Judy was so focused on trying to not give away that she had no intention of following Bellwether's order that she couldn't remember how the rest of the conversation went. The ewe seemed pleased, though, and entirely ignorant of the thoughts that were going through Judy's head. When at last Judy left the office, she was entirely preoccupied with trying to figure out what to do. She knew that she absolutely could not go back on her word to Nick, but she had no idea of how to get him out safely.

Judy was so distracted with her own thoughts that she wasn't prepared for what she saw when she left Bellwether's office. Nick was sitting on the corner of her desk, his tail wagging slowly from side to side as he took a sip from a coffee mug. In front of him, four of her fellow agents were cajoling him, but he seemed content to make them wait as he slowly drank. "I don't know, why?" said Agent Woolsey, a middle-aged ram who Judy didn't think had ever spoken more than ten words in a row to her, "Come on, you gotta tell us. Why?"

At the same time Woolsey was speaking, Agent Asinus was asking the same question. "I don't know, why?"

Having finally finished drinking, Nick looked up at his audience, his eyes twinkling in apparent delight as he finally spoke. "To hold their pants up."

There was a moment's silence, and then Asinus clapped one hoof to Nick's back before breaking out into his obnoxious braying laugh. "To hold their pants up!" the donkey repeated, wheezing between his laughs, "Oh, that's too funny by half!"

Even Woolsey and the other agents gathered around Nick were laughing, though none of them nearly so loudly as Asinus, who had pulled out a handkerchief and was wiping at his eyes. Nick grinned as he looked up from the agents to see Judy's approach and jumped off her desk, landing with a surprising grace considering his injured leg. He set the empty coffee mug down. "It's been a gas, fellas, but you know how it is. Can't let George do it."

The agents nodded and made noises of agreement cheerfully, and they actually seemed disappointed that he was leaving. "You look after Nick, Hopps!" Asinus called after them, "He's a real swell fella for a fox!"

Nick tipped his hat, still in one paw, to the donkey. Once they had left the office area, Nick turned down to look at Judy. "Bad news, I suppose?" he asked.

Judy thought a moment about how to phrase it before simply saying it outright. "Bellwether wants me to arrest you. After this case is over, she said."

"Ah," Nick said, not looking at all surprised, "Are you going to?"

He appeared completely unperturbed, but Judy thought that she could hear something in his voice, no matter how hard he must be trying to keep his tone light. "Of course not," she said, and she was surprised at how much it hurt that he had to ask.

She knew that she deserved his suspicion; she deserved far worse than his scorn for dragging him into her mess. But she could only imagine how his first meeting with Bellwether must have gone for him to be completely unsurprised by the ewe's apparent grudge. Nick nodded slowly. Before he could say anything, Judy hastily added, "We can still get you out of town now if you want."

Nick grinned at that. "You're stuck with me now," he said, "Besides, how could I pass up a chance to tweak Bellwether's nose?"

"But—" Judy protested.

Nick waved a paw dismissively. "We can figure something out," he said, and then gestured grandly with one arm as though taking in a crowd.

"I'm thinking a press conference. Can you imagine Bellwether being forced to thank a fox in front of reporters?"

Judy wasn't sure her boss would be able to get the words out, and she laughed at the mental image. "We have to solve the case first," she said, "Besides, why wouldn't it be me speaking to the reporters?"

Nick looked down at her and shook his head. "Bellwether doesn't want an Izzy and Mole to compete with her for attention," he said, "She couldn't let her agents get too popular."

Judy thought that he had a point; she had certainly gotten the feeling that Bellwether desperately wanted to rise much further in the government than her current position, and she wondered if Nick was right about her. She had assumed that Bellwether's policy of forbidding agents to speak with the press was for their own anonymity and safety, but maybe she really did just want to have the credit for every success the Bureau had to go through her. "Izzy and Mole, huh?" she said with mock thoughtfulness, though she had to admit she enjoyed the implied comparison.

She wouldn't have any complaints if she could partner up with Nick as successfully as the pair of New Yak City agents who had set records for speakeasy busts, but they needed to start investigating again. "You're definitely Mole," Nick teased.

Judy rolled her eyes. "Well then, Izzy, where to next?" she asked, as they were almost back to where she had parked the car.

"Some breakfast first," Nick said thoughtfully, "But I've got an idea."

