Never Fear (74 page)

Then she went to her office and sipped
her coffee, lukewarm by now, and thought about that nothing-special
looking man named Jack—”Just Jack” Niedermeyer.

On Friday afternoon he’d said he’d see
what he could do. Thirty-six hours later, the gifts were back and
the thief in custody.

A man who could do that just might be
able to solve her other problem.

Alicia looked up a number in her
computer’s directory and began dialing…

A FAMILY CHRISTMAS
TERROR

CHAPTER 22

Dan set the book down.
“Certainly nothing like
our
Jack. That guy had balls.
God
.” He stared into the fire. “Why
are my kids such losers? What did we do wrong?”

“
You can only do what you
can do. I know how you feel.”

“
What’s
that
supposed to
mean?”

“
Take it for what it is.
Your mother and I tried, but there comes a point...”

“
Fuck
you, old man. You’re lucky we let you live here all these
years. We could’ve just shipped you off to some old folks’ home
years ago.” He hurled the book at his father’s feet. “There. You
can finish the book. I’m fucking done with this shit!” He left the
old man with the book at his feet.

“
Dan...” Grandpa’s face
held pure disappointment. He got up to follow, but only took a
couple of steps. He looked down at the book. “I need to finish it.”
He went back to the chair and picked up the book.
“
The Boy and His Backpack...”

THE BOY AND THE
BACKPACK

JON LAND

The boy entered the bar dragging the
storm behind him. The cold wind chased him all the way inside,
drawing a shudder from the few patrons closest to the door before
it swung closed. The boy flipped back his hooded sweatshirt to
reveal long brown floppy hair stained dark at the tips by melting
snow. His faded, frayed jeans, too, were storm blackened in
splotches, and his worn motorcycle boots featured a broken buckle
that dragged along the floor like a Christmas bell.

Fitting, thought Ray Dunwoodie from
his customary spot in a back booth between sips of house scotch,
since this, after all, was Christmas Eve. Rare for Dunwoodie to
look up from the BlackBerry that sat next to his glass, daring the
ring of condensation to reach it. Rarer still for him to notice
anyone entering or leaving the bar he frequented every night. He
could tell you the man passed out at a center table beneath a
perpetually flickering light bulb drank away his monthly welfare
check, but that was about it.

Except for a single plain wreath hung
outside the entrance, the old bar showed no signs of the season. It
had been a much more central haunt when this part of the city had
been home to industry and hope now lost behind buildings awash in
FOR SALE signs. One of these hung not far from the wreath, its
letters cracked and storm-blasted while inside four patrons who
called themselves regulars sat amidst peeling paint and rotting
floorboards.

The boy’s boots clacked atop these as
he strode beneath the dull, dusty lighting for the bar and took a
stool. His shoulders sagged from the weight of a backpack that
seemed ready to pull him over at any moment. The jacket that
covered his gray sweatshirt had once been black leather before much
of what was black, and leather, were lost to age and too many
storms like the one that had descended on the city tonight. He
swept the bangs of his matted hair from his forehead and it swept
right back.

“
You got an ID?” Celia the
bartender asked him, hefty arms crossed menacingly before her. She
might have been a woman, but the baseball bat kept always within
reach knew no gender. Her dingy fell hair limply past her
shoulders, and she smelled of dishwasher solvent and stale
beer.

“
Oh.” The boy smiled. “I’m
not drinking.”

And with that, he unslung a backpack,
so overstuffed the seams looked to be tearing from his shoulders.
It looked frightfully old and tattered; wisps of fabric sticking up
in some places, thinning patches in others, and downright rips in
still more. Looked as if it might burst as soon as he set it down,
but it didn’t.

“
This is a bar, son,”
Celia noted in a far from motherly fashion. “That’s what people do
here. Drink.”

