Case Files — Score Dossier · Director's Cut
The Barcarolle
The rap sheet lists § 02.7 as 'Aggravated Croaking-and-Driving' in three tidy lines. It leaves out the part that mattered: PooPee wasn't fleeing the law on that canal. He was performing for it.
The hub file has the disposition. This is the caper behind it — why a frog with nothing left to hide sang his own rap sheet out loud on open water, and how the officer sent to stop him ended up harmonizing on the record. The Swamp P.D. files this one under 'noise complaint, technically.'
The Gondola That Sang
a.k.a. “The Barcarolle”
Take: one negotiated-down charge, and a duet the arresting officer still won't admit to
The Setup
Midnight on the South Marsh canal, and PooPee had just closed the books on the best season of his life — the drain paying out, the shells still filing, not one subpoena in sight. A frog with a season like that doesn't row home quietly. He rented a gondola, pushed off alone, and started singing — loud, unhurried, dead in key — a running verse-by-verse account of his own net worth to an audience of nobody, because a frog that good deserves at least one witness, even if the witness is the water. Officer Croaksworth's patrol skiff came alongside somewhere around verse four, badge out, ready to write up a noise complaint. He did not expect to still be there for verse seven.
The Take
There was no take, not in the usual sense. Some jobs move flies from one shell to another; this one moved reputation, out loud, across open water. Every verse was a receipt read aloud for anyone drifting close enough to hear — the storm-drain float, the seventeen shells, the forty-one deposits — sung like a frog reciting his own eulogy in advance because he intends to enjoy it. It is, by his own account, the only job in the file that turned a profit in pure legend and cost him nothing but a fine.
How It Nearly Worked
It nearly stayed a warning. Croaksworth pulled alongside meaning to write up reckless operation of a watercraft and instead found himself, tiller still in hand, correcting the second verse's harmony without thinking about it — a reflex from a choir he hadn't sung in for twenty years. PooPee noticed. PooPee always notices. By the time the citation was drafted, the arresting officer had personally contributed to the exact performance he was charging.
The Line That Got Him Caught
The charge was never the singing — Croaktown has no statute against a frog enjoying himself. It was the driving: both hands off the pole, eyes on an orchestra only he could see, a gondola drifting sideways into the reeds while its captain took a bow nobody asked for. Under oath, the Court put it to Croaksworth directly — was that true? — and got back the seven words that gutted the case before it started: 'It was kind of inspirational, Your Honor.' You cannot ask a jury to convict a frog for a performance the arresting officer just endorsed.
The next job's already running
New Scores Break on the Feed
The barcarolle is filed under 'noise complaint, technically.' The next one isn't filed at all yet. Fresh jobs — and the choruses the code hasn't outlawed — break on the feed before the dossier's even typed. Follow PooPee on X and read the score before it becomes a charge.
Follow PooPee on X — @getpoopeeNo cut for followers. No wallet. Just the feed — and one public apology, still outstanding.