Suckers - Jack Kilborn [30]
Mary Agnes Morrison.
I scurried away, palms and knees wet, and saw the bright red object that caused me to fall.
The empty can of Super Berry Mix energy drink.
So my paranoia wasn’t really paranoia after all. It was just an unhealthy amount of caffeine in my veins. Which would have been kind of funny if I wasn’t soaked with my own piss. Along with the taurine, the drink apparently contained a full day’s supply of irony.
I stood up and shook out my pants legs.
“Get a grip, McGlade. And stop talking to yourself. You always know what you’re going to say anyway.”
I took three or ten deep breaths, holstered my weapon, and then set out looking for George.
I had no idea that in just two minutes I was going to die.
I didn’t actually die. I’m lying to make the story more exciting, because this part is sort of slow.
It starts to pick up in Chapter 8. Trust me, it’s worth the wait. There’s sodomy.
It was a fruitless search, but that didn’t matter—I wasn’t looking for fruit. After a few minutes, I’d found him. He’d given me the slip by cleverly disguising himself as a group of three bawling women. Closer inspection, and some grab ass, revealed they really were women after all. I did my “pretend to be blind and deaf” act and stumbled away before any of them called the police or their lawyers.
Luckily, I caught sight of an undisguised George heading into the mausoleum. I never liked mausoleums. Burying the dead was bad enough. Putting them in the walls was just begging for mice to move in. And not the kind of mice who wear red pants and open up amusement parks. I’m talking about dirty, vicious, baby-face-eating mice, the size of rats.
Actually, I’m talking about rats.
Speaking of non-sequiturs, I really needed to take another leak. The mausoleum was decent-sized, with a few hundred vaults stacked four high. Well lit, temperature controlled, silk plants next to marble benches every twenty feet. It was the kind of place that would have a bathroom, I thought, while pissing on one of the silk plants. The pot it was in wasn’t any realer than the plant, because all of my piss leaked out the bottom. I stepped over the puddle and commenced the search.
One of the techniques they teach you in private eye school is how to conduct a search, I bet. I have no idea, because I didn’t go to private eye school. I wasn’t even sure that private eye school actually existed. But it did in my fantasies. All the teachers were naked women, and wrong answers were punished with spankings. And the water fountains were actually beer fountains. If they had a school like that, I’d go for sure.
George wasn’t down the first aisle. He wasn’t down the second aisle either. Or the first aisle, which I checked again because I got confused.
“You do this?”
I spun around, wondering who spoke. It was some little old caretaker guy, clutching a mop. He pointed at the puddle on the floor.
“It was that other guy,” I said, thinking fast. “You see him anywhere?”
“I only seen you, buddy. Did you go to the bathroom on my floor? There’s a bathroom right there behind you. What kind of man does a thing like this?”
“That’s what happens when you don’t go to college.”
“You piss on the floor?”
“You get a job cleaning up piss on the floor.”
I left the guy to his menial labor and peeked down the second aisle again. Still no George. That led me down the third aisle, and I caught a glimpse of George crawling into a hole in the wall.
Closer inspection revealed it wasn’t a hole. It was a vault. He’d crawled into someone’s open tomb. I didn’t even want to think why he’d do that, but my mind thought of it anyway, and then started thinking of it in enough detail that made me nauseous, yet oddly disgusted. Maybe a necromancer was someone who got his freak on with