A Green Lantern in Zootopia (Patreon)

The car was upside down. The package had burst and catnip had gotten everywhere. Sirens were getting louder as the police car got closer 

Nick Wilde allowed that he had miscalculated.

But of course he hadn't miscalculated. The job was from Mr. Big. Mr. Big wasn't someone you didn't do favors for, even when you didn't owe him one. And he had decided Nick was going to make things right between them by delivering something.

Nick had always felt that any idiot could make a delivery. The corollary to that was that even a genius could get pinched with catnip on him.

And he'd had a lot in the hollow pillars of his car.

He didn't know why the bunny had pulled him over. And he didn't know how she'd known he had nip in the car. He for sure didn't know why he hadn't been able to talk her out of giving him a ticket.

But she'd told him to step out of the car. What choice had he had then? He could go to jail with Mr. Big holding a grudge against him or he could at least try to make a run for it.

That hadn’t worked out.

He’d at least made it outside the city before the bunny had given him the PIT maneuver. And now he was hanging from his seatbelt in a car that was going to need a whole lot of bodywork.

Good news: it wasn’t his. Bad news: it was Mr. Big’s.

I am so screwed, getting away from this cop might actually make my day worse.

It couldn’t have taken the bunny long to catch up with him, considering she’d been right on his tail through three zip codes, but it still seemed to take a while for him to hear the squad car pull up and the door open and shut. Maybe it was the blood pooling in the uppermost reaches of his skull.

“Sir, if you’re able, step out of the vehicle now!”

She didn’t sound too butch, which Nick would’ve expected from any bunny who went and joined the police force. No, she sounded more like she should be talking like what your laundry would smell like if you bought the detergent she was selling.

“Oh, we’re still calling it a vehicle? Because I thought after rolling over five or six times, it was more akin to modern art.”

He heard the safety click on her gun. Great. That was all he needed. Having a gun pointed at him by someone with a hair trigger. Or was that hare trigger…?

“I won’t ask again!” The door swung open. Oh, that was gentlemanly, she was getting the door for him. Maybe she was butch after all. “Come out with your hands held in front of you! And, uh, watch out for broken glass…”

“Okay, okay, you got me. Just don’t blow my head off when I undo my seatbelt.”

“No sudden moves!” she barked.

“You notice how I’m hanging upside down? You have been made aware of the existence of gravity? Can you see how sudden movement really isn’t up to me, unless there’s a ladder nearby I’m not seeing…”

“Alright, I’ve got it. I’m going to count to three. Then, you undo your seatbelt. It’ll be a sudden movement, but not an unexpected one.”

“Yes, good, let’s go with that. Wouldn’t want to have you shooting the car crash victim…”

“I could always pepper spray you and then undo your seatbelt.”

“I’ve never thrown up while in this position before. Would it technically be throwing down?”

“Just be ready to pop your seatbelt.”

Nick dutifully moved his hands to his seatbelt buckle. “Waiting on you.”

“One… two… three!” She hopped back, gun at the ready, but the reaction was all on her part. Nick hadn’t moved. “Okay, I meant go on three, but even if you assumed three then go, you should’ve gone by now.”

“I’m trying. It’s stuck. This actually happened before the crash, I think you have to jimmy the tongue a little or it—”

Nick suddenly fell on his face.

“Oooh!” the bunny winced with a laugh. “That looked like it hurt!”

“Really? Because it felt great.” Carefully placing his hands to avoid putting too much of his weight on the glass from the shattered windows, Nick padded his way out of the overturned car and onto the bridge.

No sooner had he gotten to his feet then he staggered. Thrown off-balance by the blood reversing course in his right-side-up body. He tripped his way to the railing on the side of the bridge and embraced it. Now looking out over the railing, his entire view was of a belt of spruce trees bisected by a rabbit track until ending in a long stretch of sloping meadowland. Early morning mist hung in the hollows, forming a dense pool that shifted with the breeze stirring the branches.

It was barely dawn. There were no cars on the road yet. There was hardly any light from the sun, either. Just the rolling blues and reds from the bunny’s patrol car.

“Sir, put your hands up!”

“Right now, my hands are the only thing keeping me from falling on my face again. I need them where they are. Though I appreciate you probably need a laugh, working nights and all…”

“I apologize for laughing, but for my own safety I need you to raise your hands above your head.”

A soft touch, Nick thought. He probably should’ve expected that from a bunny, but then he’d never heard of a bunny cop before. He was pretty sure she’d never heard of that either.

