“Then,” he added grimly, “prep Burlough at the SJS.”
Eight
“FROM THE BEGINNING.”
“This is ridiculous! I’m not being interrogated by a drokkin’ boy—”
“From the beginning.”
“No, I refuse to participate in this farce. Under whose authorisation have you dragged me in here?”
Dredd didn’t reply, but instead wordlessly stepped aside. Burlough slid out of the shadows, her helmet tucked under her arm, the interrogation cube’s spotlights gleaming on her onyx-black skull earrings. She was an imposing sight—nearly two metres tall, with her raven hair pulled into a severe bun, accentuating the angular cast of a narrow, sharp-featured face—and Dredd wondered if Judges of a particular physical build or temperament were hand-picked for the SJS, or they just naturally drifted towards it. Justice Department’s internal affairs section, tasked with investigating and rooting out corruption and wrong-doing amongst the ranks, was only for the committed, for those who were prepared to accept a life of being feared and grudgingly respected not just by the city’s populace but also by their own colleagues. The Special Judicial Squad was a byword for dogmatic adherence to the letter of the Law, with a strict, zero-tolerance policy on those that fell outside it; spot checks, strip searches and random appraisals were a regular occurrence for those in uniform, conducted by SJS officers with all the tact and diplomacy you’d expect of a department whose chilling reputation preceded them like an acrid stench that signalled trouble was on its way.
Burlough placed her helmet gently on the table beside the chair in which Novak was strapped, the syringes and other instruments also lying there clinking against it, and stood before him. Her every movement was measured, fastidious. She put a hand on either chair-arm, and leaned close. Novak’s piss-and-vinegar attitude vaporised almost instantaneously under the laser-bore of her cool blue eyes, emanating not an iota of human warmth or sympathy. He was in his fifties and had seen his share of action, was a commended officer, and yet he paled in the presence of the SJS, his mind undoubtedly churning with the possibilities of what was to come. Sweat gleamed on his skin, and he swallowed as if his throat was constricted. Dredd hung back, watching Burlough work, intrigued by Internal Affairs’ methodology and quietly impressed with its effectiveness.
“Judge Dredd contacted my office,” she said finally, “believing that a member of Justice Department personnel was involved in criminal activities; to wit, that he was using his position as an Atlantic Hoverport customs official to aid the import of smuggled illegal narcotics from an off-world source. Reviewing the evidence, I concurred that the case warranted further investigation from my perspective. That, Judge Novak, is the authority under which you find yourself held today, pending charges that will almost certainly have a twenty-year Titan sentence attached.
“Now,” she added, straightening and folding her arms, gazing down at Novak imperiously, who was all but shaking, “how you want this conversation to continue will influence your eventual outcome. Play ball and you’ll find me most accommodating; prove useful and you might not have to leave Earth at all. Perhaps a nominal five to eight in a Cursed Earth workfarm, and then bumped down to Traffic on your return, who knows? But start talking.”
She glanced over her shoulder at Dredd, who joined her in regarding the weary-looking Judge in the chair. “From the beginning,” he repeated.
IT STARTED WHEN Deek Carver and his family moved into Ronald Neame in 2077.
Deek had been mobile infantry—119th armoured division, operating out of the Sirius Cluster—and was invalided back to Mega-City with a paper lung and half a kilo of shrapnel in his thigh when an ammo dump went hot. Coby Carver and fifteen-year-old Maggie had seen it as a silver lining kind of deal; they’d been trying to persuade Deek not to sign on for another tour of duty for months prior to the accident, reasoning that the situation in the quadrant was only going to get worse, and they felt so very far from home, barracked with the other army spouses and kids on the personnel freighters. They missed the sky, and air that wasn’t recycled. Most of all, they wanted to feel secure that their husband and father was always going to be there, that they wouldn’t have to spend every minute of every day dreading receiving the news they always feared. After he spent six weeks in a military hospital, robo-docs grafting synthiskin onto his arms and chest, he was in no position to argue, and was given an honourable discharge.
