I do not own Zootopia, that belongs to Disney. This a fan work made solely for the sake of amusement.

"Let It Go, It's Happytown"

Chapter Seven: Double Down

By: Gabriel LaVedier

"Mlle. LaBelle, I respect your desire to be an investigator but there are professionals looking into this," Sherlock said, his arms crossed over his chest. He was standing just inside Hermione's meager room, the little cracker box apartment larger than her needs but so basic it was still affordable.

It was a single, modest square, a ceiling tall enough to allow Sherlock to stand up in it, giving amazing headroom for Hermione herself. He would have had a time sleeping there, being about the size of the room, if not a little shorter. But there were furnishings there taking up more space. A bed sized for her, little more than the box and a thin mattress covered in rather fancy sheets that had seen better days, embroidered and decorated with lace, likely inherited from her family and from the old country. A small pawn shop refrigerator was in one corner, with a microwave set on top of it, her kitchen completed with a low metal sink and tap, along with a hot plate with the cord wrapped around it for the time being.

The rest of it was decorated in early pawn shop, a battered chest of draws with dull and dingy hardware, a low desk with a leg propped up with a thickly folded paper bag, a few low wooden stools scattered around, and one bit of vanity, a full-length mirror. The glass was still whole, the wooden frame was polished and the whole thing was the best looking item in the room.

"Tch, professionals," Hermione scoffed. She had one paw up on one of the stools, settled in front of the mirror. "What good are they? Those cavies were professionals too, we had to do their job for them." Her fingers smoothed her fur, pads on her fingers gently brushing her pelt down, from the middle of her thigh all the way down to her paw. She smoothed the fur of the top of her paw, flicking quickly over each toe, giving a little wiggle to examine her filed-down toe-claws. "I trust few of these outsiders. This Bogo we hear of, C. Wulfberg, M. Seedsworth. We may only trust ourselves." She picked up a fishnet stocking from the stool, already rolled up to the black-mesh-covered toe portion. She slid her paw into the little netted nylon tube and used both thumbs and her fingers to keep the thing stretched out as she drew it up, doing her best to keep it from dragging her silken fur up. She finally released it, elastic lightly slapping against her thigh. She reached under her dress hem and carefully clipped small clasps onto the edge for extra security. "The ZFD mean nothing. If I will be a detective, I will detect, and that is the reality of it, monsieur."

Sherlock looked on with an impassive gaze, his eyes tastefully focused on her face in the mirror, a slow nod following. "I understand that, Mlle. LaBelle. I understand well that drive. But even if we have permission to investigate there are others who can. I think we owe it to the name of peace to give these outsiders a chance to do the job they trained to do."

"I thought better of you, M. Gyag," Hermione said, placing her other paw up on the stool slightly tilted, her dainty pawpads visible in the mirror. She smoothed her fur once more, wiggling the plumped but comparatively dainty toes afterward, letting them more easily fit into the tight black mesh portion of the other fishnet stocking. She gave the largest pad of her paw a soft rub with her thumbs, checking the smoothness of the plump black surface before pulling the stocking slowly up once again. "I... I still think well of you, of course. But I thought you were here for Happytown. You have our interests at heart." She clipped the stocking in place and sighed. "How can I trust? The hate is so real, monsieur. I must always remember the cavies and how they failed."

"They failed," Sherlock said, with extra emphasis on the pronoun. "Not strangers. Not a faceless collective. Not agents of an oppressive state executing a plan. Not any number of things. They. Those cavies. Mlle. LaBelle I thought better of you. Far, far better. I chose you out of any other in this place because I thought you were intelligent, filled with raw talent that could be molded into a perfectly sensible detective. But you have to understand that life is made of single individuals. Vast forces may move in waves but at the bottom of each there are those directing and those following orders. As my venerable master would always say, we think of the crushing snowbank but the wise sage knows it is made of tiny flakes of snow. Blame the larger group if you must, but it was those little flakes of snow that chilled your long spine, and only them."

