Summary:

Nick has some explaining to do to a suspicious bunny! After he satisfies her incessant demands, she offers a paw in return, and Chief Bogo is pleased by what he sees.


Notes:

Oh... Look, another chapter. That must mean I'm procrastinating on Measure of a Mission's first chapter. Darn, ya caught me.


Judy jumped back a pace as she glared in revulsion at the rent reticulated reptile that the snarky renard held up for her review.

"There's a snake in your paw, Ranger Wilde!" She screeched!

"I just said that, didn't I?" Nick looked at the mass of meat in his paw.

"I hate snakes, Wilde, I hate em!" She yelled at him.

He looked back at her with a gimlet eye, "C'mon, show a little backbone, will ya? It's just a little snake."

"Are you batty, fox? That snake is longer than you are!" Males and their damn sense of size!

"So it is..." Nick lowered the end he was holding so that he could look into the bag, "Anacondas, ya know… they keep going and going..."

"Anaconda? Wait a minute..." Judy scowled at the bloody stump held in his paw, "Where is it's head?"

"Well, um… You see, they had to chop it off first and um..." Nick pursed his lips as he tucked the snake back into the bag.

She slitted her eyes as she focused intently on the back of his head, "All right, give it up! What's the con?" She demanded to know.

He looked back at her, his face radiating innocence, "Con? What con?"

"You know exactly what I mean, Mr Fox! You meet some hillbilly biker boars deep in the wood, they give you a bloody bag, and you give them an envelope full of cash! What's going on? What the hell are you going to do with that snake?" Is he smuggling drugs into Zootopia, hidden inside the carcass of reptiles supposedly dumped in the woods?

"Sausages." He nodded to her.

"What?" She looked at him in disbelief.

"I'm gonna make a lot of it into sausages." He gestured with his paws, pantomiming stuffing meat into a tube.

Her jaw dropped, "You're kidding me!"

"Nope. Gonna add in some ground basil, maybe some cracked pepper, and then fry em up with some chopped peppers and unions."

"Huh?" She hadn't expected him to actually eat it.

"For breakfast, ya know? Also cut off some steaks, maybe make some burger patties, and what not."

"You're gonna eat all of that?" She wrinkled her nose as she pointed at the bag.

"Eventually, sure. It's not that big of an anaconda; just a baby, really."

"Okay, if it's just meat, why are you buying it off of redneck swine in the middle of nowhere instead of a carnivore's butcher's shop? I'm not convinced this legal and all, since they didn't seem so happy to see me. What's the rub?" She demanded.

"Well, um… Not exactly..." He hemmed and hawed.

She shook her handcuffs out of her pocket, and dangled them from her finger, "Am I gonna have to slap the cuffs on ya, Slick?"

"Ah, rabbit, you say the nicest things to me..." He smirked as he picked up the bag and slung it over his shoulder.

Judy just glared at him, her cuffs dangling from her paws. She contemplated just shooting him right there just to stop that smirking face.

He sighed, perhaps deciding that baiting the bunny had gone on long enough and explained, "It's more of a loophole thing, really. If I, as a parks ranger, had killed an invasive snake like this here anaconda, I would have to turn the entire snake in to my department for testing, so the staff zoologists can examine the whole thing. But if a private citizen kills an invasive snake during hunting season, like those two boars did, all they have to do is turn in the head. They can keep the rest or they can legally sell it to any member of the public except restaurants or butcher shops, which would be a health code violation. That means they can sell the carcass to a ranger, or a bunny police detective, without restriction. Like they did with me." He jerked a thumb at his chest.

"Earnest and Earl just thought you were another ranger, probably a supervisor, and they didn't want to get their hunting license revoked. Once I told them you were just a cop, they calmed down." He shrugged with one shoulder as he started walking back toward the top of the ravine.

"What?!" Judy objected, "I thought..." She trailed off…

"You thought what, Carrots?" he prodded her gently.

"Um… I thought… Sorry, I'm sure…" She trailed off, coming to a halt. He turned and looked at her, waiting for her to collect her thoughts. She sighed, "I thought they were delivering a bloody mammal body to you in a bag, and you were paying them for the hit."

Nick blinked. His jaw dropped open. He blinked again, suddenly at a loss for words, before finally finding his tongue, "Really, Detective Hopps… Wow… Well, all I can say is that you have a really active imagination there, Detective." He shook his head, and started walking down the dirt road again.

Judy hurried to catch up, "I'm sorry. It's just… I saw the TUSKS logo on their back, and I thought they were members of some biker gang, and then he pulled out that bloody bag and…" She trailed off.

