“I think you screwed something up.”
Bobby picked up the bottle, swirling the liquid inside. He took a close look and scowled.
“Yeah, you may be right.”
“I don’t think whiskey is supposed to be green.”
“Well, on St Patty’s Day it would be.”
“It’s not St. Patty’s Day, Bobby. And the whiskey is green.”
“Yeah, but it smells right. Smells more than right.”
“What about the taste?”
“I haven’t tasted it yet. It’s freaking green, Mark. I don’t know if it is safe to drink.”
“OK people, settle down!”
The room grew quiet as the detectives focused on the Chief Inspector.
“You are all here for one reason and one reason only, to capture the killers known as the ‘Love Birds’. You have all been picked in no small part due to your individual successes in other investigations, but this will be the most challenging any of you have seen.”
Chief Inspector Reilly paused and took a sip a water.
“The ‘Love Birds’ are believed to be a husband and wife team of assassins. Their victims have all been witnesses in high profile organized crime cases and their work has cost us at least three convictions so far. They seem to favor a slow but brutal death for their victims, most likely at the request of whoever has been hiring them; each of their eighteen victims so far has been killed by hundreds of small lacerations and disfigurement.”
“Well, you know you can’t bake a cake without breaking a few eggs.”
“What?”
“I said you can’t bake …”
“I heard what you said. I meant what does that have to do with it? I’m not a baker. I just don’t see what eggs have to do with anything relevant.”
“It’s just a saying.”
“A saying that has nothing to do with the issue at hand. If we were baking a cake, sure, we would break some eggs. But we’re not baking a cake, are we?”
“You want to use what?”
“Bubbles.”
“Like soap bubbles?”
“Yes, exactly! Well, mostly, it’s not exactly soap, but it would be cost efficient and easily put into place. Why the savings alone …”
“Are you completely insane?!”
“What? No. No, of course I’m not insane. Why would you say such a thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you are wanting to use SOAP BUBBLES to construct environmental domes on the moon!!”
Four smokes. Just four smokes left and no new pack in sight, at least for another 150 miles. If he was lucky, there would be a shop along this desolate stretch of desert highway before he ran out. He wasn’t feeling too lucky.
The last 24 hours had been surreal, and not in a this-will-all-be-funny-when-you-look-back-on-it kind of way. More in the the-world-is-fucked-and-no-one-would-believe-you-even-if-you-could-tell-them kind of way. That was actually probably looking at it through rose colored glasses, though. In the depth of his soul he really believed it to be much worse than that.