The Righteous Man

by Michael Carroll

  He was pretending not to watch her approach as he chewed on a munce-dog, and didn’t directly look at her until she was standing right in front of him. “What?”

  “I’ve got message for you... From a mutual friend.”

  “Is that so?”

  Gillen nodded. “It is.”

  After an uncomfortably long pause, the man said, “Who’s this friend we both know?”

  “Rico Dredd.”

  Another long pause, during which the man thoughtfully sucked at the end of his munce-dog, until he apparently realised what he was doing and pulled it out of his mouth. He brushed a string of saliva away from his lower lip with the back of his hand. “Rico. I heard he was dead.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Well, I heard he was. I heard that his brother killed him over a bag of crawbies.”

  “I assure you, he’s alive. But he got himself arrested, and he won’t be around for long. He’s going to be shipped off to Titan. That’s one of the moons of Saturn.”

  “I know where it is,” the man lied. “But I don’t know who you are, or why I should talk to you.”

  “I’m Sadie. Sadie Butler. And you’re Evan Qausarano. Rico’s told me all about you. Said you’re his friend. His only friend, apart from me.”

  Quasarano nodded. “Yeah, that’s true. About me, I mean. You, I got no reason to trust.”

  “Rico stashed some money away, and he said it’s no good to him now. He told me you and I can split it fifty-fifty. But you have to help me find it.”

  “How much are we talking about?”

  Gillen had spent some time trying to come up with the ideal imaginary sum. It had to be enough to appeal to Quasarano’s greed, yet not so much that it would raise any suspicions. If she’d told him that Rico had squirrelled away ten million credits, Quasarano would start wondering how he’d managed to get his hands on so much. “About sixty-two thousand,” Gillen said. “Thirty-one for you, thirty-one for me.”

  He grinned. “What’s to stop me from just taking it all?”

  “Rico told me you’re a man of honour—you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. So, he’s really off the streets for good, then?”

  She nodded. “There’s no way out. They have him locked up in the Hall of Justice. There’s a thousand Judges in the way.”

  Quasarano jerked his head and started off along the street. As she fell into step beside him, he asked, “So, how did he tell you all this if he’s locked up so tight?”

  “He still has a few contacts in the Justice Department. Joe, for one.”

  “His brother? But they hate each other!”

  “No, they don’t. They’re rivals, sure, but they’re still brothers. You can’t break that sort of bond. Joe managed to get to see Rico, and he passed on the message to me.”

  Quasarano seemed happy with that. “Okay.” He held the damp, chewed end of the munce-dog a few centimetres in front of Gillen’s face. “Want a bite?”

  “No, but thanks.”

  “Okay. So... Why doesn’t Joe just keep the money?”

  “Well, because they’re watching him, of course! They know that he’s, you know, like Rico was. A good guy but not opposed to the idea of maybe looking the other way now and then, for a friend.”

  They reached a corner, and Quasarano stopped. “I get that. I had like a dozen Judges interrogating me about him. About both of them. They all wanted to know if Joe was on the straight-and-level. Kept asking me if—”

  “If he’d ever taken any bribes,” Gillen said, finishing Quasarano’s sentence to help persuade him that she was on his side. “Yeah, same here. But I never met Joe before Rico was arrested, so I didn’t know anything about that.”

  “Hah! You think you’ve never met Joe, but they’re identical.”

  Gillen feigned surprise at the notion. “You have a point there.”

  “So, were you one of Rico’s, you know, special friends?” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “If you know what I mean. One of his girlfriends.”

  “That’s none of your business!”

  “Ah, so you were. He must have thought you were really special if he told you where the money is. Where is it, anyway?”

  “He never said exactly, just that you would know his best hiding places, and that there’s no way anyone else will find it.”

  “Okay.” Quasarano’s brow furrowed for a few long minutes, his expression slowly turning from puzzlement to mild panic. Eventually, he said, “I dunno. I mean, there’s lots of places, but I can’t think of anywhere pacific.”

  “Specific,” Gillen corrected automatically.

  “Right. Maybe Joe would know?”

