Wear Iron (2 page)

It was the kind of fear that prompted action, in other words. The kind of fear that made the first guard—who wasn’t being paid nearly enough for gunplay, and would, under ordinary circumstances, have remembered that—go for his piece in a blur of barely-trained motion and send a slug right through McKittrick’s throat.

In that one moment, the whole operation had collapsed like a house of cards. As McKittrick staggered back—scrabbling at the bloody wound that used to be his jugular, making noises like fish used to, back when there were fish—Strader raised his gun and fired twice, and the guard fell, and then Petersen opened up with the stuttergun he’d sworn up and down he wouldn’t use.

And now here they all were.

Strader tore his eyes away from the wet chunks of flesh that’d once been guard number two—the swaying remains of the man’s legs, still bizarrely standing like that statue of Ozymandias, the blood and cartilage dribbling down a wall that looked like Swiss mock-cheese—and took a look over at McKittrick.

There was no saving him. He was still twitching, but there was nothing left in his eyes. Next to him, the dame who’d taken the ricochet in the leg lay stiff and lifeless as stone, bright red blood gushing from the wound and soaking the carpet in a spreading pool. The bullet had made a neat hole in her pulmonary artery. Petersen’s stuttergun had turned a simple heist into a triple murder.

Quadruple. Petersen, eyes glassy, cold sweat pouring down his face, swung his too-much-gun at the college girl behind the counter and opened up with a second burst that turned everything above her shoulders into wet munce. Her finger slipped off the button she’d been pressing—the silent alarm—as what was left of her slumped to the ground, legs twitching and spasming, heels drumming in the familiar rhythm of the freshly dead. Strader felt numb at the sight of it.

Everyone was being stupid now. The remaining three cits were out of control—whatever spell the stuttergun had cast over them in the first moments had reversed itself when Petersen actually fired the thing. One of them, a bald man of about forty, was kneeling down next to the dead woman with the torn artery, trying fruitlessly to wake her back up, tears splashing from his double chin into the pooled blood. The other two—punk-jocks in fake-leather jackets who’d been shopping for new cheek-rings—took their chance and made a run for the door, crying out for someone, anyone, to help. Crying for the Judges.

Petersen barked an order, hoarse and almost unintelligible, and swung the heavy stuttergun around. In that moment, his wild eyes and the set of his jaw suggested he really had gone futsie. When the stuttergun misfired and jammed, he made a strangled noise deep in the back of his throat and shook the weapon helplessly, as if trying to jar some loose part of the mechanism back into place.

In the distance, Strader could hear a siren. Closing in.

That was another of Strader’s rules—the Judges were the law, and brother, you had better believe it. The Academy of Law made them faster, better and harder than you could ever be, even if they weren’t Atom War veterans with itchy trigger fingers. Facing down the Jays was for first-time juves and mugs with more guts than brains. A true professional never tangled with the Judges. Not ever.

It was time to go.

He’d already given the job—and Petersen—up for lost. Rule three—no such thing as a job you can’t walk away from. The moment he heard the siren, mixing with Petersen’s muttered curses as he shook the massive gun like a bad father shaking a crying baby, Strader was already stepping calmly over the remains of the counter-girl and through the door that led into the back offices, walking away from the whole sorry mess.

He turned as the door swung shut behind him, risking a last look at what he was leaving. A Judge was already leaping off his bike just outside the door, Lawgiver at the ready. For his part, Petersen had grabbed the bald man by the shirt collar and was holding the useless stuttergun to his head, yelling obscenities, trying to bluff it out. Strader winced—it looked like suicide by Judge as much as anything. Maybe Petersen’s mind really had gone. But then, the Judge seemed young, fresh from the Academy—just a kid, really. After the war, they were rushing them through, trying to bolster the numbers. It was just possible Petersen had lucked out and caught one of the dumber ones—but those weren’t betting odds.

Just before the door swung shut, Strader caught a glimpse of the kid Judge’s badge:
Dredd.

Strader turned and walked quickly past the empty office in back and the meagre break room, moving as silently as he could to the fire door—it was alarmed, but Strader knew which wire to cut with his pocket las-knife to fix that.