Deek had been on active service for so long, life in the Big Meg took some getting used to. Crowds put the zap on him, and he found he was short of both patience and temper. Their apartment in Neame was tiny, far smaller than the cabins the army had given them, and he felt claustrophobic, like he was constantly tripping over Coby and Maggie. He snapped at them, a pent-up anger spilling out from he didn’t know where. He thought life away from the military would be freer, less restrictive, but if anything he felt more hemmed in, too many people at every turn. He became short of breath, and experienced flashbacks; the block meds diagnosed them as panic attacks, and proscribed him some pills to chill him out.
But the truth was, he hated it here. He hated the gangs of spugs loitering in the corridors, casting an eye over your every move, sizing you up, waiting for the chance to follow you into a darkened stairwell. He hated the Judges, who made their presence felt in every aspect of the metropolis and whose overbearing dominance instilled a constant sense of guilt into a cowed populace. He hated the size of the place and its complexity, like a knot he couldn’t unpick; he missed the austere simplicity of his bunk and the regimented rhythms of life within the battalion. He felt he didn’t belong here, like he was a foreign body that hadn’t been properly assimilated into the social system. When he walked the slab—which he did often, to exercise his leg, it becoming painful if he remained cooped up indoors for too long—he was an outsider, peering in at an environment he didn’t understand and couldn’t warm to.
He talked with his childhood friend, another ex-army grunt, who lived with his wife and their odd, loner son over in Shaw, when he could, but Marv Croons offered little in the way of answers. He considered Deek institutionalised, incapable of existing outside of the military, and suggested he try attending a veterans’ group, meet others who might also be struggling on civvy street. He went along to a few meetings, but the others seemed mentally scarred to Deek, genuinely shellshocked, barely aware of the here and now. He found their company distressing. He wasn’t the same as them, was he? Had he really left part of his sanity back on the operating table?
He grew morose and taciturn, withdrawing into himself, and it cost him dear. Twelve months into their relocation to Mega-City One, his marriage to Coby was in name only; they hardly said a word to each other, two ghosts haunting the same hab, drifting past with little acknowledgement. Maggie unsurprisingly spent as much time as she could away from the site of her parents’ disintegrating relationship and began to hang with a group of juves a couple of floors down. She became sweet on a kid about her age, Hartley, and they spent almost every waking moment together. His wife, meanwhile, commenced an affair with a guy who worked behind the counter at a nearby hottie house, and they eventually fled up north somewhere to a commune.
If Deek had had an inkling then of what was to come, he would’ve made more of an effort to save what was left of his family, of course he would’ve. He would’ve sharpened up, got his act together, intervened on the path that his daughter was intent on taking. As it was, he barely noticed Maggie’s absence in the apartment, much less the creds that were vanishing from his wallet or her irregular nocturnal habits. He was aware of a surly juve—Hartley, he presumed; they were never formally introduced—hanging around the place whenever she breezed through, whose half-closed eyes and louche manner suggested that his mind was clouded with more than just teenage disaffection, and something stirred in him, some parental alarm was triggered, that was warning him he should really be protecting her, shielding her from meatheads like this, who he had come to recognise
as the worst the city had to offer. It was little drokkers like this that represented everything he despised about living here—inured to violence and its consequences (the kid fiddled with a las-knife he kept in his overjak pocket when he was waiting for Maggie), addled by addictions, apathetic to a future for which there were no prospects of any kind—and Deek was losing his only child to their legions. But his depression seemingly blocked his attempts to take action as lethargy constantly swamped him, and when he did summon the energy to challenge the kid, he was sneered at and dismissed with nothing more than a snort of derision. He got a similar response from Maggie herself. He was just as much a loser in their eyes, a semi-crippled dult who couldn’t keep his marriage together and now struggled to get out of bed in the morning.
