Disclaimer: Zootopia stories, characters, settings, and properties belong to the Walt Disney Co. This story is written under Fair Use Copyright laws.
The Fire Triangle—A Zootopia Fanfiction
Part One:
Fuel
Chapter 3 – Day of Carrots and Blueberries
(Continued…Pt. 13)
By the time Nick reached the Midway he was high up in his dudgeon; every rabbit he encountered moved quickly out of the way and one mother bunny even put her paws over her little girl's eyes.
The fox didn't care; he couldn't remember the last time he'd been this angry.
Nick Wilde was no saint and had never claimed to be one; he'd been a hustler for most of his life and there were things in his past that made him wince when he thought of them now.
But there were limits; even on his worst day, back when he'd been working the street, there'd been places he wouldn't go. (If he hadn't spotted a canister of Fox Repellant clipped to Judy Hopp's belt for instance, he would have insisted on paying for that Jumbo Pop himself.) There were boundaries, there were lines you didn't cross—and that blankety-blank little silver-fox jerk hadn't just crossed them; he'd zig-zagged all over them with a marking pen.
"When I get my paws on that punk…!"
All foxes, even the ones who happily embraced the shifty-and-dishonest stereotype, had rules to live by. Whatever else Nick might have done back in the day, he could still hold his head up knowing he'd never broken them.
Rule number one, you never, NEVER took advantage of another mammal's misfortune; the guy you hustled was the one leaving the card game with a wad big enough to buy a new car, not the poor sap down to just enough cash to make the rent. You never turned someone else's bad luck into a disaster.
That led straight to rule number two; a good hustle always appealed to someone's greed, not their grief. "Your Mark should be someone with dollar-signs in their eyes, never tears." Nick couldn't remember where he'd heard that, but it was true. Scamming someone who wanted a quick payoff for practically nothing; you could pull that off and actually feel good about it. But cheating a poor soul who was hurting and not thinking straight? That was something YOU didn't even think about.
Conor Lewis had done a lot more than just think about it. Oooo, when he found that kid…!
Nick stopped for a second, peering ahead while shading his eye with a paw. Yep, there was the sign, right where Bonnie had said he'd find it; 'Camping Area,' with an arrow pointing right, towards a space between two stalls. Nick followed it, and found himself on a footpath running parallel to a gravel road. In the middle distance he could see a dim glow and the outlines of various humpbacked shapes; motorhomes and travel trailers, he assumed. Somewhere in that mix was Finnick's van, and somewhere inside that van was that sneaking, low-down…!
It was no use, Nick couldn't help himself; if there was one thing guaranteed to get his dander up, it was when another fox gave their species an even worse name than they already had. That was bad enough, but to do it by taking advantage of Judy Hopps's sister…
He stopped again and cracked his knuckles.
"I hope you think it was worth it, kid."
And set off at again at a brisk march
He found the campground entrance around the next bend in the road, perhaps a hundred yards further on, a kidney-shaped expanse ringed by low wooden fence. It was almost full, but most of the trailers were dark; they wouldn't come alight until later on this evening, when the Carrot Days Festival closed for the night,
Nick was halfway across the road when he heard the bull-blast of a truck horn. He turned just in time to be pinned in the glare of blinding halogens the size of rocket silos.
Thinking fast, he averted his eyes. (Foxes aren't quite a susceptible to headlights as deer but it does have an effect on them.)
The driver hit the horn again; he wasn't slowing down for the likes of Nick, The fox knew instantly that he couldn't make the other side and turned back the way he'd come, leaping out of the way he landed in a pyramid stance, just as the vehicle went rumbling by.
At that moment, he saw the driver lean out of the window. "Watch where you're going, fox!"
And then the vehicle was past him, adding injury to insult by showering Nick with gravel from its massive rear tires.
He stood up again, brushing himself off and growling. Dangit, he hadn't gotten the license plate; it had happened all too quickly. But then he saw the big-rig slow and turn off the road up ahead. Hmmm, hadn't Bonnie mentioned something about a…? Oh yes.
"You want the big campground, the first one; not the smaller one, that's the VIP camping area."
Nick was tempted to go and give that driver a piece of his mind—and a look at his badge. Nearly running down a peace officer, even an off-duty cop outside of his jurisdiction was an offense that the courts never took lightly.
It was just a lucky thing for the jerk that Nick had more important business to attend to right now. (And that driver had been a wolverine, a species no fox with half a brain wanted riled at him.)