  “Maybe, but he’s not in the city right now. They sort of exiled him. You know? Keep him out of the way until they can prove whether he’s innocent or guilty.”

  The young man laughed. “Oh, he’s guilty all right!”

  Gillen froze. This is it, she thought. The pay-off. “What makes you say that?”

  “He’s a Judge. They’re all guilty of something. What’s the saying? Power corrupts, and absolute power does too, but even more so.”

  Damn it! “But you don’t know for certain that he’s actually broken the law, do you?”

  Quasarano nodded. “Oh yeah. He has, definitely. This one time, Rico was doing a deal with someone—I’m not saying who—and then things turned bad and some money didn’t get where it was supposed to go. Spar— I mean, the guy Rico was dealing with—accused Rico of taking the money, but he swore he didn’t. There was a witness who identified him, though. Rico figured that it was Joe who’d taken the money. He said he’d talk to Joe about it, and then the next day Rico turned up with most of the money. But not all of it, because Joe had already spent some.”

  No good, that’s just hearsay, Gillen thought. Most likely Rico stole the money himself and made up the story about Joe when he realised he’d been seen. “You were going to mention Sparks Petrosky, weren’t you?”

  “No! Anyway, he’s gone now. Spending the rest of his life in an iso-cube.”

  Gillen considered her options. So far, there had been no tangible evidence against Joe Dredd. A lot of rumours from low-lifes like Evan Quasarano, but nothing she could use to build a case.

  Another dead end. She’d always known that Dredd was intelligent, if not particularly imaginative, but she hadn’t expected him to able to out-smart her. He had covered up his actions with remarkable foresight.

  The other possibility, which she didn’t feel comfortable taking into account, was that he was innocent, that he had never broken the law.

  That seemed impossible. Every Judge she’d ever investigated had done something against the rules, even if it was as minor as lying on an arrest report about the amount of force used to subdue a suspect.

  But apparently not Joe Dredd.

  No one is clean, she told herself. Everyone is guilty of something. That’s just human nature.

  Then Quasarano said, “Y’know, maybe my sister knows where Rico hid that money. They were close for a while, until he dumped her. That kinda pissed me off, got to tell you. Just outta the blue, he decided it was over.”

  Gillen knew this story. Judge Ernest Kenner, Rico’s supervisor, had discovered the affair and warned Rico to call it off. Kenner hadn’t reported it or made any note of it in his logs, but a colleague remembered a conversation in which Kenner told her that one of the young Judges under his guidance needed to be “set straight on a few things about how we interact with the cits.” The process of elimination had narrowed the young Judge down to Rico.

  But Kenner was dead now, the victim of a crime that would probably never be solved.

  Quasarano said, “I lost a lot of respect for Rico after that. I mean, if he hadn’t been a Judge I’d have pounded the stomm outta him, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I do.”

  “And Stacie couldn’t let it go, of course. She kept after him, calling him all the time and telling me to pass
messages on. Until the day Joe came around and smashed her place up and threatened to blow her head off if she didn’t leave his brother alone.”

  Gillen stared at him. “What? Is that true?” She had read all the reports on Rico’s interactions with the Quasarano family, and this had never been mentioned.

  “Yeah, it’s true... Joe was all, ‘He’s my brother and he’s a Judge, so you better forget about him or you’ll end up in Resyk with no drokkin’ head.’”

  Gillen reached into the pocket of her long coat, and pulled out a small communicator. “SJS Control, this is Judge Marion Gillen. Round up the entire family of Evan Quasarano, Brendan Behan Block, immediately. Take them to the nearest Sector House, keep them separate until I get there.”

  As soon as Gillen started speaking, Quasarano had tried to run, but she had grabbed hold of his arm with her free hand and slammed him against the wall, pinning him.

  Now, he was whimpering, repeating “You never said you were a Judge!” over and over.

  “I never said I wasn’t.”

  Nine

  ON DREDD’S SECOND night in Ezekiel, the town was attacked by raiders.

  A watchman stationed in a camouflaged hide eight kilometres south of the town—on the very edge of radio range—reported a column of dust approaching along the south road.

