There are three kinds of animals that anticipate calls in the middle of the night: politicians, surgeons, and insomniacs. The first hoped to never hear it, it the second heard it on a regular basis, and the third eagerly awaited it, just to feel useful and mobile for a change. Neither Judy nor Nick fit into any of these categories, and when the phone began its buzz in the kitchen, all it recieved in response was a shift in the sheets and a groan from the bunny. Her ears, perpetually tuned into the background radiation of life, had registered the faint sound, but could not place it coherently, nor take it as a sign to awaken. Instead she merely pulled closer to her husband and nudged him further off the bed. She was a notorious 'blanket bandit' as he called her, and she would toss and turn in the night. Thankfully, her small frame made it easy for Nick to ignore such nocturnal activity, and whenever she began, snore lightening and paws moving from their usual hiding spots in his fur, he would merely encroach upon her own territory; it was a reflex, involuntary, and often performed in a half-asleep state. Unable to move him, the sleeping bunny would instead find comfort in the new shape his form took on. Gone was the nook beside his muzzle in which she hid, but his arm had now scaled over her pillow, and she would pull it closer, to rest her head on it and await morning like that. The sole time when it became a problem is when they shared a cramped space, such as the guest room at Judy's childhood home, or the back seat of their car during that one time it broke down in the middle of nowhere. Now he rolled onto his front and pushed her to the wall, and she obligingly mirrored his motions, adjusting appropriately. Two separate streams of snores continued undeterred. The phone had stopped its buzzing and glowed in the darkness, showing one missed call. And then it rang again. Judy had made it a habit to put it on sleep mode as she shared a number of chat groups on Furbook with her parents and siblings, and having twenty-five bunnies with a family history of insomnia messaging one another in the dead of night caused both of them a great deal of stress. Now it was a habitual slide of her fingers, to the mute button, so that they may entertain one another in her absence. Each buzz of it brought it closer to the edge of the living room coffee table, and passing close by a small stack of DVDs, it rattled them too, and at this, hear ear shifted more violently. Second missed call. Content with it finally having ended, Judy's ears folded themselves back down again, stripped of what little strength had awoken them, and now lay draped clumsily across her face.
Third call. One buzz, and then a second one, and finally, it fell to the floor, hard against the wood. Judy's eyes drifted open and she sat up on her elbows. The room was completely dark. Nothing concrete to be found anywhere. To her right, Nick, murmuring something in response to her waking. She looked down. Almost three quarters of the blanket lay in her paws, promptly exposing Nick's bottom to the air, which sent his tail twitching impatiently. A mute and apologetic nod later, and she tucked him in properly. Sure enough, the bushy black and orange appendage ceased its motions. Focus, Judy. What was that noise? It was something, and she was sure of it. Someone was in the house. Fear gripped the bunny and her legs moved closer to her, partially for the sake of comfort, and partially as a preparation to pounce should an uninvited visitor make himself known in the door-frame of their bedroom. Beyond it lay darkness. A plain wall, supporting a picture frame. For some reason that was utterly beyond her at that moment, Judy attempted to recall what the aforementioned frame held. Some sort of print. Focus. Just as she was about to write it off as the building settling into its foundations, it began again, terse and prompt, boring a hole in her mind. Her left ear rose first, standing straight up and turning towards the kitchen. Usurped strands of fur lined it, having become dislodged in her sleep, and shivered with a passing breeze. The noise came in threes, buzzing, not entirely unlike a swarm of angry wasps, but distant, and muted. It echoed too. The floor? Judy leaned up and looked beyond her husband's shoulder, at the plain parquet concealed expertly beneath a small, rectangular rug. What on Earth would be making that noise in relation to the floor? She shuffled forward, across the towel they had put down, and slipped off the edge. The wood was cold against her feet. Shivers shot through her but she steadied herself and stood. Her head spun still, from the haze of dreams rudely interrupted. A weapon. What if it was another animal? Find a weapon. She took two steps towards the window and took hold of a metal candelabrum; how it got there she could not recall. Probably Nick. He enjoyed it if a room looked "busy". More cold wood against her toes, warming up slightly as she stepped on it, but she would never remain for long enough to turn that heat into something productive. No blanket, no clothes, not even a bathrobe, and the entire house was subject to the whims of night-time breezes. She pressed her thighs closer together and drew her forearms towards her chest; of course those two would instantly protest to the change in temperature. The bunny cast one glance behind herself. Outside, the trees swayed violently, and rain pock-marked the window-panes. A storm made landfall, probably from behind the hills, spilling out above Zootopia just now, sending the lights dancing. Shadows played along the far wall, monstrous in shape and size, barren branches becoming deathly limbs. Her grip on the candelabrum base tightened. Bogo, here to finish the job? He'd be louder. He would make his presence known. Subtlety was not his thing, and he would most likely not be alone. No, Judy reasoned, it was something else. Burglars? The building looked dilapidated. They'd have a better chance of stealing something valuable if they went after orphans.
Just as she prepared herself to step out of the bedroom and into the hall, something stirred sharply behind herself and she spun, clutching the candelabrum tightly in either paw, and presenting it like a sword.