The rig, though. It hadn't been a tractor-trailer, it had been a motor-home; the biggest one Nick Wilde had ever seen.
"That thing makes Gazelle's tour bus look like a micro bus." The red fox thought to himself. (He had seen it the previous year while working the Skunk Pride Parade; the pop-star had been Grand Marshal.)
Normally that might not have meant very much; the RV could have belonged to say, a hippo or an elephant. But Nick had gotten a look at the driver, and more importantly, caught a glimpse of the motorhome's back door; this baby was built for small-to-medium species, on a par with the wolverine behind the wheel. For an animal that size, it was practically a rolling a mansion.
Who the heck did it belong to? The fox had no idea, except…there'd been some artwork on the side, a vehicle wrap, too dark for him to see clearly, and yet still it had felt familiar.
"Stay focused on the job, Nick." He reminded himself with a mental slap, and then turned and darted across the road and into the campground.
As soon as he passed through the entrance, he spotted a sign tacked to a vertical beam. A map of the compound he hoped. Yep, now where was that space, annnnd…what was the number again? Oh right, space A-113, left side, about the middle of the camping area.
Moving through the campground, Nick instinctively avoided the road and stuck to the grass fringe. (Grass doesn't make crunching noises under your feet.)
It felt eerie to the fox, almost like walking through a ghost town. The quietude wouldn't last long though, he reminded himself, ever savvy to the foibles of mammalian nature.
"It may be quiet now, but by 10 tonight this place is going to be Party Central. Whoof, I'm just glad I'm with ZPD and not the Burrows County Sheriff's Department. They're going to end up getting more noise complaints and have to break up maybe a hundred…wait, there it is."
Finnick's van was nestled in a space flanked by a gooseneck trailer and a motorhome; each one of the large-mammal variety, it gave the desert fox's ride the appearance of a pawpsicle sandwiched in between two jumbo-pops.
Nick barely noticed; of much more interest to him was the fact that the lights in the van were on and the side door was open…and there he was, the little miscreant, sitting and typing on a laptop computer without a care in the world. Nick was unable to see Conor's face from this distance, but he didn't need to. This time HE was the one on the downwind side—and he'd have known that kid's scent anywhere by now.
"Got you, you little snot!" he muttered under his breath
He ducked quickly behind a snowberry bush, sprouting in the shadows of power pole —and nearly jumped when a paw fell on his shoulder.
"What you DOIN' Nick?"
Nick whirled around in a 180. Finnick…he should have known.
"Get back behind here before he sees you." The red fox hissed.
Finnick eyed him curiously for a second but then did as his former partner instructed.
"What the heck is goin' on here?" he demanded, looking up at Nick with his paws on his hips.
Nick's neck fur bristled and his voice became a guttural snarl.
"Your little friend in the van there went over the line, that's what happened."
Finnick's ears began moving like semaphores, "What do you mean he 'went over the line?'"
"This is what I mean," the red fox said and then told him the story of what had happened at the talent show. When he finished, the little fox was shaking his head like a metronome.
"No way Nick, not him, not Conor, he ain't that kind of kid. He'd never do a thing like that."
"Oh yeah?" Nick snarled, jabbing finger in the direction of the stage, "Tell that to the heartbroken little bunny I left behind just a few minutes ago; two hundred bucks for a guitar that has to be worth at least five times that much!" (He had no idea how much Erin's bass was actually worth, but that figure sounded about right.)
Finnick folded his arms.
"Nicky, there's gotta be more to the story than that. I've seen that boy in action a hundred times; he always does the right thing."
The red fox refused to be swayed.
"Not this time."
The little fennec shook his head again, making a noise that might either have been a growl of frustration or a sigh of resignation; (most likely all of the above.)
"All right, I give up; nobody can talk to you when you get like this." He tilted his head to the side, giving his former partner a piercing, one-eyed glare. "Only what you gonna DO about it, Nick? He's a kid; cop or no cop you can't lay a finger on him."
Nick polished his knuckles with his other paw, as if he was planning to do just that.
"That kid wants to hustle? I'll show him a hustle!"
The desert fox said nothing to this, only let out a sharp bark of laughter.
Nick's ears shot backwards as if caught in a sudden gale.
"WHAT?" he demanded. What, did Finnick think this was funny? He looked almost the same as when Judy had pulled off that tax-evasion hustle.
Finnick pointed in the direction of his van.
