Never Fear (73 page)

And then he heard a deep
voice.

“
Ho-ho-ho!”

The Nail looked up and saw this fat
guy with a white beard in a red suit standing on top of the
truck.

The guy did his ho-ho-ho
thing again, then shouted, “So
you’re
the one who stole the toys I
was putting aside for the AIDS babies! No one steals Santa’s toys
and gets away with it!”

Aw, man. This asshole thinks he’s
Santa Claus!

The Nail raised the pistol and plugged
a round into his heart.

Santa fucking Claus flew backward off
the top of the truck like someone had yanked a leash wrapped around
his neck.

No one steals Santa’s toys and gets
away with it?

Shit, yeah.
I
steal
anybody’s
fucking toys
and do what I damn well fucking please, asshole!

The Nail hurried around the side of
the truck. Time to put another slug in Santa Hole…

But he wasn’t there.

“
What the fuck?” The Nail
said aloud.

And then something red and white
popped up from the shadows behind a garbage can and slammed a
white-gloved fist into his face.

The Nail had heard about
seeing stars, but he’d never believed it. Now he did. He heard his
nose go
crunch
as
his face erupted in a star-studded explosion of pain. He staggered
back, caught the heel of his shoe on some alley shit, and felt
himself falling backward.

He windmilled his arms, trying to keep
his balance, but he was out of control. He went down
hard.

And when he looked up, Santa was
leaning over him.

“
You think you can stop
Santa Claus with a bullet? A mere
bullet
? Think again,
sonny!”

The voice wasn’t quite as deep and
strong as it had been a moment ago, but the guy was still standing.
And there, not two feet from Nail’s face, was a bullet hole in the
red fabric of his suit. Right over his heart.

Shit! What was going down here? The
fucker should be dead, man.

Unless of course he
really
was
Santa
Claus.

But that was crazy.

But so was the guy in the
red suit. The Nail saw his eyes gleaming between his white beard
and the furry brim of his hat. Whoever he was—hell, maybe he really
was Santa Claus—he was pissed.
Royally
pissed.

The Nail started to raise the pistol
for another shot, but Santa stomped a foot down on his
arm.

“
Don’t bother trying
again, sonny! You can’t kill Santa Claus!”

The Nail levered himself up and
reached across, trying to grab the gun with his free hand, but
Santa clocked him again with a brain-jarring right, rocking his
head back against the pavement.

Santa had a punch like a fucking mule
kick.

The Nail felt the gun ripped from his
hand, heard it skitter across the asphalt. After that, things got
fuzzy.

And painful.

The Nail remembered getting flipped
over onto his belly, grabbed by his collar and his waistband, and
hauled off the ground.

“
I checked my list,” Santa
said. “Checked it twice, in fact. It says you’ve been naughty,
sonny.
Very
naughty!”

Then Santa started using him like a
battering ram.

Slam!
Head first against the bumper of the truck.

“
Know what happens when
you steal from Santa Claus?
This!
”

Slam!
Head first into a bunch of trash cans lining the
alley.

“
If I decide to let you
live, spread the word: Don’t mess with Santa Claus.”

The Nail was spun around and flung
face first against one of the alley’s brick walls.

He let out a puny groan of agony as he
slid down the wall, feeling like a splattered egg oozing toward the
ground.

But it wasn’t over. Not by a long
shot. The Nail felt his consciousness fading over the next ten
minutes as Santa used him like some sort of rag to wipe up the
alley.

Finally Santa released
him. The Nail dropped to the ground, a puddle of agony on the
broken pavement. He felt his breath bubbling through his bloody
mouth. He was sure his jaw was broken. And his ribs—every breath
was a dozen stab wounds. Was it over? He hoped so. He
prayed
it was
over.

Just leave me be, he thought. Just
take the toys, take the whole damn truck and go. Hitch your fucking
reindeer to the bumper and you and Rudolph take off. Just don’t
mess me up anymore. Please.

But just as he finished the thought,
he felt hands go under his armpits and lift him.

“
No,” he managed to groan
past his shattered teeth. “Please… no more.”

“
Should have thought of
that before, sonny. Stealing from defenseless little sick kids puts
you on Santa’s ultra-naughty list.”

“
I’m sorry.” It came out a
faint whine. Totally wimpy.

“
Well, good. I’m glad to
hear it. And I’ll take that into consideration next Christmas. But
you complicated things by trying to kill Santa. That’s
very
naughty. Santa
doesn’t like to be shot. It makes him cranky.
Very
cranky.”

“
Oh, no…”

Something rough and long
slithered past The Nail’s cheek, and true panic set in.
Rope!
Oh, fuck no. Santa
was going to string him up!

But then he felt the rope snake under
his arms instead of around his neck. That was a relief. Of sorts.
It still hurt like all hell when the rope tightened around his
shattered ribs. He was lifted and seated on the truck’s rickety
front bumper, then tied there.

“
Wha–?”

“
Quiet, sonny,” Santa said
in a low voice that had lost all its heartiness.
“
Don’t
say
another word.”

The Nail looked up.
Everything—Santa, the alley, the whole fucking
world
—was mostly a blur… except for
Santa’s eyes. He’d always thought Santa had blue eyes, but these
were brown, and The Nail shriveled up inside when he saw the rage
bubbling behind them.

Santa wasn’t just pissed. Santa was
bugfuck nuts.

