Chapter Seventy-Nine
Threats of True Friends
Clearing his throat, Finnick closed a little on the cold desk, an uncertain smirk on his muzzle as he spoke to the red fox sat before him. "You know, that's very honest and noble of you and all, but if I opened up about your past an' all... Well, I doubt Hopps'll be happy to hear you're a mass-murdering Firm wo—"
Bogo leaned sharply and went back a bit on the timeline. "— doubt Hopps'll be happy to hear you're a mass-murdering Firm wo—"
"— a mass-murdering Firm wo—" The Chief hit the pause button, his expression frozen in a grimace, his body still sat forwards close to the screen's speaker, because he wanted to hear the silent audio, which was such due to precaution from Nick eavesdropping or waking up.
"A mass-murdering Firm worker," Bogo repeated, his voice vacant with shock. He turned slowly to the wall that divided his room with the spare bedroom — the one with the exact same red fox sleeping within it — and his head shook in doubtfulness. He rested his back into the chair, his expression still vacant as he raised a hoof to his forehead and rubbed at his brow. A long breath shivered from him. "Knew he wasn't 'clean'," he murmured, "but this? No sociopathic tendencies... and he's certainly no psychopath."
Bogo reached out and pressed play, his mind flooded with thoughts and yet able to focus on every word heard from the recording on that interrogation. He saw Nick's fist hit the table, and he heard the fox's voice shake as he snarled in reply, "I have never... killed... anyone." The burning glower was evident in Nick's fiery emeralds. Bogo kept the recording playing, but while the subject of the footage shifted to the bluffs and double bluffs of Nick trying to get information from the smaller fox, Bogo's mind stayed fixed on the two lines he had just heard.
His eye twitched as his mind swam in circles. He whispered to himself, his voice lost as though memorized by some distant ghost-unseen. "The fox with the lightest touch..."
Inspiration took him. He snatched his phone from laying upon the table and started hammering numbers into it to get in touch with the ZPD reception. Half way through, however, he twitched in sudden realization, and pressed 'clear' hurriedly as though fearful the reception might be called, despite the fact the number was only half-entered. He licked his lips, glancing to the wall beside him as he thought of the fox. The almost-empty glass of alcohol was snatched at him, and he tipped back what little remained, then turning onto his phone and entering another number. It rang for a long while, but was answered in the end.
"Clawhauser?" Bogo said.
"Oh, ughm..." a moment passed while the cheetah sighed — rubbing his eyes or stretching, judging by the sound... "Harold, what is it?"
"Out of bed, my old friend," Bogo said, his voice dry but apoplectic. "I wouldn't ask if it wasn't urgent."
"It... it's twenty minutes to—"
"I know, I know... and you can have tomorrow off if you do this for me now. Trust me, if I told you why you we're doing this, you'd see it was worth it."
"Well," Claw said through a yawn, the sound of him pulling himself out of bed coming across the receiver, "what's the matter? What do you need?"
"You still have that spare key I gave you?"
"Sure."
"I need you to sneak into the ZPD for me. Shouldn't be hard, seeing as you work there. You have to get some old files for me: they may be hard to find, but I stored them all very carefully together. I'd get them myself, but I daren't leave Wilde alone in his condition."
"But why do you need me? Someone's on call at reception twenty-four seven. Can't you just—"
"Ben," the Chief interjected strongly, "this can't be on record that I've requested these files. They'll be in storage somewhere, and I don't want anyone asking what I'm doing looking at them. It isn't high security, but you can't be seen taking the files without authorization. And if you are, you cannot say you were told to get them by me."
On the other side of the receiver, Claw took a long breath. "Alright, alright, I can do this, I can manage. Let me just... wait! Oh, I'm not sure where the key is. It, eh... it might've ended up in the cake mix. I'll just have to... eat all of it... before it comes out..."
Bogo sighed a long, heartfelt breath. He'd known the cheetah for much of his life, and he was one of his oldest and deepest friends underneath, but he did despair at him sometimes. He listened in partial discontent and partial amusement at the sound of the cheetah's scoffs over the receiver, and then he raised the phone to his mouth. "Claw," he said, his voice growing louder with impatience, "listen to me. I need you to get... Claw? Claw!"
"Hmm!" he murmured through a full mouth. "Um-hum?"
...
In another room, only a thin wall's width away, the emerald eyes of a red-furred fox twitched open, his weak sleep broken by the sound of a voice. His head inclined just a touch towards the wall from where the muffled sound came through. His auburn ear turned towards the sound instinctively, and his emerald eyes widened at the conversation he then heard.
...
"The Firm: I want all the loose ends, everything left unfinished and unknown, every discontinued lead to every abandoned clue to all the crimes that went unpunished. Rumors, theories, people we aren't even sure existed. There's five or six large boxes on the stuff, all kept together in a corner in Storage somewhere. Get them, bring them to me."
