"For sale, baby shoes, never worn" read the

"For sale, baby shoes, never worn" read the slip of paper. Dammit, why were the higher ups obsessed with Hemingway references? Last time, his contact had been an old man on a

bar stool smoking a cigar...he hated the smel of cigars.Pipes he liked.And weed.And clove cigarretes,but cigars...urr!He walked in and his fellow agent was already there

toking like a ginger army dropout. It was the brain damage. That's why his olfactory aesthetics were totally bass ackwards. That and the growing tumors in his throat and lungs.

He was a mess, but at least he was high. At least he'd really smoked some killer bud. The kind that make you wonder if there was no end to levels of highness, just before a freak o

f nature smashes through your wall, tentacles flailing, before pulling a pastel-coloured safari animal from its pocket and asking for a light. How much of this stuff had he smoked?

There was no option except to count the cigarette butts in the ashtrays. There were 2,933 of them.

This could only mean one thing: 2,933 cigarettes were smoked, stubbed out and left in the ash trays! Assuming 6 minutes per cig, and a 4 hr meeting, this meant there were

400 cigarettes smoked per person, which would indicate that there were at least 7 chain smokers in the meeting. Manatee checked the local emphysema wards and located seven patients

with no discernible lisp so that lead led to a dead end. Then Manatee got his first break. It was 9AM, Morning Smoke Break. The vast majority of the force did not smoke but they us

ually downed a half-dozen shots of Tequila and snorted a gram or two of cocaine before it was time to punch out for the weekend. Then Manatee heard Officer Wax lisp, "Night Chief!"