DETECTIVE PONY QUOTE OF THE DAY: Anna remembered that a pony would not leave a burning barn. She’d heard stories of ponies running back into a burning barn after they had been rescued. A pony thought his stall was the safest place to be, even if it was in flames. [I’m going to leave the above paragraph completely intact. Let it sink in. That’s exactly how fucking imbecilic ponies are. Running into a burning barn. Christ. I’m making a concerted effort in my writing to make ponies sound ridiculous, and even I couldn’t come up with something that bizarre. You win this round, Jeanne Betancourt. Ponies. Shit. I’m telling you, Jane, those animals have a screw loose. The screw, to literalize the idiom and expand the metaphor, is there in the hole, but it’s wobbling around like a fidgety drunkard on an overclocked carousel. The screw’s thread has no grip at all, so any second now the whole thing’s going to fall out from the underside of that shitty Ikea couch which your friends told you not to get, but what could go wrong, you said to them, you could handle it; you built a birdhouse once, so... You want to tighten the screw, but you know that you can’t. You’re lying on your stomach, flashlight between your teeth, trying to get to that fucking loose screw, but it’s all up in a corner by one of the couch’s legs so you can’t reach it with your fingers, and the damn thing’s head is fucking stripped, so your screwdriver won’t do you any good. Turn that screwdriver all you want, Jane; that screw’s not going anywhere.]