Judge Dredd Year One: City Fathers

by Matthew Smith

  The Judges executed them all without mercy.

  Six

  THE DIVE WAS jumping tonight, there was no question of that.

  Klein glanced around her and had to admit she’d never seen the bar packed like this before; they’d surely have to start turning people away at the door, and it was barely eleven pm. Quite why there was such a show of force on this wet Tuesday evening—Weather Control having programmed in a solid six hours of light drizzle—she didn’t know, but they were all here: the bikers, the gangbangers, the weirdies, the norms, the spugs and the dopehounds, all rubbing shoulders, all crammed within the four sweaty walls of this down-at-heel stommheap. There were better drinking establishments metres away, so it wasn’t like everyone was frequenting this place because it was a happening venue, somewhere to be seen; indeed, your decision to come through that entrance said more about your lack of taste and discretion than it did of your fashionableness.

  From her position at a corner table—she’d been here since late afternoon and was grateful she’d managed to secure such a decent vantage point when it’d been half empty—it was a sea of faces and voices, a heaving throng that she did her best to surreptitiously scan without dwelling too long on a given figure, lest she draw suspicion. Between studying the crowd, she took sips from her glass, a synthi-vodka she’d been nursing for a couple of hours; partly because she didn’t want to battle through the masses to buy a replacement, and partly because she didn’t want to get drunk. She gave the impression she was mildly inebriated—slurring her words as she sung quietly to herself at random intervals, enough to discourage any unwanted male attention, even if they weren’t put off by her appearance—but she was secretly sober. She couldn’t afford for the alcohol to dull her awareness.

  Malone’s was routinely on Justice Department’s radar as a known perp hangout, although the proprietor himself was smart enough to keep his nose clean and his books in order, despite repeated raids and spot checks. There was never any hard evidence to sanction closing the place down—it wasn’t exactly salubrious, and Klein wouldn’t want to eat anything that came out its kitchen, but it stayed just the right side of legal—although in all likelihood the creeps would simply move on to the next watering hole if they did manage to condemn it. It had never been established how it became an underworld meeting place, or why especially; these things often had a way of accruing traditions. But for the last few years the Judges kept a constant eye on who was frequenting the bar through spy-cams and infiltration, gleaning information from audio surveillance. It had become a regular haunt of Klein’s for the past six months or so, to the point where she was now a familiar face amongst Malone’s patrons; one more barfly sliding into unconsciousness in the corner, an alcoholic who stumbled out of the stackers each morning to seek oblivion in a bottle. The crims that gathered in the back rooms looked through her now, used to her presence and disdainful of her tatty rags, her greasy hair and the wild cast to her eyes. She was just another sap off the streets, who’d inevitably be found frozen solid inside a dumpster one morning and lamented by no one. She wasn’t anybody that mattered.

  What she was, unbeknownst to them, however, was an undercover Judge.

  Klein had been operating in the area plainclothes for over a year, long separated from the local sector house and a life in uniform, abandoning her previous identity to embed herself amongst those that walked the slab: the homeless, the drunks, the junkies, the lost. It was the ideal social group in terms of visibility; these were the ignored and forgotten, perpetually existing in the background but transparent to the regular cit. It meant she could drift between the creeps, eyes and ears open, listening, collating and reporting back, with little fear of detection. There was a small circle of other Wally Squad Judges within the sector that kept in contact, and they met and compared notes on what they’d been observing at bi-monthly intervals in case there was some crossover of information, but for ninety per cent of her time, Klein acted alone, playing a part that consumed her entirely. It was a role that she had to enact convincingly if she wasn’t going to blow the whole network of undercover officers, so she would often find herself rooting through trash for her next meal, sleeping in hostels and begging for chump change. She’d been attacked by crazies on three occasions—kicked their asses every time; so resoundingly, in fact, that she’d gained something of a reputation as a pugilist and not to be messed with—and contracted a stomach infection at least once from a diet of foodstuffs stolen from the backs of hypermarts, but this kind of thing, she reasoned, came with the job.

