He walked down the short three steps to the main floor and proceeded towards the bar, bodies reluctantly parting to allow him past. He was aware that the path behind him was being blocked, that they were sealing him in even as they shuffled out of his way, but he did not glance back. They would be dealt with soon enough, if need be. He rapped on the countertop and beckoned the barman over with a crooked finger.
“Travest Vassell on the premises?”
“Who?” the guy serving replied dismissively; unusually for a pit like this, he was human and not a mek. In his forties and with a face blunted by violence, he had previous cube time written all over him; literally, it seemed. The tatts carved into his forearms were undoubtedly Iso-block originated.
“Lie to me and it’ll cost you a year.”
The bartender went to answer when a reedy voice piped up to his left: “Ain’t you a bit young to drink in here, Judgey?” Several drunken sniggers followed. “Think you’ll find the candy store’s down the street.”
Dredd turned slowly, zeroing in on the mouth; a long-haired biker musclehead running to fat, propped up on one meaty elbow. Half his jaw had been replaced with a razor-toothed metal plate. His heavily lidded eyes bloodshot, he was clearly floating on more than just alcohol fumes. A pair of his cronies basking in the creep’s bravado instantly lost their stomm-eating grins under Dredd’s gaze, but his seemed oblivious to the trouble he was bringing on himself, swaying a little, breathing hard. He smiled and added: “Buy you a soda, if you want one, juvie.”
“I’ll give you ten seconds to rein that mouth of yours in,” Dredd warned slowly, “before I book you for insolence.”
“Whoooaaaa,” came the inevitable slurred response. “You’re gonna take me in, kid? What you gonna do, strap me to the back of your hover-scooter?” He took a step forward, his pint sloshing over his hand. The smile disappeared from his face as he drew closer. “Seriously, little Judge. What you gonna do?”
Dredd slammed his daystick into the creep’s groin with such force he was sure he heard it connect with his pelvis. Air exploded out of the meathead in a high-pitched shriek and he dropped, but before he touched the sticky, beer-soaked floor, Dredd caught him by the ponytail and yanked him upwards, wrapping an arm around his throat. “I’m through being polite with you punks,” he growled in the guy’s ear, though he was speaking as much to the audience watching in stunned fascination. “You will show me, and you will show the Law, some respect.” He bounced the drunk’s head off the edge of the countertop—his metal jaw making a dull clunking noise as it rebounded—and let him fall, then in one movement reached across and grabbed the bartender’s shirt and all but pulled him over the bar. Glasses went skittering in every direction.
“Now: Vassell. I know he came in here. Where is he?” Dredd could feel himself losing his temper, the events of the past twenty-four hours taking their toll. His Academy tutors had warned him about keeping it in check, but some days he could feel his patience dissipate like moisture on a hotplate. His judgement was under threat of being impaired, he knew; he hoped it was something he could improve his control over as he got older. He’d heard of too many other Judicial careers run aground by twenty-year men finally snapping and doling out what they thought were well-deserved beatings.
“I... I swear, Judge...” the creep stammered. “Never heard of him...”
You could see why the perps congregated in a place like this, Dredd thought, if this was the kind of loyalty shown by the staff. He moved his visored face closer to the other man’s. “Is that so? How about we take you down to the Sector House, have the Psis root around in your brain, expose what you really know. Or maybe we’ll go the chemical route, flood your bloodstream with truth drugs until all the dirty little secrets coming spilling out.”
“No...”
“You know what an interrogation cube is like, I bet. Not somewhere you want to visit twice, is it?”
“Look, m-maybe we can do a deal here...”
His helmet radio cut the guy off. “He’s rabbiting, Dredd. Figure identified as Vassell was seen climbing down the fire escape to the rear of the bar. You want units to intercept?”
“No, he’s mine. I want this place taken apart, everyone inside pulled in for questioning, as many helmets as can be mustered. Blood samples taken, without exception.”
“Wilco.”
Dredd released the bartender, who slumped back against the optics, and he turned to face the crowd again, sheathing his daystick. “This establishment is under arrest. You will remain here until officers arrive to remove you to the nearest sector house.”
