The Slay of the Santas

by Kacey Gene

  He melts down to the floor like the Wicked Witch of the West, clawing at his eyes while screaming in agony.

  Jennifer bounds past him and runs out the door. She can still hear him screaming as she makes her way out of his apartment and down the hallway. When she hits the stairwell, she takes two steps at a time until she finally lands on the ground floor. She’s convinced that she’s going to have to run home. Yes, it’s probably about four miles. Yes, her clothes are still damp. Yes, it’s just above freezing tonight. But, she doesn’t see that she has another choice.

  Throwing open the apartment building door, she runs smack into Jake, who is waiting and pacing outside Matt’s building.

  Jake stops her mid-sprint and holds onto her by her shoulders.

  “What is it? What did he do?” Jake asks, eyeing every part of Jennifer to make sure she’s okay.

  “He has the books,” Jennifer says, frantically. “He has the book,” she says, but she doesn’t show Jake what she took from Matt’s apartment. Instead, she tucks her arms inside his coat and lets him wrap her in a warm hug. She wishes she could hide inside Jake’s skin. She’d do almost anything to escape her own skin, which feels like death and deceit are crawling across it like centipedes.

  Jake doesn’t understand anything Jennifer just said, but he sees the fear in her eyes and the fright that has made her pale skin even whiter. In Jake’s mind, that’s enough evidence to justify ripping Matt’s arms off.

  Still holding her tightly, Jake says, “Get in the car. Lock yourself in, and don’t do anything until I get back.” He’s ready to storm into the building. “What’s his apartment number?”

  “No. Please, Jake. Just get me out of here. I want to get out of here.”

  “Jennifer--”

  “Jake, please,” her voice rips out of her as she looks up at him, and it’s quickly followed by tears that run down her face.

  Jake doesn’t put up a fight.

  He quickly escorts Jennifer to his car, looking over his shoulders as he does, and pulls away from Matt’s apartment building.

  They silently drive through the quiet streets, which look like they’re covered in slick oil due to the melted snow that’s lit up by tonight’s full moon. Jennifer wipes away the tears that feel like they’ll never stop while Jake eyes the book that’s in her lap. It’s too dark to see the title clearly, but he has a feeling it’s the exact book they’ve been looking for. He also knows that Jennifer isn’t ready to talk yet.

  She keeps her eyes focused outside the window on the houses covered in the warm glow of Christmas lights. Seeing those lights and the holiday decorations remind her that there’s good in the world. There are houses and apartments filled with families that laugh together, that hug and kiss, and that have warm beds they feel safe in.

  She feels Jake’s hand softly cover her hand, and she’s so relieved that he’s there with her. She can always count on him, even when she breaks his rules or makes him mad, and that fact makes her insides flood with gratefulness and love for Jake. She turns her hand over and holds his hand inside hers as well.

  “You going to tell me what happened?” Jake asks.

  Feeling that she can finally think and speak clearly, Jennifer says, “You’re going to want to send some officers over to Matt’s apartment. I pepper sprayed him, and I think I got him pretty good.”

  Then, she tells Jake everything -- about the letter, the watermark, the shelf of books, the copy of A Christmas Carol she took, and when she describes the way Matt charged toward her, her voice shakes and cracks.

  “You did the right thing pepper spraying him,” Jake says, knowing that Jennifer is debating this very fact. Ever since she was little Jennifer has succumb to her instincts and then questioned them right after. And for as long as Jake has known her, those instincts have always been spot-on.

  He gives her hand a squeeze and then lets go of her to grab the walkie talkie from the car’s dashboard. Not wanting to trigger the panic Jennifer felt back at Matt’s apartment, Jake keeps his tone calm and professional as he requests a perpetrator pick-up and gives the address. He asks Jennifer for the apartment number, which she gives. Then, Jake turns his face away because he knows that as he says, “The perpetrator has been pepper sprayed, so bring needed equipment,” he can’t help but smile. Just a bit.

  After the confirmation that Matt and his books will be brought down to the station, Jennifer feels like she can finally breathe again. Something about Matt being on the loose -- even if he is partially blind -- and possibly knowing where she lives, made her heart quiver.

  She looks down at the book in her lap, and it gives her a sense of victory. This is what they’ve been after. At least, she thinks this is what they’ve been after. Running her hands over the cover, she’s just about to crack it open when Jake interrupts her.

  “You want to tell me why you decided to break every rule we agreed to and then do something as stupid as to go up to that guy’s apartment?” His voice is parental.

  In hindsight, yes, Jennifer can see that what she did was wrong, but Jake would have done the same thing if he was in her shoes. Plus, she’s not hurt, and she got exactly what they needed by doing “something as stupid as to go up to that guy’s apartment.” This is exactly what she bites back to him.

  “You could have gotten yourself killed, do you realize that?” Jake fights back.

  “But I didn’t,” Jennifer says.

  “But you could have.” Jake’s voice is angry, yes, but there’s more to it than that. Jennifer worried him. She didn’t listen to him. In fact, she downright disobeyed him, which she knows feels completely disrespectful.

