JUDITH STRIKES!
YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE
by Charles RB
The Lawndale Lions was about to play Fielding with a 2000-strong audience, and no one official had spotted her placing agents & conning patsies through the stadium. Judith was having a good day.
She began to slip out, heading for the exit (she didn't want to be seen around when the fuzz cracked down), but she made sure she'd see the chaos that would erupt in the next twenty seconds. Ah, Fielding. Tom's school. They had this coming.
"Five... four... three... two... one..."
The Fielding team came onto the pitch, and dozens of voices started to sing: "YOU'RE SHIT – AND YOU KNOW YOU ARE! YOU'RE SHIT – AND YOU KNOW YOU ARE!"
Cackling madly, Judith ran out of the stadium, followed closely by her partner in crime.
"Your scheme involves half of those singing not realising Li didn't send those song sheets round," said Jane, raising an eyebrow. "That involves intellect. They'll never stop."
"Hey, I just think American football should be more like Europe's football, is that so bad?" Her eyes glinted ferally. "Maybe we'll get a riot."
"That's you, Judith, always dreaming big."
"Who dares wins."
"Those who can, teach."
"Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot."
"And we'd know."
The two of them kissed, hard and fast and sloppily, as always.
"We better get home before Ms Li starts looking for us," said Judith, "as part of her unfair assumptions that we're responsible for 50% of all misfortunes at school. It's 60%."
"Inviting me round, eh?"
"Nah. Sister's at home and the parents are coming in. Yours?"
"Penny just came home for a bit." Jane shuddered. "I wouldn't go home myself if all my stuff wasn't there."
"The world conspires against the Red Deaths once again. We'll have to kneecap it to show who's boss."
The two headed off, black and red and combat booted and with matching belly-button piercings: to a casual eye, they might have looked like a failed attempt at cloning. Few believed that they'd dressed in the same colours before becoming a couple.
Judith had a leisurely walk home, humming You'll Never Walk Alone – there were some catchy footie songs she'd found on that Yahoo search - mentally getting her alibi straight and hoping her willing accomplices could avoid Li's wrath. (Scarlett was pretty good at that sort of thing but Andrea, not so much; hopefully, Scarlett would take charge there) She also hoped Tom would be pissed about the stunt, but, she had to admit, he'd probably found it hilarious. Bastard.
She whacked her house door open and stomped in, calling out: "Sis! Back! We dissed the hell out of your boyfriend's school!"
Nothing. That was odd, there'd be a barbed reply by now surely. "C'mon, I know you're here, it's not like you have a social life to go to!"
Still nothing. Judith began to climb the stairs, warning bells going off: had something happened?
"Daria, snark back already, you're weirding me out."
Daria's room lay open. Every book she'd owned was shredded and scattered about like confetti. Her glasses lay broken on the floor.
And she was tied to a chair, long dead, her belly slit open and her entrails splayed out.
Judith looked calmly at the corpse of her twin sister for an unknown length of time before the screaming started.
–
Her mind wouldn't let her drift through in a fog.
Her sister was dead and her father had had another heart attack at the news and the only lead the police had – the only thing anyone had seen – was that someone in a red cloak had been seen going into the house an hour before. (No, officer, she had no idea who that might be) This was the single worst day of her entire damn life and she wanted to damn well have a mental shutdown.
Instead, her mind picked up that the investigating officer's manner had changed the second time round, when he was asking about the cloaked figure. She'd noticed that another person had come into the room, someone in a suit who clearly wasn't local police (FBI?), and that someone had mentioned a Delphi when she was leaving the station. Her mind prodded at her to pay attention.
Jane was waiting for her. Judith had convinced her mother that Jane would pick her up, that she should go be with Dad – she wanted her mother here, she wanted that more than almost anything, but some things took precedent.
"How're you holding up, amiga?" she asked softly.
"I want to stop thinking, Jane. I can't stop thinking and I..."
"Come on. Let's have a nice little walk, eh?"
Judith waited until they were down the street before speaking up.
"This wasn't random. This was a hit."
Jane didn't speak, waiting for Judith to explain.
"The brutality was too... directed to be random. Daria's books were destroyed before she was killed, and she was blinded before the end – now how likely is that unless the killer knew something about Daria? And then there's the killer. 'Red Cloak.' Whoever that bastard is, the description brought in the feds, or some other fancy organisation that had the police all twitchy. And the police were mentioning a 'Delphi'."
"Daria mentioned that once," Jane said, her voice quiet. "Delphi's were the Oracles lived in ancient Greece, right?"
"Right. It's clearly a code name for something, an operation or a task force. And a name like that, in law enforcement? That's the sort of thing you use for mob stuff and terrorism."
"So 'Red Cloak' is a very dodgy man."
"Yeah, and someone like that wouldn't go after Daria on their own initiative. I mean, come on, why would they?" Judith's eyes were hard, burning. "So somebody hired them. Somebody local."
"So we...?"
"Go see a man who'd know."
-
When they reached Tom, he looked almost as bad as Judith had – despite herself, despite the loathing she had for him and the sense he wasn't good enough for his sister, she felt a pang of sorrow. He had loved Daria after all.
He listened to Judith's theory and then abruptly left during the middle of it, coming back with a Zip disk.
"Daria left me this as 'insurance', but you clearly guessed that. Everything she'd found out or suspected."
"Let's see what we got."
