Nick and Judy had been walking back to the Buchatti for a few minutes when Nick suddenly asked a question. "So how long have you been in the city, anyway?"

Judy almost stopped, surprised that he would ask. "A little over a month now," she said, "I moved as soon as I got accepted by the Bureau."

Nick nodded thoughtfully, even as he stepped around a puddle of something brown and brackish that gave off an awful smell. "And?" he asked.

"And what?" Judy said.

At the look of confusion on her face, he added, "And what makes that little bunny brain of yours tick?"

Judy thought the question over. Nick had seen the rejection letter from the police academy and had correctly guessed that she had only applied to become a prohibition agent because of that rejection and that the murder investigation was her chance to prove herself. In that moment, he had given off an air of knowing everything about her, but she supposed that he didn't. Considering that he had told her about his experience in the war it seemed only fair to answer, particularly because she had just told him she would treat him like a partner in the investigation. "I've always wanted to be a police officer. As far back as I can remember, I've always had that dream."

Nick allowed her to continue, and seemed to be scrutinizing her even as they kept walking through the dismal streets of the Yards. "I thought I'd move to the city and it'd be, well..."

She trailed off, trying to find the right word. "Exciting," she finally decided, "Exciting and lively and just really let me help mammals."

"Is that why you want to be a cop?" he asked.

"Absolutely," she said, "But I'm not doing a very good job, am I?"

If it wasn't for the hat that was keeping her ears down, Judy was sure that they would have drooped. "And the city is just... disappointing."

Judy hadn't wanted to use the word, but it was the only one that seemed to fit. Growing up on a farm, hundreds of miles away, Zootopia had always seemed so glamorous. She had never thought it was perfect; there had been plenty of news out of the city about the various gangs and what happened when they fought each other or the police. But it had seemed better, a place where she wouldn't have to be a farmer just because she was a bunny, a place where she really could make a difference. But the mammals of the city didn't seem to be any more open-minded, when it came to what they thought bunnies could do, and if anything they were worse about how they treated predators. Then again, maybe that was only because there were predators in the city. She had seen for herself what the sheriff of Podunk had thought of Nick, the obvious contempt he held for a mammal that he didn't know anything about.

Would Nick have had a better reception in Bunnyburrows? It wasn't too long ago that she would have thought that the answer would be yes, that even though plenty of bunnies might be afraid of him at first they would at least give him a chance. But she somehow thought that it might actually be worse than the city, where at least they didn't hide how predators were treated behind any kind of veil of politeness.

Judy couldn't even claim the high ground on that, either. She had coerced Nick into going along on what was shaping up to be an incredibly dangerous investigation, completely ignoring what it meant for him and his safety. Somewhere along the way she had lost sight of why she had wanted to be a police officer until the goal had meant more to her than the means of achieving it, but she couldn't quite put a finger on when that had been. Maybe it had been the same for Nick, getting gradually drawn in until suddenly realizing where he had ended up seemingly too late to change anything. Unlike Nick, though, she had gotten a second chance, one that she felt as though she hadn't earned.

Nick had continued watching her, but seemingly oblivious to her internal conflict he simply shrugged. "I never met a cop who cared much about anything other than the dollars in their pocket. So you spent your whole life trying to be a cop? Study hard in college?"

Judy chuckled at that; she couldn't help it. It was a gross understatement to say that she had studied hard, as what she had really done was no less than demand perfection of herself. "I did," she said.

"At least twice as hard as anyone else who wanted to be a cop?"

"Maybe," she said, but Nick shook his head.

"Don't be modest," he said, his tone light.

Judy sighed. "There were plenty of bucks who thought all I wanted was an MRS degree."

Nick laughed, not unkindly. "So you spent your entire life with your nose to the grindstone. Tell me, in all that month and a little you've been in the city, have you ever done anything fun?"

Judy didn't have to think about the question very long, as the answer was unquestionably no. She had spent all her time in an endless loop of work, studying, and sleeping, and she realized that she hardly knew where anything was that wasn't on her route to work. It was a little absurd to realize that after more than a month of living in the city she barely knew it better than she had when she had first arrived. "No," she admitted, and Nick smiled at that.

"Zootopia is disappointing," Nick said, "It's dirty and noisy and no one cares about anyone else. But just because it's disappointing doesn't mean it isn't also terrific—it doesn't have to be one or the other, you know."

Judy nodded, and she thought that maybe Nick wasn't just talking about the city.

"I'll show you sometime," Nick promised, "We'll paint the town red. Responsibly, of course."

"I'll hold you to that," Judy said, and was surprised to realize that they were already back at the parking garage where they had left the Buchatti.

