The report didn't take very much time, and Simon remained mostly out of the way. He did ask whether she was going to put in how rude Jenny Scar had been, and she told him that wasn't relevant to the investigation.
"It might be," he insisted. "What if she was rude because she's hiding something?"
"You watch too much TV," Judy told him. "It's very possible that she's hiding something, but being rude doesn't enter into it."
Assistant Chief Lyttel had no doubt been told by Bogo that Simon was authorized, because she didn't say anything about the journalist bunny. The elephant took Judy's report, made a few suggestions, and barely registered when Simon made his objection.
She could've put Simon's interruption into the report. But that technically wasn't part of the interview either. All it would've done was either get Simon in trouble or make Bogo look bad for authorizing him. That might've been what Nick would do, which was partly why Judy had not wanted him to file this particular report.
"Where we going now?" Simon asked as they left the assistant chief's office.
"My desk." Judy led him down to the pit, the large room where the rank and file sat, which reeked of tiger and elephant and rhino. Her desk and Nick's were both half the size of most of the others, tucked into the space between the large door and the supply closet.
Simon's ears went back and he stared around the room. The deep bass voices of the other officers bounced back and forth, echoing around in a rumble that comforted Judy now that she was used to it. Even when she hadn't been, she hadn't been as intimidated as Simon was now.
She'd been wondering whether he would make an excuse and leave, but he slid into Nick's chair and leaned on his elbows, staring across at her. "You just have to fill out a few forms?"
Judy pointed up at the giant clock, which read 2:45. "I'm here doing paperwork until 5."
"But you have a case."
"Nick's taking care of that part. He'll call in if he needs me for anything. Right now I need to write up that interview I just had, plus Nick's report from this morning. Speaking of, could you slide me that folder off his desk?"
Simon lifted the cover of the folder, enough to see the page covered in Nick's choppy writing. Then he slid it across the desk to her.
Nick had made some notes where Bogo had told him to. Judy sighed, logged into the ZPD system, opened the case report, and started typing.
Once he realized nothing more interesting was going to happen, Simon pulled his shoulder bag onto the desk and took a laptop computer out of it. "Mind if I start typing up my own notes?" he said.
"You sure you wouldn't be more comfortable at your hotel?"
"Oh, no," he said. "This desk works just fine, and this way, if something happens, I'm right here."
"Right." She kept her ears up and lost herself in the paperwork as best she could.
Which was never very good. Judy could get through three or four spaces on the form before her mind wandered back to the case and she turned over angles in her head. Then she realized that ten minutes had gone by and she was still staring at the form on her computer.
Simon didn't seem to have that trouble. The click-click of his typing rarely stopped for more than a few seconds. What could he be writing so much about? They'd gone on one single interview, one interview that Judy only had to write a couple paragraphs about and it was taking her forever.
When Nick called at 4:30, Judy grabbed the phone on the first ring. "What's going on?" she asked.
"I talked to Daren," he said. "And I set up an interview with Caravan for tomorrow morning. Is that bug still in your ear?"
She glanced at Simon, typing happily at Nick's desk. He didn't seem to be paying attention to her, but she knew how sensitive bunny ears were. "Yeah."
"Okay, I'll text you the details. I'm all the way over in Sahara so I'm just gonna head home if that's okay."
"Sure." She liked that he asked. And then she thought of a question, but she didn't want to ask it around Simon, so she texted him from her cell: Can I call you in five?
"All right. See you in the morning." He hung up, but a second later he texted her back a thumbs up.
"I'll be right back," Judy told Simon. He nodded, barely looking up.
#
It wasn't hard to find an empty interview room, so Judy slipped into #3 and closed the door, then called Nick. "What's up, Carrots?" he said.
"Did you talk to Daren just to get an appointment with Ms. Caravan, or did you interview him?"
"Well…" He hesitated, which told her the answer.
"Dammit, Nick, we're both supposed to be working this case."
"Okay, but we also agreed we can't have Scoops McSnappy on interviews with us. I was there to make the appointment, I asked if I could talk to him for five minutes, we talked. I asked him if I could record it since you weren't there."