"The fuck are you doing, woman?" Naturally, it was Nick, and any element of surprise they had was at once ruined by his sharp, groggy whispering. She hushed him quickly and motioned behind herself with her thumb, but he decided to continue regardless "No-one there. Just the living room. Chill." There's a word she hadn't heard out of him in a very long time indeed; of course, he was still asleep.
"Will you pipe down? Someone's in the house." Judy gave a nod and Nick returned it; he probably hadn't heard a word.
"Fuck that, I'm gonna go beat their head in." Utterly unphased by her finely-honed tactics and fully worked-out approach for a sneak attack, he stood to his feet, yawned, scratched his nethers, and took a few determined steps forward, taking the candelabrum out of her paws with ease and pushing past her. Judy followed close behind but had trouble paying attention from the sudden rolling motions her eyes had taken to performing. He stopped sharply and she bumped into him, which earned her a glance from above, succeeded shortly by him looking to the living room again and slapping the candelabrum against his free paw like a bat, "Come out, dickhead. We know you're in here." He motioned behind himself, "I married a Doppler unit for a fuckin' reason. She'd hear a mouse farting in the middle of a scherzo. Can't hide from us." Silence. Howling wind at the windows, and the smack of his lips as he licked them. He turned to her, "See? Not a peep. Let's go back to bed." But the bunny didn't move.
"Look, my phone..." She extended a paw and pointed towards the floor beside the coffee table, where the device lay, embedded in the edges of another small rug, glowing with urgency, "Must've been knocked off the table." Something fell into her extended paw; the candelabrum.
"Oh no. Good luck fighting off the spirits from beyond that feed on 4G." With that, he walked around her and made for the bedroom, "If you'll be needing me, I was in the middle of devouring a plate of pancakes the size of the Zootopia Convention Centre." Judy scoffed, but couldn't help the grin which appeared on her lips; typical, "Fuckin' murder-phones, waking innocent people's mad wives up."
"I heard that!" She called after him, and he laughed groggily.
"Good! Let me know how the exorcism goes!" Shifting of sheets and a tired creak from the mattress. Judy looked ahead again. Someone called her. That was the source of the buzzing. She approached it and knelt beside it, turning the screen towards herself. Three missed calls. Two from a private number, but a third from a contact she had saved; Ritter. Judy tilted her head to one side slightly. Why would he call her at this hour? Confused and with the lightness of imminent still in full possession of her mind, she sat down on the couch and unlocked the screen. Ritter, for sure. A photograph of him grinning madly, which she took as his contact profile on their first day together, shone brightly. One press of that name and the photographs blew up on the screen. It beeped once, but only once, followed immediately by the sound of it being picked up.
"Hello?" She called softly, but no response came, "Anyone there?" More silence lined with interruptions in the form of hisses and pops. Judith felt unease grip at her, and in the dark of the living room, all she could hear were the tinny hums of the connection. Breathing. Someone was on the other end, "Ritter, you're scaring me."
"Good." The response was simple and condensed into a singular breath. Judy nearly dropped the phone in shock, but her shaking paw held onto it. Apprehension turned to terror. He could be anywhere. He could be watching her right now. After all, she told him where she lived, roughly. Not that searching for the exact address would be difficult. Asking Clawhauser would most likely result in the correct answer.
"I'm calling the police." It was an utterly idiotic response, but the best she could muster at the present moment. In a way, she promised to call herself. But it was different. More silence. More empty, electric humming, across a variable distance; either fifty miles, or two feet, or anywhere in between. They were civillians now, off duty, and he had just threatened her. At least Judy thought he did. It was close to a threat. Probable cause, harassment for sure.
"You've got the police." Ritter's voice was utterly unusual. He laughed, but it wasn't a friendly titter; rather, a terrifying gwuaff. I know more than you do, it said. In each long pause lay buried tension, and she could hear the rain as it whipped the windows, battering them madly, rattling the frames, carried aloft on the wings of the storm. Jarring reminders of the fact that she wasn't dreaming this. How she wished she was. Only minutes had passed since Judy awoke, but already she wanted to creep back into the blankets, and pretend that none of this was happening to her, that it was happening to someone else, personified in her wakeful self, in a world where the warm fold of Nick's embrace lay distant and meek. His light-hearted jest now echoed in her mind; nothing could last, "We need to talk."
"We are talking." The bunny dreaded what he would ask of her next; she knew before the words had even left his mouth.
"In person. We have to meet." She crept up along the couch and lay in the corner of it, wedged between the pillows and the armrest, and pulled her legs towards herself, but only to ease the motions of laying a blanket across her nude form; the sudden lack of immediate physical tension rendered the cold all the more potent.
"Why?" So he could get his paws on her and finish what Bogo began, of course. Two weeks of not being able to breathe through her nose planted a vivid reminder within her that was never far, and her shallowing breaths found her in the dark alcove of her living room, "I know you're rotten already. Not much to discuss beyond that."
