DISCLAIMER: I gave my bid to own Zootopia to the Magic Carpet to deliver, but he was swatted down when Ursula grew into that freakish sea monster. Far as I know, the bid is now at the bottom of the ocean. So I still don't own Zootopia.
Thanks to my two editors, GusTheBear and TheoreticallyEva for their assistance with this chapter!
"You're sure there's no loyalty deduction benefit on any of the other C-suite personal assistant's paychecks? Can you confirm this?"
The ibex across from Linus Ford nodded. "A couple of the other ones, Sophia Lopez and the CEO's, gave us examples of their pay stubs. Almost double what Wilde was making, and no loyalty deduction. Of course, they did that under the condition of anonymity."
Linus Ford nodded. "We'll have to come up with something to corroborate this before we take it to court. I'll see if I can get a judge to issue a subpoena for Furston's financial practices concerning Mrs. Wilde and her co-workers. What else do you have?"
"Not much. Just a few rumours, mostly. Mrs. Wilde was promoted to McStripeson's personal assistant after the previous one was fired, but nobody really knows why, and we can't seem to get a hold of them."
Linus Ford thought about that. "Do you have reason to suspect anything?"
The ibex shrugged. "I'm not sure."
Ford considered this for a long moment before settling back in his chair. "OK. Keep digging. I want to know if there's anything else we can throw Furston's way. Anything at all. If the other PAs get a daily Tim Howltons fund and Mrs. Wilde didn't, I want to know that. Everything we can do to get her the compensation she deserves."
The ibex left the office. A good legal assistant, he was. He'd make a great attorney himself one day. Ford turned his attention to the packet of information McStripeson's attorney had sent over, with all of the charges filed against Marian and all of the evidence compiled against Marian Wilde. It was scant and circumstantial at best, and he knew it would be easy to counter with the police evidence supporting Mrs. Wilde, provided the jury wasn't biased.
That was the big problem, and Terence Ramsford had already poisoned the pool with his news conference outside the ZPD headquarters two weeks ago, implying that Marian was the one framing McStripeson. Anything he said now would seem reactionary to that. A moment later an idea came to mind. It wasn't without risk, but it might neutralize some of that poison. The wolf reached for his phone.
Judy and Nick stared out across the park from the bench they were sitting on. The sun was setting, and the area was quiet, only the birds tweeting and a cricket somewhere calling for a mate. For the two small police officers, it was still eerie to see the normally lively open space near the coast bereft of other mammals. The comparative lack of city noise just added to the somewhat unsettling atmosphere. It was still there but sounded like someone had grabbed the volume control and turned it down halfway.
"I don't think I've heard the city so quiet." The comment from the doe seemed almost deafening.
Beside her, Nick nodded. "It hasn't been. Not in my lifetime, anyway." The two watched as a lone zebra hurried along the sidewalk of a nearby road before cutting across the street, looking around like she was being stalked. "After the gang wars, citizens were a bit more wary… My job got a lot more difficult for a few months after that. This is so much worse. It's going to take a long time to recover from this. Even with the terrorists in jail, the damage is done. I'm guessing that tourism won't recover for a long time, if ever. Same with exports. We're in for a rough ride, Fluff."
The doe nodded. "That's what the news and their economic experts have been saying."
The red canid leaned back and put his arms along the back of the bench. "There was a lot of bad press that went around in the international media about the city during and after the drug gang wars, so much so that a few tour operators that had the city on their list of stops recommended staying only in the 'tourist' areas and avoiding everything else. It kind of meant that if your business wasn't downtown, on the strip, or near the airport, train station, cruise port, or on the waterfront, you were out of luck and you really had to fight to get noticed. It made for more centralized… marks for Fin and me, though. Tourists are good because if they aren't happy with the game you are playing, you never hear back from them. On the other hand, you have to watch what you do more closely, because establishing a pattern was a surefire way for mammals like us to get noticed by the police."
Judy looked up at Nick. "What sort of games did you play?"
