"Don"t try to out-act me, kid. And don"t worry, you"re not the one who"s going to die tonight. You"re just the audience."

"Then you can"t kill me until we make some popcorn," I said.

Dennis raised an eyebrow. "You"re moments away from a horrible, painful death and you"re able to make a joke about popcorn?"

I shrugged. It had kind of surprised me, too.

Dennis grinned and pointed the knife at Roger. "Maybe I should kill him instead and make you the audience."

"No!" Roger protested. "I want the popcorn!"

Dennis shook his head. "No, I need to go with my original instinct. That"s what they tell you in acting school. Go with your instincts." He gestured at Roger with the knife. "Step out of the way."

"No."

"No?" Dennis asked.

Roger shook his head and stepped in front of me. "No. I"m not scared of you. You"re a lousy actor. In fact, you suck."

I couldn"t believe it! Roger, who I"d met for the very first time that same day, was placing himself between me and a madman with a butcher knife!

I was in awe.

This was somebody I could imagine sharing a friendship with until the end of my years.

I mean, what a brilliant freakin" end to the whole joke!

Dennis let out a well-acted scream of primal rage and ran toward us. He shoved Roger out of the way, knocking him into the refrigerator so hard that- -that it couldn"t have been faked.

He swung the knife at me.

Holy s.h.i.t!

I moved out of the way and the blade sliced across my chest. It hurt about as much as I would"ve expected a butcher knife cutting my chest to hurt. My feet slipped out from under me and I landed on my b.u.t.t. As Dennis raised the knife, I wished that I"d never seen any amus.e.m.e.nt value in clumsy baby dropping.

I kicked Dennis in the shin, hard.

He shouted something obscene, loud.

And then Roger tackled him. As the two of them engaged in a fierce struggle, I kicked Dennis in the opposite shin. He cried out, lost his balance, dropped the knife, struck his head on the counter, and fell to the floor, unconscious.

Roger took a moment to catch his breath. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"Eeep," I said, gaping at the butcher knife that now protruded from my leg.

Roger crouched down next to me. "Is it deep?"

"Eeep."

Roger yanked the knife out. It had only gone in about half an inch, but it still really hurt.

"We need to make a pact," Roger told me. He pressed his finger to the wound on my leg. "A blood pact, that no matter what, we will never, ever, ever tell anybody in the entire world that we wet our pants."

"Agreed," I said, shaking his b.l.o.o.d.y hand.

And that"s basically it. We called the cops, got in a gargantuan amount of trouble, and began a friendship that has continued for twenty years.

Yeah, I know, I"m breaking our pact by telling you about the whole pants-wetting thing now, but technically we made our blood pact using only my blood, so it doesn"t count.

- The End - P.S.: For Ms. Peckin"s make-up a.s.signment, we did a skit based on Ernest Hemingway daring Mark Twain to eat dog food. We got a D+. We were happy to get it.

A Harry McGlade/Andrew Mayhem Thriller by JA Konrath & Jeff Strand Note to fans of Andrew Mayhem: The following tale takes place between the events of Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) and Single White Psychopath Seeks Same. But long enough after Graverobbers that Andrew has had time to heal. I mean, let"s face it, he was way too messed up at the end of that book to jump right into another adventure, and we don"t want the Continuity Police throwing a hissy fit.

Note to readers unfamiliar with Andrew Mayhem: Don"t worry, you didn"t miss anything that you need to know.

Note to fans of Harry McGlade: Binge drinking is cool.

It all started with mushrooms.

Of course, lots of bad things start with mushrooms, but these were the non-hallucinogenic variety. My wife Helen despises mushrooms. I mean, she loathes them with every ounce of her being, and while she"s admittedly a rather pet.i.te woman, she"s able to cram a lot of loathing into those ounces.