A mixture of a groan and an angry shout of defiance rippled through the throng. A couple of more foolhardy individuals swore furiously and took a step towards him. Dredd drew his Lawgiver, and they instantly backed off. “Out of my way,” he growled. “Now.” A channel opened between the bar’s patrons as they shrank back, and Dredd shouldered his way to the door, tearing it open just as a pat-wagon pulled up outside with half a dozen uniforms aboard. He nodded and jerked a thumb behind him. “Round them up.”
The maze of alleys Malone’s backed on to was too awkward for a Lawmaster to negotiate, so he took off on foot, ears and eyes keen. Still, he reasoned, it didn’t hurt to have a little aerial assistance. “Control,” he murmured into his helmet mike, “do we have spy-in-the-sky, vicinity Bevel Street?”
“Affirmative.”
“Redirect to Sheedy Walk, keep me posted on Vassell’s position.”
“That’s a rog, just give us a second. Wait... We’re picking up a moving target, just coming out of Sheedy and heading for Clay Plaza. Estimate he’s maybe two minutes ahead of you.”
“Understood. Keep your eye on him.”
Dredd picked up the pace, sprinting through the litter-strewn passages, the amber glow of the streetlamps casting a doleful light. He leapt over numerous bodies sleeping rough and automatically listed the violations in his head, but had no time to stop. Those that saw him—this faceless apparition charging past, uniform blending with the night, boots slapping down on the slab—cowered behind their blankets, taking an extra-long swig of hooch, and wondered if it was a nightmare made flesh, especially as those hidden eyes seemed to penetrate their very souls as it turned its head to briefly study them.
He at last caught sight of Vassell, scrambling up another fire escape affixed to the side of a fleapit hotel. He appeared to be having trouble pulling himself up the ladder, and so Dredd closed the distance between them in a matter of seconds. “Vassell!” he roared, Lawgiver raised. “You’re under arrest! Stop or I will fire!”
The perp looked back, one hand clinging from a rung, his eyes widening as he saw Dredd. He yelled in fright and redoubled his efforts, swinging his legs up and hooking his ankles around the nearest rail, trying to ascend even faster, but his limbs seemed uncoordinated, heavy. Dredd fired a warning shot that ricocheted off the metalwork by Vassell’s midriff; he yelped but didn’t stop.
“Vassell! This is your last warning!” Dredd wanted answers still, he didn’t want to drop him permanently. But the creep wasn’t slowing and showed no signs of offering surrender. He aimed carefully and put an SE round through the man’s upper arm, ensuring he lost his grip, and he tumbled a few metres to the ground, hitting the ’crete with a thud. He lay on his side, unmoving.
Dredd strode over to the prone figure, holstering his gun. He’d intentionally shot Vassell in the meat of his bicep, bypassing bone and artery, just enough to knock the wind out of his sails. He needed him alive, but the fall might’ve stunned him. As Dredd reached the drug dealer, expecting him to be barely conscious, Vassell rolled to his feet and, leading with his injured arm, barrelled into the Judge, evidently unconcerned by his wound, driving his shoulder into Dredd’s sternum. The man was stronger than he’d anticipated and Dredd stumbled backwards, slipping and landing on his back. Vassell tried to get his hands around the Judge’s throat, but Dredd twisted and headbutted him, his helmet shattering the perp�
��s nose. There was enough respite for the lawman to roll Vassell off, but the creep kept coming, blood smeared over his face. He looked bestial, but in his eyes there was fear, as if he felt he was fighting for his life and it was pure adrenaline that was fuelling him.
No. There was something else, now that he could see the creep up close. The dilated pupils, the sweats, the pale skin, no sense of his own physical trauma—Vassell was tripping on something, and Dredd was fairly sure he knew what. The meathead had got high off his own supply. But the Judge had only one comedown available in his arsenal: he powered his fist into the perp’s face, bursting his lip and splintering teeth. The shock and pain were enough to put him on his ass once more, and Dredd was going to make sure he stayed there. He stomped a boot on Vassell’s chest, holding him down long enough to cuff one wrist then dragged him over to the fire escape and snapped the other bracelet around the lowest rung of the ladder. He stepped back to catch his breath and for a moment watched the drug dealer as he whined through a ravaged mouth and tugged at his binds like an uncomprehending animal.