She paced around the interview room, going from one wall to the other and then leaning on the leg of the huge chair. "You should've asked me before you did."
"Sorry, I thought you telling me to go deal with the interviews—"
"Set up the interviews. Not conduct them."
He paused. "I get that you're ticked off about your bunny and chain, but go complain to Bogo. It's not my fault."
"You're sure not doing anything to make it easier."
"All right. You want me to go back in time and not interview Daren? Carrots, I promise you it wasn't a very exciting interview. He wired the authorization to the bank and gave them Jenny Scar's name to pick it up. I got the timing of the authorization and that's all he knows. He doesn't even know when Jenny went to the bank."
The fact that Nick was being mostly reasonable and only a little snarky made Judy even more frustrated because it highlighted her own irritation. "Maybe I'd have picked up on something else."
"Oh, because you're a better cop than me?"
"No." Her instincts to avoid a fight kicked in first, but she was in a bad mood and couldn't leave it there. "I mean, I have been a cop for almost a year longer than you."
"You might know the rulebook better, but I was on the streets for twenty years—"
"So you're saying there's nothing I could've spotted that you didn't already see."
He heaved an exasperated sigh. "I'll drop by the station and give you the recording and then you and Paper Chase can pore over it for hidden clues."
"Don't bother," she said. "Bring it in the morning. See you then."
"All right. See you then."
She hung up with a mix of anger and frustration at herself. It wasn't right that Nick had conducted the interview without her, of course, but it was the sort of minor thing that he'd done in the past, and probably if it weren't for Simon she would've thanked him for saving her the time. But he should've known, she told herself.
#
Simon looked up when she came back. "Everything all right?"
"Female thing," she said, and his ears flicked away and he bent over his notebook again.
Judy sat at her desk and stared at the report again. Just finish the thing, she told herself. Just finish it and you can go home and watch like three episodes of Bun Paul's Drag Race and come back in the morning fresh for the case.
At quarter past five, she finally finished the write-up. The anger had left her by then, though not the certainty that she was at least technically in the right. "All right," she said to Simon, "I'm done for the day. So I'll see you tomorrow morning, I guess?"
Already in her head she was figuring out ways to keep him out of the interview with Ms. Caravan the next morning, so she missed what he said, but replaying it in her head, it didn't sound like "yeah, see you tomorrow," so she said, "Sorry, what?"
"Well…" He'd stood up and now looked slightly down at her. "I mean, I don't really know Zootopia at all, and you've been here for a year or so and you seem to really love it, so I'd like to see some of the places you love."
She stared at him long enough that he said, "Buuuuuuuuut, if you really don't want to…"
"No, it's okay." Bun Paul could wait. "So…can I go home and freshen up first?"
"Oh, sure!" Simon brightened, his ears perking up. "I need to drop this stuff off at the hotel anyway."
"I know where the Impalasy Suites are," Judy said. "How about if I meet you in the lobby there around 7:30?" That might let her get one episode in, if the train wasn't running too slow.
"Sounds great." He flashed her a big Bunnyburrow smile, as her dad used to say, and she left him just outside ZPD headquarters, hurrying to the train.
Of course, today was the day people kept shoving their antlers into the doorway as the doors were closing and the day they sat for five minutes because of maintenance at one station and for seven minutes at another, so Judy got home at quarter after six, leaving her just enough time to run down the hall, shower, and run back to put on something suitable for going out. She'd gone shopping a month ago with a raccoon Nick had introduced her to, a middle-aged investment advisor named Dahlia (she didn't ask how Nick knew an investment advisor; she'd stopped asking Nick how he knew people), and Dahlia had convinced her to buy a nice blouse and skirt combo that she said would be "versatile" and could be either "elegant" or "you know, dressy casual," depending on how Judy accessorized.
Accessorizing was one of the things Judy had never paid much attention to, so she'd shoved the outfit in her closet. She'd thought that for an appropriate occasion she would have at least a day or two notice, not half an hour, so she had to take the outfit off the hanger and throw it on without any of the things Dahlia had mentioned (only a few of which Judy remembered anyway, like a scarf, because she'd wondered why she would wear a scarf unless she were going to Tundratown).
