Judy woke up to the sounds of hooves clicking against linoleum and the voices of two mammals, one quite a bit lower than the other. As they approached, she was able to identify one of the voices as Bellwether, but she couldn't identify the other mammal as anything other than male.

"—ridiculous," Bellwether was saying, "Arresting one of my agents?"

"An agent without a badge," the other voice countered dryly, "If we contacted the Bureau every time someone caught drinking said they were one of your agents we'd never get anything done."

As the two mammals spoke, they crossed into the field of view that Judy had from her cell. Bellwether looked much as she always did, wearing a plain gray dress that Judy had seen the ewe wearing a few times before. The mammal she was speaking to absolutely dwarfed both Bellwether and Judy; he was a powerfully built middle-aged buffalo, the dull blue serge of his police uniform straining at his massive shoulders. Judy had never seen him before, but from the brass decorations on his uniform and the fact that he was a buffalo, she knew that he had to Chief Bogo of Precinct One. "Ms. Hopps," he said, addressing Judy through the bars of her cell, "I apologize for the inconvenience. I assure you, I will look into this matter."

He gestured towards the door of the cell, and the cheetah who had been guarding the cells the previous night rushed forward, fumbling with the keys to the cells. Judy hadn't heard the click of his claws or the soft tread of his paws over the much louder noises of the two hooved mammals he had apparently been following, but she felt a surge of gratitude that Ben had apparently been true to his word, although she guessed that it had to be about five in the morning. She felt rather disheveled and more than a little embarrassed, but she was more relieved than anything else when the cheetah got the cell door unlocked and let her out. "The Bureau appreciates that, Chief Bogo," Bellwether replied and began walking away, gesturing for Judy to follow.

Judy didn't move from where she stood outside the cell, though, and looked up at Chief Bogo. "Why did two officers from Precinct One respond to the call?" she asked.

"Agent Hopps," Bellwether said, a note of warning in her voice.

"Tundra Town isn't in Precinct One," Judy continued, "The bartender must have called them directly rather than dialing the operator. Those officers knew that club served alcohol."

The police chief looked down at Judy, a small frown on his muzzle. "You're the bunny that applied to the police academy, aren't you?"

Judy was surprised that the chief knew about that, but she supposed that her application was unusual enough that it had been mentioned to him; after all, Precinct One was supposed to get the best of the best, so it only made sense that the chief would be in contact with the mammal that ran the academy. "Yes sir," she replied eagerly, "I've always wanted to be a police officer."

"And are you a police officer?" Bogo asked.

"No sir," Judy replied, her heart sinking as she realized the direction that the conversation was taking.

"Then leave the police work to the police," he said shortly, but after he turned to leave she couldn't help but speak up again.

"The officers who were first on the scene were paid off by the club owner. You have to know that, sir."

Bogo stopped and stood still, even as Bellwether was looking at Judy with more anger than the bunny had ever seen the ewe express. She didn't care, though. Perhaps Bellwether and Bogo were happy with a little song and dance to gloss over that a mammal had been murdered and the officers who would likely have responsibility for the matter were only interested in making it disappear as quickly as possible, but she wasn't. Carajou was almost certainly a murderer himself, and if even half the reports about him were true the city was better off with him dead. But no matter the victim, murder was murder and Judy refused to stand by and let the matter be ignored. "I was in that club when the murder happened. Let me investigate it," she said.

Bogo turned and looked down at her, his expression unreadable. "One week," he said, holding up a single massive finger.

"If you can solve the murder in one week I'll write a letter of recommendation to Captain Ruminante myself. If you can't, I'll still be writing a letter to Captain Ruminante."

Judy instantly grasped the implication. A letter of recommendation from the Precinct One Chief of Police would almost certainly get her a position in the academy, but if he wrote a letter recommending that she not be accepted then there would be no point in applying the next year. "I won't let you down, sir," Judy replied, drawing herself up to her full height.