"We avoided the sleight of paw games after that rhino incident I told you about. Cards didn't work very well; I didn't have the skills for that. We did a sort of a street magician thing for a while—illusionism. That's how Fin got started with the whole 'he's my son' gimmick, so we decided to roll with that. You'd be surprised how many mammals don't know about fennec foxes and just assumed he really was my son."
"Yeah, I was one of them. You should have seen the look on my face when I first saw Finnick driving that van of his with a pacifier in his muzzle!"
Nick burst out laughing at that. "Oh, I can imagine it was one of the biggest 'what the hell…?' expressions ever, Carrots."
Judy grinned. "That's putting it lightly." She went silent, and after a while, she frowned. "I can only imagine what the international press is saying about Zootopia right now. 'City built on tolerance a haven for speciesist genocidal terrorists!'"
"That's probably the gist of it right there. It'll take a long time to change that image again, and until we do, things will be tough." The fox sighed. "I hope your family is ready for that."
Judy thought back. Her family had gone through a slight slump around the time Nick had said the gang wars had happened, but they'd been able to offset the drop in profits by branching out to more diverse crops. The doe let out a long breath. "I hope so, too, Nick. About a quarter of what we grow is for export. Maybe more. I don't know exactly. Mom or one of my siblings would know. I remember we had a bit of a hard time during the gang wars, but I didn't really pay attention to why at the time." She grinned. "I was a bit focussed on my goal."
Nick smiled. "Yeah, I'm guessing you would have been. I'm actually surprised that you didn't at least get some news coverage about it, though."
Judy thought back. "There might have been something on the news about it, but I didn't watch much TV. My siblings did, but it's kind of an unspoken rule in our home that you don't try and pull someone in to watch a TV program or movie. You let them involve themselves if they want to. Could you imagine even a small percentage of three hundred siblings calling you to tell you there's something on TV or the radio you needed to see or hear? It'd be chaos, and no one would ever get anything done!"
There was a bark of laughter from the fox. "Your whole life would boil down to the decision of which TV program you should watch on the recommendation of your sibling. And video recorders would make it even worse. 'Hey, Judy, I recorded this program for you, you should watch it!' 'Great, add it to the warehouse of all the other programs I should watch! Put it on section thirty-one, aisle twelve, shelf five, slot forty-two. I'll get to it as soon as I can!'"
The goofy voices Nick used just made the joke even more ridiculous, and both mammals burst out laughing. For Judy, it felt good, her chest not reminding her constantly of her brush with death.
After a while, the two calmed down and just stared out across the park. They didn't say anything for a while, just enjoying the time with their love.
Eventually, Nick broke the silence. "Carrots… Judy… Have you been having nightmares? You've… Well, you've been twitching and kicking at night… Making noise."
Judy slumped. She hadn't wanted to burden Nick with her own problems, but apparently, Nick had figured it out anyway. She shouldn't have been surprised. For the moment, she thought back to the dream she'd had that morning, still vivid in her mind.
Nick was out of the line of fire for the moment. He slowly advanced down the side of the delivery van, keeping an eye on the longhorn bull in the mirror. Judy was forced back into her hiding spot by another errant shot that sent a spray of snow up thirty feet down the sidewalk.
The doe peeked around the newspaper vendor again. Nick had gone for the ground, too, and was now in the process of climbing back to his feet. Surveying the scene quickly, her blood ran cold. Doug had used the distraction to sneak around the backside of the van and was now taking aim at Nick, and she didn't have a good angle from which to fire on the ram. "NICK! BEHIND YOU!"
It was too little too late. Doug fired and all Judy could do was watch in horror as Nick jerked, eyes wide, then looked down at his chest, a red stain spreading out from the middle of his chest. He looked back to Judy, an expression of sheer betrayal on his face, before collapsing to his knees and then on to his side, clutching the hole as though trying to keep the blood in.
