Back into the chamber turning,

All my soul within me burning.

Soon again I heard the tapping, something louder than before.

"Surely," said I, "Surely that is

something at my window lattice.

Let me see then what thereat is, and this mystery explore.

Let my heart be still a moment, and this mystery explore.

'Tis the wind, and nothing more."

The Raven,by Edgar Allan Poe

Somewhere on the car ride, Nick's stomach let out a rumble. "Ah, dang," he groaned, his paws straying to his middle. "I knew I should have had a bigger breakfast."

Judy's amusement turned to mild embarrassment when her own stomach interrupted her mid-chuckle. "I guess we'll be eating lunch a little early," she suggested.

Nick shrugged carelessly. "Pick a place?"

She shook her head. "I can't afford to eat out every day," she pointed out, "and you'd better save your cash."

"Oh, yeah," Nick muttered, remembering with chagrin that he really wasn't sure what kind of deal he might have to make to settle his taxes.

"Tell you what," Judy suggested, taking a detour. "I think I still have some of leftovers in my fridge from the last time you dropped by. We can stop there and decide what to do next."

Nick grinned. "Sounds good to me."

He should have hidden his expression. "And stay out of my stuff," she added, pointing an index finger at him.

He gave her a fake-bored look. "Carrots, you suck the fun out of everything. Are you sure you're not a vampire bunny?"

She opened her mouth and drew back her upper lip, giving a good view of her front teeth and a playful hiss. "Wouldn't you like to know," she teased. As a matter of fact, she had played a darn good vampire one Howloween when she was ten. Her mother had been… less than happy.

When they got to Judy's apartment, however, the first thing they did was to find a box sitting outside the door.

"Oh, a present from a secret admirer?" Nick teased.

Judy gave him a smile which was half sincere and half dripping with sarcasm. "I can always look Taelia up in the database and send her some info on you," she sing-songed. Then she turned to the box, which was sealed with the kind of packing tape with cris-crossing threads running through it. It was tall enough to reach her chin, and wide enough that Nick could have stretched out behind it and been hidden from view.

"That's funny," she muttered, looking over the package. "No postmark or return address, and..." Suddenly the fur on the back of her neck bristled, and her nose began to twitch. This was straight out of her textbooks from the academy. It didn't smell suspicious, but that would be easy enough to cover up.

"Nick," she said in a voice suddenly much closer to a whisper, "back away, nice and slow."

Nick caught onto her tone at once and heeded the warning with but one word of question.

"Bomb?"

"I think so," she whispered. Training took over. "I'll tell the neighbors to evacuate. You get out of here and call the ZPD – now."

Their whispering was more out of dread than any effort to go unheard, which was just as well. Their attention was so fixed on the box that Nick didn't even notice they had company until he turned and dashed off... straight into the landlady.

The armadillo didn't even notice. With her beady eyes fairly popping behind her glasses, she stared from Nick and Judy to the package.

"Did you just say 'bomb'!?" she exclaimed, her nasal voice loud and clear in the quiet hallway at a volume none would have guessed she could reach.

Judy gestured with her paws for quieter speech. "Yes, and if you don't mind, I'd like to-"

The armadillo screamed and instantly curled herself into a ball, but the damage was done. Down the hall, a bison cow poked her head out of an apartment door, her shaggy hair dangling down in curls as though she had been caught midway through tidying them up. "Did someone say there's a bomb?!"

"Wait! Please!" Judy yelled, waving her paws and hopping up and down to get her neighbor's attention. "We're not sure what it is, but if you could just calmly leave the buildi-"

"BOMB!" screamed the bison, bolting out of her apartment and towards the nearest staircase. Her deep mooing voice and thundering hoofbeats resounded up and down the hall as she fled for the exit.

The effect was immediate. At the shout, other animals poked their heads out, saw the package, and poured out of the building like it was on fire.

"Wait! Stop!" shouted Judy, but it was no use. Utter panic had consumed Pangolin Arms.

Suddenly she felt Nick grabbing her by the arm. "Never mind going around," he said, yanking her clear of an antelope's hooves. "Let's get out of here!"

To the ZPD's credit, they responded pretty darn quickly to the prospect of a bomb. It took them only five minutes to get there, and only a bit longer to confirm that everyone in the building was out.

Unfortunately, the press was similarly quick to respond.

"No, I have no comment at this time!" Francine shouted to a cluster of reporters, waving her ears like two banners. Much to her displeasure, she was one of the cops assigned to crowd control – and on the whole, she would very much have preferred dealing with the bomb. "Please stay back folks! We are doing the best we can here and-!"

"Hey!" yelled someone. "Is that Officer Hopps?!"