And of course it didn't look in her mirror the way it had looked in the store, so she spent another five minutes figuring out why and eventually realized that she'd put the blouse on inside out, and then she had to run for the train again to make it back to Simon's hotel on time, and then she missed the train by two seconds and had to watch it pull away. So of course she arrived at the lobby of the Impalasy Suites at quarter to eight.
Simon had changed into a lemon-yellow shirt with an orange bowtie, though he'd kept the blue jeans. Even to Judy's un-fashion-conscious eye, the shirt stuck out and the bowtie looked garish, but she wasn't going to say anything. It wasn't like people were going to see her with him anyway. "You look nice," she said.
"You look great!" His reply made her feel bad because it was so much more honest than her compliment had been. "Where are we going?"
"The Rainforest District is one of the neatest places in Zootopia. There's trees and flowers you won't see anywhere else and the misters make it feel like it's raining all the time."
He fingered the sleeve of his shirt. "Will we get wet?"
"I mean…" She searched for how to say this politely. "It's the Rainforest District, not the Dryforest—not Sahara Square, I mean. If you want to go there, we can, but it's mostly desert. There's a good shopping mall, though, and the Palm Hotel is really nice."
His ears perked up at that. "Is there a nice restaurant at the Palm Hotel?"
"Sure," Judy said. "There's a fancy one and a really fancy one. But you know," she laughed self-deprecatingly, "on a police officer's salary, I can't really afford to go to fancy places like that. I mean, you could go maybe have an appetizer and one drink if you just wanted to see what it was like, but."
Simon straightened his bowtie and smiled. "The paper's picking up my expenses. So let's go have dinner at the Palm."
"Oh." Judy wasn't really in the mood for a long, fancy dinner. "Isn't that some kind of journalistic, uh, conflict of interest?"
"Not unless my paper takes out an ad for the Palm Hotel, and," he laughed shortly, "why would they waste their money on an ad in Bunnyburrow?"
Why indeed? "No," Judy said, "I meant, the reporter having dinner with the subject of the report?"
"Oh, it's fine." He waved a paw and started for the door. "I'm supposed to see how you live here in the city."
"But I…" She followed after him quickly. "I don't go to places like that."
"You should, though." He held the door for her. "Maybe if you like it, you'll end up going back. Then it will be how you live and the report will be accurate."
"But then aren't you making the news and not just reporting on it?" Chief Bogo had made them all take a seminar on media coverage and she was pretty sure there was something about reporters not being involved with the people they were reporting on.
He stopped just short of the curb right in the path of a pair of gazelles, who swerved around him and muttered curses. "Look," he said. "I'm offering to take you to a nice dinner. Do you want to go or not?"
She pulled him out of the path of the pedestrians. "When you put it like that…I guess so?" She was hungry, after all, and if the appetizers were any indication, the food at the Two Fronds would be fantastic.
"Great!" He clapped his paws together and then worry creased his brow for a moment. "But just the fancy place. Not the really fancy one."
"That's fine," Judy said. "You need to reserve the really fancy one months in advance."
She took him on the bus even though he insisted he could pay for a private car. "You want to document the Zootopia experience, you need to ride the bus," Judy told him, the irony of taking a city bus to the Palm Hotel not lost on her.
They had to wait a few minutes for a Medium Small bus on the 34 line. "Can't we get on that one?" Simon watched a Medium Large go by. "It says Sahara Square."
"Bigger medium species like wildebeest can't ride in the Medium Small buses, so it's polite for us not to take up seats on theirs." Not that Judy hadn't once or twice hopped on a bigger bus than her normal, but she always stood, and it would be a half hour ride to Sahara Square. Besides, she didn't want to force Simon to stand around a bunch of tigers and lions his first night in Zootopia. "Maybe on the way back when it's not just after rush hour."
"I still don't see why we can't take a car." He had his phone out. "My app says one can be here in six minutes."
"There's the bus." Judy pointed.
