Suckers - J.A. Konrath

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 corpses. It was certainly a cheap date—
only a few bucks for Lysol and Vaseline—and unless your game was really weak you’d pretty
much always score. Still, I liked my women partially awake, and aware enough to be able to
fight me off and tell me no. Because no means try harder.
I crouched down, peering into the blackness, and saw nothing but the aforementioned
blackness. I fished out my keys, which had a mini flashlight attached to the ring, and illuminated
the situation.
This wasn’t a grave after all. In the hole was a slide, like you’d find in a children’s
playground, if the playground was in a mausoleum, and the children were all dead. Probably
wouldn’t be a lot of kids begging to go to a park like that. Not the dead ones, anyway.
I gritted my teeth. There was only one way to find out where this slide went.
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