"You don't know the half of it, Hopps." Mocking her again, but weakly, faintly. Nick was right. The pieces didn't fit, but the motive was lacking. In a fell swoop, he undid years of preparation, refinement, and subterfuge. Shown her everything, laid bare. The bones of justice, picked clean by ever-hungering buzzards, "I gave you a taste of what lies behind all of this. Tell me that you don't want more, and I'll know you're lying." Ritter's voice grew more shallow and laboured, as if he had been running, and in each syllable lay only the faintest hint of burden, a weight borne for too long leaving behind lasting marks, "I've known officers like you my whole life. Driven, motivated, willing to save the world. How can you save it if you don't understand what you're saving it from?" For almost a minute, Judy pondered how to respond. Addressing it directly would mean admitting that he was right, and doing so would be giving him an upper hand in a matter where he absolutely did not deserve it. Her chest rose and fell slowly. Deep breaths. Calm yourself. Her heart threatened to pound itself asunder within her ribcage.
"Why did you show me?" The answer hung atop the crease of her own tongue, but inferring it would mean adding fuel to the fire and utterly dismembering the balance she had established thus far; he was afraid of something, and palpably so. We all went into this for the same reasons. The flames of justice don't simply die one day.
"Parking garage at fourteenth and Lewisham, in an hour." Ritter parted his words with another lengthy pause. He had her now. No threat of her hanging up the phone. Fear was a powerful aphrodisiac, "I'd ask you to promise me you'll show up, but somehow I feel as if I don't have to." And then the speaker clicked and took Ritter's voice with itself. Long, ebbing beeps. A connection severed. From how far away? There was a rattle, stemming from a hook. Most likely a land-line, perhaps a phone booth. This could mean any number of things. At least three lay within walking distance of her house.
She stood up and threw one end of the blanket across her shoulder like a toga and kept the rest of it tightly closed, pressed to her chest by her forearms. This is how she would wander around Nick's apartment during a more innocent time, bashful and protective of her nude form, except in their most intimate moments; modesty was a victim of married life, but a worthy one. These images came to her as a buffer, to hold back the fear, lulling her like seaward waves, a vessel with a broken sail trapped atop the sea's tumultuous surface, tossed to and fro, each wave against the bow of her consciousness bringing her closer to the tipping point. The scraping of the branches against the glass turned to whispers, and she would look about herself twice before stepping into the bedroom. How close? Judy watched the space from the door-step. Waking him again made her feel bad, but it had barely been five minutes. He couldn't have been that deep in his dreams, but none the less, Judy spared a moment observing the way in which his limbs moved, grasping at the edges of sleep. His forearm spasmed impalpably. Muscles fading into their cycle of dormancy. Stand by until needed again. And a wholesome, living mind, coursing through a world constructed lying beneath it all. Her eyes would drift to him in the middle of the night, most recently during a bout of her nightmares where he became the sole reminder of her stability; a rocking boat barely bigger than a nutshell, but with a strongly-armoured port to dock in, and await the passing of the hurricane. No, she decided with a mute, curt nod, this was her war now. Ritter was her partner. If it was her destiny to be his judge, jury, and executioner, she would make it so that the last face he saw was hers and hers alone, just to remind him of what exactly he had desecrated. Not just the badge. But the code, too. The bunny made for the closet and took out a pair of simple jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, black in colour. In case she needed to use darkness to her advantage. The holster assembly fit perfectly into the belt-loops, and rattled slightly as she put it on. Carrying a lethal weapon was not something she agreed with, and only did so in moments of extreme necessity, but there was no telling which methods of revenge Ritter was inclined towards. Defence was a must, but the gun still felt heavy against her hip. It clicked as she walked. Thankfully not loud enough to wake Nick.
Fourteenth and Lewisham lay just two blocks away from the harbour district, with its endless supply of cranes and massive, leering cargo ships, swaying sternly beside the massive of the ZooCon Coliseum. Judy had looked the precise directions up on the internet, and found that Ritter was hiding inside a parking garage. Empty at this time of night. It would give her lots of space to run, but his was a profoundly predatory species. Honed eyes, precise ears, and legs that would catch her no matter how many times she would duck and weave her way through them. Hiding became her only solution. Find cover, and shoot from there; shoot to kill. If she succeeded in doing more than just wounding him, which she considered to be the worst possible outcome, but perhaps an entirely unavoidable one, Bogo would no doubt try and pin the murder on her. The slip of her jacket as she pulled it over her shoulders served as a cold reminder. It fit snugly. Just like Bogo's hands fit around her entire form. Mentally unstable, she recalled. Beneath the hem of her sleeve, she saw that damnable scar, shining almost. Why did she choose to make that incision again? Her motives lay in a mire of unknowns. That dark place she dared not venture to. Treading ground there meant unleashing demons which she did not need right now. Focus on one thing, and one thing alone; or innocents will die. This was her first true test. Subterfuge in a patrol car was nothing now that he had her alone. Perhaps not alone at all. What if more rotten officers awaited her? What if her end, which she had tried so hard to usher in before, now lay in the midst of a crossfire? There would be nowhere to run, and no way to fight it all off. They would open fire and fell her in a matter of seconds. And then came the cold arms. Without Nick. Why didn't you wake him? So that he doesn't see you broken, dying in a puddle of your own blood, and inevitably facing the same fate himself. Given the most likely outcome, the memory of her will sleep complete in his mind, as he had last seen her, atop him, cheeks flushed, breath heavy with the sounds of love-making, their beings fully lost within one another. No need to see the cold gaze she experienced in those crime scene photographs. The frozen muscles of a face that would never move again, never to whisper sweet nothings into his ear, and never to be seen as a permanent fixture in some distant future. Nick's deep, penetrating snore rattled her. This may very well be the last time she will see him.