“Do we really need the whole… ‘interlace your fingers, cross your ankles, put your hands on your head, ay macarena’ stuff? I’ve been in a car crash. I’m done. You’ve got a gun.”

“You could have a gun,” the bunny said, but she sounded uncertain.

“How about I just sit down and put my hands on my knees? You’ll be able to see I’m not trying anything and I won’t strain anything.”

“Okay. Alright. But you’d better not make any sudden moves!”

“Oh, believe me, I don’t want to do anything fast at the moment. You’ve heard of sleeping on your neck wrong? I feel like I went into a coma wrong.”

The bunny stifled a giggle. “I need to call this in. Don’t move.”

“No moving.” Nick leaned back against the railing and eased himself down until he was sitting on the sidewalk that ran the length of the bridge. “Okay. Oooh. That’s better. And here are my hands. Voila.”

Taking one hand off the Glock, the bunny keyed her radio and spewed cop jargon into it.

“Man, what a shame to hear that lovely voice talking Codes 4s and 10-7s…”

She eyed him warily. “You won’t have to put up with it much longer, sir.”

“Please, call me Nick. And by the way, how are you? I know you weren’t in a wreck, but that was really something, still. You don’t have any whiplash? Neck pain? It can be a real killer. Maybe you should sit down.”

“I’m good.”

“Okaaay, but I’m seeing a lot of tension in how you’re carrying yourself. I think a little preventative care would do you some good here. Maybe it’s just that I’m in pain, so it’d be awful if someone else threw out their back too. I was misbehaving, sure, I’ll cop to it, but you were just doing your job. You shouldn’t need a lumbar realignment.”

“I don’t need a lumbar realignment. Bunnies are very flexible. In fact, we’re practically liquid.”

Nick nodded. “Good, that’s good. Bad enough I screwed up my life, but I’d hate to think I gave you a crink in the neck.”

She leaned onto the hood of her cruiser. “I’m fine. Really.”

“That’s a relief,” he cooed. “I already feel bad over, well, can I be honest?”

“I guess—”

“When I saw a bunny was chasing me, I really thought I had it in the bag. I mean, who ever heard of a bunny being some kind of race car driver? But you sure showed me. Wow. Not that I’m a race car driver either, but I know my way around the streets and let me tell you, you stuck to me like white on rice. I’ve never seen driving like that.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“Did you grow up on a NASCAR pit crew or something?”

“Pursuit driving is part of the skillset of any good police officer. I have a friend who owns an old Crown Vic—well, someone who responded to my Ratchat post—and he let me drive it around an empty lot so I could pick up what a squad car could really do!”

She sounded excited. Very… bunnyishly excited. Her left foot gave a kick against the ground though she tried to stiffen her leg.

“Very prescient of you,” Nick praised. “You must be one heck of a cop.”

She beamed a little. “Well, I try to be. I still have a lot to learn, of course, I only just got out of the academy…”

“And already you’re making busts? Chasing down criminals in hot pursuit? Gosh! Imagine where you’ll be in a few years. They’ll be trying to make you chief of police. You’ll have to tell them ‘no, no, wait until my knees give out, I can still do a lot more running’!”

She giggled. “I’m a long way from being the chief of anything.”

“Yeah, I bet you were a long way from wearing a badge once, too. Now here you are. Bad luck for me, but I can give props where they’re due. There’s not a lot of coppers who could’ve run me down the way you did.” Nick coughed. “Hey, not to guilt-trip you or anything, but I think that crash did a number on me. You think you could call in an ambulance?”

“Oh, of course!”

“And if you could see as far as to not make me move around too much? I get that I’m going to jail, but there’s being in jail and then being in jail with a clean bill of health.”

The cop froze. Even her twitching whiskers now still. “I really should cuff you…”

“And I get that, I see that, one hundo percent understand where you’re coming from. You worked hard to get here. Now that you’re a cop, you want to do your cop thing. But have you considered all those rules—such as the one saying I should be in handcuffs—were written by the same close-minded tinpot dictators that barely let you be a cop in the first place? I mean, I’m assuming here, but tell me you never once thought that these guys were jackasses that couldn’t find it with both hands. Am I right?”

Her whiskers twitched a little. “There… may have been some misgivings about how the recruitment process worked itself out.”

“And now they’re telling you how to be a cop. Is there one of them that isn’t a Big It sitting in a padded chair? Big office with the fan on? Thick rug, both under their feet and on their head?”

She giggled some. “Okay, you’ve got a point. But I’ll still shoot you if you try anything.”