Naughty Nine Tales of Christmas Crime (23 page)

"Well, now . . . that's. . . I . . .," Santa stammered. "You wouldn't really do a mean old thing like that, would you?"

A malevolent grin slithered across the Russian's lips.

"Yez," he said. "I vould."

"I think he really would dear," Mrs. Claus said. "But he won't."

The spymaster cocked an eyebrow at her. "Oh? And vhy vouldn't I?"

"Because we returned your bomb." Mrs. Claus pulled out the control mechanism she'd slipped from his jacket while giving him a hug. "And I have this."

One of the turtleneck men blurted out a Russian phrase so foul it would have made a reindeer blush.

Mrs. Claus looked at him and shook her head reprovingly. "Such language," she said to him in perfect
Russkij
. "What would your mother say?"

"Sorry, ma'am," the henchman mumbled.

"Vhat do you mean vhen you zay you returned the bomb?" the spymaster asked, eyeing the remote control in her hand.

"We took it back where it came from."

"Where it . . . ? You mean
Mozcow
?"

Mrs. Claus nodded. "The Kremlin."

Two of the Russians burst into tears. Another threw himself down and began kicking and pounding the floorboards. Another, the tallest and palest of all the turtleneck men, simply rolled his eyes and sighed loudly as if he'd already been through the exact same experience a hundred times before.

"Zteady, comradez," the spymaster said. "She iz bluffing."

"Oh, I assure you I'm not bluffing," she bluffed.

"Yez, you are. If you vere telling the truth, you could tell me vhere the bomb vaz hidden."

"Why, in the star at the top of our Christmas tree, of course."

There was really no
of course
about it. It was a guess. That little assassin Giftwrap had been up to something in the tree, hadn't he? If she were wrong, at that very moment Jingle would be dumping a perfectly good star in the Arctic Ocean while a bomb sat in the workshop, ready to blow the place to peppermint-scented smithereens if the Russians got their hands on the remote control again.

The spymaster laughed.

It took Mrs. Claus a moment to realize that it wasn't a gloating, "You old fool!" laugh. It was a bitter, "Why me?" laugh. Then she saw the slice of fruitcake he'd drawn from his black trench coat.

"Oh, come now," she chided him. "You don't have to take it that hard."

But it was too late for the spymaster. Within seconds his chin was covered in crumbs, and he was dead.

The tall, sighing spy moved quickly to the cage around the fireplace. He pulled out a set of keys and unlocked the door.

"Go," he told Santa. He turned to Mrs. Claus. "Hurry."

He followed them out to the sleigh and helped them both into the front seat.

"I have to azk you," he said once Santa had the reins in hand. "At the North Pole, do you have . . . how you zay? Political azylum?"

"A xylo
what
?" Santa asked.

Mrs. Claus smiled. "Get in." She waited until the tall Russian was settled into the back seat, then swiveled around to face him. "So tell me, young man. What can you do?"

The secret agent shrugged. "I have been a zpy for zo many years. All I know iz thiz Cold Var."

"You don't have
any
skills?"

"Vell . . . I do know one hundred and forty vays to kill a man."

"Oh." Mrs. Claus stroked her chin for a moment. "Well, maybe Rumpity-Tump could use some help in the stable."

"Ho ho ho!" said Santa.

The reindeer knew what to do when they heard that. So they did it.

NAIVETÉ

"Look, Charlie, let's face it," said the little girl with the raven hair and the cold, unblinking eyes. "We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket."

The Reptile, a.k.a. Alvin Joseph Erie of River City, Indiana, snorted so hard Chivas Regal came out his nose. Which wasn't just undignified and uncomfortable, it was a sad waste of fine whiskey. But there was plenty more where that came from (and plenty already in the Reptile's stomach), so his mood wasn't dampened even though the front of his vintage AC/DC T-shirt was.

"You go, girl!" the Reptile croaked, voice phlegmy, puffy eyes watering, nostrils burning like he'd just snorted a line of Comet. "Testify!"

On the television screen, Lucy Van Pelt dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

"It's run by a big eastern syndicate, you know," she told Charlie Brown.

"Right on!" the Reptile cheered, losing even more of his drink as he raised the "World's Greatest Dad" mug in his hand in a sloppy, scotch-sloshing salute. He turned to Diesel, who'd draped his massive body over the living room's other La-Z-Boy recliner, and jerked a thumb at the TV. "See, D? What'd I tell you? You're not gonna get straight talk like that from no
snowman
."