I myself am no big fan of mushrooms or other fungi products, although in college we had a lot of fun with fungus when my best friend Roger got Athlete"s Foot. We called him "Itchy Roger" over and over and over and over again. I have to admit that it seems a lot less funny now than it was at the time, almost a bit pathetic in fact, but trust me, it was hysterical and kept us entertained for hours on end. The next semester, we entertained ourselves by playing darts with slices of pizza.

Anyway, I was thirty-three and long out of college (well, not that long, but that"s another story) and I"d spent the evening out drinking with Roger. Of course, we were drinking coffee, and only one cup each because that stuff was expensive as h.e.l.l. I"d been given two tasks to complete before I returned home: a) Purchase a jar of spaghetti sauce.

b) Ensure that the jar of spaghetti sauce did not include mushrooms.

When I got to the grocery store, I selected a jar of sauce. It had fancy calligraphy on it and a drawing of a smiling man in a chef"s hat. The part of my brain that should have been saying "Hey, dumb-a.s.s, don"t forget about the no-mushrooms rule!" instead said "Gee, I wonder if this place has any sour gummi bears?" I bought the sauce and the gummi bears and left the store.

As it turns out, the drawing was not a smiling man in a chef"s hat. It was a giant mushroom. d.a.m.n those poofy chef"s hats.

Now, I don"t want you to think that my wife is the kind of person who would throw a screaming temper tantrum over me purchasing the wrong variety of spaghetti sauce. Instead, she"s the kind of person who would bottle up rage over my lack of a job, my questionable babysitting habits, the incident where I accidentally didn"t shut the freezer door securely and ruined hundreds of dollars" worth of frozen meat, and a few dozen other infractions, and let it all come exploding out of her pet.i.te frame in the form of extremely strong disapproval over my choice of spaghetti sauce.

I shouted back at her (though an onlooker might have mistaken it for shameful cowering and groveling) and headed out to do a sauce exchange. As I walked into the driveway, I realized that I"d left my car keys on the kitchen table. Having just been lectured for my lack of responsibility, I didn"t think it was a good idea to walk back into the house and sheepishly say "Uh, forgot my keys." The store was only ten blocks away. I"d walk.

To keep the walking time to a minimum, I cut through several backyards. I didn"t notice the man breaking into an unfamiliar house until I practically b.u.mped into him. I"m not very observant.

He had wavy brown hair and a two-day beard that looked like dirt on his cheeks in the semi-darkness. Clenched in his teeth was a penlight, aimed down at the doorjamb where he wiggled a pry bar. Upon hearing me he dropped the tool and dug into his trenchcoat, removing a handgun the size of a loaf of handgun-shaped French bread.

"Beeb, brubbubber!" he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

He removed the penlight from his mouth. "Freeze, bloodsucker!"

"I beg your pardon?"

I"d been called a lot of things in my life, many of them only a few minutes ago, but "bloodsucker" was a new one.

The man pointed the gun at me and glanced down at the jar in my hand. "What"s that? A jar of Type O positive?"

"It"s Momma Helga"s Spaghetti Sauce."

"Why does it have a p.e.n.i.s on the label?"

"That"s a mushroom."

"It looks like a p.e.n.i.s."

"No, it looks like a chef"s hat. But it"s a mushroom."

"Drop the p.e.n.i.s sauce and get down on your knees. Then open your mouth."

I didn"t want to do that for an infinite number of reasons. "I"d rather not."

The man smacked me in the head with the gun, hard enough to make me see mushroom-shaped stars (which was odd). I got down on my knees as instructed.

"Open wide," the man said, pressing the barrel against my lips.

I opened my mouth.

"Wider."

I opened my mouth wider.

He tilted his head and peered inside, flashing the pen light along my gum line. Then he nodded, apparently satisfied with what he saw. "You can close it now. No fangs. You"re cool." He lowered the gun.

I should have made the comment, "Yeah, I lost my baby fangs when I was eight," but I never think of clever stuff like that until a few minutes after the moment has pa.s.sed. Instead I said, "What the h.e.l.l are you talking about? And why did you hit me in the head?"