The walk back to the car had seemed much shorter than the walk to the Blind Tiger, and there was a lightness in Judy's chest that hadn't been there before. "Thanks," she added.

Nick simply nodded, climbing into the passenger seat of the car. The Precinct One police station was one of those few locations in the city that Judy didn't need guidance to, and in short order they were off.

The mammal behind the main desk in the station's lobby was a middle-aged moose who had peered down at Judy nearsightedly from behind a pair of glasses with oddly small and thick lenses. He had regarded her badge—and Nick—with what seemed like a fair degree of skepticism, but when Judy asked if officer Angela Zweihorn was in, he had pointed her in the direction of the offices readily enough. "Sure," he said, "Her patrol doesn't start for a bit yet."

"And is her partner in too?" Judy asked, "Tony...?"

"Tony River?" the moose asked, "Yeah, the both of them should be in. Don't think you can miss either one, small as you are."

Despite the mild slight, Judy thanked him and walked in the direction he had indicated into the office area of the police station, which both was and was not like the one in the Bureau of Prohibition. Although the set up was virtually identical, with desks arranged in a grid across a large open area, the atmosphere was somewhat different. Perhaps it was because the police officers seemed, on average, much larger than any of the members of the Bureau, and the furniture was consequently also much larger, but that alone didn't seem to explain it. The officers seemed looser, somehow, freely leaning across desks and talking to each other, some of them all leaning around one desk with cups of coffee in their paws. There were a fair number of desks with dangerously precarious-looking piles of paper that wouldn't have met Bellwether's exacting standards, and even the lighting seemed brighter, although that was perhaps simply a function of the office having windows running along one of the walls.

As the moose had said, Zweihorn and River were easy to find. Even among the other large mammals who made up Precinct One's force, they stood out as easily being two of the largest. River was sitting at what must have been his desk, his feet up on it as he flipped through a newspaper and chatted with Zweihorn, who was leaning on the corner of his desk. "Three losses in a row to those bastards in New Yak," he said gloomily, shaking his massive head, "This ain't the year of the Cubbies, I can tell you that."

Even as Nick and Judy approached them, neither officer seemed to notice. "My sister's getting tickets when they play the Robins," Zweihorn said, and her tone was equally depressed, "I only hope they don't give her a reason to gloat."

"Oh, that's right, she moved to New Yak, what was it, four years ago? Five?"

"Eight."

"Christ, the time flies," River said, and at last seemed to catch sight of Judy.

He didn't straighten up, but he did fold up his newspaper, shooting his partner a significant look before turning his attention to Judy. "Agent Hopps, was it?" he said.

"That's right," Judy said, "I was—"

"Hope there ain't no hard feelings about the other night," River said, cutting her off, "We were only doing our jobs, and you didn't have no badge on you or nothing."

"No, I understand," Judy said, trying to do her best to sound sympathetic.

Frankly, she thought that River and Zweihorn were both crooked at best, maybe criminally complicit at worst, but they had information that she wanted. "If you're looking for an apology, I'm sorry," Zweihorn said, not sounding the least bit sorry, "Why don't you go do whatever it is the Bureau does when they're not mucking up arrests?"

"Actually, I'm working on the murder of Thomas Carajou and I was—"

"The Bureau's taking charge of a murder? First time I ever heard of a prohi doing that," River interrupted, "What'd Captain Keeshan think of that? She was pretty steamed, right?"

"I'm sorry, who?" Judy asked, suddenly lost.

"What, didn't you know?" Zweihorn asked, "Tundra Town's in Precinct Five's area. We turned everything over to Keeshan."

The rhinoceros clicked her tongue, and the sharp sound filled the enormous open space of the precinct's office. "I thought Bellwether ran a tighter ship."

River shot his partner a look and then turned to Judy. "You can square it away with the big cheese, I guess, but even Keeshan should be able to solve this one. We found the murder weapon in a garbage can near the club."

"You did?" Judy asked, and she had the sudden sense of being lost, of having events move on without her.

"Sure, no doubt about it. Big old lightning rod, covered in blood and wrapped in a rag," River said with a shrug, as if to ask what else it could be.

Judy supposed that a lightning rod would be the right size and shape for the stab wounds to Carajou's torso, but that realization barely seemed to sink in as her mind whirled. If what the hippopotamus said was right, and she had no reason to think that he was lying, then everything that she had been doing was completely pointless. "I... Thank you," she managed at last, "I'll talk to Chief Bogo."

"You do that. Whatever you dragged out of the gutter is stinking up the joint," Zweihorn said, giving Nick a dismissive look.

Nick, Judy realized, had been watching the conversation with his eyes half-lidded as usual, paying attention but not saying anything. "Of course," he said mildly, and he started walking in the direction of the frosted glass door at the front of the office that had Bogo's name written on it in gold letters, "It'd be a shame if any of my stench ended up on you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Zweihorn asked, her enormous paws suddenly balled up into fists.

