'Sir, I... Why does...' Oh, it was complicated. He remembered his rules. Nothing The Judge ever did should ever be treated as abnormal, he remembered. Still, he said, 'sir... why do we have to kill everyone? Can't you...'
‘Because, Derek, I like to kill people. Haven’t you noticed?'
'...Yessir.'
The Judge turned at the waist and retrieved his empty glass. He gave the ice a shoogle and aimed it at Derek, who habitually reached for the hip flask in his inside pocket and poured him a dram.
'If you need a reasoning with a little more weight, my boy...' Judge Rabbit examined the glass, turning the whisky around and watching as it stuck to the inside. 'Would it help you to know my father died by the hands of the people I plan to hurt on my way out? That the Court destroyed my family, ousting my father from power and forcing him into retirement? Would it be useful to know, like yourself, I'm only trying to do my father proud?'
Derek squinted through the haze, agreeing with the suggestion itself that he and The Judge were on similar paths, but still, he hesitated with his response. He knew what he wanted to say but badly needed to find a better way to say it.
The medicine, he supposed, gave up on that idea, when he said, 'that depends, sir, on whether or not that is true.'
'Oh-ho...' He took a sip of his whisky and put the glass down between them. 'Getting old, Derek. Retirement fits, decide whether or not you're joining me. I'll forget this little episode of yours, without even trying.'
'I'll consider it, sir.'
'Grand.'
Judge Rabbit got up and strolled back across the desert of carpet to the door.
Derek sat perfectly still.
The Judge spoke to the door but sent the words back across the sand. 'You remember Wilson, yes?'
'Yessir.'
'I told him, and he left me, Derek. My best friend left me.'
And with that, he exited the room.
Derek stared at the whisky left in front of him.
~
From what I understand, Judge Rabbit Senior murdered people too.
The apple barely fell off that tree.
~
Derek didn't get up for a while. It could've been the drugs, it could've been the intense chat he had with his employer, it could've been the life-altering decision he had to make.
He didn't know, but he didn't feel like standing up, not yet.
The visit didn't change anything, the choice was the same: stay or go. He was thankful Judge Rabbit had intervened and given him some detail, though.
He knew now, who Judge Rabbit planned to kill, the severity of their death, for what they were dying and - crucially - the spoils lying for him at the end of that horrible rainbow.
He knew now, why The Judge hesitated in selecting a new Reaper: he didn't need one.
He knew now, why he let The Reaper out into the world for a day: he needed to keep him distracted until his Murder Gala went ahead. Whether or not The Reaper performed well didn't matter. It would be preferable for him to fail, but not essential.
Nothing mattered to The Judge after today. He planned to blow it up and leave it at his arse, and he wanted to take Derek with him. Retirement without servitude. All the money, none of the work.
Add to that, the fact that The Judge's reasoning was incredibly relatable to Derek. So relatable, in fact, that Derek suspected emotional manipulation at play. Wasn't it a bit easy that both of them had severe daddy issues to deal with?
From the ground, Derek looked up at the baton on the mantelpiece.
It was time to get up.
He stood tenderly and rolled his toes in the carpet, balancing himself. Once he was sure he wouldn't fall back over, he picked up the whisky glass and approached the mantel.
The baton stared him down.
'Daddy, I'm lost,' he croaked over a dry mouth.
Daddy's advice was always the same: chin up, chest out, do your duty until your duty releases you.
Derek managed every day to heed his father's advice by honouring the duty part and ignoring the murder part, but he felt sure active participation in something referred to as a Murder Gala was out with his jurisdiction.
It had to be fire, too. Of course it did.
Shooting his guests wouldn't be enough. Derek could've handled the shooting. But fire? He didn't stand a chance against fire.
Without drinking from it, Derek placed the whisky glass on the mantel, opposite Daddy's truncheon.