"Pires."

"Pires?"

"Vampires."

Oh, goody. A whacko.

"Vampires don"t exist," I helpfully pointed out.

The man sneered at me. "They exist, sauce-boy." He tapped the door he"d been prying at with his penlight. "And they"re in this house."

They call me Harry McGlade. Probably because that"s my name. I"m a private eye.

My office is in Chicago, and five days ago a desperate woman named Phoebe Mertz retained me to find her daughter, Tanya. Little Tanya was sixteen, into the Goth scene big-time. You know the type: dresses in all black, collects piercings, wears way too much mascara, scowls all the time. Most parents dream their child will go to medical school. Very few dream their child will get a tattoo on their forehead that says, "Life"s a toilet."

According to Mom, Tanya had never run away before.

"I know she looks different," Phoebe had said, showing me a picture of a frowning brunette with five nose rings, three eyebrow rings, and too many earrings to count.

"I hope she stays out of lightning storms."

"She"s really a good girl. Straight A"s. Doesn"t do drugs or have a boyfriend."

"She hangs around with other Goths?"

"Yes. All of her friends are into that."

I figured that Tanya was probably in an alley somewhere, stoned out of her mind, while a bike gang ran a train on her.

I shared these thoughts with Phoebe, but it didn"t seem to ease her worries.

"I want you to find her and bring her home, Mr. McGlade."

"I get five hundred a day."

"That"s a lot of money."

"I"m expensive, but I"m worth it. You"re not just paying for the job. You"re paying for peace of mind. Once the check clears, I"ll find her. Even if she turns up dead and dismembered in an alley."

She burst into tears, obviously relieved I was on the job.

I spent the rest of Day 1 working on the case, subconsciously while I slept.

Day 2 involved me interviewing one of Tanya"s school friends, a guy named Steve who"d recently bisected his own tongue down the middle in an effort to look more like a lizard. Steve wasn"t talking-his mouth was too swollen. But he had some killer skunk bud and we lit one up.

Day 3 wasn"t very productive. I spent most of it at the ballgame, watching the Red Sox kick the h.e.l.l out of the Cubs. I kept an eye out for Tanya, but she didn"t show up.

Day 4 I spent drinking, and can"t remember much.

On Day 5 I caught a break. A phone call to a guy I know who works for a credit card company informed me that Tanya"s Mastercard was getting a workout down south. Phoebe provided me with plane fare, and I followed the paper trail to a leather bar in the suburbs of Chamber, Florida. Flashing around Phoebe"s picture was met with the usual blank stares, until President Grant helped one punk regain his memory.

"Oh yeah, she was here yesterday. Hanging out with some Pires."

Further interrogation revealed that the Pires were a gang of Goths who only came out at night and liked to wear fake fangs and drink each other"s blood. I could relate; there wasn"t much good on TV anymore, and kids can get bored in the "burbs.

After spreading around a lot of Phoebe"s cash, I managed to track down the Pires" main hangout, owned by a guy who called himself Vlad. Word on the street, Vlad was thirty-something, balding and overweight, and wore contact lenses that made his eyes look bloodshot. Just the kind of daddy-figure teenage girls found irresistible.

I was in the middle of breaking into Casa de Vlad when sauce-boy wandered over, witnessing my felony-in-progress.

"Look." He tried to smile, but it looked funny with my gun on his cheek. "This is really none of my business, and I really have to get home while the pasta is still al dente or I"ll be sleeping on the sofa for a week. And our sofa has these big, pointy springs that stick out of the cushions that feel like fish hooks."

"You think I"m an idiot?"

"Actually-"

I gave him another love tap with the b.u.t.t of my Magnum.

"Here"s the deal, sofa-man. I have to get into this house and grab someone. This someone may not want to go with me, and she may have some friends who don"t want to see her go. So this is going to be complicated enough without having to worry about the police showing up in three minutes because your pansy sofa-a.s.s went whining to them."