war apartment complexes, its façade pockmarked with age and weapons fire, many of the windows shuttered or boarded-up. Dredd couldn’t get any closer on his Lawmaster, so instead brought it to a halt a block away and dismounted, watching as the driver and his passenger emerged.
They were a pair of squirrelly looking creeps, visibly stoned on something, which would account for their over-cautiousness. Stepping round to the rear of their car, they wrenched open the back doors and each pulled a container from within, clearly struggling with the weight. They staggered into the building’s main entrance, glancing around to check they had no witnesses; the duo might as well have had ‘guilty’ written in Day-Glo colours on their backs.
The lawman set off at a trot, drawing his sidearm. “Control—Dredd. Investigating suspicious delivery, Trenmar lux-apts on Strickland. Am engaging.”
“That’s a rog,” his comm answered in his ear.
He paused at the vehicle and cast an eye inside—there were a couple more boxes nestled in the space behind the seats. He looked briefly towards the block, discerned no movement, then yanked a container forward onto the tailgate, feeling the cold even through the insulation of his gloves. He tugged on the lid with his left hand and it cracked open a touch, expelling a blast of dry ice, instantly fogging his visor; he swiped it clear and sighted his Lawgiver on whatever lay within.
The head gazed back at him with a lifeless stare, frost limning its eyebrows and lashes, pupils and lips grey, skin sallow. The freezing process had captured the victim’s expression at the point of death—or at the point his neck was severed clean off his shoulders, whichever had come first—and there was a degree of understandable surprise and consternation in the way the mouth had dropped open and the forehead had furrowed. Ice crystals gleamed in his hair. Dredd reached in and pushed it to one side to see what else was in there: a pair of hands neatly stacked like crockery, a wedding ring encrusted around one finger. He let the lid drop and turned back to the block.
He edged through the doors, gun at the ready. ‘Lux-apts’ was a joke—it had been many years since this had been desirable housing. It stank of rot and neglect, the entire subsector fallen to ruin, where the past hadn’t been entirely cemented over. After the nukes had dropped, and once Booth had been run out of town and Justice Department had taken over, the metropolis had grown and developed, pushing north and south to accommodate the swelling population: eight hundred million, at the last count. The gleaming starscrapers that grasped at the heavens and the tangle of meg-ways and zoom-lines that encircled them were just as much a distraction from the fo
rgotten tenements as they were a solution; Old New York may lie beneath their feet, but the Mega-City was still a patchwork of ancient and modern, of destitute, ravaged areas dwarfed by aggressive expansion.
People had to live somewhere, however, especially with much of the country decimated, though the new blocks—Mia Farrow, Ricardo Montalban—were well out of many cits’ price range. It grated with Dredd’s sense of justice that a lot of the blocks currently being constructed were not intended for the majority of the populace that needed them; the Judges had taken office on the understanding that they would protect its citizens, and if they couldn’t house them they were doing them a disservice. But that was the way of things, it seemed: what was right often collided with what was viable, and those caught in the fallout suffered the most, reduced to seeking shelter in borderline-condemned properties such as these. From the sky MC-1 gleamed, but there were those who were forced to exist in its shadows.
Dredd stepped into the entrance foyer, the floor cracked and littered with refuse, the walls rent in places and exposing wiring innards. The lighting looked like it had long stopped working, leaving the interior in gloom, though the infra-red function in his helmet enabled him to penetrate the murk. Moving quietly, he followed two sets of glowing red footprints down a corridor, casting glances to either side at the firmly closed apartment doors, aware that anything could be lurking behind them. One opened a sliver and a curious eye regarded him as he passed, and was quickly shut again when he swung his gun in its direction.
The footprints stopped a few yards later at a doorway which had been hastily fitted with brand-new locks and bolts. He backed against the wall, out of the periphery of the spyhole, and briefly tested the solidity of the wood—he wouldn’t be able kick it in without some assistance. He fished in his belt pouch and retrieved a pair of small, circular limpet mines, which he attached near the hinges, thumbing a ten-second fuse on the digital display. Double-checking the ammo selector on his gun, he stood back and waited for the big boom.
The charges shredded the door as they detonated, and Dredd slammed his boot into what remained, knocking the warped wood to the ground. The two creeps he’d seen making the delivery were caught with their dicks in their hands—or rather someone else’s dick, in one case; the small organ glittered like a popsicle. Their eyes widened when they found themselves staring down a Lawgiver barrel.
“Hands in the air! Now!” Dredd commanded.
The perps complied instantly, arms shooting above their heads, silvery talisman still gripped in one of their fists.
“Drop that,” the Judge muttered, and the guy raised his eyes at it sheepishly before tossing it back into the box, where it landed with a clink.
Dredd moved forward into the apartment, gun trained on the pair. It was barely furnished, little more than a shell, and clearly not used for habitation. What space there was had been given over to stacks of the same containers and a couple of industrial, tomb-like freezer units plugged into the wall, which rumbled quietly in the background. There had to be at least a dozen missing persons cases waiting to be cleared here. It was quite the backstreet operation: too organised and well stocked, Dredd considered, to be the handiwork of a couple of bozos like this. They had to be just the delivery men, which suggested they took their orders from the brains—or at least the less chemically-befuddled leader—of the outfit.
“You,” the lawman said to the scraggily-bearded meathead on the right, motioning with his weapon. “Anyone else on the premises?”
The creep rolled his eyes to one side, towards an adjoining room behind a closed door. The forefinger of one upraised hand pointed discreetly in the same direction. Whoever was in there couldn’t have failed to be alerted to the Judge’s entrance.