She'd wanted to show him the less appealing side of Zootopia, which was just as much Zootopia as the gleaming ZPD Precinct One or the Palm Hotel, but she hadn't expected him to wrinkle his nose and say, "Does it always smell like this?" while he was still putting his fare in next to the fox driver.
"Ah ha ha!" Judy dropped her fare in the box and smiled at the scowling driver, whose chipped fang showed over his lip. "He's new in town, so sorry," and then to Simon, "Come on, get back here and stop talking about how things smell."
"But—" He lowered his voice and then stumbled over a sheep's shopping bag. "Don't they wash it?"
There were two seats at the back. Judy headed for them. "We can talk about that over dinner."
"Fine." Simon followed her and sat in the seats, his nose still twitching. But he didn't say anything else, about the smell or about anything else, for the whole ride, not even when the bus passed the tiny metropolis of Little Rodentia or when the bus crossed into Sahara Square and waves of heat buffeted the windows.
Which was fine with Judy. She had a bet to win with Nick, and a really important case to impress a Zootopia Council member, not to mention Chief Bogo, so she leaned back, looked past Simon out the window, and thought about both the cases, just in case any insights came to her.
#
None had by the time the bus pulled into the main transit center at Sahara Square. Everyone stood, and Simon let Judy precede him off the bus out into the stifling heat. As the bus pulled away, Simon brushed his shirt as though the bus had shed on him. "We are definitely taking a private car ba—" Mid-sentence, he stopped and stared at the immense gold and green palm tree-shaped building revealed by the bus's departure. "Is…is that it?"
"Sure is." Judy savored the impression the hotel made on him. For sure, the Palm was impressive, but she also loved the fountains dancing in the water around it and the green park in the middle of this desert neighborhood. On the other side of the Palm was the Sahara Square beach, which she'd heard a lot about but never visited.
And all around the main square were desert-style buildings, taupe and tan adobe style, most with open rooftops and patios, many with solar panels—the constant sunlight made Sahara Square one of the most energy-efficient neighborhoods in Zootopia, and they sold power to Tundratown and Savannah Square.
The architecture was nice, but Judy wasn't a fan of the heat. The mammals of Sahara Square liked to keep things toasty, which was fine for them, but whenever she had to come here, she ducked into air conditioning as soon as possible. So she grabbed Simon's paw and dragged him to the crossing that led to the underground tunnel to the Palm.
Even the tunnel made him gasp. The rolling lights, the animated ads for the various places in the Palm, the three separate walkways for mammals of various sizes at approximate head height rather than all three on the ground, the different desert flower smells misted into the tunnel in different sections (with Marty Kat, the Palm Tree's meerkat mascot, asking in every section if you could identify which flower this was).
"This is amazing," Simon said as they stepped onto the escalator up to the Palm lobby. "It's so extravagant."
That last word died on his lips as the grand lobby came into view above his head. Even to an elephant, the roof would have been high up; to Judy and Simon it appeared as lofty as a cathedral. Each of the support columns, carved to look like a palm tree, met the domed ceiling in a cluster of fronds—not painted, but actually carved, with lights hidden behind them to give you the impression of standing at an oasis with the trees bending together to provide some shade overhead.
They stepped off the escalator onto blue marble, where Simon looked around at the sand bars that held the concierge's desk, the reception desk, and the entrances to a bank of elevators. Judy pulled him toward that last one, the leftmost of which read Two Fronds.
In front of the elevator, a slender meerkat in glasses looked up from the "Medium Guests" desk and appraised them. "Reservation?" she asked.
Simon looked to Judy, so she responded. "No reservation."
"It'll be a forty-five minute wait," the meerkat said.
"What?" Simon gaped.
Judy pulled him back and whispered, "That's actually really good for here. Just put our name in and we can walk around. There's plenty to do."
So Simon put their names in and the meerkat asked if they wanted to come back or wait up at the top. Again, Simon looked to Judy, and she said, "Let's go up. We can walk around the observation deck, and if something opens earlier, we'll be there."