  There were a lot of familiar faces amongst those that were packing out Malone’s tonight, which she’d come to know and recognise in her months staking it out: a few pimps and their girls; an ex-con with an ARV rap sheet as long as your arm; a contingent of democrat troublemakers. The biker crews were the most dangerous—zziz freaks to a man, and with a pathological hatred for the jays, they were hopped up on any amphetamine they could lay their hands on and indulged their appetites for destruction on a nightly basis. If they ever rumbled her cover, she would not live to see another morning. They were notorious dope pushers too, flooding the central sectors with particularly dirty narcotics, cut with all manner of poisons.

  Drugs changed hands as a matter of course on a night like tonight, and she could see the bundles and wraps being passed back and forth without a huge amount of discretion. Klein sensed a certain urgency amongst the buyers, though, as if they were expecting something else, and more than a few pairs of eyes turned towards the door every time it opened to admit the latest arrival. It looked like some were waiting for a delivery, and were growing impatient. Her interest piqued, she kept half her attention on the entrance too.

  When, at 23:14, she saw who it was they were waiting for, she realised she had to get to a phone.

  DREDD PULLED UP alongside White on a viewing post overlooking the Kate Moss zipway. Beneath them a fast-flowing river of traffic streamed along the sked, the roar of engines and tyres screaming on rockcrete rolling up to meet them. It was a thunderous backdrop of sound that enveloped the two Judges, a constant drone interspersed by strident horn beeps or the squeal of a Lawmaster peeling across lanes in pursuit of a miscreant.

  “White.” Dredd acknowledged his colleague with a nod. The other man—only five years older than Dredd but with acid burns from a tanker crash ravaging his left cheek and jaw so he appeared twice that age—returned the gesture. “Thanks for meeting with me.”

  “It’s fine. You said you were interested in the Calafaree suicide?”

  “Is that what it’s being labelled as?”

  “Death by misadventure, really. He clearly took something that sent him over the edge, but it’s impossible to ascertain if he knew his own mind when he went out the window.”

  “Witnesses say he was raving.”

  “Yeah, he attacked his secretary, put her in hospital—broke her nose, fractured her cheekbone. By the time others in the building made it into his office they say he’d lost it, had to be pulled off the woman, and was ranting as if he was terrified of something. They tried to restrain him but he broke free, and climbed up onto the ledge.”

  “Terrified... You think he was hallucinating?”

  “Without doubt. Vic was a walking drugstore—I checked his desk drawers and pulled his home apart, and he had stashed every kind of pill imaginable, both legal and illegal. He was a serious doper; I mean, we’re talking industrial-level quantities of drugs here.”

  “You find anything you didn’t recognise?”

  White shook his head. “No, it was all fairly standard stuff. But a bad batch of FX could’ve possibly brought on that kind of anxiety, driven him to take his own life.”

  “Maybe. What did the post-mortem say?”

  “Inconclusive. Creep was slab-meat when he was delivered to the meds, but they couldn’t find any trace in the blood samples of an unknown element. Plenty of sugar and caffeine, but nothing unusual.”

  “Damn.” Dredd look
ed out across the city, lost in thought for a few brief moments. “What about these other cases with a similar CoD?”

  White half-laughed, half-sighed with exasperation. “Yeah, well, that’s where it gets interesting. Calafaree’s death was high-profile, got a lot of media coverage—rich-boy banker, stoked on illicit pharmaceuticals, takes the plunge, you know the kind of thing—and the details flagged on five other suspicious stiffs over the past week. At the time they were passed off as futsies, but background, character, it just seemed unlikely.”

  “You got the details?”