Derek swayed around in the mirror, vacant behind those bulging eyes. His protruding jaw hung slack. He thought, with a crooked smile, if he had all of Judge Rabbit's money and none of the servitude, he might be able to have some work done on his face.
Like, all of his face.
His phone started ringing as he considered what a normal-looking chap he could transform himself into. He retrieved it from his inside pocket and answered.
'Del-boy, we've got another problem,' David stated, marking the third time in a day he had to phone Derek with an emergency he couldn't handle.
'Oh?'
'There's a break-in at the office. It's that fucking Reaper you've let run riot over the island.'
Derek's heart sunk. 'Deary me. How did he... how?'
'No idea Del-boy, but he's there. I tracked his cloak. I need you to go take a look.'
'Oh...' That sounded like an awful idea. 'I don't think I'm the right man for the job, I-'
'Well obviously! But I'm busy trying to clean up the mess Rabbit made of the world when he decided to have three people written who weren’t supposed to die today.'
'But-but... The Reaper, he's seen my face, if I show up at the office he'll link me to Wonderland, and then link Wonderland to his daughter and-'
'Wear a bloody disguise man! Do you understand what happens if they get into my cabinet?'
'Oh...' No, no, no.
'Del-boy, go. They're already in the bloody office. You need to go. Go now. Move!'
David hung up the phone.
Derek urged himself to be brave. When that failed, he gathered up the remnants of his pills, popped one and put the rest in his pocket.
Minutes later, he was in the car, clattering through the woods down Alisonhill, aiming for Wonderland Talent.
~
Thirty
Under the Hood IV: The Filing Cabinet Rodeo
Things were going much better for Tom and Grim.
They fought their way out of Hadleigh city centre and back on the ferry.
They ignored the cloak the whole way.
~
I can’t.
~
Travelling back to Wilson's Well was a much more glum experience than leaving. They decided to forego the feeling by instead staying in the car below deck.
The ferry approached the wet little island as its clouds developed a black spot at their centre. No story is complete without a storm, and Wilson's Well brewed a doozy, hanging over the island, ready to bring all kinds of catastrophe to Wilson's Well.
In spite of what Tom and Grim thought, catastrophe was coming.
But before that, Tom was close to bursting into song. It had been ages since he felt this good about his future. Hell, last time was way back when Mum went to him for relationship advice - when he managed to nudge her from her relationship with Dad and into one with himself.
Back then, his happiness came both because of and at the expense of Grim; Grim fucked up his relationship with May, Tom got her. Nearly twenty years later it was happening again; Grim came back to find his daughter, but he had to die afterwards.
Maybe Grim's cards were slightly worse than everyone else’s.
As they waited to be let off the ferry, Tom asked, 'what are you gonna say to her?'
'Cora? I'm not sure... I want to find out if she's seen Star Wars, I suppose.'
'Eh?'
Grim shrugged his uneven shoulders. 'I'm a ghost, Tom... Maybe I'll be at peace once I've watched Star Wars with my- with, with Cora.'
'Then you'll be h
appy to just die again?'
Grim didn't answer.
The Ferry opened up for them, lowering the ramp back onto Wilson's Well's gloomy little port. The two cars parked behind them reversed off first. Tom followed suit.
~
'Shouldn't we be going to the police?'
'Mate, the police are only gonna take this info, get a warrant and gut the place on Monday morning. You'll not be here on Monday morning.'
'Surely, this would be a priority...'
'Aye, but the case got pretty stale, and if they aren't looking at it every day, guess what happens?'
'...They forget?'
'They forget. We need something solid. We need hard evidence they can't turn away. We need a smoking gun, tonight.'
'So... what are we going to do instead?'
Tom pulled the car to a stop outside his house but left the engine running. 'You're not gonna like it.'
He rolled out of the vehicle over the top of Grim (pulling his jeans down in the process, Grim probably saw his whole butt), ran into the house, up the stairs and to my room. He stopped for a moment to identify his own skidmarks on my stool then grabbed the business card and left. Once he let Paddy out for a quick pee, he locked up and returned to the car. Grim had gotten out to make both their lives easier.