A creepy, almost monotonous laugh drew the doe's attention, and she turned to Doug, standing on the sidewalk, still aiming the gun at the fox. He turned and looked at Judy with a disgusting sneer on his face and started advancing on Judy's moaning fox. "You were too late, rabbit." He fired again, and Nick jerked on the ground. "You think you could have saved him?" Another shot, another jerk. "You're just as pathetic as the filth." A fourth, final shot hit Nick in the head.
Throughout it all, Judy felt frozen, stunned, unable to move, to do anything except stare. Her arms feeling like they were made of lead, the doe grabbed her lethal and brought it to bear. The ram laughed, another cruel, creepily monotone sound. "You think you're gonna hurt me with that?"
Judy looked down. It wasn't her lethal she held in her hand, but a toy water gun. She looked back up into the yawning barrel an inch from her face. Doug spoke once more. "I just wanted you to see your filthy partner die before I killed you."
Judy had woken up in a cold sweat, bolt upright and panting. Nick had still been asleep at that point, so she'd crawled out of bed and gone to the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face and have a drink before returning to bed, cuddling up close to Nick and spending the next hour reassuring herself that he was there, he was still alive, and that they were both OK.
Shaking herself out of her thoughts, she looked up at Nick. "I have been. Some of them I'm too slow to get to you. Some, he shoots you when I try to warn you. And some… Well, some he kills me, and that's it. Then I wake up, and you're there, and I realize it was just a dream. But they all seem so real. Like it's some sort of alternate reality I'm peeking into that I can't control, and every ending is bad."
"Why haven't you told me about this?"
Judy shook her head. "Because I didn't want to worry you and add my problems to yours. I know… I shouldn't have kept them from you."
Nick sighed and stared at the ground in front of them for a while, before speaking. "It's OK, Fluff. Just no more secrets, OK?"
"What about you? Haven't you had nightmares?"
Another long moment where the fox stared a hole in an unfortunate sidewalk tile in front of him. "Yes. All day and all night. I have to relive seeing you go flying. Only at night, you don't get so lucky."
Judy hugged Nick. "I guess that's reciprocal, then? No more secrets?"
The fox smiled. "No more secrets." He paused. "Hey, when is our first session with the shrink?"
"This week, on Thursday," she said with a sigh. She wasn't looking forward to that. If it were up to her, she'd rather be out on the beat, taking care of the city. But between that, her injury, and the Internal Affairs case, she knew that wasn't going to happen anytime soon.
There hadn't been much pain in her chest lately at all, though for a while, it was almost unbearable to even move without pain killers. She had another doctor's visit coming up the following Friday to see how she was doing. Despite the struggles in the rest of the healthcare system, outpatient services were still functioning. However, that was expected to be overwhelmed as well once the massive volume of emergency room patients came back for checkups. Some were saying there could be several months' worth of backlog for outpatient and non-critical services.
Fire services were expected to continue as normal once the city was opened. Police, on the other paw, would still be expected to pull long hours until the backlog of missing mammals could be cleared and the Rainforest District could be opened up again.
The sound of a ship's horn in the harbor jarred her out of her thoughts, and both looked up to see a large container ship sailing past. Nick smiled. "I guess that's a sign that things might be slowly moving forward. That one spent almost two weeks anchored off Iceberg Point."
Judy shook her head. "I still can't believe someone named part of the harbor Iceberg Point."
"Well, to be fair, ships try to avoid icebergs, and running into Iceberg Point is a pretty bad idea."
Judy grinned. "Unless you've got Leonardo Dicatprio on board and you're a ship called Titanic."
Nick groaned. "Don't tell me you were one of those females that were swooning over that leopard."
"Oh, heavens no! I was, what, seven years old at the time?" Judy laughed. "No, I wasn't, I didn't even see it until I was twenty or so and it was in the theater in Bunnyburrow again. Some buck thought it would be a great way to try to woo me with it, and he tried to kiss me during, well…THAT scene. He ended up with a black eye."
Nick snorted with laughter. "He would have. Was it anyone I know?"
Judy shook her head. "Probably not. I did stay for the rest of the movie, but he stormed out after calling me a frigid ice queen."