Hermione was silent for a long while, clipping her second stocking onto her garter belt. "Your tongue is sharp today, monsieur. Sharp as your mind. Please do not misunderstand. I appreciate you giving me this job. This opportunity to become what I knew I could become. I cannot express my gratitude. But I see these things clear as you see the things you see. I cannot always prove them and that is a weakness I accept I have. I am not yet your equal, and I suspect that may be impossible. I doubt any could be..."

"Lift yourself from that thought. We are all equal. You say it yourself, we are all wretches here," Sherlock said. "This is a mundane thing. You will learn to refine your gaze. You will see as finely as I do. And someday I will learn to see as far as you."

"Far... in darkness," Hermione sighed. "Monsieur, you see as well. Better than others. Tell me you know. You must know. Hope is a luxury we so seldom may pay for." She settled her right paw in one of her high heels, squishing her soft toepads against the base at the front and bending, the fat main pad settling securely against the shoe. She pulled the straps into place, getting them comfortably snug, pushing the metal piece through the well-worn hole. Strap by strap she got the article secured for the day.

"Hope is not a luxury. It cannot be. It is a thing that belongs to every mammal. Mademoiselle... I know you think you know what you know because you live here and have long enough to know it. I come from a place far away and lived in it long enough to know things about the world. We had no real hate in that place, everyone had a hate for everyone else but no government told them to. But we had poverty. My family was poor. I lived in austerity, intentionally. We all had little, but we still could afford hope. It is what brought us here to Zootopia. Even with hate that sent us here to Happytown, we had hope. I still hold hope. It is no luxury, it is only what all need and all hold. Even you. If you did not I would find a morning where you did not come into work. You would be gone. You would be gone and I would be without you, if you had no hope. Am I without you, Mademoiselle LaBelle?"

Hermione was silent, moving methodically, mechanically adjusting the artful straps, crossing them properly, manipulating the small metal bits to hook them through the holes. It was a robotic act. Her deft musteline digits worked the material to make it all look just right, being more fastidious than usual. "Sharp. Sharp as a blade. Mind and tongue. Non, monsieur. You will not find me missing from your door when I must work. I am but a poor immigrant. So are you. We are equal. I have hope, as you say. But some days it is..."

"Dark," Sherlock said along with her. "Yes. We live in the shadow of the looming city, with their cold eyes looking down. But there is still a sun shining beyond. In the swirling snow storm, in the shrouding icy mist and coldness there was still the sun, still shining as bright as ever. Dark as it may be, we know the light is there. Let us continue to remember."

"You are not for this place," Hermione said, planting her properly shod paws on the ground, standing straight and tall, even on the tiny spikes of her heels. "You are far better, monsieur. You do not belong here."

"We both were not born here, but this is still my home. Is it yours?" Sherlock asked. "You don't have to answer. I know you, deep into the core. I know every bit, and the answer is plain. If you will investigate, let me go with you a pace."

"I can stand on my own two paws, M. Gyag," Hermione said, with her snout raised higher than necessary. "But... it would be unkind to refuse a polite and sincere offer. I hope my absence from the office will not affect the workday too harshly."

"You're not actually a secretary, you're an understudy, by your own words," Sherlock said, closing the door after Hermione walked out of the room. "Eventually I will have to learn to be without you for a sustained period of time. You will walk the same path that I do, investigating."

Hermione laughed, her heels clicking along the hard floor of her apartment building, holding the door open for Sherlock to let him out onto the street. "I cannot wait. It will be a glorious day when I transform this provisional license of mine into a proper one. But of course, that will only be a formality. It will mean nothing until you tell me I have learned it all."

"No one ever learns it all. But you can, Mlle. LaBelle, learn enough. I only know enough, surely not as much as my venerable master. But it suffices. I do not lament what I do not know, but I treasure all the things I know. That makes it possible to keep moving forward," Sherlock said, taking his usual calm strides as Hermione clicked her way rapidly beside him.

"Enough to satisfy you, then. That will more than move the city authorities," Hermione asserted, deftly leaping over the familiar cracks and uneven spaces on the sidewalk leading from her home. She clipped along with a confident self-assurance that in any less skillful mammal would have looked like rank arrogance. Her carriage and demeanor showed her to be only doing what was proper for her.