When they emerged onto the 77th floor, Judy stepped out of the elevator and into what seemed to be the only clear space on the deck. The floor-to-ceiling windows all around were jammed with people staring out at the sunset over Savanna Square, up at the snowscapes of Tundratown, or out at the beach and the sea beyond. South toward the Grasslands, fewer people were interested, but they still had to squeeze in between a pair of yaks, and Simon did keep his mouth shut about the smell but shot Judy a look.
"Where's Bunnyburrow?" he asked as they got up to the glass. "Can we see it from here?"
"Soooort of." Judy pressed her left ear to the glass, looking all the way to the right. "You see the two peaks over there, the Onci Mountains?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, just down and a little to the right, you can see the ears of the train station." Simon squinted and didn't say anything. "They're really tiny, tinier than mice."
"Hey!"
She looked down to see a mouse and her family looking indignantly up. "I didn't mean anything by it," Judy said. "They're just really small."
"Hmph." The mouse lowered her voice to talk to her children, but Judy caught a few words, something like, "Don't let anyone tell you you're insignificant because you're small."
She wanted to protest that she hadn't said that, but she knew from experience that it wouldn't be worth having that conversation. So she tried another landmark with Simon. "Okay, look down, you see where the railroad bridge is? Not the first one here, but the one farther away?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, follow that toward the mountains…see right there?"
He sighed. "I don't think I see it."
"It's there." Judy grinned. "Trust me."
"Oh, I do! You haven't steered me wrong yet. Except for the bus."
"Let's go over to the other side." The crowds seemed to be thinning a little. "There's a better view from over there."
From the southeast side of the tower, Simon finally spotted the Bunnyburrow station. While he was marveling that he could see it from here, Judy looked down at Savanna Square with its lofty skyscrapers and then automatically to the Grand Pangolin Arms, hidden behind the SpotCom building (which was why she couldn't see the Palm from her apartment window; also the window faced the other way). Nearer, the skyscrapers dwindled down to a darker part of town, no buildings higher than about five stories, only a few spots of bright glass amid the dark stone and old brick.
She'd been up here a few times, but had always focused on the bright, tall buildings of Savanna Square. Even in her cheap, tiny apartment, she was part of that town. The Palm might not rise outside her window, but the Tiger Media complex was, and every time she watched any of their programs, she liked looking out the window and knowing that that's where they were being made.
Now her attention turned to the small, dark neighborhood, literally in the shadow of Savanna Square as the sun neared the horizon. Mrs. Bandit wasn't the first resident of Happytown Judy had met (even if you didn't count Nick, who didn't live there anymore), and Happytown wasn't the only place where criminals banded together and citizens protected them. But there was something about it that seemed particularly sad to Judy—the raccoon filming her on the sidewalk didn't trust police, and nobody seemed to want to correct her. Precinct Four jumped at every opportunity to offload Happytown crimes onto her and Nick specifically.
"Hey." Simon pointed. "That's my hotel, I think."
Sure enough, the elegant twin spires of the Impalasy Suites glittered in the sunlight. "Yep," Judy said. "Are you on this side of it?"
Simon shook his head. "It faces west, but I got in too late to see the sunset last night." Through the buildings of Savanna Square the sun glowed orange, and the clouds around it shone rose and gold. "This makes up for it, though."
"Good." A thought came to Judy as she watched Simon's face alight with the glow of a Zootopia sunset. If his piece painted Zootopia in a favorable light, and showed that Judy loved it and belonged here, maybe her mom and dad would stop sending her Help Wanted ads from Bunnyburrow with every letter. They probably thought that writing, "You would be so good at this!" would make her feel better, but every time, all it did was remind her that they didn't think she could handle herself as a police officer. And that despite the commendations, despite the graduation speech, despite the fact that she and Nick had one of the best records in the ZPD when it came to incident reports (that first time her parents had met Nick hadn't gone well, but she pushed that out of her mind).
Here, standing next to her, was a way to get into her parents' minds. They read the Beacon regularly, they knew Simon's parents—if he made a favorable report, they'd be sure to read it. It might not change their minds all at once, but it couldn't hurt.
