Suckers by Jack Kilborn

Author:Jack Kilborn
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Joe Konrath
Published: 2011-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

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 air guitar, broke an air string, put on a new one and spent a minute air tuning it, and then decided on my approach.

I could put on my ghillie suit—a mesh shirt and pants with real and fake grass and shubbery sewn into it that I ordered from PsychoSniper.com—and then slowly belly-crawl across the lawn, traverse the fence using a carbide steel bolt cutter, inch my way into the backyard, creep up the porch in slow increments stopping often to pretend to be a potted plant, trick his surveillance system by recording a loop from his outdoor camera and feeding the playback into the main line, drill into his door frame using a cordless screwdriver to disable the burglary alarm sensor, pick the pick-proof Schlage deadbolt, and sneak inside his house using my Invisible Voyeur NightVision Goggles, which I bought at CautiousStalker.org.

Or I could knock on the front door and ask what’s up.

“What’s up?” I asked when the front door opened.

Since I’d seen him yesterday, Ken had gone from half a sunburned face to a full sunburned face. The smell coming from his house was real bacon, which sure beat the smell of fake bacon, which my mother used to make out of soy and library paste and brown Crayons.

“Who are you?”

“Housing inspector.” I flashed him my PI badge, too fast for him to read it. “I’m here to check for gas leaks. Are you leaking any gases?”

“No. Can I see that badge again?”

“I smell something. Are you cooking in there?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Is it bacon?” I smacked my lips. “I love bacon. I read somewhere that you could shave with bacon. Rub it on your face raw, and it lubricates better than shaving cream. Have you ever heard of that?”

“No.”

“I tried it once. Closest shave I ever had. But I got an E. Coli infection and they had to remove eight yards of my large intestine.

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