The massive buffalo gave her a brusque nod, and then turned to the cheetah, who had been watching the proceedings with a look of amazement on his round face. "Officer Clawhauser, see them out."

For her part, Bellwether looked as though she had been stunned into silence, and none of the three spoke on the way to the door.

Once Bellwether and Judy were outside the police station, Judy opened her mouth to speak, not having wanted to say anything to her boss in front of the cheetah. Before she could get so much as a syllable out, Bellwether snapped "Not a word."

The ewe had a taxi waiting, a cheerful little brougham that was yellow below its beltline and black above. It was early enough in the morning that it was still fairly dark outside, and the taxi's electric headlights, oddly mounted on the cowl below the windshield, dimly lit the pre-dawn gloom. The driver, a slim young goat, tipped a hat as yellow as his taxi and opened the rear door closest to the curb as they approached.

Judy kept her mouth shut as the ewe ordered the taxi to the Bureau office and then opened up a newspaper and began reading it. From the corner of her eye, Judy could see that the headline was about a steelworker strike in Gaury; apparently the news of the murder in the Thief of the Night hadn't made the early edition as a front page article. The taxi ride was relatively short, and after Bellwether paid the driver Judy had followed her into the office.

"Agent Hopps," Bellwether said, finally breaking her silence as she folded up her newspaper, "That was rather embarrassing."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but I couldn't—" Judy began apologizing, but the sheep cut her off with the wave of one hoof.

"Not for you, Agent Hopps, although I'm sure it was. For the Bureau. For me. Let me make myself very clear," the ewe said, a tight and entirely fake looking smile on her face, "If you don't meet Bogo's deadline, you'll be finding a new job."

With that, the ewe turned and walked away from Judy's desk, entering her office and closing the door. Judy looked down at her desk in quiet horror, wondering what she had gotten herself into. Suddenly it wasn't just her dream job on the line; she was sure that Bellwether was absolutely serious when she had made her threat to fire her. If I fail—, she thought, before banishing it. I won't fail, she thought, because I can't. She would prove to everyone that she had what it took, and she thought about what she needed. It was clear to her, at least, that someone was targeting mammals who had some kind of connection to Mr. Big. There was Carajou and Koslov, both former associates of the shrew. Of the dozen other gang murders that had occurred recently, all had been rivals from the organizations that had sprung up to seize the vacuum left by the collapse of Mr. Big's Zootopia Outfit. There had been three mammals highly placed in the Black Paw who had been killed, and while none of them had ever worked for Mr. Big, so far as the records showed, they had been bitter rivals. Another four from the North Side Pride, one of whom had once been a low level extortionist for Mr. Big, had also died. The remaining five mammals had been from the various other gangs that had carved up the city, and the pattern was obvious. The mammal responsible must either be some former member of Mr. Big's gang, setting the path for the Zootopia Outfit to rise again by killing traitors and the organization's rivals, or someone who had an intimate knowledge of how the organization worked.

Suddenly, all the pieces fit together. What she needed, Judy realized, was someone with that same sort of intimate knowledge, someone who could name every rival and lieutenant and describe every grudge. Someone who could themselves not be involved in the recent wave of murders even if they were otherwise completely untrustworthy. Someone who would know things that even the police with all their informants wouldn't be able to learn.

Judy dug frantically through the files on her desk until she came across the report she was looking for. It was a blandly written account by one of her fellow agents of a perfunctory check conducted over the telephone with local law enforcement hundreds of miles away in Podunk for a mammal who had received government protection. There were only two items of any interest in the report itself: first, that the mammal had been a highly trusted accountant for Mr. Big who had given up his boss to escape prosecution himself, and second, the mammal's name.

Judy smiled to herself as she copied the name down onto a piece of paper. He was exactly the mammal she was looking for, someone who would know everything about the Zootopia Outfit that had never made it into an official report and could help her identify where to look. Judy stood up, taking the note with her. It's time, she thought, to pay Nicholas P. Wilde a visit.