So she cleared her throat. "You know, there's a lot of great stuff about Zootopia. Over there, see the Tiger Media tower? J. Randolph Tiger, the owner, he's really passionate about charity. Tiger Media did a big expose a couple months ago on, ah," probably better not to mention the catnip problem, "you know, Zootopia citizens who are down on their luck and how the city steps up to take care of them. Really inspiring stuff. I'm proud to be a Zootopian."
Simon nodded, still staring out at the city. Judy knew how he felt. The immensity of Zootopia could be overwhelming when you'd lived your whole life in Bunnyburrow. "You know the Future Farmers of Zootopia?"
"Sure," he nodded. "I did that for a year."
"Ha ha." She pointed to herself. "I did two. Well, that building over there…see where the Rainforest District starts, there's that red brick building?"
"Just behind the ZPD headquarters?"
"Yeah! That's the FFZ headquarters. All those brochures we got—"
"The one with that buffalo on them, what was his name?"
"Carter Herdson." Judy and one of her friends had called the officious-looking buffalo "cart the dirt, son," because that's what it looked like he was saying in all his pictures. "I think he's retired now, but yeah, he used to work there, and all that stuff we got is made there."
"Huh." He grinned back at her. "My parents wanted me to be a carrot farmer, but I never wanted to just stay in one place and literally watch plants grow. I wanted to be going out and finding out stories, giving people answers, helping people understand the world."
"Making it a better place?"
"Sure, yeah, of course." He bobbed his head. "Isn't that what all of us should be doing?"
Maybe she'd underestimated Simon. "I mean, that's what I think," she said. "My parents think you can make the world a better place by growing a couple more bushels of carrots."
"There's more to the world than carrots," Simon said.
"Do not let my parents hear you say that."
They both laughed, and it was at that moment that Simon's phone buzzed with a note that their table was ready. Judy took one last look out at the dark patch of Happytown and then walked with Simon down to their restaurant.
#
The Two Fronds, the less expensive of the Palm's restaurants, filled the entire 75th floor. Tables stretched from window to window, and above the lower floor, a balcony curved halfway around the wall, leaving the other half open for some fantastic two-story windows that looked out onto central Zootopia. Palm green tablecloths covered each table, oblong with a frond pattern hanging down on two of the sides, and the carpet had a matching green pattern of two crossed palm fronds with gold-bronze piping between them. The silverware and candleholders matched the warm bronze in the carpet and in the delicate lattice overhead that supported the numerous warm lights.
It would have been nice and intimate except that the tables had been pushed close together. As the host led Judy and Simon to the Medium section, they kept brushing other people's chairs and almost stepping on tails; there was nowhere else to walk on the floor. Simon kept staring nervously at the floor until Judy pointed him to what she'd thought was a stage. There, a hundred or so tables filled with mice and other small mammals were served by elegantly dressed mouse waiters. The other bunny looked relieved at that. "I thought they might be under the other tables," he whispered back to Judy as they came to their table.
They'd been seated in the middle of the floor, right next to the Large Mammals. At the very next table, a pair of rhinos loomed over them. Judy, who worked with rhinos and elephants every day, paid them no mind, but she did notice that Simon kept glancing up. "Don't worry," she said. "Every mammal in Zootopia is very aware of others. We live and work with mammals of all sizes."
"Oh," Simon said. "Are there mice in the police department?"
"Well, er." Judy paused. "Technically there are no mouse police officers. But we do work with some mice in Little Rodentia to keep us informed of situations there."
"Ohhh." Simon leaned in and whispered. "You mean like informants."
"Kind of."
Then the waiter came over to take their order, and they both ordered the carrot ginger soup to start. Judy got the harvest medley entrée, and Simon opted for the more exotic goulash. She let him order a wine, because she rarely had wine and he seemed to want to find out more about it.
Nick drank wine sometimes, she knew, but never on the job, and very rarely when the two of them spent time together outside the station. She'd never asked his tastes because she'd never developed a taste for wine herself, but now she wished she had. He would definitely give her a good option, even if it were delivered with a little comment about how foxes have superior senses of smell and taste.
