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Problem Sleuth wakes up with his face smushed against floorboards. Again, he thinks.
He tries to express this verbally. "Hrrrrrgggnnnnn," he says. And then, "vvnnmph". His mouth is full of cotton balls. No wait, it just feels like it's full of cotton balls. He blinks a few times, and can't quite clear all the fuzz from his mind. All the same, he attempts to take account of things.
First, he notes, he is on the floor. He is not sure where the floor is or whose floor it is, but he is certainly on it, and since he woke up there he can deduce that he either slept there or was thrown there. The latter is certainly more common, even for the top problem sleuth in the city.
Second, he feels like shit. His head is throbbing, his mouth disgusting, and his entire body aching. He's cold. He attempts to check his skull for goose eggs left by the butt of somebody's revolver or a bottle or something, the usual cause of his experience waking up on the floor. His attempt is an exceptional failure, from which he learns that thirdly, his hands are tied up somehow. He wriggles around a little, cursing under his breath the entire way. However, he has found his hands, which expands point three to include the fact that he is tied, specifically, to a wrought-iron grate framing a fireplace.
He considers for a moment, and adds on point four, which is that he cannot remember getting here; he mentally jots it down as amnesia. Too many blows to the head? Food or drink laced? He keeps them in mind.
He decides to investigate the room. He considers doing this from a standing position, but points two and three gang up and beat the suggestion down, and he takes this as a warning to stay on the floor for now. He does not often listen to warnings, but coming as it is from his own thoughts, he allows that perhaps he has a point.
Problem Sleuth looks around. The floor is hardwood, dark and polished and real swanky. Nearby is a large green bottle, and he files it under Possible Weapons in his Brainvestigation. Just because he can't feel a bump on his head doesn't mean he wasn't clocked by that bottle. He gives it an intense glare, but the bottle remains quiet. It'll take more than that to convince it to cough up its alibi.
Right beside the bottle is a rug, tossed in a heap. It looks like white tiger skin or something equally endangered and expensive. It looks surprisingly soft, and Sleuth wonders if somebody is raising white tigers and shampooing them every day. This pings at the back of his mind. He thinks he's heard something like that before.
He files that under Clues.
The wood below him is slightly darker than the rest of the floor. Sleuth suspects the rug was moved either before he was tossed there or after, pulled out from under him. Maybe he was bleeding, and they didn't want to have to skin another Pantene Tiger. He can't feel any of the sharp pulls to his movement that would register as a cut, or the red-hot-poker sensation of a bullet wound, though, so he discounts that for the moment. It is beginning to look, to his chagrin, like he went down without much of a fight.
Beside him is a bedframe. It's also dark wood, with a few bits of dark steel laced into the design. It's modern and weird-looking and seems really expensive. He's right at the foot, and can't see any more of it than the tall flat design at the end, so he's not really sure what the rest of the bed looks like.
Craning his head backwards and gritting his teeth through the twinge of neck muscles and the screaming of his aching head, he can see long curtains and the edge of a door. He files it under Escape Routes, and notes amusedly that he's already organized his thoughts more than he ever does his office.
He looks down and adds a second door to his new folder. He also adds another point (five) to his Brainvestigation- he is entirely naked. No pants, shirt, tie, watch, hat, nothing. He holds up his feet. Even his socks are gone. On the plus side, he mentally checks off the symptom "cold" from his earlier list, noting "naked" beside it.
So he's woken up somewhere unfamiliar, feeling like hell, tied to a grate, naked. And he doesn't know how he got here. Problem Sleuth begins to feel something like worry. It's not the first time any of these things have happened, but usually it's not all at once. Somebody really pulled the big guns out to make sure he wouldn't be going anywhere. Naturally, he reacts as he frequently does when confronted with dangerous and delicate situations and immediately begins yelling.
"HEY, WHOEVER, RISE AND SHINE," he bellows. Oh God, his brain. It threatens to jump ship along with anything he ate last night if he continues to make noises a billion decibels higher than anyone should ever have to listen to. There is a strangled sound nearby and somebody moving. Whoops, thinks Problem Sleuth. Turns out there was somebody else here all along. Well, maybe whoever it is has some more information.
To his surprise, a figure pokes its head over the foot of the bed. He'd figured anyone in here would have been tied-up or drugged too. The man does look incredibly groggy, which almost eclipses his gritted teeth, lips curled in a snarl. His shiny black hair is wild, and he sports a handful of really impressive bite-marks all along his shoulders.
"What," he says flatly, "the fuck," he adds, "do you want," he closes his single eye as if in pain, "you asshole?"
It's Spades Slick. In retrospect, this really does look like one of his places. Problem Sleuth shoves him bodily into his Suspects folder. "Slick, if you don't get me untied from here-" he begins, but Spades Slick cuts him off.
"It's nine o'clock," Spades Slick says, in the closest thing to patience he's ever displayed. Patience, for Spades Slick, involves him clenching his sharp teeth together with his eye closed.
"Is it?" Sleuth says with fake cheer. "Let me just check my watch." He makes a show of craning his head back to his hands. There's nothing around his wrist but rope. Spades Slick makes a gagging sound. "Nope, had no idea," Sleuth continues. "Look, Slick, I don't know what you want, but I know we can work something out. So just untie me, and we'll talk."
"You don't know," Spades Slick says, his attempted patience showing a crack or two, "what I want."
Sleuth smiles at him to hide how completely thrown off he is by all this.
"I want you to shut up and let me sleep, you complete fucking moron." Slick's hand goes to his forehead, which he holds, wincing, for a moment before running it through his wild hair. He makes a half-hearted impression of Sleuth's voice. "'Just leave me here, Slick,'" he mocks. "'Too tired to move.'" Slick snarls at him, "patience" shattering entirely. "If I'd known you'd wake up ungodly early and start howling at me through this fucking hangover to let you back out, I'd never have tied you up in the first place."
"You tied me-"
"YES, I FUCKING TIED YOU UP THERE. And if I recall correctly, you seemed to enjoy it for awhile. So fuck you, shut up, and next time you're drunk out of your skull I'm not going to listen to a fucking word you say." Spades Slick wraps himself in a blanket, grabs a pillow, and stalks out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Hm.
Sleuth peers up at his hands.
Yes, he thinks through his hangover, he does vaguely remember going out on the town with Slick the night before. It's fuzzy. He squints his eyes closed and tries to think. Yes, they went out to somewhere Slick didn't own. Slick was feeling generous and was buying drinks right, left, and center, for anybody in the room who caught his interest, so he figures he must have drank about three times what he's usually used to on a real bender.
He is unsure if the club was still standing when they left.
Then the two of them, straggling through the streets to whatever apartment was closest, alternately supporting each other and degenerating into drunken off-balance beatings. Somehow Slick got his apartment unlocked (Sleuth remembers some kerfuffle over the keys), and then very fuzzy and separate memories of travelling through his hall, kitchen, and collapsing on the sofa, Slick pulling a bottle of something from... somewhere, Slick straddling his lap, and then... pretty much nothing.
He has no idea how Spades Slick does it. The guy is three-quarters his size and skinny, but he can hold his liquor like nobody's business. And he sure ties a good knot.
Problem Sleuth takes the bottle out of the Possible Weapons file and puts it in Suspects with Spades Slick, then mentally stamps "CASE CLOSED" on it. Just another job well-done for the town's best problem sleuth. No clue unfound, no situation too embarrassing.