After a moment's struggling, Clawhauser managed to swallow his mouthful. "That'll take a couple of trips… it won't be easy getting through unseen twice!"
Bogo thought intently for a few blinks. "Send me a text when you're ready to go in. I'll phone the reception and make up something that gets their attention. I'll say the security gate was left open or something. I wouldn't have it this way if I had an option, but you have to get me this information tonight. I need it now. How long will you be?"
"I'm dressing. I can be there in three minutes, in at five... I'll text you in eight?"
"I'll be here."
"Chief, one thing..."
"Yes?"
"Why the urgency? Why the secrecy?"
"I'm not sure how best to react, yet. There are questions that need answering before I can make a proper judgment."
"I don't understand, Chief," Clawhauser said, quietly, "but I know you more than well enough not to doubt you. I'll see what I can do."
Bogo nodded. "You're a good mammle, Ben. I'm glad to have you working for me. Good luck."
...
An apartment room within a built-up part of the city of Zootopia: the upper floors of one of the nicer, more modernistic-looking buildings that was high enough from the concrete and tarmac earth beneath to be unimpressed upon by its constant light and noise. The room was filled with comfortable peacefulness, the soft-shadowed darkness surrounding and enveloping all, removing all sense of scale and shape.
A small door opened in the doorway of the room, a beam of thin light filtering through the small space, until the gap was just large enough for a figure to step through. The door clicked shut again a brief moment later, and the figure sighed softly in the darkness — it's small and trim, yet upright form, silhouetted as a dark shadow among darker siblings of the same.
The figure turned and slipped a long coat from its shoulders, hanging it on a coat stand — which it managed without fumbling in the dark. As the figure moved, its shape became just visible as a vague outline — a shape with a few rounded body parts and posture that was distinctly feminine.
She stretched, the muscles in her trim figure tensing and her arms raising high above her head. A low yawn escaped her, and then her stretch slackened, her large ears — which stood rigidly upright to aid in giving the impression of greater height throughout the day — relaxed and fell floppily to rest behind her back.
Raising a small paw, the female rubbed for a few moments at her eyes, before, taking hold of her glasses and slipping them from her face. She placed them carefully down on a small cabinet beside the door on the opposite side as the coat stand, and put her phone down adjacent to it, after which came the locking of the door.
Through the darkness, the doe reached out a paw and clicked on the switch, which set off an electrical circuit that heated a filament in the glass case set into the ceiling above her head, until it glowed with intense light, illuminating the room crisp and comfy; the room spacious and airy; the walls and furniture light and laid out in a way, which was pleasing to the eye and seemed to open out the space rather than close it in and make it claustrophobic.
The image of the city outside turned completely black in the beam of the room, and the white-furred hare crossed the softly carpeted floor to the floor-length windows that every room in this building had, thus, she pulled the thick, cream curtains closed upon them.
She shifted smartly and paced back across the clear and wide floor to the kitchen area, which was polished to a pure shine with plywood cabinets which were... nice, as nice as plywood furniture could be, anyway. She stepped into the kitchen area and clicked busily with dials and switches, until the kettle was boiling and the oven was pre-heating.
The routine was the same that day as it had been every day for her entire working life. With the kettle boiling and the oven heated, the hare reached across to a drawer, a jar and the fridge. She synchronized both arms efficiently, pulling over the requirements for both a drink and dinner — though the dinner was nothing more than a meal she'd prepared several days ago and wrapped in tinfoil.
Turning back to the small wall of counters that provided a half-wall between the kitchen and the rest of the room, the hare poured herself a glass of tea and pulled open the warming oven, sliding the ovenproof plate inside and pulling away the foil before shutting the oven door. It wasn't a bad life. The work was continuously busy and possibly quite stressful, if she'd ever paused to think about it, but there was no unnecessary pain or discomfort and nothing that ever made the hare feel like missing anything from her life. Except...
A black-tipped ear raised a little at a buzzing across the other side of the room. Flo froze in place, staring over at her phone, as it rested on the small cabinet and buzzed with an incoming text alert. The routine, which had been unchanged in every detail — had been performed in the exact same way five times a week without fail since she first became a nurse five years ago — was broken.
If she'd given it any thought, it would've surprised her how... uncomfortable this change in her habit had would've made her. She slid across the floor with unsure steps and an unsure mind. She picked up her phone and felt for the button through her shortsightedness, as to see the text message received, while her other paw reached back down at the table for her glasses.
She paused when the message appeared, her paw resting on her thick-rimmed spectacles. A brow raised quizzically at this message, not only one-worded but one-lettered, and she wondered for a few moments if it was sent to her accidentally, this theory strengthened not only by the unusual shortness of the message, but also by the fact that no one texted her.