“Vassell,” Dredd said, trying to get the man to focus on him. “The drug. What is it? Where did it come from?”
The creep rolled his eyes in a bovine manner, seemingly petrified. He scooted back away from the Judge, as far as the cuff would allow; clearly he was seeing something far worse in his mind, conjured by the narcotic. Dredd reached forward and grabbed his chin, wrenching his head to one side, studying him, then gave the perp a slap; Vassell’s eyes briefly flickered back to the here and now, slowing their relentless shimmer.
“Vassell,” Dredd tried again. “Can you understand me?”
“Help me...” he whispered, shivering, constantly glancing over his shoulder.
“You’re safe. But I need you to help me. Tell me what it is, what you’ve taken.”
“The dust... it gives you... gives you dreams...”
“Who are you working for? Who’s supplying you?”
“Gift, they said it was. Once... once the eye was closed, our minds would open...”
“‘Eye’? Vassell”—Dredd crouched close to the perp—“look at me. What do you mean? What eye?”
“The eye in the sky, it had to be closed. It would see too much.”
“You mean cameras, watching you?”
“They knew the eye was there, they knew it had to be closed.” The dealer swallowed, his face glimmering as a film of perspiration coated it. “They wouldn’t... wouldn’t give the dreams before the eye was closed...”
The peeper, Dredd realised. Croons. That’s the ‘eye’ he was talking about. Croons wasn’t murdered because of what he’d seen—he was killed before the merchandise was handed over. The perps had known Croons was there, living in that apartment, knew he was a peeper for Justice Department, and butchered him before he could record their faces.
Dredd stood up, furious with himself. He’d played this investigation wrong, approached it from the wrong angle—Croons wasn’t just an unlucky witness snuffed because he saw something he wasn’t supposed to; he was known to the killers. The ICU gang tag was a red herring, designed to throw them off the scent. He should’ve looked into Croons’ past, his associates, because somewhere there lay a clue as to why this lethal ‘dust’ was being circulated on the streets, and who was responsible.
Vassell had started to scream and pound his unchained fist against his forehead. He was no longer intelligible, merely burbling. Dredd radioed in for a med-wagon and a straitjacket—the dealer was heading for a kook-cube, and the Judge wanted to tag along to see what the psychs had to say.
TO ENTER THE psych-block was to enter a nightmare. Desperate cries and moans echoed down the sterile corridors, those imprisoned within the padded cells trapped inside their own private hells. Many—the dangerously insane, those whose minds had been irretrievably broken by life in the city—would never leave the facility without radical treatment, their frontal lobes burnt away. Hundreds were housed here, and in thousands of blocks like it dotted all over the metropolis, guarded and maintained by a contingent of med-Judges. They were dark, bleak places, with a constant backdrop of human suffering—no surprise, then, that those that visited if only for a brief time wanted to leave as soon as possible lest they succumb to, or were infected by, the madness that pervaded the building.
Dredd looking through the viewing window at Vassell, bound and whimpering in the corner of his cube, slowly tapping his head against the wall. He had made no further sense, and retreated into his hallucinations, trying violently to escape whatever visions were hounding him.
“I have no doubt,” Kendricks, one of the psychs on duty that had examined him, said, “that if he wasn’t restrained he would attempt to take his own life. He’s exhausted now; the delusions must be burning up his energy. But there seems no respite from them.”
Units had scoured the flophouse Vassell had been heading for, and found several bags of suspicious-looking powder hidden beneath the floorboards of his room. There was a substantial amount of creds too, suggesting that the dealer had already started selling it on the streets. Dredd glanced at his colleague standing behind him. “What do you make of it?”