As he pushed the fire door open, he heard the familiar dull flat boom of a standard execution bullet. It was too bad—and it put a timer on things. Even if the Judge didn’t know there was a third man on the job, he would as soon as one of the cits started talking.

Strader was just thankful he had his wrist-com working—or rather, the surveillance blocker built into it, a wireless pulse designed to scramble the software of any cameras within a hundred feet or so. A brief victory for his side in the endless war between those who made security systems and those who broke them—they were already working on plugging the hole, but for the moment, Strader had the edge. And a few other tricks besides.

He reversed his jacket quickly, moving the shocking, fluorescent green from the outside to the inside, replaced by a sombre, fashionable grey. The false moustache and eyebrows went into his pocket, before he pulled off his shoes and tossed them down the stairwell, making sure his bloody footprints ended at the fire door on the thirty-eighth floor. He gave the wires there a quick slash to complete the illusion, then carried on running down the fire stairs to ground level barefoot.

He felt safer now. The black dye in his hair might still identify him, but he could take care of that soon enough. Somewhere above him, a cit was describing some schmuck in a day-glo green jacket that had a moustache a hell of a lot like Rudy Conn’s in
Fight Thru The Night
at the Bijou—and that wasn’t him, not any more.

Still, he allowed himself the luxury of a little self-loathing as he ran—he’d acted desperate, teaming up with a couple of characters he was better than on his worst day, and as a result he was right back in the hole where he’d started. Worse—he had four murders on his rap sheet he didn’t have before, and he had a bad feeling they’d come back to haunt him.

He’d only caught a glimpse—but this Dredd kid didn’t seem the type to forget.

Two

F
OUR HOURS LATER,
Strader was a sector away, staring into a mirror at his naked face.

The hair dye was the cheap one-wash stuff, made for the juves and the club-hoppers—it washed out with just a little help from the cold tap in the toilet sink, leaving Strader’s hair a close-cropped, silvery grey. The brown disposable contacts had been removed and dropped into the sink to melt with the dye, leaving behind a pair of eyes that were as cool and green as a mint freezy-whip on a hot summer day.

Strader ran his fingertips over the stubble on his chin, wondering if it was worth a shave, if he could change himself any more completely. Razor burn was a red flag for any Jay looking to fill a day’s stop-and-search quota, but part of him wanted to risk it. There was something about the five o’clock shadow scraping the pads of his fingers—something unprofessional, something that felt like bad luck. He shook his head, as if to dispel the urge—superstition was an occupational hazard in his line of work, and something to be avoided. He’d seen too many otherwise-good men take one in the back of the head because their minds were on a missing plasteen rabbit-foot charm or a hat left on a bed in a motel somewhere. Not him. Casting a last look at his own reflection, he dried his hands under the air-jets and walked back into the bar.

He’d picked the joint at random—the Tony Hart Working Cit’s Club, a no-account hole buried deep in a block he’d never set foot in before. It was a relatively safe place to work through his options, to try and think of a way of squaring things with the Cowboy and getting out from the net he knew had to be closing in on him. He wasn’t there for any company but his own.

So when Bud Mooney waddled up out of nowhere, a wide, almost malicious grin creasing his chubby cheeks, Strader told him to go to hell.

Mooney was poison in the circles Strader worked in. Two hundred pounds of gut and sweat, crammed into a pre-war op-art jacket that made him stick out like a sore thumb. He couldn’t run or even move that fast—word had it that he took his leaks into a bag on his leg, the legacy of the same run-in with the Jaybirds that’d sent him for a ten-year holiday in the rockcrete hotel and given him his nervous twitch. When he talked, one side of his face jerked spasmodically upwards into a rictus sneer. He kept a hip flask full of bathtub hooch in an inside pocket to calm the jitters, and after a few pulls—common in any long conversation—his speech became even more audibly slurred, and his eyes flickered and rolled nervously back and forth in his head.

Bud Mooney was a wreck, pure and simple. A wreck and a liability.

There was even a rumour doing the rounds that he might be a snitch, or at least half of one—at one point his name still carried some water among the older school of yegg, but over the past few months, those few friends who’d kept in contact had developed a serious blackmail problem. Those who didn’t pay a modest fee to an anonymous voice on the vidphone before a job would find themselves pinched by the Judges during—whoever was behind the scam was probably a Judge themselves, or at least had their ear. But the trail went back to Mooney, and now there was nobody left willing to say two words to him.