Diesel (a.k.a. Kenneth Patrick McIntyre) kept his gaze glued to the TV, answering only with a "whatever" grunt that stirred some extra foam into the bottle of Bud Lite perched atop the round mound of his belly. There'd been three DVDs to choose from that evening—
A Charlie Brown Christmas
,
Frosty the Snowman
and (excavated from its hiding place at the bottom of a drawer of socks)
Girls Gone Wild: Dormroom Fantasies Volume 2
. They'd already watched the
Girls Gone Wild
DVD. Twice. After that, Diesel had voted for
Frosty
. But the Reptile cast his vote for
Charlie Brown
, which meant
Frosty
lost by a landslide. In the tiny, two-man democracy Diesel and the Reptile had founded six years before, "one man, one vote" was
not
the law of the land.

Necessity had first bonded the men together. They met in the Knox County Jail: Diesel a fumble-fingered would-be beer thief, the Reptile a pot dealer so far down on the drug cartel totem pole he wasn't really on the pole at all but merely part of the dirt on which it stood. They were the pettiest of petty criminals, together in a holding cell the very night the River City Police Department took down the town's biggest crack house and the crew of swaggering gangbangers who ran it. This being Indiana, these were
Hoosier
gangbangers, and therefore lacking the serious street cred of their New York or Los Angeles counterparts. Which only meant they had something to prove. And there'd be no better way to prove it than grinding a couple crackers into crumbs.

The Reptile managed to keep himself and his new-found friend from the bottom of their cellmates' Reeboks by orchestrating a brilliant campaign of bluster and bravado (for the super-sized Diesel) and butt-kissing and bootlicking (for himself). Ever since then, Diesel had let the Reptile call all the shots.

Many of which had been misfires. Though he aspired to be a Napoleon of Crime, the Reptile was, in sad reality, closer to a Custer. But despite a long parade of bad ideas and worse luck—the foiled highjacking of an ice cream truck, the successful (though ultimately unprofitable) highjacking of an Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, the oh-so-critical typo on the counterfeit "
Ben
Jovi" T-shirts they tried to unload at a concert in Indianapolis—the Reptile somehow managed to keep them alive and out of jail. Which had kept Diesel loyal. Up to now.

And
now
was looking pretty good. It was Christmas Eve, and they were enjoying a quiet night at home.

Not that it was their home. It actually belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Hettle, whose eldest son Arlo was one of the Reptile's most reliable (and, being perpetually baked, easy to short-change) clients. The day before, Arlo had dropped by the Reptile's dark, dank basement-apartment lair to purchase an especially large bag of weed.

"I'm gonna be stuck at my grandma's in Jasper for
four days
with, like, my entire family," the stoner moaned, his droopy eyelids, wispy kid mustache and predilection for mouth-breathing making him look, as always, like a sleepy catfish. "Bro, if I run out of ganja down there I'm gonna, like, totally lose my mind."

"Don't worry, my man. The Reptile won't let you down," the Reptile replied, offering his customer an encouraging wink. "So . . . when do you leave, anyway?"

And Arlo told him, thus ensuring that his home would soon receive a late-night holiday visitation that involved not reindeer on the rooftop and a shimmy down the chimney but a spluttering Plymouth Reliant parked around the corner and a back-door jimmied with a crowbar.

"Oh, Lucy Lucy Lucy," the Reptile sighed, sinking back into the La-Z-Boy's marshmallow embrace. "Now
that's
the Reptile's kinda woman." A box of cigarettes rested in his lap, and he shook out and lit up his fifteenth Kool of the day. "Saucy little wench."

"Do you think Peppermint Patty's a dyke?" Diesel mumbled, still unable to tear his eyes from the screen. Anything he saw on television other than static and C-SPAN utterly mesmerized him, and only hunger, thirst and their related urges could pry him away when a TV was on. In fact, just a few weeks before he'd botched the Reptile's scheme for a snatch-and-grab jewelry heist at Target because he forgot to provide the pre-planned distraction—a bogus vet-off-his-meds freakout in Housewares—after he became hypnotized by a demonstration video for the George Foreman Grill.

The Reptile shot him a venomous (and completely unnoticed) glare. "Peppermint Patty's not in this one," he snapped. "And anyway, you're missing the point. That Lucy—she tells it like it is. That's why I love this damn cartoon. Christmas
is
a racket. The stores, the guys who make the toys and cards and all that garbage, the bums they round up to play Santa. They all make money off it. They may as well call it . . . ." The Reptile racked his brain for something clever, but after a few seconds he decided that Diesel wasn't worth the effort. "Oh, I don't know. Cashmas. Cuz that's what it's all about, D. Everybody's just making a buck."

