Suckers - Jack Kilborn [49]
I kicked Dennis in the shin, hard.
He shouted something obscene, loud.
And then Roger tackled him. As the two of them engaged in a fierce struggle, I kicked Dennis in the opposite shin. He cried out, lost his balance, dropped the knife, struck his head on the counter, and fell to the floor, unconscious.
Roger took a moment to catch his breath. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Eeep,” I said, gaping at the butcher knife that now protruded from my leg.
Roger crouched down next to me. “Is it deep?”
“Eeep.”
Roger yanked the knife out. It had only gone in about half an inch, but it still really hurt.
“We need to make a pact,” Roger told me. He pressed his finger to the wound on my leg. “A blood pact, that no matter what, we will never, ever, ever tell anybody in the entire world that we wet our pants.”
“Agreed,” I said, shaking his bloody hand.
And that’s basically it. We called the cops, got in a gargantuan amount of trouble, and began a friendship that has continued for twenty years.
Yeah, I know, I’m breaking our pact by telling you about the whole pants-wetting thing now, but technically we made our blood pact using only my blood, so it doesn’t count.
- The End -
P.S.: For Ms. Peckin’s make-up assignment, we did a skit based on Ernest Hemingway daring Mark Twain to eat dog food. We got a D+. We were happy to get it.
A Harry McGlade/Andrew Mayhem Thriller by JA Konrath & Jeff Strand
Note to fans of Andrew Mayhem: The following tale takes place between the events of Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) and Single White Psychopath Seeks Same. But long enough after Graverobbers that Andrew has had time to heal. I mean, let’s face it, he was way too messed up at the end of that book to jump right into another adventure, and we don’t want the Continuity Police throwing a hissy fit.
Note to readers unfamiliar with Andrew Mayhem: Don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything that you need to know.
Note to fans of Harry McGlade: Binge drinking is cool.
It all started with mushrooms.
Of course, lots of bad things start with mushrooms, but these were the non-hallucinogenic variety. My wife Helen despises mushrooms. I mean, she loathes them with every ounce of her being, and while she’s admittedly a rather petite woman, she’s able to cram a lot of loathing into those ounces.
I myself am no big fan of mushrooms or other fungi products, although in college we had a lot of fun with fungus when my best friend Roger got Athlete’s Foot. We called him “Itchy Roger” over and over and over and over again. I have to admit that it seems a lot less funny now than it was at the time, almost a bit pathetic in fact, but trust me, it was hysterical and kept us entertained for hours on end. The next semester, we entertained ourselves by playing darts with slices of pizza.
Anyway, I was thirty-three and long out of college (well, not that long, but that’s another story) and I’d spent the evening out drinking with Roger. Of course, we were drinking coffee, and only one cup each because that stuff was expensive as hell. I’d been given two tasks to complete before I returned home:
a) Purchase a jar of spaghetti sauce.
b) Ensure that the jar of spaghetti sauce did not include mushrooms.
When I got to the grocery store, I selected a jar of sauce. It had fancy calligraphy on it and a drawing of a smiling man in a chef’s hat. The part of my brain that should have been saying “Hey, dumb-ass, don’t forget about the no-mushrooms rule!” instead said “Gee, I wonder if this place has any sour gummi bears?” I bought the sauce and the gummi bears and left the store.
As it turns out, the drawing was not a smiling man in a chef’s hat. It was a giant mushroom. Damn those poofy chef’s hats.
Now, I don’t want you to think that my wife is the kind of person who would throw a screaming temper tantrum over me purchasing the wrong variety of spaghetti sauce. Instead, she’s the kind of person who would bottle up rage over my lack of a job, my questionable babysitting habits, the incident where I accidentally didn’t shut the freezer door securely