Judy eased the Buchatti to a stop across the street from a restaurant that was only about a block away from the Bureau office and jumped out, Nick following her as they crossed the road. The Little Spoon had a sunny yellow awning with the name of the restaurant written in large black letters that had faded somewhat over a couple of large windows around the door. Before Judy had gotten close enough to grab the doorknob, Nick spoke up. "Why don't you just grab something to go?" Nick asked suddenly.

"We can take ten minutes to eat," Judy said, somewhat surprised by his eagerness to get to work, considering it had been his idea to get food.

"Maybe you can," Nick said with a significant look at the front of the restaurant.

"What's that supposed to—" Judy started to say before she realized what he meant.

Judy had only been to the Little Spoon once before, shortly after she started at the Bureau when her coworkers had invited her out to lunch with what seemed like a purely perfunctory air. They had not asked again, and Judy had not gone on her own, but she did walk past it every day on her way to and from the Bureau office. She had thought that she remembered it perfectly well as an inexpensive little diner that was nonetheless neatly kept. Somehow, though, she had failed to notice, either on her first visit or on any of the many occasions she had passed the storefront since then, the neatly lettered sign in one corner of the window by the door. It read, quite simply, "WE SERVE PREY ONLY."

"Oh," she said, "I didn't... I never..."

Judy struggled to think of something to say. "We can go someplace else," she managed at last.

Nick simply shrugged. "We're already here," he said, "See if they have an egg salad sandwich, would you? Some coffee, too."

With that, he turned around and headed back towards the car, giving her a mock salute before crossing the street again. Judy looked at the little sign again. It was the sort of thing she had only ever seen in the city; there hadn't been any predators in Bunnyburrows to single out, although they would have probably gotten a similar reception. She had never even noticed the sign before, which made it all the worse. Nick had given every impression that it didn't bother him, but she thought that it did, that so many doors, both literally and figuratively, were closed in his face simply because he was a fox. Suddenly she no longer felt like anything that the Little Spoon might have, and she looked across the street at Nick. He was sitting in the Buchatti as though he didn't have a care in the world, idly watching mammals as they walked past. Judy swallowed and opened the door, making the little bell above it jingle.

The Buchatti wasn't the ideal place to eat a meal, as it didn't have trays or anywhere else to put things other than on the floor of the car. It was rather cramped, too, with the two of them sitting in it, but Judy was determined to make do. Nick sipped at his little paper cup of coffee and took fastidious bites from his sandwich, and Judy struggled to do the same, having lost her appetite at the realization of the kind of mammal the owner of the Little Spoon was. "How do you do it?" she asked suddenly.

Nick paused to finish chewing and swallowing a bite before he answered. "Do what?" he asked.

"Deal with that," she said, gesturing across the street at the storefront of the Little Spoon with its hateful sign.

"That?" Nick asked casually, "That's just the way things are."

"It shouldn't be that way," she said.

"How do you deal with mammals who say a bunny can't be a cop?" Nick asked.

He seemed genuinely curious, and Judy thought about it before answering, tracing the delicate blue illustration of an angel that decorated the cup. She didn't think it was nearly the same thing; no matter what anyone said about bunnies and what they could do, she had never been kicked out of a restaurant before. "They're wrong," she said, "And I'm going to show them that they're wrong."

"What if you can't?" Nick asked, and he was looking at her intently, his eyes seeming almost to burn holes in her.

"I'm never going to stop trying," she said as firmly as she could.

Nick sighed. "So say you do become a cop. What then?"

"What then?" she repeated, unsure of his point.

"Sure," he said, "What then? What comes next for the first bunny cop?"

"Well," she said, "I'd do my best to be the best police officer that I could be."

She looked down as she gathered her thoughts and realized that she had squeezed the watercress out of her sandwich. "I've already met some officers who aren't good."

She had already told Nick about her experience with the rhinoceros and hippopotamus officers at the Thief of the Night, and she saw his mouth quirk into a smile. "Sure Zweihorn and River are good," he said, "Good and bought."

She nodded to acknowledge his point. "I want to be better than that. I want all officers to be better than that."

Nick leaned back. "Leading by example, or something like that?"

"I suppose so."

Nick shook his head. "You really are an idealistic one, aren't you?"