Judy tore a post-it note from the fridge stack, where they kept the blanks, for purposes of grocery lists and such. She clicked the pen open and began writing. It was a brief note, not mentioning the possibility of her death, but keeping it fully on the table, not promising anything in the other direction either. Merely the address, and a warning stating that, if she did not return until seven in the morning, he should come look for her. And if possible alert the relevant authorities. Her paw hung over that last part. With her out of the picture, there was no threat to Nick any more. Nothing to come and hound him with her six feet under the Earth. Judy closed her eyes and sighed. On the very bottom she wrote 'I love you so very much, and please, don't worry about me'. It was the closest he would have to a farewell from her. No time. Half an hour left until the meeting, and with the conditions outside, it may take her that long to get there. Judy placed it on the night-stand, atop the case with her badge, and leaned over Nick, kissing his cheek lightly. He smiled. Tears nearly welled up in her eyes momentarily. The possibly of not meeting her own children just came to her now. For a very long time, she thought of Nicholas as the perfect father; involved in the lives of his future offspring, and doing everything in his power to protect and prepare them for the world into which they would inevitably be thrust. It was a far-off moment, standing at the doorstep, watching their children leave, to begin lives of their own. Their duties would then be fulfilled. But now the nature of her duty was different. To care for all those that cannot speak for themselves; driven officers, as Ritter had said it himself. Was it a goal worthy of sacrifice? Naturally. It simply had to be. If it wasn't, what was? I need all of you, she recalled, not a half-life. Not supporting the terrifying status quo. What good were the images of non-existent children if that moment of separation lay bittersweet, steeped in resentment to her not having done the right thing at the right time? Bogo wanted her to fail. But she wouldn't. With a swift pull of her sleeve across her cheek, Judy wiped her tear and took a breath, rapid and shallow, but steady. She was composed.
The sheer strength of the gale outside required her to brace her feet against the ground. Thunder shone amongs the broken clouds overhead. Flashes, followed by a tremendous crack, drowned out by the rattle of wind in her ears. She sat in the car and listened in uneasily. The apartment building had one parking lot in front of itself, with several private garages lining the ground floor, owned by the residents living in some of the more fanciful structures which surrounded their humble dwelling. She saw them at times, driving out in their luxurious family sedans and high-riding SUVs, but she knew none of them by name; only by sight. A line of trees served to part the lot from the intersecting road, leading further South, towards the coastal burrows. Judy sat in the car for a moment and watched the wide, dark tree trunks sway in the wind, their branches rattling madly, some of them reaching upwards, to scrape at the extinguished windows of the apartment building. This was the source of the scraping. She thrust the key into the ignition and drove in the direction of town. No-one was out at this hour. She checked the clock on the dashboard; nearly four in the morning, on a Wednesday. Nick refused to set the clock to the correct time and instead kept it a few minutes fast. The reason for this was simple: Judy would often take her time getting ready, and this ensured that the deception of lateness was complete, which served to hurry her up, or alternatively, at least apologize for making them late. She broke a brief smile at the memory of him explaining it for the first time; it was a method his mother used on him and the kitchen clock, given his habutal tardiness. The warmth in her heart ebbed and died. This was not the time to live in the past. Endless intersections lay ahead of her. From her point of view she could see each stop-light about a minute before she got to it, and with no traffic to obstruct her line of sight, the vista of the city centre was marvellous. It would be illuminated through the night. The leering skyscrapers sat dark for the most part, save for shimmers of light speckled across their fronts, and the big, massive searchlights atop each of them, invisible in the clouds. They hung low, and gave the business district an almost saintly appearance, of pillars supporting a stranger, more distant heaven. In each of these towers sat banks, and stock exchanges, bustling nervous centres at the core of a living, breathing city. The desolation of the streets appeared almost unearthly to Judy when combined with the sight before her. Zootopia never slept, they would say, but now it did; perhaps even the very citizens had sensed the danger and retreated indoors, all twenty-five million of them. She laughed to herself thinly. Like in those old Western pictures, where frontier towns would empty as soon as a pair of duelling gunmen stepped out into the main thoroughfare. The image would be complete, she thought, if Ritter had parked his car at the end of the four-lane interstate and was waiting for her, expecting a spirited game of chicken, of predator and prey, where everything hung in the balance regardless of the roles that mother nature had assigned them.
