by Al Ewing
“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.”
“I could—” Mooney started, and stopped, letting his head hang.
“No, you really couldn’t.” Rico paused, his hand on the door control. “So who are our three? Anyone I know?”
“That’s just it.” Mooney swallowed hard, unable to meet Rico’s eye. “It’s what you had me doing, y’know? Snitching on people. Nobody’s gonna come in with me anymore. Nobody’s even takin’ my calls. I—I was hoping you knew somebody—”
“That’s a shame, Buddy-boy,” Rico said, and showed Mooney a big, toothy grin, the one he knew Mooney didn’t like. “A real shame. I guess I’ll see you when I see you.” He opened the kitchen door, giving Tellerman a curt nod on the way out. Tellerman cringed, shrinking into the armchair. “Look at Rocky there, Bud. He knows how to be a team player. He knows what I like.”
Mooney stumbled to his feet, following Rico to the front door like a lost puppy. “Rico—c’mon, Rico, please. You ain’t bein’ fair here—” He was trying to keep the whine out of his voice—and probably hating himself for not being able to manage it, too. Which was a kick, as far as it went, but it wasn’t exactly solving the problem at hand.
“I’ve been more than fair, Buddy-boy. You’ve been taking advantage of me, that’s the trouble. Taking advantage of all my kindness.” Rico paused before he left the hab, giving Mooney a long, hard stare. “But listen, if you do manage to come up with somebody—just one guy will do—you’ve got Justice Department’s number, so you can arrange a meet with me. Just act like you’re a narc.” He grinned, enjoying Mooney’s sullen expression. “If I were you, Bud, I’d make sure you got in touch with me before I reached out and got in touch with you. Just a word to the wise.”
Mooney tried to protest, but Rico closed the door in his face. It’d give him something to think about, at least.
Still, while fear was a pretty good motivator—certainly the best one Rico had come across—it couldn’t work miracles. If Mooney was as used-up as he said he was, Rico was going to have to start looking elsewhere for talent—and they’d need real talent if they wanted to break into that money room without getting caught.
Rico turned it over in his mind as he climbed onto his bike—still sitting where he left it in the watch-bay just outside Jeff Daniels—and started the engine. Maybe he’d get some inspiration on patrol—hell, he could even see if Little Joe was available to break a few heads open. That always cheered him up—
As he logged back in on the onboard computer, his own voice filled his helmet speakers. Speak of the wind and in it blows, he thought. Little Joe—probably passing through Rico’s sector on the way to some assignment or other. He had a habit of jumping whenever the Council snapped their fingers.
“This is Dredd to all units,” he heard his brother say. “We have an ARV”—armed robbery with violence—“Barry Scott Block Mall. One suspect down, one fleeing—Caucasian, black hair, day-glo green overjacket, Rudy Conn moustache. Suspect may be a professional thief—cameras were hacked wirelessly. Now believed headed west on Trudeau—”
Trudeau Street—that would take the perp onto the pedway, if he was smart, right past Jeff Daniels. ARVs were a dime a dozen, but this one had a couple of interesting factors. That Rudy Conn ’tache had to be a fake, for a start, and Little Joe wouldn’t have mentioned the ‘professional thief’ angle unless he was sure.
And if he was a pro heister, maybe Mooney could be useful after all.
“This is Rico Dredd responding—on my way, Little Joe.” Rico grinned into the radio. “I’ve got Trudeau locked down, don’t you worry. If your man comes by here, I’ll take him out for you. Save you a job.” He was careful to pack in just the right degree of arrogance—although he preferred to think of it as natural charm. Any more humility than they were used to out of him and they might just smell a rat.
Once he’d clicked off, he set the bike radio to dial Mooney’s apartment.
The fat slob picked up on the second ring. Rico had him well trained. “Buddy-boy? Well, who else would it be? No, no, I know what I said—look, just shut up and listen, Mooney. You go to your window and watch the pedway, see if you spot any familiar faces. The hair might be a dye-job, but keep your eyes skinned and tell me if you see anybody you know. And if you do see someone from the old days—some talent, I mean—don’t let them get away.”
He flicked the radio back to the main band. “Rico Dredd to all points—no sign of your man on Trudeau Street. Over.” That should be enough to throw them off and give his heister a head start.
Rico was playing a hunch here and he knew it, but his hunches had served him well in the past—and besides, if he was wrong and this was just a no-account punk who wasn’t part of Mooney’s criminal fraternity, it wasn’t like anything was lost. Easy come, easy go. He sat back in the seat of his Lawmaster, smiling up at the sun, and waited for Mooney to report in.
