Free Sweet Justice by Neil Gaiman Page B

right knee.
    I hadn’t wanted to report him for hassling me – Psi Division is understaffed as it is – but enough is enough, right?
    Well, during all this excitement, I’d forgotten about my locker. By the time I got there it was noon, and the cupboard was bare. Security knew nothing about it; they said they hadn’t seen anyone but me go near the locker all day.
    The next time those guys call themselves security I’m going to sue them under the old Trade Description Act.
    My philosophy flash was pretty accurate. Actually, it was disaffected Pragmatists , not Hedonists, who teamed up with the Existentialists, but who’s counting?
    As for today, I see yet another snarl-up en route to H.Q.; I see Ned Kamen, after a brief trip to Med Bay, putting in for a transfer to Mutant Control Division, where he will feel more at home; I see a few petty crimes that I’ll log, and I see myself walking into an exclusive uptown apartment and shooting a businessman’s head off.
    Hold on. Look at that again, Anderson. Grud, that’s heavy. I just walk straight into his room, lift my Lawgiver, and pebble-dash the wall with his frontal lobes.
    Now it’s going a bit hazy, like looking through a dirty window. I see myself, walking... walking a little strangely. I go up to this man, another businessman I think, in another uptown apartment. What am I going to do? Shoot him too? He puts something onto the table. A case. He opens the case. Inside the case is a lot of money. A hell of a lot of money. I shut the case, shake the man’s hand, and I walk out of the room with the money.
    ‘Nice job, Anderson,’ says the man. Am I going crazy? Am I a killer? Or am I both?
    What I mean is, do I have another side to my personality? Beneath this good-natured, highly cultivated, mild-mannered exterior does there lurk a Judge Hyde character? And if there does, can she please go live somewhere else?
    Let’s try and piece this thing together. I have a flash about emptying a guy’s cranium of all its grey matter. But during the day, I have no conscious awareness that I’m doing such a thing. That’s the truth. As far as I’m concerned, I did not shoot that man. But that man was shot. Oh yes. Took me hours to piece the flash together, but finally I located the address where the ‘killing’ was to happen. Only I arrived too late. There was a Lawgiver lying on the floor. I picked up the gun and at that moment some other residents came into the room, just like a corny old vid where the hero picks up the bloodied knife and is holding it over the bloodied corpse as the screaming witnesses appear.
    ‘See anyone enter the building in the last five minutes?’ I asked. The residents shrugged their shoulders and looked bored. Seeing a Judge shoot down a perp in Mega-City One is no big deal I guess.
    ‘Only you , Judge. Only you.’
    Weirder and weirder. I went to the armoury with the Lawgiver that shot the businessman. Seems it was one I called for – personally – a few hours before the homicide. So. I had the gun that shot the man, I was the only person the other residents saw going into the businessman’s apartment, and I had a flash in which I saw myself divorcing his cerebral cortex from his spine. Doesn’t take a genius to work out who shot him, does it, Anderson? You’re flipping out, girl.
    Or else...
    Let’s concentrate on today. A few magazine-sellers hacked to an inch of their lives on Geller Strasse; illegal Scottish coffee-drinking party at the Loch Ness Cafe. Small time. Ignore it. Look harder. Ah, there I am. I’m walking into a club, a low-grade joint called Slimelight. I’m going up to the owner. He’s smiling, not because he knows me but because I’m a Judge, as I lift my Lawgiver and point it at his face. A second later he has nothing left to smile with.
    Not exactly following Judge procedure there, Anderson.
    What next? Ned Kamen will eat his lunch opposite me. Forget it. Forget Kamen, Anderson. You’re getting confused. There