Nick scratched his chin. "Ice queen? He must have been delusional. Dumb bunny, maybe, but not icy."
"And you know it, Dumb Fox."
It seemed like every part of Nolwazi Longtooth's body hurt, itched, ached, or throbbed. The weeks of sixteen-hour shifts and shuttling to and from crime scenes, the stations, the prisons, city hall, and the justice department had her feeling like a train hit her.
All she wanted was to kick back and relax for a few hours before bed. Maybe play a game with her boyfriend, if he'd gotten all the stuff she'd asked him to do that morning before she left.
Even her keys seemed to fight her as she tried to work the lock on the door to her apartment. It was a nice unit in a nice building in Sahara Square. It was spacious, with transit close by, along with shopping and her home precinct.
She finally got the door open, tossed her keys in the bowl she kept by the door, and hung her coat up when the sound of clattering dishes reached her ears. 'Hmmm, maybe he's a little late doing those.' The lioness headed towards the kitchen.
She couldn't have been more wrong. Not only were the dishes not done, but the counters were piled high with stuff she was sure wasn't there when she left. Finally, her nose told her that the garbage hadn't been taken out.
The lioness put her good paw up to her forehead to rub the headache she knew was coming on when her boyfriend barged into the room, carrying another stack of dishes, no doubt from the TV meals he'd been having all day. "Nol! I…uh… I didn't expect you to be home so soon."
The detective stared at the other lion. "I've been gone for almost 17 hours, Alan." She looked around. "Have you done ANYTHIN' while I've been gone?"
"I was… I did…Well, I put the laundry in the washer and... Well, I was going to, but…"
"Let me guess, you were playin' games all day again." The lioness rubbed her face with her paw.
"Hey, I had…a big tournament to play in! It was important!"
"Alan, you've been out of work for two weeks, and you've barely done anythin' around here, while I've been runnin' myself ragged sixteen hours a day tryin' to keep this city from fallin' apart, without even knowin' if I'll be paid for the overtime! All I asked was that you contribute a little bit more to the chores around here! Why can't you even do that?!"
"I'm not your personal maid, all right, Nol?! I want to take advantage of my time off to relax! It's not my fault you're spending all your time at work, and not with me! Just get someone else to do the cop work for a while!"
"There is no one else, all right?! Everyone is either pullin' double or triple shifts, in the hospital, on medical leave, or DEAD! Who the hell would cover for me?! In case you didn't notice, there are tens of thousands of mammals missin' or dead because of those attacks two weeks ago!"
"Maybe if the right mammals were in charge, this never would have happened."
Longtooth stared at the other mammal in her kitchen. "What are you sayin'?"
"I'm saying that a predator would have handled things way better."
The lioness continued staring slack-jawed at the lion she was sure couldn't have been one she would have once called a boyfriend. "I'm warnin' you, Alan, keep this under control."
"Prey should always be the ones answering to us, Nol, not the other way around. Serving us. It was that way since the dawn of time, and it should be that way now."
The lioness police detective was seeing red, quaking in anger. Her claws dug into her palm pads as she fought the urge to deck the mammal in front of her. "I can't believe you're sayin' this, Alan. I can't believe I'm hearin' this."
"Come on, you know it, I know it. Prey are scared of us, that's why they keep us shackled. You can't tell me a predator wouldn't have figured out what was going on sooner."
"Last I checked, Alan, I AM a predator, and guess what? We had almost no warnin', too. We weren't able to connect all of the dots until AFTER the attack, you idiot!"
"Yeah, you and your police buddies. But I bet you were held back by a prey partner. Isn't that always the case now? Especially that bunny. What's her name? Juicy Hips or something?"
In one single statement, the mammal in front of her had disrespected everyone she worked with and cared about, some of whom she was certain were no longer around. She flexed her fingers, paws no longer balled into fists, but claws fully extended nonetheless. Her tail was thrashing the air behind her in pure rage.
"And you bloody arrested the terrorists! They don't deserve a trial. Should have just shot them where they were. Made an example of them."