He didn't sound as though he was trying to be condescending; if anything he sounded commiserating, as though he thought she was well on the way to becoming as cynical and jaded as he was. "That's not so bad, is it?" she said, "The world needs some idealism."

"See how you feel in a few years," he said glibly, and she wondered if any of his own idealism had survived his past.

He had finished the last of his sandwich and clapped his paws together, apparently ready to change topics. "You had asked me about Quill."

She pushed aside her other thoughts and focused on what he was saying. "About him letting gangsters make deals in his clubs."

Nick nodded. "Ol' Quill doesn't just own one or two clubs, you know. Last I heard, he had nine, all across Zootopia."

Judy asked the obvious question. "But... That means he has clubs in areas different gangs control, doesn't it? You said he paid protection money to the Zootopia Outfit."

Nick actually appeared impressed. "That's right. And he wasn't just paying protection money to the Zootopia Outfit. He was paying off the Black Paw, the Syndicate, and a few of the small fries, just to keep the peace."

"They all went for that?" she asked, amazed that the irritable little hedgehog was brave enough to try.

"Quill paid them all a cut and they agreed not to conduct any business in his clubs," Nick said, although from his tone she guessed that it wasn't quite so simple.

Judy frowned. "He didn't actually enforce that, did he?"

Nick laughed. "Now you're getting it, Carrots! Maybe he did, once, but you saw how he looked in La Porte Verte."

She remembered how poorly Quill had reacted to Nick's mild implication that he allowed gangs to make deals in his club and thought that Nick was on to something. "So what's your idea?" she asked eagerly.

Nick settled back in his seat. "Well," he said casually, "We can't go to any of Quill's clubs, but I know a fella who's done some work for Mr. Big."

"What kind of work?" Judy asked hesitantly, wondering if he was planning on bringing in an assassin or something similar.

Nick's smile spread across his face slowly. "Would you believe flower arrangement?"

It had been a short drive to the address that Nick had provided for Emmitt Otterton, an otter who was apparently florist to the stars when it came to the world of gangsters. Nick had explained, over the din of the Buchatti as she drove, that the otter had done the floral arrangements for the wedding of Mr. Big's daughter Francesca among a number of other events. She had been somewhat skeptical that it meant that Otterton would know anything, but Nick had explained that he had likely overheard quite a bit despite never being part of the Zootopia Outfit himself.

When they arrived, though, it seemed as though the address was a dead end as a lead. It was clear that there had been a building on the plot once, but that must have been at least a year ago. The shadowy outline of a foundation was still visible on the small dirt plot but all that was left were weeds, broken bottles, and a few stray bricks. Nick looked up from the garbage and shrugged apologetically. "It has been two years," he said.

Judy supposed that he had a point. Nick had been totally cut off from the goings-on in the city long enough that it wasn't reasonable to expect all of his leads to be up to date. Still, her heart sank, thinking of the time that they had wasted on the trip. "Is there anywhere else he might be? Do you know where he lives?" she asked.

"Above the shop, as a matter of fact," Nick said, looking around the vacant lot that had apparently once been a flower shop.

Judy sighed. Since there was no longer a building, let alone a second floor, it was obvious that Otterton no longer lived there. There were a thousand reasons why that might be the case, but there was no sign of what had happened or where he might have gone. Judy was about to ask Nick if he had any other leads worth following when he spoke up again. "There is one other place he spent a lot of time," he said thoughtfully, "Someone there might know where he is now, but you're not going to like it."

"What makes you say that?" she asked, frowning.

"It just doesn't seem like it'd be your kind of place, that's all," he replied, "I could go there alone."

Judy crossed her arms over her chest and looked up at him. "Look," she said firmly, "I'm not some helpless bunny, you know. I don't care what kind of place this is, we're going there together."

She had no idea what kind of place it must be for him to seem so reluctant to take her there. Maybe it was the opposite of the Little Spoon and only served predators or maybe it was a den of gangsters he thought would be too dangerous for her. Whatever it was, she absolutely refused to give up on a lead. Nick was clever and observant, she had to admit, but that didn't mean that he could spot everything. Considering the way that her apartment had been burned down, it might not be safe for Nick to be alone, and she took her promise to keep him safe entirely seriously.

"It's a club called the Mystic Springs Oasis. You haven't heard of it, have you?"

Judy shook her head, and Nick chuckled. She wasn't sure she trusted the slow grin that spread across his face. "Oh, you are in for a treat."

