Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

by Michael Carroll

The investigation into my actions said I was “building a criminal empire,” but that’s plainly stomm. It wasn’t an empire. It was me on my own, bringing order to the chaos. Sometimes things turned sour, that’s bound to happen. Some people died, like Judge Kenner, but no one can deny that—thanks to me—more people lived.

  Serious crimes were down in my district, way down, and that was because the citizens trusted me. Or they knew me, which amounted to the same thing. One time, a dealer moved in with a batch of high-grade endorphium. He approached Petrosky, tried to come to an arrangement where he’d sell the stuff and give Petrosky a good-sized cut.

  Petrosky came to me, I arrested the perp, and the endorphium was seized and destroyed. Well, most of it. It’s actually a very useful drug; pumps up the user’s energy levels, keeps him sharp, keeps him going long after anyone else would have quit. I kept a small supply on me, just in case I was ever in a bind and really needed a boost. But the point is, Sparks Petrosky turned in that dealer and cut himself out of a huge chunk of money, all because he understood that was how the game was now played.

  I knew what I was doing, and I was doing it well. A newly-paroled perp moved into the district, or a new gang, and I’d pay them a visit. It’s a process, really. Almost an algorithm. You arrive unannounced, kick in the door, take down whatever muscle they have, and make it clear that if they want to operate in the area then there’s a tax. And they play their part, too: they react with indignation and threats, you bust a few more heads—or even, if you really have to hammer home the point, you find the guy’s second-in-command and you put a slug inside his skull. That one usually makes them realise that you’re not messing around.

  It’s not like it’s murder to kill a henchman, though my prosecution made it clear that they didn’t agree with that. They were wrong, and they’d have known that if they’d been riding Lawmasters instead of desks. Like I said, it’s an algorithm, an equation. A dead second-in-command perp is a lot better than a dead innocent citizen. And of course they’d never stop at just one dead citizen, so whichever way you look at it, my method saved lives.

  So, yeah, my body-count was up, reported crime was down, and I figured that would be enough to keep the Department’s nose out of my business. But I was wrong. It all came crashing down.

  Thanks to my brother.

  HE’D BEEN SUSPICIOUS of me for a long time, but hadn’t said anything, so I didn’t know. Joe was like that; the ultimate poker-face. You almost never knew what he was thinking.

  He showed up at my place one day. This was my second apartment, a nice place. I was on the roof, enjoying the sun.

  Joe strode across the rooftop straight for me, like he was approaching a perp, and I knew what was coming. I also knew that I could cope with it. I’d always been smarter than him. Maybe not academically, but I had the street-smarts that he lacked.

  “You’re out of uniform,” he said.

  “Day off. We are entitled to time off. You’d know that if you ever took it. What do you want?”

  “Been checking your stats. Body-count’s giving me cause for suspicion, and you’ve got an above-average number of complaints.”

  That bugged me. A lot. He had no right to pry into the way I ran things. And I knew that he didn’t come up with it on his own. Kenner was still pretty fresh in my mind, and I didn’t want things to have to go that way again. “So the bigwigs sent Little Joe to give Big Rico a lecture, huh?”

  He stopped in front of me, scowled down. “You’re drunk, Rico.”

  I’d had a couple of drinks. Not more than two. I was in no way drunk. And certainly sober enough to hold my own in a battle of wits with him.

  Amber came out onto the patio. “Everythin’ all right, honey?”

  “Just my other half come to give me some earache,” I told her. “Better leave us be, honey. Little Joe can be real mean when he takes a mind.”

  Joe looked around. At the pool, the expensive planters, the fifteen-hundred-cred Taneasy lounger I was lying on. “Where did you get the money for all this?”

  I said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I hadn’t meant to say that. I’d always planned that if anyone asked I’d say that the apartment belonged to some rich guy who was spending a year in Texas City, and he’d asked me to live there so that it wouldn’t get burgled. But Joe was pissing me off. Or maybe I was drunker than I’d thought.

  “It’s got to stop, Rico! You can’t keep breaking the rules!”