Amidst her neighbors, Judy's ears dropped and she tried to make herself scarce. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of anywhere to go in the crowd where her uniform wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb. Even her small size was little use for concealment in a sea of mammals actively looking for her.

"Officer Hopps?" asked someone else. "Where?!"

"Over there! I could swear it was her!" shouted the first one.

As several mammals armed with notepads and microphones swarmed in Judy's direction, Nick spotted an opening. "Come on!" he hissed, grabbing Judy by the arm and hastily pulling her through the space in a giraffe's legs. The towering mammal never noticed, and fortunately neither did a pair of hippos as the much smaller duo crawled on all fours through the considerable space between one's feet and the other's.

"Always knew all that flab was good for something," murmured Nick.

"Hey! I heard that!" yelled one of them. However, before the outraged creature could get a lock on Nick, he and Judy were well away in another part of the crowd.

After navigating the labyrinthine crowd, they finally managed to make their way to the edge of an area cordoned off by the ZPD for interviewing witnesses with some degree of privacy. At the moment, Chief Bogo was questioning the bison cow who had first set off the panic.

"So you were the first one to recognize the presence of a bomb?"

"No, I got it from Mrs. Armadiio," answered the cow, gesturing to the landlay a short distance away. A tiger cop had wearied of trying to coax the landlady out of her shell and was now trying to pry her open, thinking that perhaps she couldn't hear him with her armor plating closed. Instead, she snapped shut after he'd made only an inch of progress, leaving him to stifle some unbecoming language when she trapped two of his fingers in the process.

"Um, actually," Judy called, slipping past the line of officers with one paw raised, "I was the one who first found it. It was left outside my apartment door."

Bogo turned, ready to tell her to wait her turn when he realized who was speaking. "Hopps?" he asked, raising his brows for an instant in surprise before they scrunched back down in displeasure.

Judy stopped and put her arms to her sides. "Yes, Chief."

Chief Bogo turned to the cow. "That will be all for now," he told her. "We'll get a full statement when we need it."

As the bison left, Bogo turned forbiddingly to Judy. "So," he asked, "what happened here?"

"Well, I went to return to my apartment – after the adjustment," she added as an afterthought, "and I found a suspicious package outside my apartment door."

"I see." Bogo had one eyebrow raised. That was never a good sign. "So from there, you decided to throw the entire apartment building into a panic, is that it?"

"Uh, I hate to argue, but no, that wasn't me. I was going to go around and advise everyone to leave in an orderly fashion – with a gas leak or something like that as a cover story – and I quietly told N- uh, told one person to call the ZPD about a possible bomb."

Alas, for all his other faults Chief Bogo was not gullible. "I suppose this one person was the fox."

Judy wanted to smack herself in the face, but resisted the urge. "That's not the point, Chief. What's important is that Mrs. Armadiio heard what I said, and she repeated it loudly enough that the bison you were just talking to heard it, and she started the panic."

Bogo regarded her unpleasantly. "I see," he said slowly.

"Chief," Judy went on, knowing how this looked, "I know this looks bad, but Nick had nothing to do with this mess. If you're going to-"

"Save it," Bogo interrupted. "Right now we have bigger problems to worry about."

As if on cue, his radio crackled to life. "Bomb Squad to Relay," said Wolfard's distorted voice. "Do you copy? Over."

Bogo answered. "Relay here. I copy. Over."

"Yeah, we checked out the package. Over."

"What's the situation? Over."

"The package is full of papers," Wolford replied.

Judy felt ill. You have got to be kidding me…

"It's all Greek to me, but it looks like records; sales and production, or..."

This time, Judy did not resist the urge to facepaw as Wolfard gave his report. I am going to killthat skunk! she thought furiously.

Bogo had obviously figured out the same thing she had. "Working from home, Officer Hopps?" he asked sardonically.

Judy's face was burning, but she tried to salvage such dignity as she could. "For the record, she didn't get my address from me," she asserted in her defense.

"Noted."

Chief Bogo's radio crackled. "Chief?"

"Yes, Bomb Squad. Leave the package up there and pack everything else up. Relay to all units:: false alarm. There is no bomb. Over and out."

He returned his radio to his belt, letting out a weary sigh as he did. Then he turned his eyes on Judy. "Hopps..."

Judy gulped. "I take it you want the package up there for me to go through?"

The buffalo nodded. "Make this worth the trouble. I don't care how, but make this amount to something."

She gave a weary salute, then headed off into the crowd to find Nick.

Bogo gazed after her. "So much for avoiding a panic," he muttered.

"Carrots! Over here!"

Judy flicked her ears towards the sound, then scanned the crowd. It only took a moment to spot Nick's waving paw, and a quick bit of ducking and weaving brought the rest of him into view.

The fox was the very picture of one impatient for news, with his arms angled out to the sides and his ears back with uncertainty. "So, what happened?"

