We filed after Bogo out of the conference room. No one spoke until we had reached the parking lot, at which point Bogo motioned for us to join him in his car.
"Car" may have been putting it lightly. It was a massive SUV, the kind meant for rhinos and other megafauna, where even Bogo had legroom. While the exterior was unmarked, the inside of the car was more kitted out than a standard cruiser: a sort of "home away from home" of a command center, replete with screens and keyboards and dials of all sorts. Judy and I (and about a half dozen other mammals our size) fit comfortably together in the passenger seat.
"Are they right, sir?" Judy said, breaking the silence. "Do they really have the jurisdiction to just…close our case like that?" The ungulate gave a heavy sigh, nodding.
"I'm afraid so, Hopps." He unbuttoned the top few buttons on his heavy coat as the car began to heat up. "The real question is what to do with you two now that this case has been hijacked by the Bureau." He snorted, and reached for the handset radio on the dash.
"Clawhauser," he said brusquely, speaking into the radio. After a moment or two, the cheetah responded with a burst of static.
"Yes, Chief Bogo?"
"Do we have any active cases without assignment?"
"Lemme check real quick, Chief." Clawhauser must have left his paw on the transmit button, because the next minute was filled with the scratchy sounds of paper shuffling and mouse clicking. "Afraid not, Chief." Bogo hung his head.
"Thank you, Clawhauser." He set the handset back on the dash as Clawhauser's voice burst through again.
"Are you on your way back soon? They updated the Gazelle Dancer app—"
With a forceful push of a button the radio was silenced. Normally this sort of thing would have made a prime target for some ribbing, but I couldn't even muster a chuckle at the moment.
"I was counting on this case to be a taste of some more specialized police work for the two of you," Bogo explained after a moment of silence. "I wouldn't normally tell you this, for fear of inflating your heads too much, but I've been considering you both candidates for detective." He let out a short, humorless laugh. "Well, I suppose you can call it a day. Your patrol was being covered while you were on Loxley's case, so I don't have anything else for you to do today. Tomorrow you'll go back out on regular patrol, barring any cases that fit your caliber cropping up in the meantime."
He started the engine to his tank of an SUV, and the car's sound system began to blast Gazelle briefly before it, too, was mercilessly silenced by a hoof. Incapable of meeting us in the eyes, Bogo gruffly dismissed us back into the cold of Tundratown.
Returning to Precinct One so early felt a little like being sent home from school for causing trouble. Neither Judy nor I broke the silence in the cruiser as we had driven back to Savannah Central. We parted ways briefly to duck into our respective locker rooms in a wordless agreement to change into civvies.
God, what was I even doing? Of course I couldn't close this case. I slung my tie into my locked as soon as it cleared my ears. I began to undo my duty belt, leaving all my gear in place before it too joined the locker at high speeds. I honestly don't know why I expected any different.
My head began to ache something fierce; a pain that started in my temples and soon began to press behind my eyes. To think that less than twenty hours ago, Judy and I had confessed our feelings to each other.
After a long moment of standing around like an idiot half out of uniform, I shrugged my shirt and pants off and tossed them in haphazardly, fetching the plain slacks and ZPA sweatshirt I kept in my locker.
Judy was already waiting for me by the time I returned to the lobby, though she looked about as deep in thought as I had felt in the locker room. I tried to muster up a smile as I approached.
"Ready to go, Carrots?" I asked, startling her from her train of thought.
"Sure," she replied, nodding slowly and standing from the massive step she'd been sitting on.
"So…" she began as we made the walk back to her apartment. "I hope this doesn't put too much of a damper on the rest of our day."
I gave a noncommittal grunt in response. The fake smile I'd whipped up in the lobby had long since slid from my muzzle as thoughts of my own inadequacy began to plague me again.
"But hey," she exclaimed, nudging me with an elbow. "Bogo thinks we're on track to move to detective! That's exciting!" I shrugged.
"I guess. Doesn't do Todd Loxley much good." Judy's ears fell.
"C'mon, Slick. It sucks, but it happens. At least we know who did it! A lot of times the trail will just go cold and the perp gets away. We know Lebedev doesn't have long!" A little bit of spring went back into her step as she spoke, but I felt as hollow and as useless as before.
"I…think I need to visit my apartment tonight." I said after a few minutes of walking. Judy looked taken aback.
"Oh. Are you sure?" she asked, eyeing me carefully.
"I've got…laundry…and stuff," I mumbled lamely.
"Well, we could both go to your place. Or you could grab what you need, and your laundry, and take it over to mine—"
"Yeah," I replied, cutting her off. "I just—I think I need some time to myself tonight." Judy looked devastated at that, which sent a deep pang of guilt into my chest. "I'm sure everything will be fine tomorrow," I said, taking her shoulders in my paws, trying to convince myself as much as her. "Love you." She brightened slightly at that, but only barely.