Podunk didn't have so much as a single traffic light, let alone street signs, and the badly rutted dirt roads sprawled in all directions as they wove their way around the farms. It reminded Judy a bit of Bunnyburrows, although Podunk was both larger and seemed shabbier. The sheriff, an aging boar with a generous gut, had met her as she got off the train and had given her identification only a perfunctory check; prior to getting on the train in Zootopia she had called ahead to make arrangements. The sheriff had made small talk on the extremely short trip from the train station to his office, but once they were inside the cheerless, dusty office he finally got down to business. "You want this fox back in the city? Throw him in prison, maybe?" he asked, sounding hopeful.

Judy got the feeling that being sheriff of Podunk wasn't exactly a job that made many demands on his time; his desk was almost completely bare except for some rather well-worn playing cards set out in a game of Solitaire and an unlit gas lamp, and the single cell in the attached jail was empty. The sheriff's office was the single building on what could generously be called Podunk's main street that was built out of brick. The train station and the grain elevator looked fairly well-kept but the general store and the church both had badly peeling paint over warped clapboard siding. Still, the sheriff had agreed to let her borrow his car, a Furd Model T pickup truck even older and more battered than the one on her parents' farm, so Judy did her best to swallow her impatience and humor the old boar. "We'll see," she said noncommittally, "Bureau business, you know."

The sheriff scratched at the bristles on his chin and gave a nervous glance towards the bottom drawer of his desk. "Of course, of course. What did this Wilcox do, anyway? Why'd they stick him here?"

The government had had the foresight to create a new identity for Nicholas Wilde when he had been put in Podunk, and as far as the sheriff knew, the fox was named Nathaniel Wilcox. Judy realized that she probably knew more about Wilde than the sheriff did, although she herself knew precious little. The train ride from Zootopia to Podunk had taken almost six hours, and while she had spent all of them reviewing the material she had brought along in a briefcase, the Bureau's files were rather lacking about Wilde considering that the information he had provided had been vital to taking Mr. Big down.

From the thin file she had read, Judy knew that Wilde had been drafted in 1917 and served in the war, but there weren't any details about his service. He must have been a mediocre soldier at best, though, because he had received a general discharge for reasons not specified in the file in 1918 shortly after the armistice was signed. Wilde's file indicated that he had lived in Purris until 1920, though it had no details on what he had done for those two years, before returning to the country and Zootopia. Most frustrating of all, though, was that the entire period of time between his return to the city and when Wilde had turned on Mr. Big was summarized in a single sentence: Nicholas Wilde served as Alphonse Biggliani's top accountant. It was as though whoever had written the file was trying to make it as useless as possible; if that had been their goal they had done remarkably well. Judy supposed that at least part of it was that Wilde's new identity had been arranged by the Bureau of Investigation. They might have been reluctant to share details that were actually relevant with the Bureau of Prohibition even if they were quite happy to leave the tedious business of following up with local law enforcement to ensure that the fox wasn't getting in trouble to another Bureau.

"There's other predators in Podunk," Judy replied, choosing to ignore his first question, "I suppose they thought he'd blend in."

The sheriff snorted. "Too many of them already, you ask me. Sticks to their part of town, though."

Judy was eager to get the conversation over with. "Where's his house?"

"His house?" the sheriff replied, "Just go down Main Street and take a right at the dead oak tree what was struck by lightning in '09. Keep going 'til you're past the pred school—they got that Wilcox teaching math of all things, like a pred could understand it—and take a left at Johnson's barn. Can't miss it, the old fool painted it blue for some reason or t'other. Wilcox's place is on the right."