"You just gonna waltz down there an' take that guitar back, easy-peasy, without payin' even a nickel for it. Is that what you think, Slick?" He held up his paw, and showed two fingers, displaying them one at a time: "Two words, 'Not'…'Happening'."
"Get out of here Finnick," the red fox scoffed, "You think I can't handle a thirteen year old kid?"
"Fourteen," the fennec corrected him.
Nick waved his paw in the air.
"Fourteen, thirteen…whatever; I eat punks like that for breakfast."
Finnick narrowed his eyes and smirked.
"That's why you gonna crash and burn if you try to take him on. Conor Lewis ain't nobody's punk." He flipped his paw upwards in a throwaway gesture. "Oh, you could take him like candy from a cub on a good day, Nick. When you on a roll, I ain't never seen a hustler, good as you."
He jumped up, grabbing Nick by the shirt and getting right in his face. His mood was almost jolly.
"Only you ain't havin' a good day, Slick and you ain't on a roll. You always had two weak spots boy, when you get mad and when you get cocky; remember how Judy Hopps hustled you on those taxes?…and you mad and cocky both right now." He let go of the red-fox's shirt, and dropped back down to the ground, brushing at his arms.
Then he looked up with that penetrating gaze once more.
"You think Conor Lewis is just another smart-mouthed street kid, gonna fold up like a house of cards if you lean on him? Well he's not. He's tough an' smart, that one…really smart for a kid his age; someone taught him good along the way…and you ain't hustling him in the mood you in. Like I said, it ain't happening."
"That's it, I've heard enough of this." the red fox said, turning to go.
"Fine," Finnick was smirking again, the look on his face felt like claws on a blackboard to Nick, "Then how 'bout you put your money where your mouth is, big fox." He held up a bill between two fingers. "I got a twenty right here says that boy makes a chump out of you."
"You're on." Nick Wilde sneered. No kid was going to play him for a sucker.
He turned and stalked away, flattening himself against the side of the gooseneck trailer and pausing to consider his options. The first order of business was to lift his nose and take an air sample. Good, he was still downwind from the little jerk and he was still there, inside the van.
All right, how should he do this, just stroll in and openly confront the kid? No, that wasn't an option, not if Conor was as tough as Finnick said he was (and as Nick suspected he was, never mind what he'd just said to his former partner.)
Nope, this situation called for a stealthy approach, he needed to catch Conor by surprise and then start laying the hustle on him before he had time to recover. Yes, that was the way, only how to…? Hmmm, wait a second, there was the answer, literally right at his back.
Like all foxes, Nick Wilde had the ability to secrete himself in a space that by rights should have been much too narrow to accommodate an animal of his size. One time, to the utter amazement of his partner Judy Hopps, he'd pursued a fleeing muskrat right through a storm-drain entrance, a space that had looked no bigger than a shoebox to the bunny.
He dropped down and slipped silently beneath the gooseneck trailer. He could manage that okay, but he knew from experience that the space beneath Finnick's van was too constricted even for him; (blankety-blank rear axle and drive shaft!) No, he'd have to make this a perimeter approach once he was clear of the trailer.
At the rear end of the gooseneck, Nick turned sideways, lay on his back, and rolled, coming to rest face down, less that a centimeter from the edge of the van's front bumper; a near-perfect move.
"Maybe that Police Academy training was good for something after all." He mused, listening and sniffing the air.
Conor's scent was still there, and now he could hear the clatter of laptop keys.
He began to slither around the edge of the van, making no noise. A glow appeared in the corner of his eye. The side door was still open. All right…closer…closer…just a little bit closerrrrrr, annnnnnnd…NOW!
Nick sprang upwards to his full height, grinning for ear to ear. "Hello, bayyyyyyy-BEH!"
Conor Lewis was not surprised by this.
Conor Lewis wasn't there.
And neither was the bass guitar; both of them were gone, along with the laptop. Dangit, how the heck had the kid known…?
A young voice spoke to him from behind.
"Mama don't 'llow no prowlers round here!"
Nick spun around and found himself less than two feet away from Conor Lewis. He knew instantly what had happened; somehow the kid had sensed his presence and made an end run, bolting out through the driver's side window, and then sneaking back up on him from under the van. (Nick could have kicked himself for forgetting; that space might have been too narrow for an adult fox, but not for a younger one.)
"Should have known he wouldn't run," the red fox thought. What he said was, "All right, give it up, punk!"