Nick snorted a laugh, "Gang? Well, maybe, I guess. If you count fraternal orders, I suppose. T.U.S.K.S means 'Take Up yon Swords, o' Knights of Sus.' They're a fraternal order of boars, running around doing volunteer work at hospitals, drive those little cars during parades, that sort of thing." He jerked his muzzle back toward the retreating pigs, "Those two have been hunting out here with their lodge going on ten years now. Earl's a hydrology engineer back home, and Earnest's an architect, I think. HVAC systems, or something like that. They're good swine." He paused to look down at her, "Besides, they just flew in from the Great Lakes region yesterday morning. I know that cause I was at the front office yesterday afternoon when they came to verify their hunting licenses for the reptile bounty program, and we negotiated for a little snake on the side."

They walked around a bend in the road, and a gaggle of mammal vehicles came into view, parked haphazardly among the trees. Nick pointed to a gray parks and recreations 4×4 truck, "Let me put this bag into my ice chest, and we can rejoin the rest of the mammals down below." Nick let down the tailgate, and slid the bag into a red cooler laying in the bed. Closing the tailgate, he nodded toward the other trail leading down, "Shall we?"

Judy nodded, looking around at the parked ZPD cruisers and CSU vans. There was something missing. "Wait a minute? Where are all the dragons you said would be up here?"

Nick looked around as well, "Probably scattered into the forests. They don't like the all new sounds and smells here. They're pretty solitary reptiles anyway, so once they finished sunning themselves, they would have gone off to hunt in the woods." She eyed the trees nervously. He caught her glance and reminded her, "Don't worry, Detective. You and I can easily outrun them." He started down the overgrown trail that Judy and Bogo had walked down earlier when they had first arrived at the scene.

Judy was silent for a few yards as they walked along. She peered over the edge of the ravine at the beehive of activity down below here, as CSU offices and park rangers dug at the ground with shovels and trowels. Embarrassed at the way she had behaved earlier, she drew herself up and announced, "Ranger Wilde, I owe you an apology."

He stopped and turned to her, "Oh? What for?"

She drew in a deep breath, "I jumped to conclusions about what I had just witnessed, and I want to say that I'm sorry for that." She held out her paw to him.

He looked down at the offered paw, and biting back a snarky comment about her being a rabbit and jumping, he took it and gave it a shake. "I understand. It's not a big deal. Besides, you didn't know what was going on." He said as he let go of her paw.

She cocked her head down at the crime scene, "Yeah, well, I should still know better. In my limited defense, I would say that being on the police force for fifteen years has made me suspicious of every mammal I encounter. It tends to make me snippy and solitary, I suppose."

"Oh, I know something about solitary..." Nick nodded to her. She looked back up at him. He explained, "Park Ranger? We tend to work alone, cut off from other mammals."

She nodded, "Yeah…" She coughed, "Um… Can I ask a favor?"

He shrugged, "Sure?"

She dropped her ears in entreaty, "Can you not mention the whole freak out thing to my boss? He thinks I'm too anti-social as it is, and he'd probably send me off to the department shrink for a good head scrubbing." She grimaced, "I mean, you saved my life from the caiman, and drove off the turkey, and got me breakfast, and all I was was suspicious and jumpy in return." She turned her great amethyst eyes up to him, "Please?"

He considered her request before asking himself, "Alright, as long I can get a favor in return?"

"Shoot!", she said.

He placed a paw on his chest, "I am a crack shot, you know!" She snorted, but waved her paw in a circle for him to get on with it. He asked her, "Can you not mention the snake carcass to my boss?" He nodded down at the scene below them, "All the blood down there is gonna make her nervous, and she's liable to take my head off over that." He grinned nervously as he held out his paw to her.

She beamed a smile up at him as she took his paw back and shook it briskly, "Sure!" They could keep each others' secrets! She knew.

"Thank you," he said as he patted her paw with his other paw before releasing it. Hold out his arm, he pointed down the path. "Shall we get back to work?"

She nodded and with her mood buoyed, she skipped down the path in front of him.


Bogo stood in the middle of the milling mammals, doing his best to look like he was supervising, but truth be told he had little to do. His CSU mammals were going about their work efficiently and effectively, leaving him to wonder what exactly he was doing there.

He scowled for moment as the path leading out of the ravine and into the wood. His dimunitive detective had been gone too long, and she and the fox should be back by now. He contemplated going after them when his ear twitched, and he turned his head up to the cliff face.

Oh, never mind. There they are, he realized. Somehow they had made it all the way back around. He watched as they walked down the path, and stopped to talk to each other. They shook paws, and after a little more talking shook paws again, before starting down the path again.

Mungu! Is she skipping? Is she actually happy for once in her life? They must have made up! He realized.

Good! That will make the Park Director's latest request easier to implement!