  On the streets, O’Donnell assembled his guards: ten of them, plus Dredd, Ramini and Montag. “Could be another raid. If it is, we’ve got maybe eighteen minutes,” O’Donnell said. “They’ll split up into two groups, hit us from the north and south at the same time. Ramini, your team will defend the south, tackle the first group. The rest of us will take the north. Don’t make yourself known until they’re within range, then hit them hard. Ignore the outriders and take out the leaders first.”

  “No. Outriders first is a better tactic,” Ramini said. “And we should take them down before they get a chance to split. If we don’t, we’ve got two areas to defend. So we pick off the outriders first, that’ll discourage them from splitting. Then we target the main group.”

  O’Donnell said, “Judge, don’t undermine my orders. I’m the deputy here.”

  “I don’t care.” Ramini looked around at the assembled townsfolk. “I want the best marksmen up on the roofs of the southernmost buildings. That includes you, Montag. Target the raiders at the rear of the group, not the front, got that? Crashed vehicles at the rear makes it harder for the others to retreat; crashed vehicles in front gives them cover. Anyone own a motorbike?”

  One young woman raised her hand, and Dredd recognised her as Eloise Crow, the woman he’d met waiting to begin her shift in the mine. “We have one. It’s only an old Suzuki, but it works.”

  “Get it, bring it back here.”

  As Eloise darted away, someone else called out, “Why the hell should we follow your orders, Judgie? You’re barely here a wet day! You don’t know squat about our town!”

  O’Donnell said, “He has a point, Ramini. We—”

  “We’ve read your reports on the previous attacks,” Dredd said. “You keep making the same mistake—letting them get away. The survivors tell their comrades the state of your town’s defences. The raids aren’t increasing in frequency just because the Earthers are getting more desperate, it’s because they’re wearing you down. They’re winning.”

  “We don’t have the resources to stop them all!”

  “Just do what I tell you, O’Donnell,” Ramini said. “And douse every external light in the town—we’re not going to make it easy for them.”

  Dredd drew his Lawgiver. “Ramini, you’re the best shot. You take the watchtower.” He began to run.

  “Where are you going?” she shouted after him.

  “We need reinforcements.” Dredd raced westwards through the small town toward the mine entrance, where three of the mine’s guards had gathered.

  The burly woman, Santiago, watched Dredd approach. “Another attack?”

  “Looks like it,” Dredd said. “How many of you are there?”

  “Nine, including me.”

  “That’ll have to do. I want two of your people to remain here, in case the raiders get past us. The rest of you come with me.”

  Santiago shook her head. “No. Miss Hanenberger gives the orders, not you.”

  A younger woman stepped out from behind Santiago, her hands resting on her guns. “You heard her, Judge. Walk away. We’ll defend the mine; that’s what we’re paid to do. You want us to help you, take it up with Hanenberger.”

  Dredd glowered at them. “When this is over, we’ll talk again.”

  FOUR MINUTES LATER, Dredd and Montag stood on the roof of the town’s southernmost building. Next to them, Esteban was crouched, unmoving, watching distant hills that were barely visible against the starless sky.

  “We could booby-trap the roads,” Montag said.

  Esteban shook his head. “Lot of people use those roads.” He froze. “They’re coming—I can hear them.” He pointed ahead, to a gap between two small hills about a kilometre away. “There. Figure they’ll split into two groups any minute.”

  Dredd drew his Lawgiver. “What else is out there? Any homes in that direction within two klicks?”

  “Nothing. Just different types of dirt. Sometimes sand.”

  Dredd unclipped the communicator O’Donnell had given him from his belt. “O’Donnell, this is Dredd. Hold your fire until I give the word. Maintain radio silence unless absolutely necessary.”

  “Wilco.”

  “Tower, what can you see?”

  Judge Ramini’s voice came back, “It’s raiders. Maybe twenty vehicles, most of them armoured. Starting to split into two groups. One coming right toward us, other’s starting to head west. Their outriders are breaking off too, on bikes.”