They were off again in no time.
Wonderland Talent was on the east of the island, behind the secondary school, amongst a small row of red stone buildings. One of them belonged to a dentist on the ground floor and Wonderland Talent on top.
I was curious - when I played the drums for David as part of my audition - what kind of effect my disruptive drumming would be having on any dental procedure that might involve a drill below us, but only briefly.
Tom steered the car around the back of the building into an empty car park. There, leading up to the front door of Wonderland Talent, were THE STAIRS.
~
Oh, THE STAIRS...
~
Tom halted the car and shut the engine off.
Without the sound of the engine, if they paid any attention whatsoever, they would have noticed a low hum coming from the backseat. If they had stopped for even a second and listened, they would've heard the cloak stressing out. But nah, the boys were distracted by the crime they were about to commit.
'We're breaking in??' Grim yelped. 'Why, why are we breaking in?? Why are we doing that?'
'Stop pretending you didn't see this coming, fuck sake. Come on.'
'N-no.' Grim grabbed the handle of the door tight. 'We c-can't do this.'
Tom moaned and collapsed on his steering wheel.
'I don't think I can do this.'
'Right, but listen... you fought for a day, right? You wanna waste it?'
'Why don't we, well, let's phone the owner and-'
'Fuck off.'
'O-okay, right. What about if you leave it until Monday? I don't mind. I'll be out of your hair and you can find her. And you can be her Dad forever. Let's go to the pub tonight. You wanted to-'
'What if she's in that building, right now, waiting to be rescued? You want to leave her another night? Is that what the best Dad ever would do?'
'Well, Thomas, I'm not her Dad anymore.'
'Aw for fuck-' Tom rattled his hand against the steering wheel, blaring the horn and alerting anyone in the surrounding area to their presence.
Tom pointed at the building. 'Listen, I'm putting something through that window right now. I'm not taking the risk. You're back for one day - it had to be for a fucking reason. It's our destiny to rescue her today, mate. What if she's in there, Dad. Huh?'
~
So, fucking, much chat about Grim dying the next day, and not once did they think to check in with the cloak in the backseat.
Seriously.
Regardless, Tom had a way of convincing people of things they didn't know they wanted to do. He convinced Mum to stick with him, he convinced me to stick with drums, and he convinced Grim to break into Wonderland Talent.
~
They got out of the car and climbed THE STAIRS - wet and crumbling beneath their feet - to the front door of the office. It was straight-forward and old, made of questionable wood and a pane of single-glazed glass. Not a stylistic choice, rest-assured. Nothing on the east coast of Wilson's Well had two panes of glass, that would stick out like a sore thumb. Any additional security applied to the building had to be subtle. Double-glazing, no - criminals would know the office had something to hide. However, a tiny, best-money-can-buy camera at the top-right of the building, pointing at the door but close to invisible to Tom as he searched for such a thing, yes - that was the type of security Wonderland Talent had.
Tom looked right at it as he examined the entrance, he'd have been as well smiling for the bloody thing. 'Right then...' he said.
Grim was oblivious as Tom balled up a fist, too busy flinching at the sound of every raindrop. 'Do you need something to break-'
Tom punched straight through the glass.
SMASH.
'Oh dear!' Grim cried.
'Ooooh aye!' Tom grinned at his handiwork as he pulled his fist back. 'You see that?'
Grim changed colour. 'Your hand is bleeding.'
Tom checked. 'Ooft,' he said, extracting a piece of glass the size of a nacho from his palm.
A torrent of blood poured from the slit.
'Oh nononono.' Grim turned away - towards the camera, by the way - and covered both his mouth and eyes with his hands.
'Aye, this isn't great.' He pinned the hand under his armpit and pressed hard. 'Shit.'
'Please put it away.'
'Away where?'
'Has it stopped bleeding?'
'Of course it fucking hasn't.'
