3) why Beef would actually be looking for a broken ice machine. Maybe he will follow a trail of ice from a vandalized (re: Tilted) ice machine that Ray has likely toe up?
Not so much vandalized as
completely exhausted. Wherever there is an empty ice machine, Ray is somewhere nearby getting his
mad drink on. If we want to be
overly obsessive about it, I will point out that old pinball machines, once tilted, were pretty much locked up until reset by the operator.
Sometime in the 60s manufacturers started adding little mercury bubble switches (the same kind used as booby-traps in bombs which make the bomb explode if you pick up or jostle the bomb) that would turn off the flipper controls if you bumped the table too much.
These days (not that they're really
making pinball machines anymore, the bastards) the tilt mechanism is a plumb-bob suspended in the center of a metal ring. If the machine is sufficiently tilted / physically abused, plumb-bob touches metal ring, completes circuit, triggers Bad Things, etc. It would be
completely unscrupulous to open up a pinball machine and tape said plumb-bob out of harm's way.
I "HEART" PINBALL