-
The Morgendorffer twins looked alike and had the same intelligence, but their ethics had differed for as long as they could remember: they joked Daria had got both of their consciences. Judith was always running around getting into trouble, pushing the limits, doing what she shouldn't. Daria, for all her desire to avoid people, had principles and views, and would get into a fury at injustices or hypocrisy.
When they moved to Lawndale, Judith had encouraged Daria to join the school newspaper and indulge her investigative journalism fantasies. It lasted all of two weeks before Principal Li kicked her off but it was too late by then: Daria had grown interested in the seedy underbelly of the school and town.
Stories began to leak out to the local press from a "Lois S. Thompson", someone who was clearly part of the school. Half the school suspected it was Daria (and rightly) but there was no proof, so Li could do nothing except assigning Daria petty tasks (which she did). "Thompson's" stories had done some major damage to Lawndale, especially the expose on the grade fixing for the sports "stars". Ms Morris had to resign after that, which served her right for trying to blackmail Jane. (The track team's equipment had also been vandalised, because if Judith couldn't cost people their jobs she could still do that)
So Li clearly had it in for Daria. Enough so that Daria would want an off-site backup with a friendly face.
-
"I remember the 'Fizz Ed' story. I thought that stopped Li's deal with UltraCola." Jane tapped the computer screen. "But look, here it comes again, like Jason Voorhees sensing teens having fun."
"I don't know how Daria managed it, but she has to have had a source with UltraCola's middleman agency," said Tom. "There's too much for it to just be her. This is damaging stuff. Li's doing a lot of underhanded stuff to get the deal through this time, before anyone can stop it; the superintendent is helping out; serious money's involved... But is that really enough to kill someone?"
"Look at the figures Daria has her for the school finances," growled Judith. "Look at this shit she dragged up on UltraCola using paramilitaries in the third world to bust unions. And, oh yeah, it's Li and we know she's corrupt."
"Daria slips up or her source gets found out..."
"And the conspiracy decides to 'silence' her. I don't know how many people are involved in this but Li has to be, 'Red Cloak' knew too much about how to hurt Daria."
"So what do we do?" asked Jane.
"I don't know what I do," said Judith pointedly.
"Nuh-uh. I met Daria before I met you, she was one of my best friends."
"That goes double for me," said Tom. "You want to do something, we're both helping. For Daria."
"You both realise that we don't have enough for the police, and we don't have a hope in hell of finding out the sort of things she could have."
"I'm aware of that, Judith."
"Ditto."
Pause. "Okay. Alright. Let's look this over one more time..."
–
In her grief, it was natural Judith would want to be with her girlfriend. No one was going to find that suspicious.
If Tom abruptly got upset and left his house saying he needed to see Jane to talk about Daria, well, that wasn't surprising either.
Trent practicing loudly, so loudly Penny stormed out of the house, not surprising either. Him stopping soon after, hey, he had whims.
As a result, only Trent would have seen that Jane, Judith and Tom had sneaked out the back window, that Tom had brought some vodka bottles from the family wine cellar (bought many years ago and untraceable) and that Jane a red cloak (from an old Red Riding Hood fancy dress costume), and that a car belonging to neighbours known to be on holiday had just driven off.
And Trent saw that the three kids were in Jane's room the whole night. Honest.
-
Li's address was in the phone book. It was in the nice part of town, near to Crewe Neck. Nice and peaceful, and late enough that nobody would be out.
Two windows on the top floor could be her bedroom window. Hitting them with slingshots would involve getting too close for comfort, valuable seconds would be added to the run back to the getaway car, but risks had to be made.
Two Molotov cocktails lit. Two fired through top floor windows through slingshots – one (Jane, who then ran), and then the other (Judith, red cloaked). A few seconds between each shot; everyone who looked out if the window would just see a red cloaked figure running to a car from the scene, a red cloaked figure who'd clearly just struck both windows on their own.
The fire brigade would be out soon, but it'd be too late for Li, she'd have burnt to death before then. A brutally savage murder by a red cloaked figure, and of someone from the same school as Red Cloak's last victim.
"The fed on Op Delphi," Judith had explained, "will hopefully think it's a related hit. They'll start wondering why. When Leonard Lamm reaches a sticky end too – because as the go-between he's got to be in this to his eyeballs – then they're likely to go 'hey, those two dead scumbags worked together once on that UltraCola thing'. It won't be hard to find out Daria broke that story, and that means the common thread is UltraCola. And then they can find out who else was involved..."
The car was quietly returned and the three teens sneaked back into Jane's house, as if they'd never left. A few minutes later, Li's brutal murder was on the television news.
" Dunno how we'll do Lamm," said Tom.
"I'll find a way," said Judith. "I'm very smart. 'I got the looks, she got the brains – and so did I'. Or vice versa, depending on who was telling the joke."
Her voice had started to break. Jane and Tom pretended they didn't notice – they knew her.
"What about after Lamm?" asked Jane.
"After Lamm?" Judith stared into the abyss. "Then the last person we know is involved is 'Red Cloak' himself. And someone out there knows who that is, how to find them... and I will find them."
"You're not walking away from that sort of fight."
"You don't need to come with me."
"Not what she's saying," said Tom. "She's just saying you won't walk away. Just so all three of us know the stakes."
Pause. "Thanks. Truly."
"What can I say?" said Jane. "You're walking into the abyss, but you'll never walk alone."