Suckers - J.A. Konrath

"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
113