"Get out." The lioness was certain if this continued, she'd do something that Alan would regret.
"Shot them with… Wait, what?"
"I said… Get. Out. Now. Leave. This is the end for us, and if I ever catch you spoutin' that shit off again, I'm gonna haul your ass in for a nice stay in prison. In case you don't remember, I'm a cop. And in case it never went through your head, you were just utterin' threats. To a cop. Now grab the things you need and get out. We're through. I'll have a colleague contact you when you can get the rest of your stuff out of here."
The lion blinked. "But where am I gonna stay?"
"Not my problem. Now get out before I haul you in for trespassing."
The lion stared back at her, gawking like a fish out of the water. "You can't do this!"
"It's my name on the rental agreement, and this is my official address, so yes, I can, and I will, now get out. Where you go, I don't care."
Alan Manesbury was livid. She was supposed to be on his side. How did she not see what was so blatantly obvious? Prey were oppressing predators and had been for generations. Prey were supposed to live at predators' behest. This was the natural order of things. He, too, had been blind to it until recently, until he'd seen a FurTube video that had explained everything.
Besides, what was her problem? So, what if he hadn't done all the chores she'd given him? It wasn't his fault she chose to work so much that she couldn't do her share of the work around here, or that he was out of work until the city reopened. And now, he would have to pay for a hotel room.
"Fine, you bitch, but when you realize I'm right, don't come crying to me."
"Oh, don't you worry about that. You're the last mammal I'd come cryin' to. Oh, and give me your apartment keys, too."
Alan stared at the lioness for a moment before walking down the hallway and out the door, pulling his keychain out and grabbing the two keys in question. His intention was to rip them off and throw them at his now ex-girlfriend. He failed on both counts, because instead of just the two keys, the ring came apart, and all of the keys he flew off, clattering everywhere. When he threw the two at Nolwazi, she deftly caught them in her left paw, smirking and turning back into her apartment, slamming and locking the door.
The now-homeless lion yelled some obscenities at the now-closed door before proceeding to pick up his scattered keys under the eyes of quite a few of Nol's neighbours, who'd come out of their own units to see what all the shouting was about. A few of them were even prey animals, and all looked at him with some level of disgust. He didn't care.
After picking up the final key, he walked down the hall and stairs and out of the building. Spying his ex-girlfriend's car, he briefly considered leaving a message in the paint job, but he decided against it after seeing the security cameras. She'd immediately know who'd done it and would have both the proof and the means to bring him in for vandalism.
The lion headed out into the street, intending to hail a cab, and ended up walking half a mile before he even saw another car. It was going to be a long night, but it gave him time to think about how he could get Nol back. Or more likely, get back at her.
Back in the apartment, the lioness in question sighed and slumped against her front door, the adrenaline rush dissipating. Nolwazi rubbed her face with one paw, wondering how she didn't see this in him before. The guy had seemed decent enough when she met him a year ago. He'd struck up a conversation with her when she'd stopped for a quick break during one of her morning runs. They seemed to hit it off. They'd met up a few more times before he'd asked her out, and she'd readily agreed. They'd gone on quite a few dates since, and it seemed like a great match, but he'd changed a few weeks after the Grand Palm attack. He'd started to get more opinionated against prey mammals, more outspoken about predator supremacy, right around the time work had started to consume more of her time. When his lease was up a month ago, he'd moved in with her. She'd been hoping that the closer contact would help her get him off that path, but he'd just gotten worse. This was just the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back.
Strangely, she didn't feel too put off about it, though the lioness wondered if that would hit her like a brick later. If so, she was not looking forward to that.
Picking herself up from the floor, she moved back into her kitchen, intent on cleaning up the very things she'd wanted done in the first place. She needed to do something mindless for a while. Too bad it wasn't something like playing a video game or watching a movie.
"Are you sure about this?" Meagan Moon was lying on her couch, watching her cheetah partner do something in her kitchen. He'd promised her a home-cooked meal but had seemingly neglected to mention that he'd be the one doing the cooking. In retrospect, she should have seen this coming.