"I have every confidence in you, and I do not give that lightly. I have no idea what you might find after the fire mammals have been through. Still, you have skills at searching out the tiniest clue. Use them well," Sherlock said, turning off down the road toward the office.

"Perhaps if I had your magic glass, but I will do all I can," Hermione chuckled. She opened up the clutch she had been carrying under her arm and pulled out her own magnifying glass, a cheap little job she had bought at the pawn shop and had put on a chain. She slipped it over her head and let it swing freely in front of her, occasionally highlighting her orange and cream striped retailored mustelid dress.

She continued to walk a rather scenic route to the burned-out building. Other Zootopians mocked the idea of Happytown as a scenic place. But she had seen it as her home. While it was true that a native will become inured to their own home's loveliness, it never goes away. She had always known it to her hers. Even if her family was not from it, she felt as native as any other. The peeling and faded fliers for bands, clubs and movies each had a unique charm that changed as the seasons weathered them, and they vanished slowly, a testament to time. They had their own fertility in the heart of a supposedly sterile city. Trees had taken root ages ago, been integrated into some designs. Hardy weeds shot up though the smallest crack, tufts of grass clawed the sidewalk apart with desperate green fingers. Life surged where it had the tiniest chance, reaching for a sun the Happytowners sometimes forgot, but which nature always recognized.

She casually reached down to carefully pluck the offshoot of a hairy, almost but not quite prickly, tall weed. The distinctly strange leaves with their many points looked dangerous but they were harmless, and merely covered in a light fuzz. The small flowers on most of the weed were slightly in bloom, but she had plucked off part that had the downy heads of the seeds showing. She lightly squeezed below the head and blew casually, sending the puffy mass out, disintegrating into hundreds of little specks, held aloft by the wind. She wished them well, to find the next crack or bare patch and bring forth life once more.

Sherlock had told her once that his old home was truly sterile, very little able to truly grow, especially at the higher altitudes. All life to them was precious. It all had a place and all had a right if it could be preserved. He never looked on weeds the way others did. Happytowners ignored them, Zootopians in general shrugged at them, apparently Meadowlanders had some kind of genocidal war against them. Sherlocked loved them. They were plants. They had flowers. No matter what, they were life. She had to admit, as much as she had thought of them as unpleasant before, they were life, and that was beautiful.

What wasn't beautiful was what she found at the end of her walk. The building that had been burned looked like a horrifying corpse, gutted and raw. The whole face of it was scorched, and almost a hole, like a gaping wound, was caved into the front from the firefighters and the fire. The tape was still up and the area was clear of the usual loiterers that usually clustered on the various streets of Happytown. It was an impressive change considering there were no police officers or fire officials guarding the cordoned off area.

She dug through her clutch again and pulled out her wallet with her provisional license and ID, to quickly provide her justification for being beyond the tape. She ducked under it and eyed the damage up close. The firemammals had hacked open the entrance to the narrow, tall building, some scorching around the opening showing they had done it while the fire was still raging out of control.

Her nose wiggled lightly as she sniffed over the edges of the door while she passed. The smell of char, diminished by water but still present. No accelerant, not even a tiny trace that she could tell. The fire had reached the doorway by taking advantage of the fact that many Happytown buildings, particularly the abandoned ones, often degraded through neglect and thoughtless ruin into deadly firetraps. It made a fire an excellent way to make anything look like an accident.

The interior had been gutted by the fire and most of the debris largely washed away by the water. There was a lot of cheap material. The threadbare carpet that had doubtless been in there was gone, the wood beneath showing through to the basement area where the game itself was being arranged. The crossbeams were scorched but still secure, about the only quality thing in the building, likely because collapse couldn't be ignored and so keeping the building standing was the bare minimum, and of utmost importance.

All buildings like that had extensive basements, which was why the abandoned versions were popular with purveyors of vice or other folk that needed a place to be out of sight and surrounded by sturdy walls of rock and concrete. The path to it was also made of concrete, going down into the basement via stairs. Though still slightly wet she made it down, her heels not hindering her a bit.