Nick looked up at her and gave her a lopsided smile. "Only that I'll get out of your fur."

The fox gave an exaggerated reaction of surprise as he looked up and down at the rhinoceros; except for the fringes of her ears and the tuft at the end of her tail, Judy didn't see so much as a single hair on Zweihorn's leathery skin. "Well, away from your partner's desk, at least."

"Watch yourself, fox," Zweihorn spat, and the look that she gave Nick was almost murderous, "It might be your number coming up next."

Nick held up both paws in a gesture of surrender as he carefully navigated a path around the officer without turning away from her. "Well, it's all a numbers game in the end, isn't that right?"

There was a sudden ripping sound, and Judy turned her attention away from Zweihorn to see that River had torn his newspaper apart between two massive, suddenly trembling paws. "You ought to go," he said, looking at Nick, but his voice was suddenly unsteady.

Nick didn't seem to need any further prodding, and he kept edging his way around, Judy following him and keeping an eye on both Zweihorn and River. "What was that about?" she hissed when she caught up to him, completely puzzled as to what Nick had said that had made River lose his composure to such an extent.

Nick looked around briefly. "I'll tell you later," he said, his voice low, and Judy realized that every eye was on them, the other police officers not even pretending to be focused on something else.

Judy nodded slightly, willing to let the matter rest for the moment. She knocked on the door to Bogo's office, and after a moment a voice called out from inside. "Enter."

Bogo's office was definitely a reflection of the buffalo. It was large and spacious, with a window that overlooked the street below, but all of the furniture was strictly functional and immaculately clean. There were a few piles of paperwork on his massive desk, rigidly ordered with a seemingly geometric precision, and the only personal touch that Judy could see was a small picture in a silver frame, showing Bogo on what must have been his wedding day. Even there, standing beside his beaming bride in her lacy dress in the stark black and white image, he wasn't smiling. He looked more like a mammal resigned to do something intensely unpleasant, the only visible sign of any sort of affection being his fingers interlaced with hers.

"Something on your mind, Agent Hopps?" he asked mildly, not turning his attention away from a piece of paperwork before him, "Have a seat."

Perhaps it wasn't intentional, but the chairs in front of his desk were so low that, while neither Judy nor Nick had to climb up into them, both had to crane their necks to look up at the chief. "You assigned the Carajou murder to another precinct," Judy said.

Bogo looked up from his paperwork at last, although he had to look down at Judy to see her face. The tips of her ears were about all that cleared the top of his desk. "You didn't honestly believe that I'd assign a murder case to a rookie prohibition agent, did you?" he asked.

"I guess your word's not worth anything then," Nick said coldly, looking up at the chief of police.

Bogo's nostrils flared. "I will not be lectured about honesty by a fox," he said, and his voice had a warning grumble to it, "It's none of my business how Bellwether runs the Bureau, but I will not take officers away from a case so that you can play cop."

"I'm not trying to play cop," Judy said, and her own words seemed to be coming from very far away.

She suddenly remembered what Nick had said, when he had figured out what the investigation meant to her. He had told her that there would always be another hoop to jump through, that she would never actually be given a chance. Now it looked like he was right. Even worse, it seemed as though she hadn't even managed to accomplish anything other than endangering Nick and herself; the investigation had continued to move along with absolutely no need for any contribution from her.

"Then you're doing a very poor job of being one," Bogo said, "You wait two days before turning to the police, pull a known gangster into an active investigation... If you were one of my officers I would have already demanded your badge."

"No, you wouldn't have," Nick said firmly.

"Excuse me?" Bogo asked, "Is that drawing on your vast experience as a police chief?"

"Just my experience as a gangster," Nick said, throwing the word back at Bogo, "At least half the officers out there are crooked enough to go to jail for life, and you're going to lecture her about trying to solve a murder?"

Bogo seemed at a sudden loss for words. "I work with what I get," he finally said gruffly, "I can't stamp out corruption."

"You haven't even tried, have you?" Nick asked, "The kind of mammal you should want as an officer is sitting in front of you and you don't care."

Bogo's breathing slowed as the buffalo seemed to force himself to calm down. "I am a mammal of my word, Agent Hopps," he said at last, "If you can solve the murder, I will write your recommendation. But I will not make Keeshan pull any officers off the case, and I will not tolerate any interference in police business."

He said the last of it with a stern gaze at Nick. "That's all we ask. Isn't that right, Agent Hopps?" Nick said, turning to look at her.

"That's right," Judy said quietly, and the faraway sensation left her.