"Relax, Meagan, I made this a hundred times with my ma back in the day. Trust me."
"OK, but if you blow up my kitchen or give me food poisoning or something, you're buying takeout for us for, like, a month." Meagan lay back. Her head had been throbbing almost non-stop since the hospital had released her, though she'd been told to expect this. She was also told to expect a long recovery road in general, the doctors not likely to clear her even for desk duty for at least six weeks.
She'd spent the bulk of the last week catching up on the things on which she'd missed out. News first and foremost, and what she didn't get from the news, she picked up from Arnie and the endless parade of her colleagues that came by to say hi. Nick and Judy had even swung by at one point to wish her well and say hi to Arnie at the same time. It had taken Meagan all of half a second to realize how deep their relationship had gotten, their scents so intermingled that she had to concentrate for a brief instant to tell the two apart.
'Then again, Arnie had been telling me that from the day I met him, and more,' the she-wolf had thought with a wry smile. Arnie'd even told her, in all the crude details, how he'd tried to encourage Nick to 'chase that bunny tail,' in his words, back at the academy. He'd been thrilled to learn that the two had finally 'gotten together,' though he had thrown in a side comment to her about bunnies and their well-known…proclivities, for which Meagan had just laughed.
The other thing she spent her time catching up on was episodes of the TV shows that she'd been forced to stop watching when she went full-time as an officer two years ago. Real life before TV shows, even though TV show life was more interesting. She'd found that some of the shows she'd grown up watching and taken as fact, like police procedurals, just weren't accurate at all, but she didn't mind. They just fit into the comedy category now.
While the attacks that took place weeks ago and the fallout still dominated the news segments, almost every station had returned to regular programming, with several running marathons of the year's television seasons in an effort to retain viewers who were increasingly turning to Pawflix, Hooflu, and Mawmazon Prime for their entertainment during the hours of being shut in.
The smells of a dish she couldn't identify started filling her small apartment, all of them pleasant. Maybe Arnie did have a knack for the kitchen after all. Then again, she was continually surprised by him, ever since they'd been paired up. When his girlfriend had dropped him like a dirty rag a couple months in, she'd been the one to whom he'd opened up, revealing an interestingly sensitive mammal beneath the crude exterior. She found out they hadn't been getting along for months, which had led to his flirtatious (or so he thought) behavior.
The crudeness hadn't bothered her, either, as she had the mouth of a sailor on occasion as well, a trait she'd picked up from her father. He'd been a sailor for years before settling down with her mother and opening a boutique in Moonsong, joining the local wolf pack out there as well. Her own lack of a filter when it came to topics of a somewhat less-than-polite nature was a result of growing up with four older brothers and no sisters. Hearing sex talk, crude jokes, and other things of that nature was as commonplace as breathing in her household.
It was an hour before Arnie announced that dinner was ready. She'd been able to determine for herself that whatever he was making involved salmon, something she quite enjoyed, and she was eager to see what he'd conjured up. Her head protested somewhat as she got up off the couch and moved to her small dining area. What was spread before her looked amazing. Grilled marinated salmon with a mango salsa and a red wine she didn't know he had picked up. She looked up at the cheetah, who was more than a little nervous. "What's all this?"
"Just something my ma's parents brought over from Africa. Hope you like it. Ma and I loved making this when I was at home. Thought you might like it.
"It looks terrific, Arnie. I can't wait to try it."
The two dove in to the meal, just enjoying the conversation and each other's company for the moment.
A/N
Two couple become closer, one gets torn apart. Life moves on, right?
Apologies for getting this up a lot later than usual. Had to deal with some crap today, and as a result, everything got pushed back. And now I have a Mandalorian episode to watch!
No one found the last chapter's references! I promise there is one in this chapter! Can you find it?
Coming up on November 27: Good Business!
Questions? Critiques? Did Flotsam and Jetsam overturn your boat when you were about to kiss your significant other? Leave a comment!