Despite the darkness of the surrounding windows, the above-ground parking garage shed rays of yellow-green neon from the windowless partitions on each floor. Barren, unpainted concrete turned a darker shade of grey with the water streaming down its sides. Oddly utilitarian from an aesthetic viewpoint, and utterly out of place given its profoundly decorated surroundings, it did not help ease the tension Judy felt as she drove into it, and up a long, winding ramp. Hold the wheel hard to the right and keep your foot on the accelerator. She almost felt proud. The bunny was never a particularly good driver; merely average, and hopelessly outclassed by her husband. So the fact that she hadn't scuffed the bodywork in that moment, mind torn between fear and exhaustion, was cause for a soft nod of celebration. Ritter hadn't specified exactly where he would be hiding, but something drew her to the last floor of the garage. It was an inexplicable urge to be closer to the sky in that moment. An apex of something intangible. This is where he would be, and no doubt about it. There was also a tactical angle to it. There were more floors for her to clear if she wanted to escape, and pursuing her down the helical approach would be easier the longer it was. She pulled into the open concrete area. Most parking structures had an uncovered, final floor, but a series of arbitrary building codes had left the roof of this one unused. The neon lights stung Judy's eyes. Ten feet of blank space separated each neon tube, and the arcs of light spilling from them left cracks of darkness behind, which manifested themselves as long, drawn-out shadows, passing across Judy's face like a camera shutter. A few cars sat in the parking spaces. Most were luxurious in nature, which was a testament to the expensive nature of the waterfront district. But there was one that stood out. Black and white, with counter-rotating emergency lights, extinguished in the far corner; its official nature was one thing, but the darkness inside of it effectively rendered it inseparable from all the other ones. An uninitiated soul may find it a commonplace sight. But it protruded, unwanted and desolate. Judy stopped the car. It eased to a halt and she sat up. The cherry of a lit cigarette hovered inside the police vehicle; Ritter. She pondered parking the car and giving the scene a sense of uniformity. A poor tactical choice, though. Parking meant unparking as well, and in case of a pursuit, it would make escaping substantially more difficult. And it wasn't as if anyone was going to barge in on them and drive off. No danger of her cover being blown. So she turned the engine off and stepped outside. Cold air rushed through the structure and it howled akin to a tremendous beast in pain. Choking on a spear lodged in its throat by a whale-hunter. With her paws tucked under her shoulders and her weapon concealed beneath the fold of her jacket, she made for the corner; a thin sliver of light streaked down the front of the car; Unstoppable.
How would she approach this? Was it polite to knock on the door? Or was he going to open it for her? Questions raced through her mind at a thousand miles per hour. The closer she got to the door, the heavier the gun on her hip seemed to become; and her nose began closing up again. A burning sensation, gentle at first, made its presence known at the very tip of her muzzle. What if a bullet came streaming through the window? This would be the last thing she'd ever see. A black and white frame, speckled with drying rain, in a world of noise. And then nothing. No time for that now. She stood in front of the car and waited for a moment, still uncertain about what to do. Nothing came. No bullet, no roar of the engine, nothing immediately lethal or threatening. And then it opened. There he was. Clad in his blue uniform, with the badge affixed front and centre, and a pair of pens sticking out of the pocket on the other side, an equal distance from one another, as always. Directly above his forehead, the safety light glowed starkly, switching on whenever a door was opened just like in civilian cars, and revealed his features to her. Deep, almost bruised bags under either of his eyes, and an unshaven beard growing around his muzzle. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke. Chain-smoking wasn't a trait of his she knew about. Judy was rooted to the spot. Her legs would not move. In twenty-four hours, the grey-furred wolf before turned from ally to arch-enemy. Now she was within arm's reach of him. Once more that inane thought drilled its way into her mind; what if you were bigger? What if fate had decided to make you an elephant or a rhino or any other number of creatures far larger and stronger than he was?
"Get in." It was a simple command, and it tore her from her own thoughts entirely. This was a bad idea, she heard her own mind complain. There he is, the man who will do anything to maintain his own position. Put an innocent away into a mental institution just to serve his own racket. Why wouldn't he kill you right now? Coming here struck her as a show of weakness. He knows you trust him. Focus, Judith. Nothing has happened yet. If there ever was a bad time to doubt yourself through over-thinking, it was now. Yet, that scar beneath her sleeve would not cease its pulsating beat. She sank into the leather seat and shut the door. At once, the roar disappeared, and became drumming, a constrained whisper pulling its way through the car's bodywork. "I suppose..." He said slowly; his accent, North-Western in origin, dragged each word out slightly at the end, "You're wondering why you're here."
"Not really." She responded and drummed her fingers across the tops of her thighs uneasily. Judy couldn't bear to look at him right now. Instead, her eyes focused on a small, barely visible incision in the leather covering the glove compartment. How long has that been there?
"Oh?" His retort was simple, and they sank into a silence. Naturally, the question that followed didn't even need to be implied. Judy supposed he wanted to hear her say it. It certainly brought him satisfaction.
"You're going to kill me, aren't you?" Nothing. Not even a twitch in his face, or a shake of the head; neither confirm nor deny. Ritter was playing with her. The light above them extinguished itself slowly, fading from a brilliant, colourless glow, to a dimming yellow, and finally, to nothing at all.
"I've done enough killing for one life. I didn't even bring a weapon." She turned to him, but kept her features as neutral as she could, despite of how much that statement took her aback, "I'm here to set things to right."
"That was the second possibility." For a moment, Judy had ceased to mull her words, and instead said the first thing that came to mind. It had indeed been the second possibility for quite some time now. A rather unlikely one, but not one that she had ruled out entirely. Holding her breath for another moment, frozen at the edge of her throat, the bunny exhaled deeply, "Why go through the motions on the phone with me, then?"