Tom's white(ish) tee-shirt absorbed the blood.
~
Tom knocked out the remaining glass with his elbow, allowing them safe passage through the window. Tom climbed in with about as much grace as he could manage, being fat, wet and one-handed. Grim leant over, guts first, and toppled down on the other side with a damp slap.
Tom turned from the useless pile of suit on the floor and felt around the wall for a light switch.
When he found one, the light revealed an office. Just an office. It had exposed brick walls and a laminate floor, three desks with three computers in three corners, and a water machine in the fourth. Very modern-space, very art-deco, the whole place stunk of scented candles and forced positivity. At the back of the room, there was another door lying ajar, and the bathroom was on the left.
Tom had hoped to find a cage with me in it, I guess.
Grim staggered to his feet. 'Thomas, this looks like an office.'
'Well, I never thought they'd keep her like... in here.'
'You just told me they might.'
Tom entered the bathroom and found nothing but a toilet and a sink. After he grabbed several wads of toilet paper to help soak up the blood pissing from his hand, he re-entered the office space and approached the door at the back of the room. It had 'David Hunter, Chief Talent Director' embossed on the glass. Tom pushed it open and hoped for an arrow pointing at some glaring, incriminating evidence.
He got nothing.
'Motherfucker...' he sighed.
This one had a bigger desk, a fancier computer, a plant and not much else. On the walls, as Tom walked around, he saw the same man in each of them. He shook hands, cuddled or posed with groups of teens, each of them was captioned something ridiculous like 'Sex Healz for Lolz' and 'Deaf Death' and 'Fuck Arnie, We're The Terminators.' The man in each of them was undoubtedly this David character, the same gent, too old for his ponytail, from the gig footage at The Ivory.
It was becoming clear that the office was either a startlingly-well-put-together front for a local talent agency, or an actual local talent agency.
Tom perched himself up on the desk and checked his hand under the rapidly pulping paper with which he covered his wound. It didn't seem to be stopping, and to add to his woes, he could trac
k his progress around the room with several little droplets of blood on the floor.
'Shit.'
Another dead end.
From all of the photos, there was Derek again, smirking at him. 'Dead end is right, my friend! And now you're a bloody criminal too! Well done!'
'Thomas, how do we feel about this?'
Tom’s partner-in-crime shut the office door over, revealing a filing cabinet behind it.
He lifted an eyebrow.
'Do you think anything will be in-'
'Aye.' Tom marched forward.
'Oh? How can you tell?'
'Because it's 2016, and I count five computers in here.' He crouched over, inspecting the cabinet. It was stout, with only two drawers, big and deep with a lock at the top. 'The only reason you'd keep your shit in a locked filing cabinet in an office with five computers and the whole internet to keep your shit on, is if you've got something to hide.'
'Eh...' Grim scratched at his ear. 'That seems thin.'
'Cheers, nineteen-ninety-nine, but we've done breaking and entering, property damage is a step-down. Gimme a hand.'
What followed could only be described as a wrestling match between two men and a filing cabinet.
Neither Tom nor Grim knew how to pick a lock, so they had to bash their way in. They started by pulling the drawers as hard as they could. When they established that didn't work - and had decorated the cabinet in stylish red hand prints - they started jamming things in the tiny gaps around the side of the drawers to lever them open. These things were limited to office supplies - rulers and the likes - so that didn't work either. Next, after realising they should come at it from a different angle, they tipped it onto its face, aiming a stretch of plain metal at the ceiling.
Tom got a hold of a pair of scissors and sent Grim to find any others lying around.
Moments later, both of my Dads sat astride the filing cabinet.
They were stabbing it.
Two wet men; one dangerously malnourished, the other tubby as hell; one in a brown suit that didn't fit, the other in a see-through white tee-shirt with blood patches; one apologising to the cabinet with every stab, the other bleeding all over it; taking turns thrusting office scissors into the metal between their legs.
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