She reached into her clutch again to pull out a small but powerful flashlight. The space was a standard square, reeking of scorched flesh and the last lingering traces of smoke. The last traces of furnishings and decorations were scattered haphazardly by the action of water and gathering up the dead.

Her flashlight slowly swept across the scene. She wasn't studied in the ways of fire but could see where the fire started, she had to assume. Dim light filtered down from the ruined ceiling, highlighting the huge scorch mark in the middle of the floor. That area had been swept clear by the water, making her turn her attention away to light up the shattered chairs and table debris.

The sound of steps on the stairs made her ears twitch, and she turned her head to try and resolve the small patch of shadowed form that was there. "I have my Identification, I am..." Her words halted when the figure wordlessly went back up the stairs. She moved her light over to them as though trying to catch the figure once more. The sound was heavy, with sharp clicks of shoes like hers or hooves like Sherlock's. "Wait, I am..." The light from above was interrupted by a shadowed form, something with horns, or possibly antlers, a thing which moved when she looked up.

"Arrêt! Come back here!" Hermione practically flew up the stairs, clacking her way up with minimal tottering and quickly hanging a turn out the busted entrance. She practically ran face-first into a police antelope after casting her gaze down the street to one side, who held her arms once she had impacted him. "What is this? Why did you run?"

"I could ask you the same thing," the buck snorted. "This is a marked area, what are you doing here?"

Hermione struggled just enough to get an ungainly grip on her wallet, opening it and showing the provisional license and her ID. "Hermione LaBelle, I am authorized to investigate this scene. Call your precinct, I'm sure someone will get to Chief Bogo or Councilor Seedsworth eventually."

"Big names and big talk..." The officer clicked his shoulder radio. "Precinct one, this is Officer Stotterson. I have a white... weasel..."

"Hermine," Hermione corrected, with proud indignation.

"Ermine, says she's investiga-"

"Oh! She's there? Good, the chief was hoping someone was investigating."

"Hermione... LaBelle it says on the ID and the license. So this is a thing?" Officer Stotterson asked.

"Fully authorized by the chief. She's working for Sherlock Gyag, he owns the detective agency they've contracted with. Why?"

"She just ran out of the building and into me. Asking why I ran when I was just arriving."

"Someone had been coming down while I was in the basement, and looked down on me. Someone with antlers, but not... not like yours..." Hermione realized.

"I can't explain that, but then again, I came around the corner and someone could have made their way out. I heard a lot of clicking but I'm guessing those shoes made some of the noise," the officer said, clicking his radio. "False alarm. Stotterson out."

"Strange..." Hermione said, looking out over the empty street. "I think... there is more smoke to this fire than we expected."

o o o

Sherlock had to consider how different his life had become. He had always seen and accepted himself as a small fish in a small pond, swallowed up inside a large aquarium. He was a middling nobody plodding along his path, helping his home with his skill at detecting. All he ever wanted was to be a fair and righteous individual, like his master.

Suddenly, with one gift from a mammal he had merely treated with due respect, he had been thrust into strange new heights, beyond the dizzying altitude of the sacred mother. He was hobnobbing with police elite and major elected officials. His detective skills were being used as ammunition in a war between those who care and those who wanted to ignore Happytown.

One murder that would not be contained busted the rotten rind of hateful degradation wide open. The putrid flesh was exposed for all to experience, stinking up the city in a way the powerful wanted to keep at bay. Tongues were wagging and eyes were being drawn into Happytown. His home would have notice, and help. Once they could not be ignored, they would be tended.

That first case, however, would have to be put on a shelf, in a way. There were more bodies, more active attention, and much bigger folks actively interested in the resolution. Given the nature of the deaths, however, there was an undeniable connection, in Sherlock's mind. The method was too exact to be a coincidence, the whole thing designed to look like something that could be lost in Happytown. Suicide, fire danger or the brutality of a gang burning out an uncooperative vice-seller that refused to pay their fees.