“Hey, man, come on,” his partner whispered. “I know it looks bad, but we ain’t got a choice in this; w-we just do what we’re told. We just pick this stomm up—we ain’t killers or nothin’.”
“Shut up and move over there,” Dredd growled, beckoning for them to sidle away from the next room. He quickly patted them down, finding nothing in their overjaks. He fished for his cuffs on his belt, and chucked them towards the duo, the whiny guy catching them. “Put them on, one wrist each. Then sit down with your backs against each other.”
“Look—” the perp started, doing as instructed regardless.
“I thought I told you to shut up. Not a sound, understand?”
It was at that point that the third occupant of the apartment came out blasting. The first shot tore through the door and punched a hole in the wall above his prisoners. Plaster, masonry and dust rained down on them; yelling and panicking, they tried to scoot out of the way, pulling uselessly in opposite directions. Dredd booted them onto their sides, where they lay sobbing, then ducked low and circled around the doorway. Another shot blew apart the latch, and the door swung open on one hinge. It listed for a moment, then a figure came barrelling through and tore it down completely. Dredd followed the figure’s trajectory and pumped three Standard Execution rounds after it, but it disappeared behind a freezer unit.
“This is the Law,” he said, gun trained on where he surmised the perp was hiding. “Drop the weapon and come out with your hands raised. You will get no further warning.”
No response. He moved closer, aware that the appliances ruled out a hotshot; there’d be the risk the bullet would boomerang back and strike him as the nearest heat source. He glanced to his left and saw an open container. He reached in carefully and retrieved what appeared to be an expertly removed lung, encased in a vacuum-pak. It shifted beneath his fingers, already starting to defrost. He hefted it once then slung it over the freezer and took a single shot, piercing the pak and spraying brown blood and dark matter in a wide arc. He heard a cry of disgust, and his perp clambered to their feet to avoid the shower, revulsion temporarily overriding safety.
Dredd had a bead on her as soon as she appeared—a wild-haired woman in her fifties, surprisingly light on her feet considering she was more than several pounds into the obese category. She was wearing a kind of smock, covered in what he judged to be human stains, and she was wiping gore streaks off her face, still holding the shotgun.
“Drop it,” he barked, knowing even as he said it that she wouldn’t cooperate. Half blind, she swung round at the sound of his voice, finger on the trigger, and he fired without hesitation, drilling an SE slug through her skull. She hit the floor with a thump.
He crossed through the shattered door and found a makeshift laboratory-stroke-operating theatre: the shelves were lined with jars and medical equipment, a heart monitor and several oxygen cylinders stood by the wall, and in the centre were two gurneys that had seen better days. Upon one, hooked up to a saline drip, lay an unconscious male eldster, covered up to his neck by a green sheet. As Dredd got closer, he saw that one of the cit’s eyes was missing: just a riven, bloodied black hole. On a tray nearby stood a solution-filled beaker in which floated an eyeball, optic nerve trailing after it. Given the freshness of the organ, he guessed it hadn’t belonged to the patient. Dredd checked the old guy’s pulse and found a weak sign, then headed back into the main apartment, where the two delivery creeps were still whimpering under a film of filth.
“Control, need catch-, meat- and med-wagons to Trenmar,” he muttered into his comm. “Uncovered a considerable organ-legging operation. Could do with a forensics team here too—multiple body parts from numerous victims, will require some piecing together.”
“Sh-she was just trynna help, man,” the whinger said. “People round here, they can’t afford the insurance, can’t go to the hospitals. They needed a cheap op, th-they came to her. She was savin’ lives best way she knew how, that’s all...”
Dredd didn’t reply, merely surveyed the damage in the room, Perrineau’s words from earlier that morning coming back to him. How did he feel?
He looked at the blood splatter. The simple answer was that he couldn’t afford to.
Two
10.33 am
HE STUCK AROUND at the scene for the catch-wagon to cart away the two perps and for forensics to do their work. Curiosity made him linger. It didn’t take much encouragement for the creeps to talk while they waited, though what they knew was frustratingly sparse: couriers, basically, instructed to pick up body parts from specific collection points. A first-year cadet could tell that these two were not capable of murder, much less dismemberment, and they freely admitted the only way that they could handle the deliveries was to be wrecked on Banana City Brown (both were holding, and Dredd added a few years for possession on top of the organ-legging charges, though neither seemed to care by this point). They’d done more than two dozen of these runs in the past year, and they’d never met the killer, or had any clue to their identity, stating with some vehemence that the dead woman—Mama ‘Doc’ Carrington—wasn’t guilty either. The Judge suspected this was true, though the kills were almost certainly carried out at her behest; she was more than likely contracting a reliable out-of-sector hitman to keep her supplied.
The doltish pair seemed to have no shortage of respect for Carrington, believing that she was only doing what was necessary to come to the aid of those that would otherwise be neglected. Dredd ran the woman’s details through his bike computer: she’d been trained as a med-assistant over at St Bart’s in Sector 12 but had been made redundant a couple of decades ago. Since then, she’d barely appeared on the system, falling through the cracks like so many in this twilight world. Employment records would be sketchy to the point of non-existent that close to the war, and would probably lead nowhere, but he had a fancy that her hired associate was also connected to the hospital—the victims were too cleanly disassembled for the perp not to know his way around the human anatomy. Dredd made a mental note to chase down KAs and cross-reference them with the targets, once they’d been fully ID’d. Could be that they’d been specifically chosen—rare blood group, low rad-count, healthy genes; info that someone with access to med-records could determine—rather than random snatches off the street.
Judge Dredd: Year Two Page 14