Kendricks shook his head. “We’ve found nothing untoward in his bloodstream. It’s unusual but not without precedent for a substance to disperse in the system and leave no trace behind. Evidently, whatever he’s taken is extremely powerful, and even the tiniest amount can cause this complete psychological breakdown. Having done a preliminary analysis of the samples we’ve retrieved, I’d be surprised if it had been created in the city.”
“Brought in from overseas, you think?”
“More likely off-planet. I’ve never seen symptoms so severe, long-lasting and ultimately fatal, and the chemical make-up is unusual. It’s a compound we’ve never encountered before.”
“He called it ‘dust’...”
“Inhaled, most probably. Delivered straight to the brain.” The medic jerked a thumb at Vassell through the door. “You say he was dealing this stuff? Why take it himself? That seems to be breaking a cardinal rule amongst drug traffickers.”
“Yeah, I’ve been wondering that myself. From what I’ve pieced together from witness reports from the bar, I think he was under pressure to prove that it was safe, and that it delivered the hit that he’d promised. He’d been heavily hyping it as an amazing high, and obviously tonight he’d announced that he was going to start distributing it at Malone’s. That accounts for the turnout—everyone wanted a piece.”
Kendricks nodded. “Well, we’ll continue our tests on it, see if we can learn more about it. Vassell’s no use to us now; I doubt we’ll get an intelligible word from him again.”
Dredd slammed home the shutter on the viewing window. The uniforms that had rounded up the clientele at the bar reported that half a dozen creeps started exhibiting the telltale freak-outs in the back of the catch-wagon, and by the time they’d been processed at the nearest iso-block were fully blown frantic: aggressive, terrified, jabbering. They’d been transferred here, and were ensconced somewhere in the bowels of the facility, on another corridor exactly like this one, climbing the walls of their respective cells. Little could be gleaned from the bar patrons that were still capable of making sense—a few had heard on the underworld grapevine that Vassell was packing merch like no other and was looking to sell, and others had seen him talk to the barman and then disappear into a back room, with a few wiseguys following and returning moments later out of their gourds. A witness said that one had told him everything looked and felt sharper, brighter, like the contrast on the world had been adjusted. If that was so, the initial euphoria upon taking the drug must last no more than fifteen minutes or so before the bad trip set in.
Who had supplied this drug to Vassell in the first place? The dealer was just a conduit, a way to disseminate the stuff onto the streets; persons unknown had brought it to him, sold it to him, and if Kendricks’ theory was right then it had been imported from another planet.
Did they know that the drug triggered such a violent reaction—indeed, were they deliberately poisoning the well? Using Vassell as a patsy to distribute a lethal narcotic that fractured the minds of all who took it?
And they knew Croons, knew what he did and where he lived. Dredd had called up the peeper’s file, trying to find clues in his past where he would have come into contact with drug manufacturers and smugglers, but the man had been a lonely case, subsumed by his abiding voyeuristic desires, not one with criminal affiliations. Judge Henry Novak was recorded as being the last arresting officer at the time, who’d put him forward as a peeping operative, offering the man the choice between heavy cube time or working for the city. Dredd wondered if Croons had disclosed anything pertinent to him.
“Control—Dredd,” he murmured into his helmet mike, raising a hand in farewell to Kendricks as he marched towards the welcome sight of the psych-building’s exit. “Can you forward a message to Judge Novak to get in contact with me when his rotation finishes? When’s he due off the street?”
“Uh, Novak was transferred from Street Division six months ago. If you want, I can check to see if he’s at his station right now.”
“Oh?” Dredd answered, walking out into the breaking dawn. “Where was he transferred to?”
“Port authority. He’s in Customs at Atlantic Hoverport.”
Dredd stopped. “Say again?”
“Atlantic Hoverport. Records say Novak was busted down to Customs due to irregularities in his arrests. Reading between the lines, it looks like he was a bit too happy with the daystick.”
Wheels turned in Dredd’s mind. Extrapolate, extrapolate... “Control, can you put out a call to bring Novak in to the nearest Sector House, but don’t tell him the request came from me. Say he may have been assigned faulty Lawgiver ammo and the armoury is calling it in for replacement. I don’t want him spooked.
Judge Dredd Year One: City Fathers Page 7