Diesel squirmed, looking uneasy in his easy chair, as if some weight deep in his gut had suddenly shifted. A concrete burrito. A chocolate brick. A soul.

"Not everybody," he said. "I mean, it means something to some folks, right? You got people giving gifts, giving money to the Salivation Army, going to church—"

"Oh, my man! You are so naïve!" The Reptile sucked in a deep lungful of hot carcinogenic goodness, then blew the smoke out in a cloud that drifted between Diesel and the TV screen he was still staring at. "Churches are the worst of all. Tonight's the night they bankroll their whole
year
. They get people coming in on Christmas Eve all full of that 'season of giving' crap, throwing big ol' wads of money on the donation plate to make up for the fact that they haven't been to church the last 364 days. It's just oil for the gears, D." The Reptile nodded and took a sip of Chivas Regal, pleased with his metaphor though he would've been hard-pressed to explain it. "Oil for the god damn gears."

"Well," Diesel grunted. The word just floated there for nearly a minute, a bridge to nowhere. "Well," he finally said again. "You don't see
me
making any money off Christmas."

The Reptile misinterpreted this as a criticism of his leadership abilities.

"Hey, you got nothing to complain about. Free beer, free food, free
Girls Gone Wild
. We'll take the DVD player, the TV, the stereo—whatever we can fit in the car. We'll make out alright."

Diesel just shook his head, seemingly unconvinced. Independent thinking wasn't something the Reptile witnessed in his friend very often, and it threw him. He thought about his plan for the night, the Napoleon in him clamoring atop a tall steed to survey the field of battle. And he had to admit it. It didn't look very impressive.

They'd never had much luck with hot goods. The most valuable item they'd ever had their hands on (aside from the Weinermobile) was a mint-condition copy of
Amazing Spider-Man
#5, which was supposedly worth nearly $3,000. When they took it to the owner of a local comic book shop, he told them he knew exactly where they'd stolen it from and he wouldn't call the cops if they sold the comic to
him
for twenty bucks . . . in store credit. Their track record with electronics wasn't much better, and there was a very real chance that they wouldn't make enough from the loot in Arlo's house to order a decent pizza.

Diesel was right, the Reptile thought. Stealing
stuff
was hardly worth the trouble. They needed to give themselves the gift that keeps on giving.

Cash.

It was Christmas Eve, and a Saturday night to boot. There'd be piles of money just lying around till the banks opened Monday morning. All they had to do was find one of those piles and rake it into a bag.

It was almost ten. What would still be open? Who wouldn't have guards and alarms? Where could they find lambs ready for the slaughter—preferably a whole flock?

And then, like a star going super-nova, a bright idea blazed to life in the Reptile's mind, and a not-so-heavenly choir belted out the Hallelujah Chorus.

When the
Peanuts
gang began "too-loo-loo"-ing their way through "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," signaling the impending ending of
A Charlie Brown Christmas
, Diesel finally glanced over at the Reptile, who'd been unnaturally quiet the last ten minutes. What he saw popped his eyes as wide as anything he'd ever seen on TV.

The Reptile was staring off into space, the stubby butt of a long-dead cigarette still in his mouth, his lips stretching toward his ears in a grin so intense it seemed to curl in on itself in pinwheeling spirals.

"Jeez, dude," Diesel said. "You look like the Grinch."

The Reptile hopped to his feet as fast as a man can from a La-Z-Boy at full recline. "Come on, D." Impossibly, his grin grew even bigger. "We're going to church."

The Reptile explained his plan as they raided closets in search of appropriate worship-wear. (The Reptile's AC/DC T and frayed jeans would surely raise eyebrows in even the most liberal church, while Diesel's camo gear and combat boots made him look like Sasquatch trick-or-treating as a Latin American death squad comandante.) Arlo's father apparently shared the Reptile's scrawny build and questionable taste, and a white linen suit from the Don Johnson/
Miami Vice
school of fashion was quickly drafted into service. Outfitting Diesel proved to be more of a challenge until the Reptile caught sight of a family portrait. Arlo's mother, it turned out, was what the marketing department at Lane Bryant calls "a real woman." Very,
very
real. Which is how her closet could produce a black "bigshirt" and an electric blue pantsuit large enough to contain almost all of Diesel's heft. The pant legs came to an end a full half-foot above the ground, but other than that the Reptile considered the ensemble a complete success.