When Judy pulled off the road, her first thought was that crime really didn't pay. If nothing else, she could be sure that Wilde wasn't living the high life as part of his new identity; his home was a tar paper shack about the size of one of the woodsheds on her parents' farm. The ground around the shack was bare dirt, with weeds and a few feeble brown tufts of grass poking up here and there through cracks in the earth. In front of the shack, near a scratched and peeling door that hung crookedly, was a rough chair with a fox sitting in it, dressed in a pair of well-worn overalls with a straw hat pulled low over his face. At his side was a windup record player; the disc was spinning, but the record must have reached the end of its groove because the only sound it was making was a series of faint pops and hisses. Judy at first thought that the fox was asleep because he was leaning back and entirely still except for the occasional twitch of his tail, but when she crossed his little yard he sat up suddenly and addressed her. "Hey there, li'l bunneh," he drawled in about the thickest country accent she had ever heard, "That truck o' yers strand ya heah? Don' got no gas-o-line meself, but ah got some ker-o-sene that'll do ya fine, if'n ya need fuel. Got a jack, too, if'n you be needin' to change a tire."

"I'm here for Nicholas Wilde," Judy replied, not fooled at all by his little act as a country fox with its ridiculous parody of an accent.

Even if she hadn't been able to identify him from the photograph that had been in his file, the record album that sat next to his record player was titled Le Bœuf sur le toit in neatly embossed letters. The title was meaningless to her, but it didn't seem like the sort of thing that a simple country fox would listen to. The fox shook his head. "Ain't no one heah by that name, sorry t' say."

Judy pulled out her badge and showed it to him. "Agent Judy Hopps, Bureau of Prohibition. Care to try again?" she asked sweetly.

Judy couldn't put a finger on precisely what it was, but Wilde's entire appearance seemed to change. It could have just been that he sat up straighter, no longer lounging casually in his chair, but there also seemed to be something in his eyes that hadn't been there before, a sort of cunning gleam that had been entirely absent. Even though he was still dressed like someone's idea of a country bumpkin, it suddenly looked like a bad Halloween costume rather than who he was. "Well now," he said smoothly, with absolutely no trace of a country accent as he inspected her badge, "They really will let anyone be a Prohi, won't they?"

Judy ignored the jibe as she put the badge away. "Someone's murdering Mr. Big's former associates and his rivals. I need your help."

"You must be the low mammal on the totem pole," Wilde remarked as he stretched widely, "Who sent you out to a place like this?"

"That's not important. I need you to come back to Zootopia with me."

Wilde laughed, although it sounded rather insincere. "Not much of a joke, Agent Carrots."

Judy did her best to maintain control of the situation. "It's not a joke, and you won't call me that. Mammals are dying, Mr. Wilde. Innocent mammals are getting caught in the cross-fire."

Wilde leaned forward. "And I'll be one of them, if I go back to the city."

He inspected the claws on one paw casually, seeming to ignore her. "I didn't exactly leave on good terms, you know. I'd rather everyone keep thinking that I'm already dead."

Judy hadn't expected the fox to exactly jump at the opportunity to help, but it was appalling how self-centered and cowardly he was. "I just need your help for a week," she pleaded, "Just a week."

Wilde smiled thinly. "You can't make me."

"I—" Judy started.

"Find someone who cares," he cut her off.

With that, he stood up, stepping past her as he gathered up his record player and the album and walked into his shack. Before shutting the door behind himself, he added brightly, "Like the police. Or a real Prohibition Agent."

Judy sat in the cab of the battered old pickup truck, which smelled powerfully of the sheriff's body odor. She looked down at the steering wheel; she hadn't cranked the engine yet, and the truck was silent and still. It had taken her six hours to get out to Podunk, and she would lose another six on her way back to Zootopia. That was half a day right there, and she refused to return to the city with nothing to show for it. She squeezed the steering wheel tightly, trying to figure out how to get the hatefully smug fox to help, and suddenly inspiration struck.

Judy got out of the truck and walked past the crank without a thought. She marched up to Wilde's door and pounded on it, her firm knocks making the entire little shack shake. She had been knocking for at least a minute before Wilde opened the door, an expression of pure annoyance on his face. "What are you still doing here?" he asked.

"You're right," Judy admitted, "I can't force you to help me."

