“The plan was rock solid. These guys were real pros. Especially the leader. Funny thing about a plan, though: even the best laid ones gang aft a-gley, and you’re left with your dick in your hand, looking down at a mouse whose house you just plowed up.”
“Yeah, Lou, I guess so.”

That’s me, Detective Lou Logeater.

Near as I could tell, they’d pulled the job off without a hitch. There were three of ‘em, two men and a woman. One of the men did all the talking, and all of the dangerous work. He kept the teller occupied. This was the leader, a charming son of a bitch that had been popping up on my radar for years, always one step ahead of law. The other guy was behind a computer a half a mile away, talking to the first guy through an earpiece. This guy was a computer geek. You know, a hacker type. He was on the internet the whole time, looking up the answer to the question. The woman ran interference, pretending to be having a baby in order to buy more time. She was a knockout, I mean, drop dead gorgeous. But she had a dark side. On the force, we called her type a Black Widow Spider.

“The bodies are right over here.” Bud said.

They didn’t look so tough, lying there on slabs. Bud swung a lamp over them and flicked on the light. All three of them had bullets holes and coffee stains on their clothes. A gutter in the side of the table caught the blood from where Bud had cut them open. I took an enormous drag off my cigarette.

“What happened, Lou?”
“What Year was the Rosetta Stone Discovered?” I asked.

“You see, Luau Jack’s has this contest where every day they put up a new trivia question on the whiteboard outside the Expresso Hut. If you answer the question, you get a free 12oz coffee. You’re supposed to try to answer it yourself, but these three didn’t want to play nice. They had a con going, where that one would feed answers to this one, while this one distracted the barista. Like I say, it worked. Too well. When they got the coffee back to their hideout, 12 ounces split 3 ways didn’t seem like such a good take after all. They all had the same idea, at the same time, and they all succeeded. Too well.”
“Jesus, Lou.”
“Bang, bang, bang, three dead perps. So, Bud, What Year was the Rosetta Stone Discovered?”
“No idea.”
“That’s ok, Bud, I’ll buy this one.”

The ash from my cigarette crumbled off and fell onto the slab, was swept along by the gooey current until it reached the drain pipe and disappeared. Bud switched off the lights and locked up the morgue on our way out. The next morning it turned out one of his assistants had still been working in the cold room. He’d been locked in there all night with seven corpses and a pen-light. The assistant went insane. Bud lost his job, not because of the assistant, but because he was a necrophiliac, and everybody knew it. Me, I kept plugging away, and three years later I retired with a full pension, an ulcer, and a stack of unsolved cases that haunt me to this day.