WHAT? YOU THINK I'm taking the big sleep?!" Sweet screamed at the mortician, who inadvertently yanked an embalming hose out of the presumably departed detective's nostril as he fainted in a heap on the linoleum. Whoever said Sweet was dead had obviously seen too many movies. Didn't they know that in hipster parlance, "dead" merely suggested an especially far-out drug high?
And what euphoric heights. He'd felt like his body was covered by 1,000 itchy ears inside of which 1,000 Q-tips were simultaneously twirling. But now he was coming down, hard, and there was only one thing to do before he hit bottom: get some coffee, pronto. If possible, the best coffee in Tucson.
Racing downtown on a Sun Tran, he mulled over the case so far; The Maltese Pygmy Owl, "Macho Hombre"...was there a relationship? Sweet felt like a Web site that hadn't been updated since 1996: all his links went nowhere. Just then he caught sight of a familiar, toothy head rendered spookily enormous on a billboard. It was an ad for Becky Duckrump, the hopelessly perky TV reporter. In spite of everything, he was still dizzy with that dame. Never could get over their romantic weekend perusing the dead-puppy art in Bisbee. Maybe she could help him now.
Sweet fished for his little gray cell phone. "Toots, Sam Sweet here. Important business. Meet me at the CAP-Water Café, and don't be latte," he said with a delivery as dry as the Rillito River.
The café was filled to the rim with riffraff. There were Elvis Costello glasses that were wearing people, sour-looking Goth girls with more makeup base than face, and chess-playing patzers who wouldn't know a good en passant if it rapped them on the noodle. The walls were painted the green shade of an early '70s kitchen appliance, and covered with artwork that looked as though Van Gogh had eaten a bunch of flowers and barfed.
The menu bewildered. "We've got macchiato, chai, breve and, uh, the stuff creams are made of," said the jerky java clerk, whose name was Josh Speedball. Sweet took a shot in the dark and ordered a Shot in the Dark. Speedball smiled strangely, and it occurred to Sweet that this guy was a real wrong number. Head shaved, bushy sideburns--he looked like an Hasidic skinhead. And those piercings: eyebrows, septum, lower lip...was it just him, or had someone grafted a Mat Bevel sculpture onto his ugly mug? As Speedball turned to operate some sort of shiny, miniature nuclear reactor, Sweet leaned over the counter and snatched a business card out of his low-hanging back pocket. It read, "Lobo Goodearth, Environmental Lawyer." Hmmm.
Just then, the door's many bells jangled. Toots walked in, sans microphone. Sitting on matching faux leopard-skin stools, they ordered. He got the Really Tough Cookie, she the baba ganoush. "Gesundheit," Sweet wisecracked when she ordered, and while her eyes were rolling he slipped his hand into her purse intuitively...and pulled out the Maltese Pygmy Owl!
"What have we here?" he said, feeling the bewilderment of a driver with no wristwatch using the suicide lanes at the end of rush hour.
"Shhh!" she sputtered. "I've discovered a plot to poison Tucson's water with the deadly 'Macho Hombre' virility drug! That may be why Jimbob Gemstone was murdered!"
"But where'd you get the bird?" he asked, using a coffee straw to pick gum off the sole of his Doc Melvins.
"That's deep background," said Toots, "but if you must know, artist Willie Norman gave it to me in exchange for a series of puff pieces about his gallery. I've no idea where he got it, but when I peered into its...uh...secret compartment, I found these water-contamination plans." Across the table she pushed a piece of paper that'd been ripped down the middle.
Could she be trusted? Toots was like a microwave burrito that hadn't been properly rotated: callous on the outside, icy cold on the inside. But the plans looked real enough. Sweet examined them more closely. "There may be more here than meets the peepers," he said smugly.
"How can you be sure?"
"K through six, my dear Duckrump."
"Don't you mean 'elementary'?"
"Whatever." Picking up a table crayon, he rubbed Royal Blue gently over the paper. Aha! The scribbling revealed an indented trace that read: Thanks for the ganga deal on killing Gemstone. Need you to bump off the other chump who knows. Meeting set up tomorrow at Reid Park. Make escape via paddle boat. The victim's name is... The words ended abruptly at the torn edge.
Sweet looked up at Toots. "How long have you had the Maltese Pygmy Owl?" he demanded.
"Since yesterday."
"That means another murder is set to go down today! Quick--we've got to get to Reid Park!"