She put her phone back down on the table, slipped on her glasses and made over to her small army of filing cabinets, fingering through the perfectly alphabetized tomes as she searched for the right book. "Lacanian Psychology, Latin, Latin Phonetics and Phonology, Islets of Langerhan, Leptospirosis... Lieberkuhn's Gland, Linacre T., Lindale E., Linonophobia, Ling... ah, Linguistic Codes of Communication."
She pulled out the wide book — the sleeve decorated with an intricate series of apparently random numbers, with circles around every eighth number, which spelled out the title of the book when read together. "Twenty four," she muttered, thumbing through the pages, "twenty four... what's the significance of the twenty-forth letter of the alphabet? What is the significance of the letter 'x'? And who'd be sending it? The only person in recent memory who..."
The phone buzzed a second time. Flo turned and made towards it quickly, her speed driven by curiosity. There it was, and it carried more than one letter in its contents, 'Sheesh, don't leave me hanging or anything will ya!' A small but peculiar smile appeared on Rose's expression, just as a similarly peculiar lightness appeared in her chest. Finding herself unable to either ignore the text or reply with something condescendingly sarcastic, the hare's mind pushed her towards playfulness.
'And what's that supposed to mean?' she wrote in reply.
'So,' there came a moment later, 'you are awake. Wanna chat? I can call.'
'Wolfard, we...' Flo chewed on her lip in thought. Wolfard was taking too many letters, she judged. Clearing the text, she started again, 'Wool, we were just speaking twenty minutes ago.'
'Yeah, and I'm missing ya already.' Flo couldn't remember the last time she'd found herself grinning. It only lasted a moment, and her overall reaction was liken to the surprised 'what was that?' when one got to believe they've seen a pink elephant walk by. But this didn't stop her texting, nor did it stop her from walking over to the middle of the clear living room and allowing herself to fall back into the wide, soft sofa.
Her usually so upright and proper stature turned to a casual one, and the hare pulled her legs up onto the settee, as she lay out with her head propped on the arm rest. Resting compatibly and warmly upon the sofa, though the 'warmth' was nothing to do with the temperature of the room, Flo started to do something she had never in her life done before... she lost herself deep in the midst of social texting. 'Missing me already? Incredible the effects a touching of two mammal's lips can have.'
'So you admit it, that little kiss of ours had an effect on you too.'
'You call it kissing, do you? Did we kiss? Did we 'really' kiss do you think?'
'Well, you had your arms round my neck and you held me tight like I was trying to escape.'
'Perhaps you're mistaken. Possibly you're still delusional, Jim.' Flo chuckled softly as she typed out another reply.
And so the texting went on, and on — all through the heating and eating of her meal, until the lateness of the hour forced her to inform the wolf she had to go off to bed. Wolfard's reply to that had startled the hare. She didn't reply to it, but put the phone carefully down on the cabinet beside her. She lay down in the darkness to sleep — an act which on all other occasions resulted in near instant slumber for the amount of time and effort she put into every working day — but this time, despite the lateness of the hour, she was awake a long while after, her thoughts in motion and her small paw tapping in thought.
'I have to go, Wool,' she had sent him, 'it'll be negligent to my patients if I don't get rested up for tomorrow. I need to go to bed.' After sending that text, the hare had slipped out of her items of clothing and had been just reaching to put her night clothes on, when his response had buzzed through. She had reached out and had picked up the phone, naked and vulnerable in the void of the room. She hadn't given her state of undress any thought, but it added to the resulting impact of the text saw.
'Wish I was there with you.' Her paw still tapping in thoughts, she went through them slowly: dubious and doubtful, and yet surprising herself with her underlying openness to the idea of his words. At length, another text arrived, and the hare's paw shot across to pick up her phone, while the text was opened before it even had reached her eyes.
It took a few seconds more for her to put her glasses back on for the blurs to clear, but when they had, her brow furrowed. The text messages board was empty of new texts. A moment later she found that the source of the buzz had been from her ze-mail. Drawing breath — aware it would be from work — she opened the ze-mail and read thus:
'Hi Flo, Kathy from reception here. Just letting you know the badger you brought in earlier, the one from the ZPD raid on Erkin you EMT-ed for has died. Your report was correct and the blood loss wasn't that severe, but it appears he was under the influence of illegal substances at the time and this effected his body's capacity to sustain itself. He had a heart attack. He should've been in the Intensive Care Ward, but since there was no prior indication his condition was that bad, it's been agreed you're in no way to blame for his death. Thanks! Kathy.'
Turning off the screen and removing her glasses, Flo's head fell back against the pillow and her eyes immediately started to drift shut. In an instant, all energy had been drained from her body, and she found she was able to drift swiftly into silent, blissful sleep with the lingering distant fantasies of the new additions to her monotone life.
Author's notes:
Hesitance jumps around your mind,
Grooms decision thus chosen blind.
Your thoughts most succulent of snack,
All delivered by luscious feedback.
So don't hide like a tiny shrew,
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