In answer, she grabbed his paw and began towing him toward the nearest door leading into the building. "I'll explain... as soon as there's nobody in earshot."

Nick jogged to keep up with the bunny's rapid, aggressive strides. "Sensitive information?"

Her tone was one of barely suppressed fury. "No, just a chance of language I'm not supposed to use in public."

Yikes, he thought, cringing to imagine what could tick her off that way.

Once they were inside, going up a little-used back staircase, Judy filled her friend in on what had happened. Somehow she managed to explain it without saying anything regrettable… barely.

"Ouch," he sympathized as they reached her floor. "So, what do we do now?"

She unlocked the door and began pushing the box into her apartment, past Officer Wolford. The fellow officer lent them a paw and tried without success to reassure the irate rabbit that false alarms were nothing to sweat. She thanked him mechanically, then shut the door so quickly that she almost got Nick's tail caught in the jamb.

"Whoa, whoa," he protested, yanking the extremity out of harm's way. Feeling slightly paranoid, he held it close a few seconds longer than necessary. "You got something against my tail?"

"No!" she snapped. Then she caught herself. "I mean... no." She took a few deep breaths. "Sorry, Nick. I'm just... rrgh, I can't believe this."

She was so tense she flinched for a moment when his paw descended on her shoulder. Then, reluctantly, she relaxed and looked up.

"Look, Carrots," he advised, "it doesn't take a brain like either of ours to know she did this to mess with you."

Judy looked away, not in much of a mood to be reassured. "Well, it worked," she replied. Then she pulled away, bothered not only about the false alarm, but about the reason why it was such a big concern. "Come on, let's go through these files and find something we can stick to that skunk."

Nick could feel the hostility radiating off of her as she opened the flaps (which Wolford had closed out of courtesy) and pulled out a folder. For a long moment he could only stare as she went to her bed, jumped up, and began leafing through.

Something tells me that skunk bugged the wrong bunny, he thought to himself.

Although Judy had eluded any tries for an interview, there was no hiding the fact that she lived at the place which had received such a scare. That was due in part to the big mouths of her next-door neighbors, and in part to fleeting glimpses people had managed to catch of her as she was running up to talk with Chief Bogo. Naturally, where the ZPD refused to give details, the media was more than happy to make up their own.

So it was that on that same evening, news outlets of every medium were blasting the story, leading three mammals around the city to read the same headline: Officer Judy Hopps Hit with Bomb Threat.

In the Moonbeamers' basement, Taelia got a shock when Vicky brought it up and asked if she thought Nick might be involved. Even after learning that no one had been hurt and the situation had been resolved, she was unsettled through the whole practice session and vowed she would not sleep that night until she had talked with Nick on the phone. Nicole, meanwhile, picked up on Taelia's unease and vowed she would not let the vixen get home that night without 'a good girl talk.'

Over in TudraTown, Vanya laughed to herself – a sound which usually meant trouble of some sort or other. She had a feeling that whatever the facts of the incident might be, Nick was mixed up in it somehow. As problematic as such a turnaround might be on the surface, a vixen like her could use such situations to her advantage. After all, if he ran into too many such problems, he might reconsider his career options. If not... well, she knew him well enough to make things difficult if he ever came after her. In the meantime, she had business to sort out. Mr. Big had called, telling her and the other Angels to be ready for an infiltration run on a place in Meadowlands.

In the Poisson mansion, the author of the whole stunt shook her head. She had expected some sort of reaction to the unmarked personal delivery – carried by the paws of a very capable employee – but she had also expected a trained police officer to keep a better lid on it than that. Of course, Officer Hopps would be sure to come after her more aggressively in the near future. For the moment, though, the skunk could at least have a chuckle over the snafu while she waited for the next move in their little battle of wits.

So the bomb was a bust, but what's the outcome? How is a snafu like this going to impact the ZPD's image and mission? What's Judy going to do to settle accounts with Miss Poisson? For that matter, where the heck is Obearon, and when is he reallygoing to strike?

Hope I didn't keep everyone waiting too long. This was a chapter I'd been waiting to do for some time, and although I wasn't able to include many Easter Eggs I did put a lot of thought into the details. I think you'll all be surprised as the case continues to unfold, and everyone's part in it is gradually revealed.

On a side note, I thought about having Olivia put in an old-fashioned alarm clock so the package would audibly tick, but decided that would make it too easy to slap charges (no pun intended) on her. No easy-to-catch villains in this story; I'll promise you that.

The "Sword of Hamocles" is a reference to a Greek fable called "The Sword of Damocles," which is a bit lengthy to explain here but well worth looking up.My deepest thanks to everyone for tracking and reviewing this little creation of mine.

Easter Eggs

Looney Tunes