“
Give the kid a break,
Ceil,” came a voice from the far end of a bar. It belonged to a man
named Hank Waggoner, unlit cigarette dangling in his hand even
though he’d quit smoking a dozen years back. “Can’t you see he’s
hungry?”

Celia regarded the boy
again. He looked no more than sixteen, seventeen at the most, and
was practically licking his chops now. On the bar’s scratchy
television,
It’s a Wonderful Life
was playing for the millionth time, Jimmy Stewart
dancing through Bedford Falls having recovered his will to live. No
one was watching.

“
That true, kid?” Celia
the bartender asked.

The boy looked at her with wide, puppy
dog eyes. “Starved, actually.”

“
Cook went home. But if
you wait a bit, I’ll see what I can fix you up.”

“
That be great. Got a
remote?” the boy asked, following Jimmy Stewart’s prance down Main
Street.

“
Got a name?”

“
Guess.”

“
Guess?”

“
Guess.”

The bartender sneered but answered
anyway. “Okay. Trevor.”

The boy slapped the bar with a palm.
“See, you guessed right.”

Celia laid her two flabby hands down
on the counter, wondering how exactly she’d come up with that name.
“Well, the remote’s been missing for a month now. Last time the
channel was changed was the night before Thanksgiving.”

“
Then it’s a good thing I
brought you a gift,” Trevor said, leaning low enough off his stool
to reach down and unzip his bulging backpack. After a few tries it
finally opened with a slight tearing sound. “Here you
go.”

Spoken as he sat back up with a small,
neatly wrapped and bowed present he handed to Celia. She eyed it
suspiciously at first, then set to stripping the paper off while
never once taking her eyes off the boy until she’d finished the
task.

“
You kidding me?” she
said, the open box revealing a universal television remote control,
sleek and black.

“
Batteries installed and
already programmed.”

Celia was too busy
flipping through the channels to ask how the boy had managed that.
Something made her stop on an old nostalgia station that was
playing an ancient Andy Williams Christmas special, Andy just
breaking into
White Christmas
as fake snow with the texture of cardboard rained
down upon him.

“
Roget Ellis hates that
dang song,” came a voice four stools down from the boy, belonging
to an old black man with white hair that looked like thick cotton
woven to his scalp.

“
Who’s Roget Ellis?”
Trevor asked.

“
Him,” said Hank Waggoner
from the other side of the bar. “Old Roget likes to talk about
himself in the third person.”

“
It’s Ro-jay,” the old man
corrected. He pointed at the screen as Andy Williams cruised into
the chorus. “Bing Crosby sang it for the first time Christmas Day
1941 on his NBC radio show
The Kraft Music
Hall
. But the recording was lost forever.
Know how Roget Ellis knows that? ‘Cause he was there.” Ellis was
focusing on the boy now with droopy, bloodshot eyes suddenly
bursting with intensity. “Part of the band. Played the saxophone
and man, was Roget good. His very last gig until he shipped out to
boot camp at Fort Dix. Came back from the war with this …” Here,
the old man used his left hand to help raise his right, pretty much
a gnarled and useless appendage with two of the fingers missing.
“Land mine killed Roget’s arm and his career on May 29, 1942, the
same day Crosby recorded ‘White Christmas’ with the John Scott
Trotter Orchestra. Oh well,” he said, plopping his dead arm down
and lifting a glass of whiskey in its place, “least Roget Ellis got
his memories.”

Saying nothing, the boy dropped down
from his stool and fished a second present from his still unzipped
backpack. This one was flat, rectangular and thin, but equally well
wrapped. He walked down to Roget Ellis and handed it to
him.

“
Merry Christmas, Mr.
Ellis.”

The old man took it with a suspicious
smile, the boy already back on his stool by the time he finished
peeling off the wrapping with his one good hand to reveal an
unmarked sleeve and pristine record. “What is…”

“
Turns out that original
recording of
White Christmas
wasn’t lost at all,” Trevor told him. “Just
missing for a while.”

