Suckers - J.A. Konrath

“I’ll call you in exactly two hours. If you don’t hear from me, I want you to call Lt.
Jacqueline Daniels in District 26 and tell her where I am. Tell her it’s an emergency. Did you get
that?”
“Yeah. Is that apple juice?”
I glanced at my pee bottle.
“Yeah. But it’s warm.”
“I have ice in the house.”
“Help yourself.”
She took the piss, and I started the car and drove off. Little did I know I was about to face
the darkest moment of my entire career. A moment so dark, that had I known it was coming, I
would have done something else instead, like see a movie, or go to the zoo and bang on the
windows in the monkey house. But I didn’t know what was going to happen, because I couldn’t
predict the future, because if I could I would have predicted the lottery numbers and been superrich
and never would have needed the money that caused me to go to that house in Streeterville,
which was the darkest moment of my entire career. So that’s where I went. Unbeknownst to me.
In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have gone.
Chapter 12 aka The Darkest Moment Of My Career
So I had no idea I was heading into the darkest moment of my career, but I went anyway.
Before going there, however, I stopped for red hots at Fat Louie’s Red Hots on Clark and got a
dog with the works. It was terrible, and I have really low standards. In my humble opinion, hot
dogs shouldn’t have veins. Or anything resembling a foreskin. I could barely choke the third one
down.
Uncomfortably sated, I pressed onward to Phil’s parent’s house. The house was unassuming
enough. Split-level, single family, red brick exterior. There was an oak tree out front, and a
chainlink fence partitioning off the tiny backyard. I parked on the street, then took out my remote
control surveillance tank. After double-checking the batteries, servos, memory card, remote
sensor, camera focus, tread alignment, and wireless frequency, I gingerly set the tank down in
the street and a taxi ran it over.
Damn taxi jerks. I decided to charge it to Mrs. Drawbridge’s bill.
My next course of action was to figure out my next course of action. I played a little more
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