Nick could feel his fur beginning to fluff out and his voice beginning to gekker, becoming a high pitched, rippling duck's quack.
He ignored it all; so did Conor, whose fur was also fluffing and whose voice was beginning to sound as if he'd just taken a hit of helium.
"You mean that bass guitar, right?" he said,
"No, I mean the Infinity Stones." Nick's mouth was open wide now and ALL his fur was standing, out, the classic stance of an angry fox confronting another member of his species. "Yeah, that's what I mean, give it up!"
Conor's jaw snapped open and then HIS fur was looking as if he'd just stuck his finger in a light-socket.
"Two words and a number, Wilde-thing: 4! Get! and It!" (It would have been good comeback if it hadn't been delivered in a squeaky falsetto.)
Too angry to think, Nick took a step forward. The heck with hustling and the heck with rules; he wanted to wring this juvenile delinquent's neck until his head popped off.
Conor saw him and as if from thin air something appeared in the young fox's paw, springing out to a length of three feet; a telescoping baton.
Nick tensed and unsheathed his claws; there was nothing that said he couldn't take on a kid if the kid went after him first.
But then the younger fox said, "I'll only give that bass guitar to Erin Hopps, no one else. She can have it back for 200 bucks."
Nick blinked and felt his fur beginning to flatten again.
"Two…hundred? But that's all you paid for it." His voice had dropped noticeably in pitch.
"And that's all I want for it," Conor answered him, lowering both the baton and his fur. His speech had also begun returning to normal.
"Awwww you guys!" A deep voice groaned out of the dark, "just when things was gettin' GOOD!"
Nick and Conor both turned with their ears laid back.
"Finnick!"
"All right, all riiight." The desert fox growled and retreated back into the night.
Nick turned to Conor again, no longer angry but thoroughly perplexed.
"I keep forgetting about those ears of his… Okay, help me out here. Why would you buy Erin's guitar if you were just going to sell it back to her at the same price?
The younger fox threw up his arms.
"What can I say? It was all I could think of to keep her from trashing it."
Nick's ears went up and pointed at each other.
"Wait, what? She was going to break that guitar?"
Conor's ears pricked up as well.
"Dang straight she was, you didn't know? Yeah, she was gonna smash it against a rock; I had to do something."
Nick took a step backwards; it felt like he was stepping back from the edge of a cliff. Sweet cheez n' crackers, as Judy would say, what he'd almost done! But now the younger fox's actions made sense, now everything made sense.
And he had badly misjudged this boy; Finnick had been right about him.
"Nobody told us she did that," he said and laid a paw on the young silver fox's shoulder. "I'm sorry Conor, really."
The kid looked at the paw for a second as if it were some strange artifact.
"Sorry, for what? You didn't do anything."
Nick couldn't help laughing. No he hadn't, when you thought about it.
"There is one thing though big guy" the young fox said compressing the baton back down to its normal size. "I won't sell that bass back to Erin for 200 or a million bucks—not until I'm sure she won't try to destroy it again."
"She won't." Nick assured him, "Judy and I will make sure of that…don't worry, she won't." He did not add that when Bonnie found out what had really happened, the chances of Erin breaking her guitar would be roughly the same as that of her breaking the sound barrier on rusty roller-skates.
"That's all I wanted to hear," Conor answered looking greatly relieved. "If you can go and get her, she can have her guitar back."
"Will do," the red fox answered, fully understanding the wisdom of Conor wanting Erin to come to him instead of vice versa. He knew the full story but the others didn't—and they needed to hear it before they caught sight of the young silver fox; otherwise he might end up as a throw rug before he could get a word in edgewise.
Nick turned to go, but then something else occurred to him.
"Mmmm, before I take off kid, there's a problem we need to deal with—Finnick."
Conor's head tilted sideways and his ears went up again.
"Finnick?" he started to say, "What's the problem with…." But then his head righted itself and he nodded knowingly, "Oh yeeeaaahhhh, that's something he would do."
"Right," the red fox nodded, "Good friend, but he never could resist a prank."
"Tell me about it." Conor rolled his amber eyes,
Nick sat down for a second and scratched at an ear with his foot. Nice place the Burrows but there were a lot more bugs out here than in the city. Then he stood up again and looked at Conor.
"Finnick's a lot closer to your size than mine, kid. If I distract him, you think you can you grab it?"
The young fox smiled puckishly and fanned a palm. "No problemo, Jefe."