"Programming. It's how we were taught to communicate with those outside our 'circle'. I managed to break free of it, though. I won't hurt you." He said and she felt a paw on her shoulder, giving it a gentle caress, friendly and caring. It stung her almost. Her shoulder moved away from him and followed the rest of her in curling up by the door. There was no comfort in his presence, and even less in his touch. A traitor to the badge. It shone in the half-light that streamed in from outside.
"Good. I'm...relieved." She looked at him again, one paw still on her thigh and the other in the centre of her chest, trying to calm the wicked beating beneath; when did her heart start pounding? "So...you're on Bogo's payroll." He looked away, and his paw vanished, retreating back to the steering wheel, and into the darkness "Or at least you used to be."
"Used to be is correct." His eyes were fixed on something outside the car, "I'll spare you the details of how long ago I agreed to it. It doesn't matter." He turned to her; his eyes were empty, "How much do you know?"
"I know that the package Baerton dropped into the trash can was a bomb, I know that he didn't do it of his own volition, and I know that Bogo doesn't want any of this brought out into the public or investigated. Same goes for the Nightclub incident." Judy's eyes drifted to the side as she listed everything off, and counted on her fingers, closing her eyes for a second to see if she had forgotten anything, "And I know that you make sure the couriers don't speak out against you by packing them away in institutions."
"Sometimes its institutions." He began, and turned his whole body to her, slowly taking a cigarette out of the box and putting it between his lips. He paused for another second and held the box towards her, and she helped herself. He lit both cigarettes, took a deep drag, and resumed, smoke billowing from his nose and lips with each word, "At others, its just regular prisons, or house arrest, or any other excuse we could've thought of." Judy may not have brought a pen and a pad of paper with her, but she hung onto each word, memorizing it, ensuring it stuck; the dictaphone in the inside pocket of her jacket churned away tirelessly. It was a secondary matter when she left the house, but it still felt like a good move. It had been running since she pulled into the garage, "But that's details. None of this will come up until it's too late. Until the buzzards are picking apart the shrapnel, trying to piece together what happened. How it could've happened. There's more pressing issues at paw." She swallowed a lump she didn't know existed; innocent people will die, "The bomb you saw dropped yesterday was just one of many. I removed it, and threw it into the river. It'll still explode, but won't cause any damage." He took another drag, "I would've done the same with the others, but the drops are kept a secret until the very last moment. Bogo ensured himself from within. He made sure that no-one would be able to stop the plan even if they wanted to."
"There's a plan?" She interjected suddenly; more bombs. How many? How many could he possibly have planted, and where? "Ritter, how time sensitive is this?"
"I doesn't matter. We're already too late." He looked out the window again, "We could still stop it if, and this is a big 'if', we had all the locations. But we don't. And we won't have them for some time." He paused, "You. You won't have them." An odd turn of phrase, but it merely entered her subconscious, her conscious mind too busy quantifying the consequences of what he was telling her; the deaths, the damage, the terror, "Our 'plan', if you want to call it that, started out small. Bogo and a few others grew tired of their work some fifteen years back. Began breaking small laws, and then moved onto bigger ones. They started working with organized crime, selling weapons seized as evidence and pawning off cars in impound lots. But it grew. Thelonious was at the forefront of it all. One after the other, all those he worked with at a higher level, all those that he helped insure from any possible internal investigations disappeared. They began dropping like flies, one after the other. Freak accident here, a disappearance there, and no-one to investigate it. Crossing Thelonious Bogo ten years ago meant crossing every single syndicate in town. The storm that would follow would serve as a warning to others." Judy kept nodding time and time again, eyes widening with each word, and breaths turning quicker; two years she worked for this man. Two years she helped him do this. Doubt every arrest you've ever made. Now she knew why those images came to her last night. Why she began questioning every piece of her own professional career, "I myself wasn't involved with it until it grew beyond that. Bogo wanted more than a bunch of paid-off cops under his heel. He wanted power. And power, Judy..." He rolled the window down and threw the cigarette out, and she did the same, turning away for just a moment. When she looked back, his eyes were locked on her, cold and empty, devoid of any emotion, retelling the events of the past in an almost robotic inflection, "Power corrupts."
"What happened next?" Her question came out in a single breath. The entire space of her back lay drenched in cold sweat. Even if he had pulled a gun on her right now, she would not move. She was incapable of it. Each and every single muscle in her body was locked in place. Ice beat through her veins.