Wilde left his shack and got back into his chair. "Glad to hear you say it, Fluff," he said, sounding quite smug as he settled down, "Now hop along."

He made a little shooing motion that Judy ignored. "Mr. Big's rivals are being killed, you know," she said, "He might come after you next, seeing as how you betrayed him."

Judy thought that there was at least a chance that Mr. Big was orchestrating events from his cell, and she suspected that the fox was probably at least a little afraid of the shrew. If nothing else, she thought her words gave the impression that she knew much more than she actually did. "Well, it's a good thing that I've got the government to keep me safe," Wilde replied, crossing his legs casually.

Judy repressed a smile. He was already in her trap; he just didn't know it yet. "That's true," she said, "We do want to keep you safe, we really do. But that might not be possible here in Podunk."

He glanced up at her, and she seemed to finally have his full attention. "What do you mean by that?" he asked, and while his tone was carefully neutral Judy thought she saw a hint of something like worry in his eyes.

"You've been here, what, two years now? That's a long time. Long enough for rumors to start spreading. Why, if they got back to Zootopia I don't think the sheriff here could keep you safe."

Her words positively oozed false sincerity and Wilde frowned at her. "Is that a threat?"

"Certainly not!" Judy said, doing her best to appear appalled, "A real Prohibition Agent like me doesn't make threats. I think we could find something for you in a little mining town in the Appaloosas, though. You'll be working twelve hours a day, six days a week, breaking coal half a mile underground. It'll be backbreaking work and you'll probably forget what the sun looks like, but you'll be safe. That's what important, you know, that you stay safe, no matter what else happens."

"You can't do that," Wilde protested, but he no longer seemed quite as self-assured, his tail flicking back and forth in apparent agitation.

Judy put her paws on either arm of Wilde's chair and leaned in until their noses were only inches apart; with the fox sitting down they were more or less the same height. "I can," she said with absolute unblinking confidence, "And I will, if you make me."

"You're getting in the truck either way," she continued, "So what'll it be: a week in the city or the rest of your life in the mines?"

Wilde scowled at her, his ears flat against his head. "The city," he said grudgingly.

Judy clapped her paws together and gave him her own smug smile that she thought was at least the equal of his own. "You've got ten minutes to pack," she said.

Author's Notes: The title of this chapter, "Ain't She Sweet?" comes from a Milton Ager and Jack Yellen song first released in 1927 that quickly became a jazz standard. It's been covered by a large number of artists, including a pop version by the Beatles in 1969. In this chapter, I figure that the title applies equally well to both Bellwether and Judy, although obviously somewhat sarcastically in both cases.

911 only became the emergency phone number in the US in 1968. In the 1920s, people would have had to request that the telephone operator connect them with the police, and Judy is quite right that it doesn't make sense for police from a different precinct to show up; an operator would have connected the call to the police station closest to the emergency. 1927 is also too early for police cars to be equipped with radios; squad cars in the US didn't start to be equipped with two-way radios until the 1930s, and police cars with radio receivers (thus being able to receive radio communication but not respond) debuted in 1928.

The taxi that Bellwether and Judy take is based on a Yellow Cab Model A-2; in the 1920s the Yellow Cab Company was essentially fully integrated in the sense that they manufactured their own cars for use as taxis. A brougham is a style of car that is no longer made; the passenger compartment is completely enclosed and separated from the driver's compartment, which is not fully enclosed. In the case of the A-2, the driver's compartment did not have side windows.

Gaury is a pun on the gaur, the world's largest species of wild cattle, and Gary, a city in Indiana that was a massive player in the US steel industry in the 1920s.