  Dredd raised his Lawgiver and adjusted the scope. At this range, in the darkness, even the best marksman would have trouble finding a target, let alone hitting it.

  For a few seconds, the Lawgiver’s enhanced-light scope showed nothing but wavering darkness, then a blur appeared, growing steadily stronger. Smaller blurs moved off to either side.

  Dredd tracked the one moving left and fired, his shot streaking out into the darkness. He immediately panned right, and fired again.

  Esteban said, “Dredd, even I can’t see well enough to—”

  Out in the darkness, almost a kilometre away, something exploded. A second later, a scream from somewhere off to the right.

  “Heat-seekers,” Dredd explained to Esteban. Into the radio, he yelled, “Light them up!”

  From every rooftop in the town, long-burning flare-rockets were launched. They arced over the Cursed Earth, exploding into light on reaching their apex, illuminating the scene.

  A couple of the Earthers’ vehicles were already turning back, but most remained on course for the town. All pretence at a sneak attack was cast aside: they gunned their engines and spread out, roaring over the rough ground.

  “Montag, stay put and keep low. And conserve your ammo—standard shots unless you have no choice. Esteban, let’s go.”

  As the other townsfolk on the rooftops opened fire at the raiders, Dredd swung himself down from the roof and landed next to Eloise Crow’s old motorbike. It wasn’t much compared to a Lawmaster, but it would be faster than being on foot.

  Esteban jumped down next to him, landing lightly in a crouch.

  “You know what to do?” Dredd asked him.

  “I know.” Esteban climbed onto the bike, kick-started it and sped back through the town.

  Dredd turned back to face the approaching raiders. He had six heat-seeking rounds left, but resisted the temptation to release them in one rapid-fire volley aimed at the largest cluster of raiders. They would be more useful later on, and right now some of the raiders were close enough that he could pick them off with standard rounds.

  Around him, the night air was filled with gunshots, engines and screams, but the raiders had clearly been rattled by the early elimination of their outri
ders and the use of flares.

  As a lone armour-plated jeep broke ahead of the others and roared toward the town, Dredd darted across the street ahead of it, and disappeared into the shadows. A glimpse of a Mega-City One Judge should unnerve them.

  Behind the jeep, a half-track truck was on its tail, followed by two Earthers riding what looked like a large, heavily-modified snow-mobile, one steering, the other shooting. Dredd aimed and fired at the snow-mobile’s driver. The single-tracked vehicle wavered for a second, hit a furrow and flipped. It hit the ground upside-down, crushing both the driver and his passenger.

  The half-track should have been his next target, but the jeep was blocking his shot. Dredd switched to armour-piercing, and put four shots into the jeep’s shielded cab where he expected the driver to be sitting.

  The jeep swerved and scraped against the tapered side of a building, and the half-track behind it was forced to veer around it, passing within two metres of Dredd’s position.

  He darted out behind the half-track, and saw that it was only armoured at the front: the raiders hadn’t anticipated an attack from behind. Its rear bed was carrying six Earthers, all but one armed with rifles and handguns.

  The sixth raider was hoisting a rocket-launcher onto his shoulder. The man spotted Dredd and yelled a warning to the others, but he was too late: Dredd opened fire with a high-explosive shell which struck the rocket-launcher at the same instant that the raider fired.

  The explosion tore through the half-track with enough force that shrapnel embedded itself in the walls of the surrounding buildings.

  Dredd didn’t slow down. He raced toward the remains of the half-track, leaped over lumps of charred, twitching flesh and burning debris. The wounded, blood-drenched driver of the vehicle collapsed out of the cab onto the dirt, his handgun falling from his smouldering grip. As he scrambled to snatch it up, Dredd put a single round into the back of his head, and kept moving.

  He sprinted along a cross-street, now illuminated by the burning wreckage of the half-track, and out onto the next main street, where he saw two of O’Donnell’s men still on a rooftop, expertly picking off a team of Earthers as they raced toward the town on foot. Another Earther, a mutant who was more animal than human, rapidly loped toward their building from the side. As Dredd was about to fire, a shot from high above turned the mutant’s brain into liquid.