  “Yeah, I’ll punch it up.” He entered the info into his bike computer. “OK, here we go, in chronological DoD order,” he said, running an eye over the text scrolling before him. “Sura Blanchard, twenty-six, wife of the property tycoon Marvin Blanchard, carves up their apartment with a las-knife before slitting her own throat; Les Bumpf, forty-three, head of accounts at MekTek, hangs himself; Austin Jillagon, nineteen-year-old politics student at MegaU, beats his lecturer unconscious in front of the rest of his class and then runs headfirst into a plate-glasseen window; Bodley Hume, thirty, unemployed droid engineer, climbs feet first into the public garbage grinder in the Jeff Bridges block recreation park; and Angie Fluck, fifty-seven, housewife, sets her neighbours on fire—the Patersons in Geoffrey Howe—then jumps into the flames herself. They average out about one a day, though Hume and Fluck died within twelve hours of each other.”

  Dredd’s mind raced, trying to find connections. The Blanchards lived in a mansion on Treddick, six blocks away from William Holden; Bridges and Howe were even closer, just round the corner, effectively. MegaU was in Central but the campus accommodation stretched this way. MekTek was out near the east wall, though.

  “What was Bumpf’s address?” he asked.

  “Uh... 48/C Margaret Atwood. Left behind a wife and four juves.”

  Atwood was on the other side of Shaw.

  White could see the other man ruminating. “It mean something?”

  “The five of them all lived within a two-mile square of William Holden block. Drug dealer I’m chasing operated out of there, name of Travest Vassell. Wait, where was Calafaree living?”

  “He had a place on the Epstein estate—”

  “Two minutes from Treddick. He was practically on the Blanchards’ doorstep.”

  “Swanky area like that, I’d be surprised if they didn’t know each other.”

  “You said the futsie angle seemed unlikely?”

  White scratched his scars. “Yeah, psychologically they were sound. No previous mental-health issues. But apart from Blanchard and Calafaree, all had priors for drug possession and abuse; all had done cube time for it. The rich creeps just hid it better.”

  “So they’d know where to go to get some if they wanted to.”

  “This Vassell meathead.”

  Dredd nodded. “Right. The word on the slab is that he’s acquired this new merchandise that he reckons is going to make him rich. So far no one’s seen anything of it—but what if he soft-launched it amongst a few of his regulars, tried it out on them. The stuff’s being trailed as having this incredible high, so they wouldn’t take much convincing.”

  “That’s always assuming the drug has anything to do with their freakouts. They were passed off as futsies because the medical reports couldn’t find any trace in the vics’ remains of an irregular outside contaminant.”

  “Then it must be undetectable, disperse in the body’s system. Or the meds don’t know what to look for. It seems too much of a coincidence otherwise—new narcotic surfaces on the market, cits start dying.”

  “I agree, it’s suspicious. But without any hard evidence linking the two, it’s still just circumstantial. If we knew for definite that Vassell was supplying Calafaree, then we could probably connect him to the other vics. But drug dealers don’t leave business cards.”

  “Too many bodies piling up around this creep for him not to be involved. I’ve got a dead peeper, murdered because he witnessed something that went down in Vassell’s hab.”

  “If it is the case, then the drug’s lethal in the extreme. I mean, does Vassell even know what the hell he’s giving to people, what he’s going to be distributing throughout the sector? What the drokk is in it?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. The priority is finding him and stopping him before more get their hands on it. I’ve had an APB out on him for the past twenty-four hours, but he’s gone to ground. Meanwhile, six users have ended up in Resyk, in all probability because of something they’d taken.”

  “Possibly seven. I hadn’t linked a stiff that was discovered last night because she didn’t fit on a social level with the other vics—thought she’d just overdosed. Units pursuing an organ-legging gang followed them into Vanderbilt, that slum block over on the west side. It’s a notorious hideout for junkies and creeps on the run; place needs demolishing. Anyway, in the course of their sweep, they found a dead female, early twenties, hypodermic embedded in her carotid artery, obviously self inflicted. But from the expression on her face, they said, it was like she’d been scared to death.”

  “Was she ID’d?”

  “DNA records named her as Judi Jones, but that just yelled alias...”

  “You’re right. She’s—was really Abigail Snood. Sometime dealer and slabwalker, bigtime user.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Only by association. She used to be Vassell’s girlfriend.”

