Suckers - J.A. Konrath

I slapped the kid, making his eyes cross.
“Hey! You hit me!”
“A woman hired you to kill her husband.”
“I don’t know what you’re—“
He got another smack. “That’s for lying.”
“You can’t hit me,” he whined. “I’ll sue you.”
I hit him twice more; once because I didn’t like being threatened by punk kids, and once
because I didn’t like lawyers. When I pulled my palm back for threesies, the kid broke.
“Please! Stop it! I admit it!”
I released his t-shirt and let him blubber for a minute. His blue eyes matched those of the
woman upstairs. Not many professional killers lived in their mother’s basement, and I wondered
how Marietta Garbonzo could have been this naive.
“I’m guessing you never met Mrs. Garbonzo in person.”
“I only talked to her on the phone. She sent the money to a P.O. Box. That’s how the pros do
it.”
“So how did she get your home address?”
“She wouldn’t give me the money without my address. She said if I didn’t trust her, why
should she trust me?”
Here was my proof that each new generation of teenagers was stupider than the last. I blame
MTV.
“How much did she give you?”
He smiled, showing me a mouth full of braces. “Fifty large.”
“And how were you going to do it? With your BB gun?”
“I was going to follow him around and then... you know... shove him.”
“Shove him?”
“He’s an old guy. I was thinking I’d shove him down some stairs, or into traffic. I dunno.”
“Have you shoved a lot of old people into traffic, Billy boy?”
He must not have liked the look in my eyes, because he shrunk two sizes.
“No! Never! I never killed anybody!”
“So why put an ad in the magazine?”
“I dunno. Something to do.”
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