The waiter did handle Simon's request smoothly. Of course it made sense they would be trained to deal with people who didn't know a lot about wine or gourmet food. Looking up at the rhinos, Judy noticed the way they both stared raptly out the windows, pointing things out to each other. Then there were the wrinkles in one's blouse, the way her skirt and the other's dress both had small stains here and there and tears at the hem. Probably they were here for a special night out. As opposed to the pair of meerkats behind Simon, dressed in neatly pressed suits and barely looking at the windows at all. This was just another evening for them.
Simon looked out the windows from time to time, but mostly kept his attention on Judy. She asked him how things were in Bunnyburrow and he told her the gossip about a few people she remembered and many more she pretended to remember. The soup was excellent, as were the entrees, though they left Judy too full for dessert. Simon ordered a carrot cake, though, and insisted she try a bite. Here, she thought, the Two Fronds fell a little short. The carrot cake was fancy, but she liked the plain one from her favorite bakery better.
Coffee came after, and here Judy had to admit the coffee was better than the coffee Clawhauser made every morning. She could actually sip it, not gulp it down and then eat a bite of donut to cut the sweetness (Clawhauser loved the sugary syrupy coffee flavors and nobody else could work the machine, so they got Tundratown Toffee and Savanna Cinnamon Sugar and his favorite, Gazelle Dark Chocolate Caramel, which Nick flatly refused to drink and got coffee from Shalia the armadillo's cart a block outside the station, but Judy had seen the number of times Shalia had been written up for health code violations).
Guilt plucked at her when Simon put his card down for the bill, but she let it go. She was helping him with his story, she told herself. Heck, she was his story, when it came to that. She tried not to look at the bill but couldn't help it, and sucked in her breath when she saw it was more than she usually spent on food in a week.
Soon enough they were standing at the bus stop talking about their favorite parts of the meal, where Simon confessed to her how embarrassed he'd been while ordering the wine and Judy told him she hadn't noticed. The bus seemed to arrive in no time, and then Judy enjoyed pointing out the sights of Zootopia at night to Simon, both of them trying to ignore the smell of the drunk platypus at the back of the bus.
("Can't you arrest him?" Simon whispered.
"For what?" Judy whispered back, and he didn't answer.)
When they got to Judy's stop, she stood up. "See you tomorrow," she said.
Simon stood with her, and she thought he was just going to say goodbye, but he followed her to the door. "Uh," she said, "what are you doing?"
He smiled, a different kind of smile than she'd seen on him up to that point. "We're having a lot of fun, right?"
"Sure…" Judy leaned away from him. The bus pulled to a halt.
"So…I mean, want to keep the conversation going?"
It might've been the bus jerking to a stop or it might've been something else, but he swung toward her. She put out a paw to his shoulder, stopping his momentum abruptly. "I have to get up early to work tomorrow," she said. "And you have to get up early to ride along with me. So I'm going to get some sleep. See you tomorrow."
She hopped down out of the bus and walked quickly away. He might hop down and follow her, and then—and then she'd have to think of something else. But her backwards-perked ears caught nothing but the hiss of the bus's door closing and then the grind of the engine as the bus pulled away. When it was gone, the street behind her remained silent.
She exhaled and hurried to her apartment building. The Oryx-Antlersons were home and bickering as usual; the familiar noise settled her as she sat down to check her email. She couldn't focus on it, though, cursing herself for being so vague with Simon. He was going to think that if they went to dinner on a night when she didn't have to get up early, something might happen. She should've said, "Let's keep this professional"—no, then he would ask her out after the assignment. A firm, "I'm not interested in you that way," would have been best, but…they'd been having such a nice time, and besides, besides, what if she rejected him and then he got mad and wrote something bad in the profile?
Her paw had gone to the MuzzleTime icon, but no, he knew her parents, so she couldn't really talk to them about it. Nick, then.
But he wasn't answering his phone, as he often didn't this late at night. She'd have to invent some excuse to get time alone with him in the morning to tell him about Simon. He'd be—he'd probably be unsurprised, and he'd give her that Nick smile and tell her he knew the guy was trouble as soon as he saw him.
With that thought bringing a smile to her lips, she got back to her emails.