  Dredd’s helmet radio crackled, silencing him before he could say anymore. “Dredd, just received a call from a Wally Squad operative stationed on Bevel Street, insisted the info be relayed to you immediately. She said, ‘He’s here.’”

  DREDD TORE ALONG the sked, issuing orders via Control as he went: he wanted any undercover units in the area to keep Malone’s surrounded and exits covered, but from a discreet distance. Too many uniforms would spook Vassell. They were to stand off and eyeball him only, wait until Dredd got to the scene; a lone Judge cruising past was not going to set off any criminal antennae unnecessarily.

  Bevel Street was in the low-rent end of the sector, colloquially known as ‘Puke Alley’ by the locals because of the number of cheap bars that were stationed along its length. It was popular with vagrants and junkies, taking advantage of both the cut-price alcohol and the minimal camera presence—it remained something of a blind spot in Justice Department’s surveillance network, which was why they had so many of Wally Squad on the ground—and as such organised crime chose it as regular meeting place, using the surrounding dregs for cover. It was the kind of place he should’ve guessed Vassell would be hiding out in; with petty lawlessness and public disorder offences rife, it was easy to maintain a low profile and slip through the cracks.

  Dredd decelerated as he approached Bevel, the crowd thickening with late-night revellers, and he had to pick his way through the throng, the Lawmaster’s engine rumbling as it crawled along the thoroughfare. He was conscious of attracting more than a handful of hard stares from those he passed, groups of drunks instantly sobering as they were caught in the beam of the bike’s headlamps and parting like waves before his advance; he made sure he gave them all the impression he was taking note of every one of them. He even threw a few backward glances to hammer the point home, a silent order to behave.

  He saw Malone’s—a gaudy, neon-festooned wreck with what looked like fire-damaged walls and more than couple of bullet holes pockmarking its frontage—appear to his left, and he slowed as he gave it the once-over, noise spilling out from within. He continued to the next corner, spying the slump of a human figure curled up amongst rubbish sacks in the mouth of a narrow passage, and stopped next to it.

  “Got reports of a beggar making a nuisance of themselves,” he said.

  “Dunno anythin’ ’bout that,” the figure slurred in reply.

  “Come on, on your feet,” he ordered, swinging himself off his bike and then lifting away several of the trash bags with the end of his daystick. The figure grumb
led but moved finally when Dredd gave it a gentle kick to the feet. He hauled it up the rest of the way, an actual face of a recognisable gender emerging from the layers of grimy clothes and blankets, and told her to stand by the wall.

  “Well?” Dredd asked as he gave the pretence of patting her down.

  “He went into one of the back rooms, creeps have been going in and out,” Klein answered, whispering. “I think he was expected; there was a lot of anticipation prior to his arrival. The place is packed: word must’ve got out that he was coming here tonight.”

  “How long has he been on the premises now?”

  “About ten to fifteen minutes.”

  “He come with anyone?”

  “Nope.”

  “OK. Keep your people monitoring the bar in case he makes a break for it. I’ve asked uniforms to stay back so there won’t be much in the way of assistance, should you need it.”

  “Understood.”

  Dredd stepped away from Klein, and gave her the briefest of nods. Then he strode back up the street towards Malone’s, daystick still in his hand, his grip on it tightening as he reached the entrance.

  Seven

  IT WAS AS if the entire bar held its breath.

  Dredd paused in the doorway and faced a hostile crowd, dozens of sullen eyes fixed in his direction. Klein hadn’t been exaggerating; the place was heaving, standing room only. Prior to striding inside—he’d ordered the two robo-doormen stood sentinel at the entrance not to allow anyone else in after him, under pain of deactivation—Malone’s had been raucous, a jumble of laughter, shouts, and beery conversation. Once the clientele were aware of his presence, though, the noise dribbled to a halt, heads turning to investigate the spreading silence and gazes coming to rest on the uniformed figure motionless by the door, clutching his daystick in one gauntleted hand and tapping it lightly into the other. No one said a word; some looked nervous, guilty consciences rushing to the surface at the merest sight of a Judge badge, but most studied him with hatred.