The Nail closed his eyes while Santa
taped something to his head. By the time it squeezed through to his
battered brain that he shouldn’t let Santa—even this homicidal
psycho Santa—tie him to the front of a truck, it was too late. He
tried to wriggle free but the rope that lashed him to the grille
crisscrossed his body around the shoulders and between the legs.
His legs and his arms were free, but all the knots were somewhere
behind him.

With a cold sick certainty, The Nail
realized he wasn’t going nowhere. Not under his own steam,
anyway.

He stiffened as he heard the old
engine rumble and shudder to life against his back. He began to
blubber as the truck lurched into motion.

Santa was going to run him into the
wall!

But no. The truck bounced
out of the alley onto the street. After that it was a nightmare
ride through the Lower East Side with people staring, pointing,
some even laughing, then crosstown on Fourteenth with the truck
swerving from lane to lane, running lights, screeching to a halt
inches—
inches!
—from rear bumpers and fenders, then roaring into motion
again.

All that was bad enough, man, but when
the westbound lanes weren’t moving fast enough, the truck swerved
into the oncoming traffic and played chicken with a banged-up
yellow cab. The Nail knew fuck sure ol’ Santa wasn’t going to back
down, and for the few screaming, terror-filled heartbeats it looked
like the cab wasn’t going to either, The Nail lost it. Literally.
Warm liquid spilled down his left leg.

But the cab lunged out of the way at
the last second and the truck got back on the right side of the
street and began accelerating.

A cop! The Nail had never dreamed he’d
be in any situation when he’d want to see a cop on his tail, but
here it was. And where were they? Why wasn’t there ever a fucking
cop around when you needed one?

The truck fishtailed into a wide,
screeching turn onto what The Nail thought might be Seventh Avenue,
but he couldn’t be sure because he closed his eyes as they scooted
within a hair of a horn-blaring bus. Then the truck jumped the curb
and scattered terrified pedestrians before skidding to a halt on
the sidewalk.

As the engine cut out, The Nail
whimpered and waited in terror to see what Santa had planned for
him next. But Santa said nothing, did nothing. The Nail twisted and
looked through the windshield. Santa was gone.

But The Nail wasn’t alone. A crowd of
gawkers was gathering, forming a semicircle around him and the
truck, staring, pointing at his bloody face, his pee-stained pants,
and whatever it was Santa had taped to his head. Someone laughed.
Others joined in.

The Nail wanted to die.

And then he heard the
sirens.

Sunday

“
Oh, no,” Alicia said as
she rounded the corner and saw the police cars in front of the
Center. “What now?”

She had her donut and
coffee from the hospital caf in one hand, the fat Sunday
Times
in the other. She
usually spent the rest of Sunday morning at the Center. They still
had kids coming in for their treatments, just like every other day,
but it was lot less intense than the rest of the week—nowhere near
as many phone calls, for one thing—so she used it to catch up on
her paperwork.

But now…

Just inside the front door
she nearly collided with two cops, one white, one black, talking to
Raymond.
Raymond
.
He was devoted to the Center but he rarely if ever showed up on
Sunday.

“
Oh, Alicia!” he said.
“There you are! Isn’t it wonderful?”

“
Isn’t what
wonderful?”

“
Didn’t anyone tell you?
The toys! The
toys
are back!”

Suddenly Alicia wanted to cry. She
turned to the pair of policemen. Raymond introduced her. She wanted
to hug them.

“
You found them? Already?
That’s… that’s wonderful!” Better than wonderful—fantastic was the
word.

“
I guess you could say we
found them,” the black cop said, scratching his bald head. His name
tag read,
Pomus
.
“If you can call opening up a truck parked on the sidewalk by your
front door ‘finding’ them.”

“
Wait a minute. Back up
just a bit. What truck?”

“
A panel truck, Alicia,”
Raymond said. “Filled with the toys. The police think it was the
same one used to haul them away. Someone drove it up on the
sidewalk last night and left it there.”

“
Any idea who?” she asked,
although she had a pretty good idea.

The white
cop—
Schwartz
on
his tag—grinned. “According to the guy tied to the bumper, it was
Santa Claus himself.”

“
Guy tied to
what?
”

They went on to explain about the man
they’d found lashed to the front of the toy-filled truck. Someone
had “knocked the crap out of him,” as Officer Pomus put it, and
taped some rubber antlers to his head. The battered man admitted to
the theft and swore that his assailant had been Santa Claus—even
admitted to shooting Santa, rambling on about shooting him in the
heart without killing him.

“
But of course, you can’t
kill Santa,” Officer Schwartz said, grinning.

“
He’s obviously a user and
he sounds like an EDP, so we don’t know what to believe,” Officer
Pomus added. “We’ve got him up on Bellevue’s flight deck now, under
observation.”

“
Flight deck?”

“
You know—the psych ward.
Sooner or later, we’ll get the straight story out of
him.”

“
And throw the book at
him, I hope.”

“
Oh, yeah,” Pomus said.
“No question about that. But he’s already had worse than a book
thrown at him.” He grinned. “A
lot
worse.”

“
Yeah,” Schwartz said.
“Someone worked him over
real
good before dropping him here. The creep seemed
almost glad to be arrested.”

After they were gone, Alicia and
Raymond went to the storeroom and inspected the gifts. Except for a
little wrinkling of the paper and an occasional bumped corner, most
were in the same condition as before the theft. She told Raymond to
get hold of a locksmith—she didn’t care that it was Sunday—and have
him secure that door, even if it meant putting a bar across
it.