"One morning, he called us into his office. Stood by his table like usually did. It was a select number of us. I became one of his favourites amongst the 'footsoldiers'. Didn't know anyone else in the room. They all worked investigative positions, had more direct contact with politicians, city councilmen, and fixtures in the criminal underground. They were all far more important. But, in hindsight, I was just as instrumental to all this as they were. I digress." He cleared his throat slightly, and then coughed, "This was Thelonious' way of telling us that we're all getting promoted. He was honouring us. And then he unveiled the plan." The wolf closed his eyes, "He called it 'Operation Lazarus'. We were the very first to know about it." His chin jerked to one side quickly, and then to the other; he appeared to be struggling to keep his voice level, "It was then that we found out about his world view, about the way he saw everyone in the city. 'Might makes right' is the best way to some it up. To Thelonious, it was never about predators versus prey, about species versus species. It was the rule of the strong over the weak. He called it 'naturalism'." Ritter's paws shook as he spoke and he barely managed to find a firm grasp on his own chin; his tone, however, remained just as cold as before, "And then it occurred to me; everyone that I was with in that room fit into the category of strong. Bulls, elephants, water buffalo, rhinoceroses, wolves, and so on. Thelonious' ideal world is one where everyone works for us. He wanted us to show everyone, in that hypothetical future of his, how we could kill them with a single motion of our paws. How they were nothing, and we were everything. This would keep them docile, he claimed, and ensure that we lived the rest of our lives as kings." A lull in the conversation occurred. Ritter took deep, laboured breaths. His shoulders rose and fell beneath his uniform, and he leaned forward, over the steering wheel; in the darkness, his outline drawn in strong lines by the back-light, he looked almost feral, "Not only would the weak not even think about rebelling, they would be commanded not to. Nature's way, he called it. In his eyes, we were undoing three thousand years of injustice and treason. Thelonious armoured his entire philosophy. Everyone became our enemy."
"Hence the name..." Judy whispered, "He was going to..."
"Revive the old order of things, yes. Kings and serfs. Masters and slaves." His lips lay twisted into an expressionless line, but she could sense his fear; the burden of a creature that knows what he's created, and what he is responsible for, "It went downhill from there. No matter what we did, we were right, and everyone else was wrong. I actually believed it, Judy. For a few precious moments every day, looking at myself in the mirror..." A glimpse of something appeared in the corner of his eyes. Tears, "And I believed everything he said. We were the chosen people of the Gods. Faster, stronger, smarter, better. A master race. But..." He swallowed a bitter gasp, "I fell in love. With a sheep. A sheep, Judith. I loved her more than anything in this world. She was perfect. Intelligent, well-spoken, and loving. Caring beyond anything. We would stay up for hours and just...talk. I began to forget everything he taught me. Supremacy didn't matter any-more. How could it? How could an inferior species produce something so radiant and pure? It all slipped away from under me. When she wasn't there, I felt...conflicted. I was betraying everything. I was undoing what we tried so hard to build by merely following what I found to be true. But then she'd reappear, and I'd stop caring. Inevitably, he called me into his office. I tried my best to keep it secret, but the news had reached him somehow. The moment they did, it was too late." Otis Ritter wept through closed eyes, "He loaded the gun, put it my paws, and pushed it towards me. The Gods will it, he said. He called my feelings unnatural. I believed him. I believed him when he told me that she was a manifestation of the very corruption we were fighting."
"Otis, no..." Judy reached for him but he tore himself away, shivering madly, breaths turned to hisses.
"And then...I did it! I fucking did it! I told her I loved her, kissed her good-bye one last time, and made her look away..." The pitch of his voice heightened the quicker he spoke, and his paws gripped at one another tightly, pressure meeting pressure, rending it all apart, "Her wool looked so marvellous in the morning sun." He swallowed quietly, "I...I had done my duty. I destroyed something beautiful." Once again, it all became a flat line, "Thelonious took me in after that. Said I had shown myself to be the most capable out of all of them. I repressed it. I repressed the melody of her voice, and the warmth her presence had once given me. During her funeral, I did not cry. I even smiled once. She was dead. She wouldn't take me from my brothers." Ritter was hissing each word out, "For ten fucking years, I followed him, I listened to him, and the more time passed, the more vulgar and daring he became. It turned to a game. What was the biggest thing we could do and still not get caught? We infiltrated everything. We rigged elections, changed the order of play in Zootopia. Lionheart is one of our own. So is Buller, Sugarfang, Adams...the list goes on, Judy."
"By the Gods..." All names of high-ranking members of the city council, instrumental in making decisions that profoundly affected the day-to-day life within Zootopia's boundaries. Things began to emerge. Changes forced by ideology. Slowly sculpting life into a more malleable form for themselves. To assume power one must first set conditions for it. Little by little, step by step, everything went in their favour. There was nothing that she could say, nothing coherent, to even give form to what Ritter had described, "He's a monster."
"No. We're all monsters." The bitter shakes of his head as he tried to negate the facts tugged at the bunny beside him, but she did not dare touch him any-more, barely even capable of looking at him, "We have all brought this into existence. The fact that I am doing this now doesn't make me any better than them. It doesn't atone for my crimes against animal kind, and everything I had done in service of a creature that blinded us with his sick ideology. This is why I said that you didn't know anything. What you have is barely the very edge of the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to this. Things not even I know. He hid his footprints from everyone but himself. There is only one animal in this city that knows the whole truth, and his name is Thelonious Bogo." Ritter drew breath rapidly and shivered in place. Silence drifted between them again. Softness. The breeze blowing through the undercarriage of the car. Distant, rolling thunder. It all existed in some faraway place.
"You're wrong..." Judy uttered, voice skirting the boundary between a whisper and a firm proclamation, but the strength she needed to sound persuasive left her; nothing she could do now, "You are better than the rest of them. You spoke out against this. You can still tell good from evil, Ritter."