A clever criminal was more dangerous than rampaging hordes of violent gangsters. Those were a known element. They were hardly subtle and often blatantly displayed their allegiances. Only the requirement for proof in a court of law stopped them from being rounded up and incarcerated. Witnesses were intimidated by them, evidence could be obfuscated by many hands and active interference. But a single clever perpetrator could be a ghost. A serial killer left no witnesses or generated none in the first place. They were methodical, purposeful and directed. The shield of chaos was good, but the pinpoint nature of focus, the difficulty of picking out one individual and gathering the evidence against them, was even better. Gangs absorbed loss by numbers, the single criminal simply avoided ever being on police radar.

The difficulty was not lost on Sherlock. His task was great, but he knew he could rely on a grimly gruesome inverse of how the gangs defended themselves. The more bodies that piled up, the more potential for mistakes existed. Each body had a set possibility for mistakes. Like flipping a coin, the odds never change from fifty-fifty, but that meant that each one could come up or fail in equal measure. The more times the unknown agent killed the more times he could make a mistake. He already had, arranging the 'suicide' improperly. The discovery in the burning building had been a fluke. No one was meant to look too closely. Sherlock had looked.

It was his home under attack, he would look and never stop looking. He had come to accept that it was a dangerous game he was playing. He had never actually considered his occupation dangerous. PI was to Happytown as police officer was to the rest of Zootopia, a thing that was necessary to public order, such as it was in the denigrated location. There was some risk but always mitigated by the tense truce that existed between various elements. Crimes could be handled, and were, even between gangs. Too many random murders would bring the attention neither side wanted. Strange as it seemed, inter-gang arbitration was a reality and PIs were the ones that mediated.

Vicemongers like Fleabite were semi-respectable citizens. Much as his own experience with excess and addiction had paled him on such folk, Sherlock had to take the pragmatic view that sometimes there was no perfect solution. His venerable master had disabused him of that notion very early, leaving him able to understand that folk will pay for what they will pay for. And if they served the community without actually parasitizing it, like the worst of the gangs did, then they were respectable, in some sense.

He had known of other floating games like his, though never as big. Mostly they paid protection money to the gangs in whose territory they operated and did what they could where and when they could. He was aware that such gambling was illegal, and could have turned them over to outside authorities. But it was Happytown, and with no good legal options or real source of anything of substance to distract from the crushing environment, it was best to just let it go and mind where they were.

If one was taken out, others might be as well, for the same reason. Protection. Not offered through the gangs but always assumed. It wasn't just that PIs like him didn't turn them in. Sellers of vice had a strange untouchability, they always seemed to have some resources, though from what he had heard in passing not even they had any idea where it came from. They operated within limits and gave cuts to figures that demanded. They assumed it was gang-related, but were never really sure about that.

Fleabite had opted to go alone, and paid for it. It sent a message, but not one loud and clear enough. One of the competing games had decided to go in on his territory knowing his workers were dead and customers eager. As he had said, Sherlock knew very little in a general sense, but much about his own home. He knew where they were setting up, and had many questions for them. Their audacity likely meant they were arrogant enough to talk freely, even to someone tainted by the greater world. His walking a line between Happytown and Zootopia proper made things more questionable, but Sherlock never shied away from a challenge.

His intentions to question the new players vanished when he smelled the acrid stink of smoke and heard clopping steps echoing around the tight back of buildings. He rushed forward to barely catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure retreating around a corner from a building with smoke just rising from the door.

He didn't think about his decision, there wasn't time for it. Even if it was likely that they had already been smothered in plastic bags and left to burn for the crime of defying a mysterious someone he knew it was right to try and rescue them.

While for the longest time he had been resistant to use a cell phone, Hermione's influence had gotten him to buy a very old, out-of-date model, largely for the games she had put on it. He fought with the device for a short space, finally getting the emergency response line. "This is Sherlock Gyag, a contract employee for the ZPD! I'm entering a burning building, 220 Basil Street, to recover possibly living mammals within!"

"Mr. Gyag! Mr. Gyag! Please stay on the line and don't go into the building! Mr. Gyag? Are you there? Mr. Gyag?"

The tinny voice screeched on in Sherlock's inner pocket, unheeded, as he sucked in a huge breath and plunged into the smoke, bound for the basement.