A commenter, who commented only as a guest, correctly guessed that in this story Nick would have served in WWI. As in the movie, he's 32, which means he was born in 1895 and was 22 in 1917, right in the age range that American soldiers were pulled from. As to how he served, well, I'm not going to give any spoilers. As to how he left the service, general discharges do exist. In between honorable and dishonorable discharges from the military, there are also general discharges, which are typically given for medical reasons or misconduct when it doesn't warrant a dishonorable discharge. A general discharge also disqualifies a veteran from certain benefits and definitely does not help when the veteran tries to find a civilian job; nowadays people who receive a general discharge have to sign an acknowledgement that they may experience prejudice in civilian life. I suppose it does say something about Judy, though, that her immediate thought is misconduct rather than a medical reason. Purris is a pun on Paris, and there were a fair number of American service members who remained in France after WWI ended.

The Bureau of Investigation, the BOI, was founded in 1908 and would eventually become the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, in 1935. In 1933, the Bureau of Prohibition was rolled into the BOI, which was renamed the Division of Investigation. As such, the departmental squabbling that seems to keep the BOI from sharing information with the Bureau of Prohibition is not too far off from being completely pointless.

I imagine that Mr. Big's name isn't actually Mr. Big; Alphonse Biggliani is something of a nod to Al Capone, the notorious Chicago gangster. The description of this story indicates that Nick was put into the Witness Protection Program, which isn't quite accurate but was the best I could do to meet the character limit for story descriptions on FF. The modern US Witness Protection Program didn't start until 1970, long after this story is set. However, as far back as 1871, the US government did provide specific protection for witnesses, and in the early 20th century the BOI did occasionally create new identities to protect witnesses. In this story, it can be assumed that Nick was able to cut a deal to give up Mr. Big in exchange for a new identity.

Podunk in this chapter is a literal Podunk town in this case, and is true to many rural communities in the US in the 1920s. In 1927, not even 5% of all farms in the US had electricity, which makes Podunk completely typical. The description of Nick's home as a tar paper shack is accurate to what a lot of poorer people would have lived in during the time period; considering that he doesn't own any land and would have been forced to leave behind his illicit earnings, it's probably the best that he could get.

Le Bœuf sur le toit is a French avant-garde surrealist ballet that premiered in 1920. The English title for the piece is The Ox on the Roof: the Nothing-Doing Bar. France, like the US, had a thriving music scene in the 1920s, and the piece gave its name to a cabaret that opened in 1921 and became the best-known French jazz club. Record albums of the 1920s weren't the same as later record albums; early record albums were bound like books, hence why the title is embossed into the cover. As described, Podunk isn't the sort of town that would have a record store, and even if it did, there's really no way that it would carry a song like Le Bœuf sur le toit.

Although by modern standards the Ford Model T is severely underpowered, making only 20 horsepower, the engine was solidly designed with the low quality fuels of the era in mind. Unlike a modern car, the Model T can run on gasoline, kerosene, or even pure ethanol without modification, although obviously during Prohibition it'd be rare for someone to use ethanol. Still, it does mean that Nick's offer of kerosene is a fuel that the truck could use. The Model T was in continuous production from 1908 to 1927; production stopped on May 26, shortly before this story starts. Although Ford did also sell the Model TT, a heavier duty version of the Model T made from 1917 onwards, it was also quite common for owners of the Model T to customize the car to suit their needs. Conversions to trucks and tractors were quite common, and wrecked Model Ts were frequently scavenged for spare parts or had the motor salvaged for use in a stationary installation. Thus, it's entirely possible that the sheriff's truck could be almost 20 years old in 1927. Model Ts only started offering electric starters in 1919, so the truck is at least 8 years old considering that it required manual cranking to start.

"Prohi" was 1920s slang for a Prohibition Agent. The Appaloosas is a pun on the breed of horse and the Appalachians, a range of mountains in the Eastern US that have large deposits of coal in them. Coal mining in the 1920s was a terrible job, considering the lack of modern safety equipment and tools. Judy does not, of course, have the ability to carry out her threat, but she's pretty good at bluffing.

Now that the two main characters are (grudgingly) together, it's time for some investigative work, starting with the next chapter. Thanks for reading, and as always I'd love to know what you thought of this chapter!