So he failed her and paid the price. He was roused late one night by an incessant hammering on the apartment’s front door, and when he opened it was confronted with the sight of his daughter bleeding to death in the corridor, bullet holes in her chest and belly. Judging by the crimson trail that was left in her wake, she’d had to crawl home clutching her wounds. She was crying and asking for him and her mother, and she died minutes later in his arms, her final moments witnessed by several curious neighbours peering out from around their own doors.
The Judges told him that their investigations led them to believe that Maggie had been murdered by drug dealers she was involved with and had possibly ripped off—Hartley’s remains were dredged out of a rad-pit in the next sector—and the autopsy revealed that she was a heavy zziz user, as well as showing numerous other illegal substances in her body. When they searched her bedroom, they discovered over thirty thousand creds hidden in her wardrobe. Deek was recommended that he find somewhere else to live in case those responsible came looking for their missing money, and he numbly agreed. He never did discover if anyone had been arrested or charged with Maggie’s death; he got the impression the Judges saw killings such as these as the inevitable outcome for idiots who played with fire.
With the help of Marv, he moved to William Holden—close enough to his friend’s family for support, should he need it—and was assigned a grief counsellor, who spent most of the ten minutes she allotted him passing on the details of other organisations that could help. There was one that caught his eye—a bereaved fathers circle—and though reluctant, he reasoned that if he’d stuck with the veterans’ group it might’ve aided him psychologically and as a consequence he might’ve done more to save Maggie’s life from descending into criminality. He had to talk to someone—Coby was impossible to contact, in all likelihood still unaware that her daughter was dead—if only to assuage for a few hours the alternately suicidal and homicidal thoughts that rampaged around his brain.
He knew as soon as he met the other dads that it had been the right thing to do: they were all like him, all victims of the amoral scum the city spat out, and all had similar stories, speaking of the rage they felt towards those that had taken their children’s lives, their own powerlessness, their distrust of the Judges. There was an enormous sense of relief at unloading the bile that had built up in him since Maggie’s funeral, and to be in company that understood what he was going through. For the first time since he’d arrived in the metropolis, he felt he was somewhere he belonged. Deek found himself particularly allying with three other men—Bud Tronjer, Dane Novak and Biv Hubbly—who’d lost their offspring in gang rumbles and petty juve rivalries, and they began to meet outside of the group evenings, drinking until closing time several nights a week. Both Deek and Bud no longer had any immediate family, so the former often crashed the night, when too drunk too stagger home, on the latter’s Mo-pad. Tronjer worked as a security guard at Atlantic Hoverport, overseeing those that disembarked from the cruise ships that docked almost daily; he helped get Deek a job as a steward, and with it a sense of stability.
But the desire for vengeance still simmered. Whenever the four of them met up, they discussed at length what they would do if they could take control from Justice Department, how they would bring retribution down on the mobsters and the pushers, the gangbangers and psychopaths, who helped foment the culture of violence in which the whole city stewed, and for which innocents suffered. The entire criminal underworld needed to be destroyed from within—the Judges were proving just too ineffective—if they were to stop more lives being lost. Despite the rhetoric, however, they admitted quietly to themselves that it was mostly the alcohol talking, and it would’ve remained nothing more than a pipe dream if it wasn’t for the convergence of events that followed.
Firstly, Deek’s friend Marv and his wife were carjacked one night and both thrown to their deaths from the megway. Their senseless, random murder underscored everything the four men had been talking about, and Deek—already in a fragile state of mind—felt the centre of his world drop away from him, a cold, hard knot of fury lodging in his chest. The Croons’ son Jacob seemingly dealt with the loss of his parents by becoming even more obsessed with watching from their apartment window—trying to catch sight of who was responsible, perhaps, or just jealously studying those countless other lives beyond the glass that had yet to be touched by the city’s malign influence. Either way, he became a hermit, unwilling to venture beyond the hab’s threshold unless he had to.