Author's Notes:

The title of this chapter, "A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You," comes from a 1925 song by Joseph Meyer. If you've watched old Warner Brothers cartoons, you might recognize it, since an instrumental version was frequently used in scenes about food or eating. I'm using the title pretty literally, but it's also just a nice little up tempo number on the pleasures of sharing even a simple meal with someone you care about.

The joke that goes along with Nick's orphaned punch line is "Why do police officers wear belts?" It's not a particularly funny joke, but I like it because it's kind of an anti-joke; the humor comes out of it being a statement of the obvious. It struck me as the kind of joke that Nick might pull out, considering the one he tells Flash in the movie.

As a sheep, Woolsey's name has a pretty obvious source, and Asinus is named after the scientific name for the donkey, Equus africanus asinus.

This chapter shows some of the ugliness of the bigotry of the 1920s that was common in the wider world outside the more inclusive realm of illegal clubs, and there are unfortunately plenty more examples to come.

"Let George do it," was an expression common in the 1920s to mean that something else could take care of a problem and is not a reference to a particular person named George, although that could be confusing if there was an actual George around.

Izzy and Mole is a punny reference to Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, a pair of Prohibition agents active in New York City from 1920 to 1925 who quickly became famous for busting speakeasies, frequently using elaborate disguises. One of the keys to their fame was their understanding of the media and building a rapport with reporters. When they learned that newspapers had the most room to fill on Mondays, they staged an elaborate raid of 71 speakeasies in a row with reporters in tow on a Sunday, ensuring massive amounts of media coverage. They were fired in 1925; it seemed as though their bosses were jealous of the positive attention and fame that they achieved and used a department reorganization as an excuse to get rid of them. Considering Bellwether's apparent lust for power, Nick's assessment of her as not wanting her agents to similarly become popular is a logical conclusion, though perhaps not the correct one.

The rhinoceros and hippopotamus officers at the Thief of the Night showed up in chapter 4. Officers Angela Zweihorn and Tony River are kind of the antithesis of Judy's values, being obviously corrupt.

The Zootopia Outfit as the name of Mr. Big's criminal enterprise is a reference to Al Capone's Chicago Outfit, which was somewhat blandly named as far as criminal empires go. The Black Paw is a natural take off of the Black Hand, an extortion scheme that flourished in the early 20th century in Chicago. The North Side Pride has no obvious historical reference for the name; I think it's just something that a gangster might think sounds cool. The Syndicate is simple a common term for a criminal enterprise. There were an awful lot of gangsters in 1920s Chicago; the book Chicago Mobs of the Twenties would be a great reference if it could be found.

In the 1920s, paper cups had really just started catching on, but they were somewhat different from modern cups. The forerunner to modern paper cups dates to about 1907, and they were intended as a more hygienic replacement for the practice of sharing a common cup that was in place on railroads at the time, which easily spread germs. Indeed, the Dixie Cup, one of the most common disposable paper cups in modern times, was called the Health Kup from its invention in 1908 until it was rebranded after a popular line of dolls in 1919. The danger of spreading infections was made painfully clear by the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 to 1920, which killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people, with a significant fraction of them healthy adults. A greater public awareness of the importance of hygiene, combined with advances in production techniques and aggressive advertising, made paper cups extraordinarily popular, and the cups described match those that would have been common in 1927. The famous Anthora New York City coffee cup with the blue Greek design and the text reading "WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU" wasn't created until 1963, so this story is a bit too early to feature those.

The ubiquitous coffee cup sleeves of modern coffee chains weren't actually invented until 1991, so hot drinks in paper cups could be painful to hold in the 1920s. The cups also didn't have lids, making them easier to spill, but even these downsides didn't deter people who wanted coffee on the go.

The Bugatti Type 35 definitely did not have cup holders; cup holders in cars really didn't start becoming common until the 1980s, and a street legal race car really doesn't have any reason to have them or any kind of tray for convenience, as some cars of the 1920s did.

Francesca is, of course, Fru Fru; I would certainly hope that Fru Fru is a nickname and Francesca seemed a logical extrapolation of what her real name could be since it is an actual Italian name.

We're back into the swing of things when it comes to the investigation, and the next chapter will continue to build from here. As always, I'd enjoy hearing what you thought. Thanks for reading!