The old man used his good hand to slip
an old 78-rpm recording disc from the album sleeve. His eyes misted
up, holding the record in disbelief.

“
Tell Roget this is what
he thinks it is! Tell him that!”

Trevor grinned broadly. “I’m a sucker
for a sax, sir.”

And as Roget Ellis clutched the record
like it was a newborn babe, the boy ducked his hand back into his
seemingly bottomless backpack. “And I’ve got something for you too,
Mr. Waggoner.”

“
Ain’t had nothing to
mattered to me since longer than I can remember,” Waggoner said,
studying the knobby fingers of his workingman hands. “I don’t give
up the smoke when I do, maybe I’m dead now.” He gazed at the unlit
cigarette as if it were a lost love. “Guess maybe I never should’ve
quit.”

Trevor used the new remote to switch
the channel again, this time in a swift motion to the Major League
Baseball channel that was showing World Series highlights held
forever in grainy black and white. Waggoner’s eyes widened as
Trevor slid a small, equally well-wrapped box his way.

“
Merry Christmas, Mr.
Waggoner.”

Waggoner resisted at first, trying to
place exactly when he’d told the kid his name, then yanked at the
small box with feigned disinterest until its contents were
revealed. “Topps Baseball Cards. Why this looks just like …” His
eyes snapped outright, seeking the boy out with suspicion. “How’d
you know? Who told you?”

“
Told me what?”

“
My baseball card
collection,” he continued, opening the box as if something might
jump out. “My dad and I, we collected them together. Then he died
and I was so angry and bitter I tossed them all out. Still remember
chasing the garbage truck down the street after I changed my mind,
but I never did catch ...Oh my,” he said suddenly, flipping through
the box’s pristine contents. “Mickey Mantle, Willy Mays, Stan
Musial,
Ted Williams
!” His grateful gaze sought out Trevor anew. “They’re all
here, all brand spanking new! How did you, how could you ...” Again
Waggoner’s words drifted off, attention returned to his
bounty.

“
Whatcha got in there for
me, punk?” an angry voice demanded. “Gotta be something in there
for me!”

“
Oh boy,” muttered Ray
Dunwoodie, recalling that the nameless man who drank away his
welfare check was prone to fits that had drawn Celia on more than
one occasion to take baseball bat in hand.

“
There is,” Trevor
replied, holding a small box as his boots click-clacked toward the
man.

The man’s eyes looked red and wild in
the light flickering over him, his hair a thinning mess of tangles
and ringlets aimed in all directions at once. Dunwoodie could
almost smell the stench washing over him. Closest thing the man had
to a shower was a soaking rainstorm few and far between this time
of year. Funding deficits had forced off the hot water in the
shelter where he lived.

“
Better be, I say, better
be!” he blared, rising to his full height, which looked enormous in
the shadows but barely passed for average.

Trevor extended the box toward him and
didn’t so much as flinch when the homeless man tore it from his
grasp. He went at the wrapping like a piranha, emerging with a
prepaid cell phone.

“
This some kind of joke?”
the homeless man shouted at the boy. “That what it is? Like I got
someone to call?”

“
You do?”

“
Huh?”

“
Your son,” Trevor told
him.

The man’s face got red, his teeth
starting to bare enough for Celia to remember the baseball bat.
Then he simply sighed, all the air seeming to drain out of him.
“Like I know where he is.”

Trevor looked unruffled, the
flickering light making his features seem more liquid than solid.
His eyes aimed toward the box the homeless man still held in his
grubby hands. “His number’s preprogrammed. Just turn the phone on
and press ‘1.’”

“
But how could
…

That’s as far as the homeless man got,
his shoulders sagging to make him look very small and not nearly as
scary. No one seemed to notice that the light over him had stopped
flickering. Behind the bar, Celia took her hand off the knob of the
bat, unable to similarly take her eyes off the boy. She wanted to
say something, couldn’t.