Suckers - J.A. Konrath

“Hey, old caretaker guy!” I yelled. “Where does this slide go?”
“Go to hell!”
“I told you, it wasn’t me. I had asparagus on my pizza. Does it smell like asparagus?”
“Go to hell!”
I rubbed my chin. Maybe old caretaker guy was trying to tell me that this slide went straight
to hell. I didn’t really believe him. First of all, I didn’t see any flames, and there wasn’t any
smoke or brimstone or screams of the damned. Second, hell doesn’t really exist. It’s a fairy tale
taught by parents to make their kids behave. Like Santa Claus. And the death penalty.
Still, going down a pitch black slide in a mausoleum wasn’t on my list of things to do before
I died. My list was mostly centered around Angelina Jolie.
“This does smell like asparagus, you bastard!”
A glanced over my shoulder. Old caretaker guy was hobbling toward me, his drippy
asparagus mop raised back like a baseball bat—a stinky, wet baseball bat that you wouldn’t want
to use in a baseball game, because you wouldn’t get any hits, and because it was soaked with
urine and stinked.
I decided, then and there, I wasn’t going to play ball with old caretaker guy. Which left me
no choice. I took a deep breath and dove face-first down the slide.
Chapter 7
When I was ten years old, my strange uncle who lived in the country took me into his barn
and showed me a strange game called milk the cow. The game involved a strong grip, and used a
combination of squeezing and stroking until the milk came. I remember it was weird, and hurt
my arm, but kind of fun nonetheless.
Afterward, we fed the cow some hay and used the fresh milk to make pancakes. When we
finished breakfast, we watched a little television. It was a portable, with a tiny ten-inch screen.
Many years later, my strange uncle got arrested, for tax evasion. So I have no idea why I’m
bringing any of this up.
The slide was a straight-shot down, no twists or curve. The dive jostled my grip and my key
light winked out, shrouding me in darkness, like a shroud. I had no idea how fast I was going or
how far I traveled. Time lost all meaning, but time really didn’t matter much anyway since I’d
bought a TiVo. Minutes blurred into weeks, which blurred into seconds, which blurred into more
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