"That's right," she repeated, more loudly, and she fixed her eyes unflinchingly into Bogo's.

"Then you ought to get a move on," he said, and gestured towards his door, turning his attention back down to his paperwork.

Judy stood up, somewhat stiffly, but the feeling seemed as though it started returning to her limbs as they walked out of the buffalo's office and through the large open office area, where all of the police officers were gaping at them silently. She idly wondered how much of their conversation had been audible through the door of Bogo's office, and then dismissed the thought. Judy waited until they were outside the police station, away from any prying ears, before she spoke again. "Thank you," Judy said, aware that the words seemed woefully inadequate to express what she was feeling.

Nick shrugged, but Judy persisted. "Did you mean it? What you said in Bogo's office, I mean?"

He grinned. "I sure wasn't talking about myself, Carrots. Come on, let's go to Precinct Five."

Author's Notes:

The title of this chapter, "Did You Mean It?" comes from a 1928 Marion Harris songs, and is one of the rare instances in this story of me directly using a line or the title of a song. My reason for using it should be obvious from the last paragraph of this chapter.

Going for an MRS degree is a pretty common, and pretty old, expression to mean a woman who only goes to college to find a husband, and I think it's pretty understandable why Judy would resent that being assumed about her.

"Painting the town red" is an expression that goes back at least to the 19th century, and means to have a wild good time.

Officers Angela Zweihorn and Tony River were first mentioned in chapter 4 as the officers who were first on the scene to the scene of the murder at the Thief of the Night, and also as the ones who arrested Judy in that same chapter. At the time of her arrest, though, Judy only caught Zweihorn's full name, which is why here she needed the receptionist to give River's last name. As Judy noted in chapter 5, Tundra Town isn't in Precinct One, which explains why responsibility for the investigation has been transferred to the Precinct Five station. It should also be possible to guess Captain Keeshan's species on the basis of her name and my predilection for names that are either punny or a reference to something. I'll offer meaningless internet points (and a nod in the next chapter's author's notes) to anyone who guesses it right!

I've been pretty vague in previous chapters in terms of when this story takes place, only identifying it as August of 1927. However, the baseball scores that River is reviewing do allow the date to be definitively determined to be, as of this chapter, August 31, 1927. The Chicago Cubs played a three game series in New York against the Giants, with a double header on the 29th and the final game on the 30th. They did, in fact, lose all three games, and ended the 1927 baseball season in fourth place in the National League at a time when there were only eight teams in the league. In those days, there were no playoffs; once the regular season ended the team at the top of the National League played the team at the top of the American League in the best of seven World Series.

The Robins was a name in common use for the team that is now the Los Angeles Dodgers; they didn't formally take the Dodgers name until the 1932 season, and until 1958 they were based out of Brooklyn, New York City, not Los Angeles. Prior to taking the Dodgers name, they were officially the Brooklyn Base Ball Club, and the Dodger name originated as a derisive nickname in reference to the fans being trolley dodgers—that is, Brooklyn had a lot of street cars in operation that were widely regarded as dangerous to pedestrians.

As anyone familiar with Chicago baseball knows, not only was 1927 not the year of the Cubs but their time wouldn't come again for quite a while; after two consecutive World Series wins in 1907 and 1908, the Cubs wouldn't win the World Series again until 2016, a championship drought of 108 years that was the single longest in any American professional sport. Sometimes it's really tough to be a Cubs fan.

How sports would work in Zootopia is an interesting question. We do see evidence that at least two real sports are played; there's the hilariously lopsided game of volleyball in the Naturalist Club, and there are the kits playing with a soccer ball at the end of the movie. I suppose that they might have leagues based on size, similarly to how boxing has different weight classes, but as far as how public interest goes, I'd imagine that would vary depending on the audience, with most mammals being fans of the leagues for mammals of their own size. Alternatively, some size brackets might be seen as the most competitive and therefore the most interesting to watch, even for mammals much bigger or smaller. The fundamentals of some games might be very different in different size brackets. For example, elephants literally can't jump, so if basketball hoops for elephant players were proportionally as tall as they are for human basketball players, you'd see a very different game with no dunking or jump shots, which might make it boring compared to a game played by bunnies on a proportional court with incredible leaping action. I kept the description of baseball vague enough that I suppose any interpretation is valid, but sports are a big part of culture.

Although both Zweihorn and River are prejudiced and quite possibly crooked, I thought that it was an interesting parallel to show that they get along with each other pretty well, and they don't just exist in a vacuum to be mean to Judy.

The big cheese as a term for the person in charge was a slang expression in use at the time in the 1920s, although it is perhaps not something that any of the officers would call Bogo to his face.

As always, thanks for reading, and I'd love to know what you thought!