They found the little desert fox sitting on upturned bucket, grooving to the beat of his iPaw. As soon as he saw Nick and Conor coming, he plucked the ear buds and got up again with a bi-i-ig smile on his face. Nick Wilde's ears were like wilted lilies and his tail was dragging limply along the ground. As he trudged along, he could be heard grumbling oaths under his breath, a noise easily picked up by the fennec fox's ginormous ears. "Call me a planewreck…nrrrrghhhg…grrrrggh…smartmouth….grrrml… punk…"
The 'smartmouth punk' by contrast was almost skipping along beside him, and looking like he'd just won the car raffle. It didn't take a rocket scientist to know which one of them had come out on top in the exchange that must have followed the fennec fox's departure.
Finnick said nothing, only held out his paw and winked, grinning almost as broadly as Conor was right now. Nick saw him and jammed a paw in his pocket, extracting his wallet and pulling out a twenty.
"All right wiseguy, all right." the red fox growled, holding out the cash in his old partner's direction.
The desert fox reached out to take it, and in that instant, two things happened simultaneously; Conor Lewis brushed against him from behind and Nick snatched the money out his reach.
"Hey!"
Finnick slapped at his belt, and wheeled rapidly to see Conor holding his cell phone.
"What the…? Give that back, you little…"
Conor didn't answer him; he let the cell speak for itself, turning it around to show a display of Nick and himself on the screen. He pressed a button and the image began to move, accompanied by a pair of voices reduced to near squeaks by the combination of a tiny speaker and the fact that the two of them had been gekkering.
"You mean that bass guitar, right?"
"No, I mean the Infinity Stones."
Conor shut the phone off and shook his head in an exaggerated theatrical manner, mournful as a mortician on a sunny day with not a whiff of death in the air.
"Finnick…for shame! Hitting the 'record' button on your buds like that. Who'd have ever thunk you could do such a thing?" He looked off to the side for a second, biting his lip, "besides anyone who's ever known you, I mean."
The little fox's oversize ears shot backwards…whether from guilt, embarrassment, or anger Nick Wilde couldn't tell.
"Now, now Conor," he said, making placating gestures with his paws, "I've known Little Too…I-I mean Finnick longer than you and I'm sure he'd never do a thing like that. Noooo, someone must have stolen his phone, shot that video of us arguing, and then slipped it back in his pocket with him even knowing it." He turned and winked at the desert fox, "That's what happened, isn't it, pal?"
He got no answer to this; his former partner just stood there, looking like a pop bottle that's been shaken fifty times.
"And being the good friend he is." Nick went on, warming to his subject, "I know Finnick would have wanted that video deleted as soon as he found it. Conor, would you do the honors?"
"Why certainly," the young silver fox said, scrolling pressing and pressing again. He tossed the phone back to the fennec fox. "There you go DF, and don't say I never did anything nice for ya."
Finnick almost dropped the phone, bobbling it in his paws for a second then slamming it back in the holster so hard he almost cracked the screen.
"Har har, real funny, both of you." He jabbed a finger at Nick. "I'm gonna remember this, Nicky," and then at Conor, "And you. You wanna walk home boy, keep it up!"
He turned and stalked away, growling at nobody.
"You're not gonna ask for your twenty?" Conor queried when he was gone. (Nick had told him about the bet.)
"Nahhhh," the red fox folded his arms and shook his head, "I'm calling it a draw—and don't worry, Finnick won't stay mad for long."
The younger fox just fanned his pawlm again.
"Ahhh, I know that, he never does. Heck, he'll prolly end up saying he's sorry for shooting that vid in the first place."
"He was right about one thing though Conor," Nick told him, laying another paw on the silver fox's shoulder, "You ARE a good kid."
Conor looked away embarrassed for a second.
"I-I try to be, big guy. I got some stuff to make up for…from back in Zoo York City. You follow what I'm bringing out?"
Nick felt his ears go up again. 'Follow what I'm bringing out?' There'd been another fox he'd known once who always used that expression. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Conor where he'd gotten it, but then he decided it wasn't important.
It was a decision Nick Wilde would later come to regret.
"Okay," he said, "Hang on while I go get Erin."
"Right, you know where to find me." Conor answered, and with that they parted company.
To find out what gekkering sounds like, go to Youtube and enter 'foxes gekkering' in the search window
This particular chapter contains one of the most famous of all Disney Easter Eggs. (Actually a Disney-Pixar Easter Egg, there's your clue.)