"I love you too, Nick. Don't forget it." She snuck a kiss to my cheek from her place between my paws. "Text me if you change your mind about spending the night, okay?"
"Mhm." I pecked her cheek back and began shuffling off towards my apartment alone.
…
"Hopps, Wilde: back on regular patrol. Sorry." Bogo said bluntly, moving on quickly to the next set of names on his list. Numbly, I got up from our shared seat at the front and slipped to the floor, turning around to offer Judy a paw down behind me.
"Ready to make the world a better place?" Judy asked. I nodded, twitching an ear slightly.
"Yeah, let's get to it." I responded eventually. "Gonna grab some coffee from the break room first." I shambled over to the "small" break room, which was sized for wolves and mountain lions and obviously still enormous to Judy and me. As I poured a cup of burnt instant coffee into a wolf-sized communal mug, I realized Judy had followed me in.
"Don't you usually make a pot before coming into work? I've never seen you drink this stuff." I shrugged.
"Didn't get up in time today," I said, pressing my lips to the cup and getting the horrible taste of shit coffee in return. As well as a pretty strong scent of wolf. Maybe this mug wasn't so communal after all.
Judy watched me with an intensely concerned look in her eyes as I made to drain the rest of my coffee as fast as I could.
"Are you okay? Do you want to talk about…yesterday?" Standing on the tips of my toes to place the now empty mug (which had the initials "P.H." scribbled in permanent marker on the bottom, I now noticed) into the sink, I shook my head.
"Nah. Let's get going, Fluff. World won't be a better place with us standing around the break room."
"34," I read dully from the lidar gun as the next car passed by. Judy was seated patiently at the wheel, though I could see by the way her paws were fidgeting that she was itching to chase someone down.
"34," she repeated, craning her neck to see if the car's tags were up to date. The way she slumped back into her seat told me that everything checked out.
Judy's tapping and fidgeting began to worsen. Her feet began to sway, then tap intermittently, then incessantly.
"Fidgety today?" I asked drolly. As I broke the vacuum of conversation, Judy turned to me, a desperate look in her eyes.
"Nick, please talk to me. I can see that this is eating you up, and it's killing me for you to just bottle it up and keep it to yourself." A car passed by.
"32," I read out from the display. Judy made to look at the plates but stopped herself halfway.
"Please, Nick," she said in a very small voice as she turned back to face me.
With a sigh, I set the lidar gun down into my lap, twisting in my seat slightly to face her better.
" I dunno," I said morosely. "I just feel—I feel like I let you down. Like I could've talked those X-Files wannabes into letting us carry on the case. Or maybe there was something I missed at the scene. Like…I don't know. I'm just wondering if I'm not good enough at…this," I gestured vaguely. "I feel like at some point you're going to realize I'm dragging you down, keeping you from making detective, or captain, or chief someday." I hung my head as my ears burned in shame and embarrassment.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Judy turn the car off, pull a sticky note from a pouch on her belt, and place it carefully over the car's dashcam. She then began to climb over the center console into my lap.
"What're you—Hopps, what are you doing?" She didn't say anything right away, just curled her arms around me and planted her head firmly under my chin.
"Shhh," she said soothingly. "Did you really think I'd ever get tired of you, Slick? That I'd ever want to—gosh, trade you in?" I slumped in her embrace.
"No…I guess not." My arms hung limply at my sides.
"You don't have to protect yourself from me, Nick. I'm gonna be around for a long time, whether you like it or not."
My eyes felt a little blurry, and I let out a watery chuckle.
"Sorry, Carrots. Dumb fox, and all."
"My fox," she corrected, gripping me tighter. I moved to return the embrace.
"Your fox," I agreed.
A car whipped past us, causing the lidar gun (which had fallen to the floor in favor of an affectionate bunny) to light up and squawk. Judy shrieked and dove for the gun.
"57!" she shouted triumphantly, before her face fell. "Cripes, we gotta get after them!" Scrambling back behind the wheel, she had barely cinched her seat belt before the car was moving and the lights were flashing. My paw flung out and gripped the door handle, caught off guard by the sudden acceleration.
"Easy, Carrots," I begged as we began to catch up to our speeder. "They're pulling over already." I squinted as I caught sight of their rear plates. "Hold on…those aren't embassy plates of some kind, are they? They don't look right." As Judy shifted (very abruptly) into park behind the sedan, her eyes lit up.
"Sovereign citizen! Oh, Nick, you're in for a treat!" She hopped out of the car as quick as she could. After a moment, though, she jumped back up to her seat.
"Forget something, Fluff?" I asked. She jerked her head towards the car.
"I know this usually only takes one, but you won't want to miss this. Trust me," she said, glee evident in her voice.