  I put down my drink. “I do what I want. I’m a Judge—I make the rules.” Yeah, I guess I was heading toward wasted by that stage. Part of me was thinking, Shut the drokk up, Rico! but Joe’s holier-than-everyone attitude had long since lost its charm. He was turning into a self-assured scuzzball who’d forgotten which of us had received the higher marks in the Academy. Or maybe he hadn’t forgotten; maybe it had stuck in his craw, and it was all he could think about. I said to him, “I say the word...” I snapped my fingers. “Boom. You’re gone. So don’t tell big brother what to do, Joey.”

  I’d meant that as a joke. I mean, he was my brother, he knew I’d never actually threaten him. Or he should have known. If he’d had a personality, he’d have been able to tell that I wasn’t really serious.

  Joe reached out and grabbed the collar of my shirt, hauled me up so we were face to face. “Get this through your head. You’re not my big brother. You never were. You’re me and there’s something wrong with you! Do something—or I will.”

  He shoved me back into the Taneasy and stormed away.

  Joe had kept his helmet on, but I didn’t need to see his eyes to know what he was thinking.

  He was scared. He saw that I’d strayed from the rigid path set out by the Academy, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep up. He wasn’t prepared for the way the department would have to change if it was to keep control of the city.

  A government can exist only as long as the people allow it. You might say, “Yeah? What about a dictatorship?” Well, the same rule applies. Dictators can only push so far before they’re overthrown.

  And that’s what Mega-City One became when the Judges took over. There’s no democracy, but then most democracies are that in name only: the citizens are allowed to choose their figurehead, but the people with the power remain the same. The elections make a difference to the citizens’ lives in the same way that changing a hood ornament makes a difference to a car’s destination.

  Mega-City One’s Justice Department was established by my clone-father, Eustace Fargo, as a way to return order to the chaos after a succession of devastating wars. It worked, too, for a while. But sooner or later every empire falls. The smart people either try to steer that fall, or they get the hell out of the way.

  Joe was part of the establishment and it bothered him that I was able to stand outside of it, to see the cracks as they appeared. He would take me down, if the opportunity showed itself. And he knew that he could do it a lot easier and faster if he were prepared to break the rules, but if he did that, then he wouldn’t be Judge Joe Dredd. Then he’d be just like everyone else.

  JOE’S SUSPICIONS WERE confirmed when a routine speeder chase took him into my patch. The driver was just a kid. Fifteen years old. Young enough to still believe that he was indestructible and smarter than everyone else, and tall enough to be able to see over the steering-wheel.

  The kid blazed through a red light coming off the elevated highway, and next thing a Lawmaster was roaring up behind, lights flashing. If he’d been smart, he’d have pulled over, grovelled an apology and silently prayed for a lenient term. But he was an idiot—he tried to outrun Joe Dredd.

  The stolen car—a ’78 Fellini convertible, with deep red body-work and fitted with a state-of-the-art hover-plate that allowed it to reach several hundred KPH—ended up embedded in a wall. The kid died, of course, his skull coming to a stop a lot later than the rest of his body, but that was no loss. Just natural selection in action.

  But as Joe was waiting for a clean-up crew and trying to
keep the Lookie-Lous away, he was approached by one of my guys, Evan Quasarano. Understand that I don’t know for sure this is exactly how it went down—I had to piece it together from a couple of reports and a few things I heard—but the outcome was the same.

  “Hey, JD,” Quasarano said. He’d taken to calling me that, instead of using my first name; you don’t let people know you’re friends with a Judge.

  Joe nodded to him. “What can I do for you, citizen?”

  Quasarano peered past him at the wreckage. “What happened here?”

  “None of your concern. Move along before I cite you for obstruction.”

  Quasarano laughed at that. “Yeah, right. Listen, old man Petrosky sent one of his guys over last night. They want to talk to you about some trouble they’re having with Vijay McMorran and his crew. Figure it’s the usual, you know? Pushing past the edges of their territory.”