"That's so typical of you, Judy." He laughed to himself, a titter born of desolation and abandonment, no closer than the rattle of thunder, "You always see the best in everyone. In a way, you're the reason why." He looked away again; two brown, tear-stained eyes, formerly delicately observing the nuances of life, but perpetually pushed down by the weight of a terrible secret, now lost all focus, "The reason why I spoke out. Two months ago, you entered my life. Pure of heart and motive. Fundamentally just. And yet...inferior. Or at least he'd like us to believe that you are." He gave a muddled sigh, "I saw in you something I promised I'd never see again. Goodness in the lesser ones. I don't think you know just how much of her there is in you..." Once again, his eyes locked with her, "Remember our first arrest?" She did; they were tasked with detaining an otter that had failed to pay his taxes, and he fled. Ritter intercepted with the car and Judy slapped the cuffs on him. Four miles on foot. It was a profoundly radiant moment in her career, as she had both arrested someone that was on the bulletin, and broken the precinct's record for the longest on-foot pursuit at the same time, "I can still recall the way you laughed as Clawhauser handed you that slip of paper. No-one but you considered it important. It was an arbitrary number that we kept in the back of our heads, and never thought about, but you broke it just to prove that you could. That you would run that far for the sake of justice. It was exactly the sort of thing she would've done." Before Judy had a chance to respond, Ritter turned away from her and reached for something underneath the steering wheel. He passed it to her. It was a small, black USB stick, with a tape across it, to affix it to the base of the steering column, "I had been hiding this in here for some time now. It's a key." She took it and looked it over; an insignificant little fragment of plastic and metal, "Bogo's terminal needs a biometric scan of his fingerprint to access the data, but if you plug this in before you turn it on, it'll register just the same. Inside you'll find everything." He leaned back and rested his head against the seat, staring out, "Recently he's started to think of himself as some sort of God-given revolutionary. I imagine he's writing everything down. Revolutionaries tend to do so. The need for legitimacy and all that." Once again, something beyond the interior of the car took his attention, and he stared, "Do right by this, and you'll do right by her. You'll have done what I never could." Without another breath, he swung the door of the car wide open and stepped outside. Ritter walked with purpose towards her own car. Judy opened the door on her own side and began to follow him.
"Ritter, what are you doing?" She caught up with him easily and walked beside him, but he remained silent, disciplined eyes facing forward, "Where are you going? You left the car behind."
"I suppose you think I was naive, don't you?" He walked quicker, past the yellow sub-compact, and towards the far side of the building, "That I had fallen for all of this and found myself unable to walk away?"
"I do, and I don't blame you for any of it. You did some horrible things, but you stepped forward. You have a conscience. You know of justice. You're a whistle-blower now, Otis. The law has mechanisms in place to protect you." She finished her sentence just as they arrived on the other side of the lot, "You'll still serve time but it'll be reduced greatly, and you'll most likely be recognised as a hero for what you've done." He stood at the concrete divider and looked out, the rain coursing down his face, striking him, and she watched as he closed his eyes, "Ritter?"
"The door was never closed. I could've walked away any time I wanted to. But I chose not to, just like the rest of them." He pulled his uniform out of his trousers and placed his paw atop his belt, "I wanted to see how far we could go. What else we could do. We assumed that glory was our right, given to us by the Gods. That our providence was unbreakable. Now these fields lie just as barren as they were when we took it upon ourselves to bring them back to their former greatness." The roar of the wind intensified, and it flung the hem of his shirt aside, revealing a black grip, "Our lives have become a flat circle. We sowed death and devastation, and that is all we shall reap."
"You said you weren't armed." She jumped back a little as he reached for it, but instead of turning around, he merely kept it by his side, arm rigid; the revolved was identical to hers, just in a better state, and with a nickel finish; it refracted the light, and he turned it a bit, catching drops of rain atop it.
"I lied." This time, he did turn towards her; she pressed her left foot forward and leaned towards him, right paw already having undone her holster. The chequering of the grip was coarse against her palm, giving warmth with each tug, but radiated a deathly cold along with it. He cocked the revolver and raised it, holding it close to his chest; fear froze the gears of her mind. In the turmoil, an idea had appeared, but became lost in her urge to defend herself; this bullet is not for you, "They say you die twice: the first time is when you stop breathing. The second is when someone says your name for the last time." He took a step back and stood on the edge of the concrete wall, hanging roughly seventy feet above the pavement below, and struggling to keep himself steady against the gale; but he kept his balance, "Her name was Claire Gibbs."
"Ritter, no!" In a flash, he raised the weapon to his chin and looped his finger through the trigger-guard. Far too fast for Judy to react. Far too close to the edge for her to knock it out of his paw with a leap. He would fall regardless.
"I'm coming home." The bang was tremendous. It shattered everything. Before her eyes, she saw the flash, and then, nothing. Ritter was gone. The wind had taken him. Seconds later, she heard a thud. All she could see before herself was her paw, grasping at the air, and the rays of a young sun as they drifted inwards. The morning had arrived. And Otis Ritter was dead.
Half an hour later, she woke Nick with her hysterical weeping. He found her suspended above the bathroom sink, desperately throwing pawful after pawful of water in her face in a futile attempt to wipe a single, invisible drop of blood away.