A few seconds later, the call came through. “Rico!” Mooney’s excitement crackled through the static. “I know the guy! He’s gone into Tony Hart—I figure he’s gonna lay low there for a while. Listen, I’m gonna go talk to him—I’ll call you back—”
Rico smiled. Once they had the first of their three-man team on board, he could bring in others—whoever this one remaining friend of Buddy-boy’s was, he’d know people, just like Mooney had before Rico had drained him dry. It all clicked into place.
Everything clicked into place for Rico Dredd.
He knew he had a certain overconfidence problem—the tutors at the Academy had commented on it more than once, and Joe occasionally worked it into one of his endless lectures—but with his boots up on the handlebars, the sun shining into his visor and everything just falling into his lap, it really did seem like there was nothing he couldn’t accomplish. Even stealing an ambulance didn’t seem like a major issue at this point—just one more thing to check off the list. One more kick.
He couldn’t wait for the big day.
Part Three
Ten
THE CLOCK TICKED past midnight.
> The big day was here.
Strader—crouched on the fire escape across the street—trained his binox on the Herc, watching the guards patrolling. There were three of them, as far as he could see—one taking the weight off on the front steps with a synthi-caf and a trashzine, keeping half an eye on the front, the other two slowly walking circuits around the circular building, stopping every now and then to rest. Every hour or so, they’d swap positions—every six, they’d be replaced by a new shift. He’d spent all of last night watching them, and by now he had their routine down to a science.
These three were mainly worried about stopping people camping out overnight—they’d be relatively easy to slip past. There were a set of fire doors at the side of the building that he could get to without being seen, the same double doors they’d be using to carry the ‘body’ out during the heist itself. Once he was inside, though, he’d have at least four or five other guards to worry about—guards whose patterns he didn’t know, whose readiness he couldn’t fathom. Would they be bored old men nursing hot drinks and old paperbacks, like the boys out front? Or would they be young and keen, eager to prevent any attacks on the Herc on the eve of its return to greatness?
He didn’t even know the people he was working with. He still couldn’t trust Mooney—not after he’d found out how deep in Rico’s power the fat man was—and the getaway crew, Prowse and Ramirez, weren’t that well known to him either. He’d worked with Gina Prowse once—which was how he’d managed to convince her to come on board—but that was in Mega-City Two, and while Prowse was a great driver, he found himself worrying that she might be more used to the wide, empty freeways of the west coast than the choked, traffic-heavy loops and whorls of the Big Meg. Ramirez, meanwhile, was an unknown quantity—a thin, sour-faced man with a pencil moustache and a six-cube-a-day sugar habit.
Usually Strader preferred not to work with sugar addicts—it was often the sign of a deeper problem. If only they’d had more time to get a crew together, they might have found some better people—just like they might have worked out a way to properly case the joint, or maybe get some cameras in there. As it was, Strader was going in blind. Another rule broken, he thought, bitterly—he’d started this off as a man bound strictly by rules, a man who pretended to have a professional code. One bad year, one bad month, one bad day—the bad second when the firing had started in the jewellery store and sent him down this road—that had been all it took to strip that from him.
If Strader could, he’d walk away, start again—take it on the lam to somewhere he’d never been, like Paris or Vegas or Antarctic City, and hole up there while he found an easier score at his leisure. But that was the whole problem in a nutshell—he couldn’t. He was trapped between a rock and a hard place—between the Cowboy, inexorably counting down the time until he could make Strader dead for his debts, and that grinning maniac Dredd. He felt almost like he was being ground between two millstones, the hard shell of rules he’d once considered so unbreakable being slowly worn away until there was only one left.
He reached down to his hip, feeling the outline of the quick-release holster, drawing reassurance from it.
Wear iron. That was the rule.
He checked his wrist-com—a quarter past. The three men were out front, dickering over whose turn it was to sit and read the trashzine. Strader wasn’t going to get a better chance than that. He pulled the old-style black watch-cap he was wearing down over his face to make a balaclava. That, with the all-black clothing he was wearing, would make him harder to spot in the darkness—like an old-time cat burglar. The downside was that if any passing Judge—or security guard—caught a decent look at him, he wouldn’t be able to explain the outfit away... and he doubted Rico Dredd would let him live to be interrogated.
Another man might have frozen up, faced with the risk. Strader actually found himself breathing easier than he had in a while. Everything was reduced to this one moment—either he’d succeed, or he’d be dead. No in-betweens. It was liberating, in a way.
He took a single deep breath.
Then he was down the fire escape and across the street, the soft pads on his boots keeping him silent as he ran for the fire doors ahead of him. The pack on his back—black, like the rest of his outfit—was weighing him down a little, but it had a change of clothes, the zip-ties and duct tape he’d insisted on bringing along over Rico’s objections, Mooney’s weird blow-up-doll money bag—and most importantly, the tools to get through the door to the counting room. He figured he had maybe a minute before one of the guards rounded the corner and spotted him, but that would be all he’d need.