  Now, my brother might be a cold-hearted, humourless, unimaginative, by-the-book stickler for rules, but he’s not an idiot. Far from it. It was clear to him that Quasarano thought they knew each other, and that could only mean he thought Joe was me. And why wouldn’t he? We looked the same, sounded the same, wore the same badge. So Joe played along to find out more. “Got it,” he said. “So how did things go last night, anyway?”

  “Pretty quiet. No trouble. Well, there was one guy who claimed he wasn’t satisfied and he wanted his money back, but we took care of it.”

  “Glad to hear it. What did you do with him?”

  “The usual.”

  “You get his ID? I might want to pay him a visit myself.”

  Quasarano nodded. “Sure, yeah. Name’s Donald Fletta. Old guy. Maybe forty or fifty, or sixty. Lives over in the Crimson Furrows. You know it?”

  “Yeah, I know it,” Joe said. “Fletta still in one piece?”

  “A few bruises and cuts, that’s all. Like you always say, right? You can only take money off a dead man once.”

  “That’s true,” Joe told him. He gestured back toward the crowd. “Better get clear. Med-wagon’s coming in. What you said about Petrosky...? He mention a time when we’re supposed to meet?”

  “No. Guess he wants you to call him to arrange it.”

  “Good work. Thanks, kid.”

  And Evan Quasarano smiled and nodded and felt pleased with himself, and wandered back into the crowd without the slightest inkling of what he had just set in motion.

  Five

  I SHOULD GO back a bit, I think; I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, the whole deal with guys like Sparks Petrosky was that they thought I was working for them, when really they were working for me. I got them to temper their actions—no more murdering innocents if it could be avoided, for example—and they got a certain amount of freedom. Together, we established an uneasy sort of peace. I let them run their protection, prostitution, drug-dealing and loan-sharking with the understanding that they didn’t do anything too flashy that might draw the wrong sort of attention. You could say that I was acting as an unofficial intermediary between the criminal classes and the judiciary.

  They gave me a cut, sure, because if I hadn’t taken it they would have been suspicious. And I’m not going to lie, the money was nice. In the Academy, we were raised without luxuries of any kind. There were no soft pillows or foaming baths, no rich foods or pet dogs or birthday presents. No hugs from Mom, no stories at bedtime, no games or toys and not many jokes. We didn’t get to have a real childhood. We didn’t get to have an adolescence, either. No girlfriends or boyfriends, no staying out late and sneaking home just before dawn, no concerts or movie theatres or parties or any of that.

  No fun. Judges are expected to sit in judgement on the ordinary people without really knowing what it’s like to be a person.

  So I’d decked out my apartment with the latest in cool gadgets and stocked the refrigerator with treats. I rented movies and bought music and dated girls and sometimes got drunk or high and enjoyed myself.

  But my new life didn’t come free. The price was that I had to do some things that were technically illegal. I had to be seen to be just as bad as Sparks Petrosky and the others believed me to be.

  And that meant, sometimes, doing little bad things in order to prevent larger bad things from happening. It’s a matter of scale, and that’s what Joe could never understand.

  Virgil Livingstone was a small-time dealer who worked on the fringes of the district. He had a four-hours-a-week job delivering office supplies, and the uniform gave him access to a lot of places where he’d otherwise stand out.

  He sometimes sold weapons or banned publications, but he mostly dealt low-impact drugs like cane sugar, caffeine, snizz or crawbies. And every now and then he’d come into contact with someone who could get hold of endorphium or even powdered jetsam. He sold to the city’s fairly-rich and mildly-famous; mostly k-list celebrities and the kids of declining corporate empires.

  And Livingstone and I had an arrangement. He told me who he was selling to, and I didn’t arrest him. See, if I had arrested him, then his clients would have just bought their stuff from someone else. But with him free to deal, I was able to build a very nice dossier on the corrupt elements in the mid-to-high levels of Mega-City One society.

  He didn’t know what I was really doing, of course. He saw me as an enforcer who collected the tribute for Petrosky, so it was vital that I played that role with conviction. That meant that sometimes I had to hurt him.

