Jack Kilborn & J. A. Konrath (17 page)

“We should check his pulse.”

“You check his pulse!”

“Fine.” I cautiously walked over to the body, then knelt down beside it. I pressed my fingers to his wrist.

“Anything?”

“I’m not sure I’m in the right spot.”

“Well…poke him with something.”

“I’m not going to poke him!”

“Then breathe on him. Do something to wake him up!”

Suddenly Dennis sat up, arms outstretched, and shouted something that sounded approximately like “AAUUGGHHAAA!!!!”

I scooted backward at 37,916 miles per hour and shouted something that sounded approximately like “Shit!” Then I punched Roger in the shoulder as hard as I possibly could. I struck a particularly solid part of his shoulder and it felt like I’d smashed the bones in my hand into bite-sized chunks, but it was worth it.

“Ow! Why’d you hit me?”

“Because you’re a jerk!”

“What’d I do?”

“You planned this whole thing! I almost wet my pants! You probably wanted to tell everybody at school that I wet my pants, didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t me!”

“Yes it was!”

“No it wasn’t!”

But then I discovered something truly shocking. Roger had wet his own pants. Would somebody who had plotted out this scheme spontaneously urinate over the revelation of the surprise? Unlikely. So Roger was innocent. I’d struck the shoulder of an innocent man.

I turned my attention away from Roger and toward Dennis. The smug bastard who’d scared me half to death was looking…well, not particularly smug. Not smug at all, in fact. He looked somewhat depressed, and somewhat homicidal.

“Did I scare you?” he asked. I could see the butcher knife on the floor where he’d been lying.

Roger and I both nodded.

He wiped a tear from his eye. “I knew I could scare you. I was good, wasn’t I? I can act, right?”

“You sure can,” Roger said, eyeing me nervously as if to say “Did you perhaps notice that this gentleman is sounding depressed and homicidal?”

“I
know
I can! I spent days practicing for that audition! I spend days practicing for
every
audition! So why the hell don’t I ever get the part?” He picked up the butcher knife. “Huh? Tell me why I never get the part?”

I said the first thing that popped into my mind: “Because… you have…you’ve got…um, facial features…that…that…you know, they aren’t traditional…and…and…and…you know how Robert De Niro doesn’t really look like a movie star, but he’s famous, but it probably took a long time because he doesn’t…you know…he’s got that mole and people who make movies took a while to figure out how good he was, but now they all love him…that’s you…you’re like Robert De Niro.”

“Yeah,” said Roger.

Dennis considered that. “De Niro is a god to me.”

“He’s a god to everybody,” I said. “So you just have to keep trying and someday you’ll be the next De Niro.”

“But he won the Academy Award for
Godfather II
when he was barely thirty years old! I’m forty-six!”

“Well, he probably had a better agent,” said Roger.

Dennis raised the butcher knife. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give the performance of a lifetime. They always say I should be more real. Well, I’ll show them just how real I can be! They’ll have a pretty hard time saying I’m not real when I gut one of you with this knife, don’t you think?”

Though I admittedly couldn’t find any holes in his theory, it wasn’t a plan of action that I wanted to encourage. “Look, just let us go,” I said, as Roger and I cautiously backed toward the door. “We won’t say anything.”

“If you don’t say anything, that wrecks the whole point!” said Dennis, swishing the butcher knife through the air. “I can either go lie in the bathtub, slit my wrists, and die in obscurity, or I can kill one of you and go to prison a celebrity! I sure as hell will get a role in the prison Thanksgiving pageant, that’s for sure!”

He took a menacing step forward, and I suddenly relaxed. He was still acting. This was all payback for the phone call prank. He was just trying to scare a couple of whippersnappers, to teach us the error of our ways, to provide a life lesson that would suit us well as we entered maturity.

“I think I’ll kill…” Dennis hesitated, looking back and forth between Roger and I, and then pointed the knife at me. “You.”

He rushed forward. I still kind of thought he might be trying to help me with my development of a moral core, but my bladder disagreed.

There wasn’t time to get the door open, so we rushed across the living room into the kitchen, screaming, with Dennis right behind us. “
Does this seem real? Are you scared
?”

Though of course we couldn’t have known the floor plan to Dennis’ home beforehand, it still sucked to discover that the kitchen was a dead end.

I grabbed the first available object to defend myself. In a kitchen that no doubt contained knives, forks, meat cleavers, tenderizers, cheese graters, and rolling pins, I felt a little silly trying to be intimidating with a plastic measuring cup, but, hey, sometimes you just have to make the best of things.

“My uncle knows a Hollywood producer,” Roger said. “He can get you a big part, I promise.”

“Oh yeah? What’s his name?”

“Uncle Phil.”

“The producer’s name, jackass.”

“Ummm…”

“Don’t try to out-act me, kid. And don’t worry, you’re not the one who’s going to die tonight. You’re just the audience.”

“Then you can’t kill me until we make some popcorn,” I said.

Dennis raised an eyebrow. “You’re moments away from a horrible, painful death and you’re able to make a joke about popcorn?”

I shrugged. It had kind of surprised me, too.

Dennis grinned and pointed the knife at Roger. “Maybe I should kill him instead and make
you
the audience.”

“No!” Roger protested. “I want the popcorn!”

Dennis shook his head. “No, I need to go with my original instinct. That’s what they tell you in acting school. Go with your instincts.” He gestured at Roger with the knife. “Step out of the way.”

“No.”

“No?” Dennis asked.

Roger shook his head and stepped in front of me. “No. I’m not scared of you. You’re a lousy actor. In fact, you suck.”

I couldn’t believe it! Roger, who I’d met for the very first time that same day, was placing himself between me and a madman with a butcher knife!

I was in awe.

This was somebody I could imagine sharing a friendship with until the end of my years.

I mean, what a
brilliant
freakin’ end to the whole joke!

Dennis let out a well-acted scream of primal rage and ran toward us. He shoved Roger out of the way, knocking him into the refrigerator so hard that—

—that it couldn’t have been faked.

He swung the knife at me.

Holy shit!

I moved out of the way and the blade sliced across my chest. It hurt about as much as I would’ve expected a butcher knife cutting my chest to hurt. My feet slipped out from under me and I landed on my butt. As Dennis raised the knife, I wished that I’d never seen any amusement value in clumsy baby dropping.

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.

I
t 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 and ruined hundreds of dollars’ worth of frozen meat, and a few dozen other infractions, and let it all come exploding out of her petite frame in the form of extremely strong disapproval over my choice of spaghetti sauce.

I shouted back at her (though an onlooker might have mistaken it for shameful cowering and groveling) and headed out to do a sauce exchange. As I walked into the driveway, I realized that I’d left my car keys on the kitchen table. Having just been lectured for my lack of responsibility, I didn’t think it was a good idea to walk back into the house and sheepishly say “Uh, forgot my keys.” The store was only ten blocks away. I’d walk.

To keep the walking time to a minimum, I cut through several backyards. I didn’t notice the man breaking into an unfamiliar house until I practically bumped into him. I’m not very observant.