As he ran, he reached behind him, ripped the bulky las-cutter free of its snap-fastenings and brought it to bear on the white plasteel to the right of the door—where the alarm wires would be. He turned the cutter up to maximum, made a quick horizontal slash—not too elegant, but it did the job—and forced the doors open. He had just enough time to slip a little of the white tape over the burn mark—not something that’d stand up to expert scrutiny, but it was the same shade as the wall and it’d fool the guards—and then he was inside.
Now the game was different. He didn’t know where the guards were or what pattern they were taking—he’d have to case the joint as he went along. Haste was the enemy. His best bet was to hide in dark alcoves, in the spaces between vending machines, in the ostentatious toilet stalls—slowly make his way through to where he needed to be, then find somewhere he could hide and watch—somewhere he could wait for two, three hours, or even longer, counting the guards, memorising their patterns, learning the timetable enough to sneak out and work on the alarms to the money room door. The hardest part—assuming the system was the one on the plans, and it hadn’t been updated—was getting the casing on the keypad unlocked and open. After that, he’d be able to work for a few minutes at a time on the innards, cutting and splicing the wires in the order he’d memorised, replacing the casing and returning to whatever hiding spot he’d picked when he knew the guards were coming by again.
It was going to be a very long, very tense, very dangerous night, but there was one consolation.
The day after would be worse.
Eleven
MORNING BRIEFING AT the Sector House.
“All right, we all know why we’re here.” Koslowski looked tired—eager to get it all over with. The room was crowded today, with Shifts One and Two crammed together in the same space. As Koslowski ran through the details of who’d be with Muttox on the inside of the stadium and who’d be helping Friedricks deal with the potential riot outside—details she’d gone through ten times or more already—Rico found himself looking around the room, examining each of the new faces in turn. Something was bothering him—a sensation in the back of his mind, a feeling that he was in two places at once. He’d had flashes of that occasionally all his life, from the clone tank on, but this time it was particularly acute, as if he’d defocussed his eyes and was seeing the same room from different angles. Come to think of it, the last time he’d felt anything like that was on a patrol with—
“Dredd!”
Rico looked up suddenly, assuming Koslowski was chiding him for being distracted—but she was looking across the room. “You’re with Friedricks,” she said, curtly, “and glad to have you with us. Hope you don’t find you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.” Rico blinked. What in Grud’s name was she talking about? He was with Muttox on the inside, working the gates and the spectators. The whole plan depended on—
Then the cred dropped.
Rico let his eyes follow Koslowski’s... and he saw himself standing there—or rather a ramrod-straight version of himself, not even sitting down but standing stiffly to attention, arms at his sides, chin raised imperiously at a forty-five degree angle. He’d maintain that pose through the whole briefing, Rico knew—all day, if his precious concept of the law demanded it. That was just how Little Joe was.
He was a stickler.
“Other Dredd...” There was laughte
r from Shift One at that, as Koslowski turned her attention on him. Rico felt his face redden a little at the jibe. “You’re still with Muttox. But I expect you to co-ordinate with your clone here—I figure Ike and Mike should maybe think alike for once.” More laughter. Rico smiled curtly, pretending to appreciate the joke at his expense, but inside his blood was boiling. Co-ordinate with Little Joe—the word stuck in his throat like a fishbone.
Rico spent the rest of the briefing holding back the mounting fury building inside him, but the second Koslowski dismissed the two shifts—giving them a good ten minutes to check ammo and belt pouches and synchronise their chronometers before they all rode down to the Herc and the action began—he’d marched up to Joe, fuming, and demanded an explanation. “What the hell are you doing here? This is my sector, Joe—all you’re doing here is getting in my way, the way you’ve been doing ever since the Academy. Nobody’s going to help you pick up your scores this time, little brother. You can forget about riding on my shoulder pads.”
A couple of the street jocks around them grinned, watching the new kid with the attitude problem having an argument with himself, and that just made Rico angrier. It was humiliating, that’s what it was—not to mention it could be the spanner in the works that wrecked the whole scheme. Was that what Joe was planning? How much did he know?
It was no use looking in the man’s face. The sour, tight-lipped frown that had always struck Rico as equal parts contempt and self-righteousness was plastered all over his big chin—their chin, Fargo’s chin. Rico occasionally had nightmares that one day his own face would be permanently fixed in an expression like that.
After a moment’s pause, Joe spoke, with a trace of sardonic humour. “Figured you could use a hand, Rico. I put in a transfer to your sector for a month or so—just to make sure you’re okay. You let that jewellery store thief slip past you, after all. The one you said wasn’t on Trudeau Street.” He locked eyes with his brother, unblinking. “I worry about things like that.”