  For weeks, he’d been putting me off; “I’ve got the money, but I just don’t have it on me.” I let that slide. I knew from my other contacts that he was actually telling the truth. A large shipment of quality European chocolate was coming in across the Black Atlantic, and I wanted to wait until it was in before I made my move. I could arrest the buyers as well as the dealers and really make an impact.

  And then the rumours started to spread that the shipment already had come in, that Virgil Livingstone was now starting to think that he was big enough to sell it without Sparks getting his cut.

  So I had to teach him a lesson, plain and simple. It had to be a lesson he’d never forget.

  VIRGIL LIVINGSTONE’S OFFICE door opened and he grinned nervously at me. “Hey, Rico. Good timing. I was just going to see you, man. I got—”

  “I hear you’ve been holding out on me, Virgil.”

  “What? No! No way! See, what happened was there were these guys who—”

  He stopped then, staring down the barrel of my Lawgiver.

  “You’re three weeks late with the payment, Virgil. Hand it over. You’ve got four seconds.”

  “Okay, okay... I’ve got it here.” Slowly, carefully, he moved his hand inside his jacket. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.” He pulled out a thick, plastic-wrapped bundle of cash. “Eighteen grand, Rico. I know that’s less than I owe, but that’s because I did a deal that got...” He stopped talking, just stared at me as he held out the bundle of cash. “Rico... Please...”

  “Eighteen’s not enough. You’re disrespecting the situation, Livingstone. You’re disrespecting me. What was your mark-up on the deal? Fifty per cent? Sixty? I want all of it.”

  He slowly shook his head. “No. Look, I did make a profit. Nothing like fifty per cent, though. That’s what I’m trying to say, if you just let me finish. I sold the chocolate at a knock-down price because there’s another shipment coming in, a much larger one. Two months, and we’ll have the clients crying for more. I’m thinking we can quadruple the price, and they’ll pay it. You see what I’m saying? Rico, this is the deal of a lifetime! This eighteen grand”—again, he waved the cash in front of my face—“is all I made on the first deal. That’s all I’ve got.”

  I took the cash and weighed up my options. It sounded like a good deal, and Livingstone was too scared of me to lie. But I couldn’t just leave it there. Something like this new deal should have been run past Sparks and me first.

  But because he didn’t do that, because he was trying to bump up his own status, Livingstone
had to be taught a lesson. I grabbed him by the collar, forced him down to his knees.

  One good scare is usually all it takes. I held my Lawgiver right in front of his face, side-on, so he could see the ammo-selector. “You see this, you sweat-soaked bag of stomm? Incendiary. You know what that round can do to a human head at point-blank?”

  “Jovus! Rico, please...”

  I flipped the gun’s selector. “Or maybe you’d prefer a Ricochet, huh? Bounces around in your skull. You’ll be dead in seconds, but they’ll be the longest seconds you can imagine.”

  I’d used this trick before. It scares the hell out of the perps, makes sure they stay in-line. You let them think they’re getting a Standard Execution shot when really you flip it back to Ricochet. Afterwards, they’re so grateful to be alive that it’d take something really drastic to shatter their new-found loyalty.

  “You don’t like that, Livingstone? That’s not how you want to go? Okay. Fast and simple.” I flipped the selector. “See that? Standard Execution. That more your style?”

  “Rico, show some mercy! Please!”

  “This is drokkin’ mercy, punk!” I yelled at him “This is me being lenient, doing it painlessly. More than you deserve. You knew the rules, but you tried to go it alone. Now you pay.”

  Livingstone was crying now. “I’ll give you everything I get on the new deal! Everything! My entire profit!”

  Gotcha, I thought. You’re mine now, creep. Forever. After this, I’d be able to tell him to jump from the top of Power Tower, and he’d do it.

  And then he was there, coming out of the shadows. Joseph Dredd. My brother.

  “Step away from him, Rico. Now.”

  SO JOE HAD been following me. Maybe he’d picked up a trick or two on the streets, because I’d had no idea.

  A thousand thoughts ran through my head. I was fast, definitely faster than Joe, and my gun was already drawn. He wouldn’t be expecting it. I figured I had a good chance of taking him out.