It hadn’t always been that way. Back when the jacket was still in style, before the ten-stretch and the twitch and the urine bag, Bud Mooney had been one to watch, the undisputed king in a world of princes, a master of his chosen art. Stick-up kids still talked about the Bullet Train Heist of ’62—they’d made a movie out of it, though it’d gone straight to vid-slug—but if you pointed Bud Mooney out now and told them how that stumbling, alcoholic wad of blubber had been the mastermind for that caper... if you were lucky, they’d only laugh in your face.

And who could blame them? That Bud Mooney had died with a dumdum bullet in his bladder, and now a fat, broken ghost shuffled through the streets in his place, dreaming impossible dreams of jobs that’d never happen, carried out by crews who could never trust him again, in between pulls of a dented metal flask in an eternally twitching hand. A human shipwreck.

The shipwreck made another attempt at a smile. The twitch turned it into a leer. “Paul? Paul Strader?” He had teeth missing. Strader winced in disgust.

“I said go to hell, Mooney.”

But Mooney didn’t go anywhere. He shuffled closer, pulling out a chair and carefully cramming his bulk into it, smiling obsequiously in between sips of some cheap soygin that smelled like lighter fluid. “Listen, I got a job for someone like you.”

Strader closed his eyes, shaking his head and hoping the other man would vanish away like a daydream. What were the odds of running into Mooney here? He felt a momentary flash of paranoia shoot down his spine—if someone like Mooney could find him here, the Judges or the Cowboy’s people probably weren’t far behind. He didn’t know which of those options was worse.

On the one hand, he’d be safe from the Cowboy in the cubes. But on the other hand, death might be preferable—even that kind. Maybe it was because he’d never been inside, even for the basic thirty-day misdemeanour stretch that every cit seemed to hit sometime or other, but there was something about the idea of those four grey rockcrete walls closing in on him that filled him with a primal terror.

To be cubed, he knew, would be like being buried alive. Even if the Cowboy took things slow with Strader, he’d be dead and out of it eventually. But he was looking at a life stretch for the fiasco in the jewellery store—and medical technology was only getting better. He could live for a hundred years, maybe a hundred and fifty, crammed into a tiny rockcrete box, spending day after lonely day praying for another atom war to finish him off quickly...

Strader wet his lips, shooting a narrow glance at Mooney. “Why are you even here? How did you find me?” He tried and failed to keep the panic out of his voice.

Mooney heard it, and smiled. “Don’t get your u-fronts in a bunch, Paul.” He held up a shaky hand, a little conciliatory gesture. “Pure coincidence, I swear. See, I got this hab across the street, over in Daniels Block—nothin’ special, just a dump on the twenty-second floor, but it’s got a real good view of the pedway into Tony Hart.”

He grinned a little wider, and Strader resisted the urge to smash his glass into those rotten teeth. Maybe save Mooney a few creds at the robo-dentist. “Anyway,” the fat man babbled on, “I like to sit and watch the people go by. I had to sell the vid—I got bills—and, y’know, you gotta watch somethin’. Anyway, guess who I saw? I mean, you had black hair, so maybe I thought I’d got it wrong, but I’d know that face anywhere and it sure
walked
like you do—”

Strader slumped back in his seat, listening to Mooney describe how he’d followed Strader into the block, then searched the block directory for a likely bar, some dive where people might go not to be found. He felt a wave of depression stealing over him, like a heavy blanket. Mooney’s story sounded like it was at least half a lie, but if it was true—was that how easy it was? All his disguise, all his preparation, and it had been seen through by a half-smart rummy in less than a second.

He thought back to the young Judge, the one who he was sure had caught a glimpse of him—Dredd. That kid had infinite cameras at his disposal, most of them well out of wireless range—plus countless audio bugs, chemical tracers, human snitches and snoops, the whole sweep of surveillance available to Justice Department. Every day there were more eyes and ears on the streets. All “for the good of the citizenry,” of course—but all the same, all Dredd had to do was be as smart as Bud Mooney and Strader would be warming a cube by nightfall.