Secondly, Bud confiscated a suspicious substance from a pair of stoned tourists returning from a round trip to the Speelor moons. He’d caught passengers using drugs before, but this was something he’d never seen before—a mauve powder with a coppery smell. They claimed a guide had sold it to them, told them it was crushed babooba root, a powerful hallucinogenic favoured by the native shamans. Just one grain dissolved in a solution could send the user on a two-hour trip. Bud chose not to throw the wrap into the incinerator, as per company policy, but hung on to it, intrigued, and found a mention of it in a guidebook. He was surprised to learn that star pilots occasionally took fractional doses to leaven the psychological effects of light-speed, which, though highly risky, they managed to get through the med-tests because it left no trace in the bloodstream. The book cautioned that babooba root taken in any quantity larger than singular grains was highly dangerous.
Thirdly, by a complete coincidence, the Croons boy was busted for peeping by Dane’s Judge brother Henry, setting him up to work for Justice Department. An officer who believed vigilance and harsh penalties were essential if crime was to be combated, and the guilty punished, Novak Senior encouraged Jacob to keep his fellow citizens under constant surveillance. When he was investigated himself for his somewhat flexible approach to the Law—the report citing the disproportionate number of juves on his patrol vector with broken limbs and fractured skulls—he was demoted from Street to Customs. Becoming acquainted with Deek and Bud through his sibling, Novak would casually mention the multitude of illegalities that were still taking place out on the slab, right under the Judges’ noses, that nobody was doing anything to stop. Lives were still being ruined, the perpetrators still escaped justice.
A plan was formed.
“YOU AND CARVER and the rest brutally murdered his best friend’s son?”
“I wasn’t there,” Novak protested. “I’d told them about Croons, knew he was keeping an eye on Vassell. They’d decided they were going to take the peeper out, make sure he didn’t see them selling on the drug to the dealer. But I didn’t know what they had planned, how far they’d go—”
“They redecorated the apartment with him,” Dredd snapped.
“They were trying to divert attention away from themselves, make it look like a gang revenge killing, bring down the helmets on the street scum. I think it was Tronjer who came up with the idea of painting the symbol on the wall, like the perpetrators were marking their territory. It was all a ruse to give a false impression of who was responsible.”
“They told you this.”
“Afterwards. Croons was dead and Vassell had the dust, there was nothing I could’ve done.”
“Do you know how many man-hours have been wasted cha
sing false leads? And in the meantime, the narcotic was being distributed, lives were being lost.”
“I... I was compromised, Dredd,” Novak murmured, looking down. “I was involved. I’d helped them get the drug into the city. To have cubed them would’ve meant the end for me too.”
“And it’s worked out so well for you otherwise, hasn’t it?” Burlough said, snorting.
“Why Vassell? Why choose him to distribute it?”
“Deek had seen him around William Holden, seen a regular flow of customers coming through. He seemed a good fit.”
“These creeps, Carver and the other three,” Dredd growled, leaning in closer to the other Judge. “How crazy are they?”
“They’re obsessed. They want to destroy the criminals, wipe out the users and the pushers indiscriminately, get retribution on the kind that they lost their children to. They’ve released this dust into the underworld so the perps kill themselves, go out of their minds through their own appetites.” Novak held Dredd’s gaze. “They’re doing our job for us. They’re targeting the creeps far more effectively than we ever can. These aren’t innocents that are dying here. Their methods may be different, but what are they doing that’s any different from our own sanctioned crime prevention—”
“Never mind the fact that you’re complicit in murder and drug smuggling, Novak; you’re truly no longer fit to wear that badge if you honestly believe that,” Dredd replied, turning to leave. “There’s a poison circulating out there, and this sector’s about to descend into chaos. What you’ve helped unleash is going to cause untold damage.”
“This sector?” Novak said and chuckled.
Judge Dredd Year One: City Fathers Page 8