  “Look, you’re right,” Jennifer says, waving a verbal white flag. “And I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I may eventually accept your apology,” Jake says. After a moment of silence he says, “Plus, I can’t think this is all your fault. Someone set off the sprinkler system at Michele’s place, and Matt just happened to be there to steal you away. Seems too coincidental for me.”

  “Yeah, what in the world happened there? One minute I’m in the bathroom, and the next minute, I’m in an indoor monsoon.”

  “Someone did that on purpose; I know it,” Jake says. “And, there’s more.”

  Jennifer looks over at him, and she sees him take a deep breath. “My dad called. They got the lab and autopsy results.”

  “And?” Jennifer asks, turning her body toward him.

  “The sprig of holly was clean. But the pudding sample from Fred’s and from Earl’s place both had cyanide in them. That’s how the men died; they were poisoned with cyanide.”

  “Cyanide?” Jennifer asks, completely surprised by this information.

  “Yep,” Jake says. “So both men were poisoned with cyanide, both men were positioned to emulate a scene from A Christmas Carol, both men had an oddly large amount of pudding in their house, and both men had the same set of Dickens novels. The question is: Why?”

  “And,” Jennifer asks with trepidation, “who’s next?”

  Jake eyes the book in Jennifer’s lap, and she does the same. They both share the sense that this book will hold all the answers. Jennifer cracks open the cover, and looks in the upper corner. It doesn’t have the hand-written message like the others. It does, however, have the Pelznickel sticker.

  Jennifer flips to the title page, which has a beautiful illustration of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig, from A Christmas Carol, dancing. And then she opens to page one of the story.

  “Look at this,” Jennifer says, barely able to believe what she’s seeing. There are number combinations next to random words and paragraphs on the first page.

  “457811; 259802; 778909; and 82308,” Jennifer says, reading them out loud. “What do these mean?” she asks, tilting the book toward Jake as he pulls into her parking garage.

  “You have to be kidding me,” Jake says, eyeing the numbers. While he makes turn after turn in her parking garage to get to the eighth floor, he keeps glancing over at the book.
“And some of those combinations have six numbers. The one we took from the Dickens novel you saved only had five numbers.”

  Jennifer quickly scans the combinations. “Actually, some of these have four numbers in the combination and some have seven,” she says, frustratingly. Then she flips to the next page. There are even more combinations scattered above random words and next to random paragraphs. And, all of them have a different amount of numbers in them. Fearing the worst, Jennifer fans through all the pages in the book and sees that every single page is plagued with number combinations like they’re measles.

  Jake sees the exact same thing. “You can’t be serious,” he says.

  He makes the last turn in the garage toward her parking spot, but then he slams on the brakes, sending both of them and the book flying forward.

  “What in the world?” Jennifer asks, raising back up from her thrashed state, but then she sees what caused Jake’s reaction. Her parking space is filled with at least three feet of gelatinous chocolate pudding.

  “Seriously?” Jennifer asks. “More pudding? Who has access to all of this pudding?”

  “And how did they get it to stay like that just in your parking spot?” Jake asks, eyeing the mound in wonder.

  Both of them get out of Jake’s car, and walk toward the pudding mountain. “How am I going to clean this up?” She looks down at her hands that are still red and cracked from cleaning the pudding off her windows in the icy cold this afternoon.

  Sighing, she takes another step closer and hears a crunch under her boot. Looking down, she doesn’t see anything, but something tells her not to move.

  “Uh, Jake,” she says, pointing to her frozen foot. “I think I stepped on something.”

  “Don’t move,” he says, throwing himself at her feet. He flattens himself against the cement and shines his flashlight under her boot. He looks up at her, and she doesn’t need to hear his words. She can see in the way that Jake anxiously covers his mouth with his hand and then runs that hand through his hair that it’s bad.

  “What is it?” Jennifer asks.

  “I need you to stay completely still,” Jake says, looking around. “You’ve stepped on some kind of detonator.”

  “A detonator?” Jennifer yells so loudly that a pair of random birds flap in fear through the parking garage. They startle Jennifer so much that she jumps back. And then she realizes what she’s actually done.

  Her foot is off the detonator.

  She looks at Jake. They stare at each other in silence, and that’s when they hear it. A ticking. It’s close by, but it sounds muffled.

  “Run,” Jake yells, grabbing Jennifer’s hand.

  But it’s too late. The ticking turns into an alarm before the two of them can take one step.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Captain Sharb Gets Serious (Part II)

  Suddenly, a giant whoosh fills the parking garage. A large piece of fabric springs out from the brown, gelatinous mound and flings pudding all over Jennifer and Jake.

  “Oh, gross,” Jake says, scooping pudding off his face and out of his hair. Jennifer does the same, and when she scoops a glob of pudding from right above her eye, she sees that the fabric that caused this pudding shower is actually a banner.

  Whomever did this had the banner knotted to fishing line, and when Jennifer stepped on the detonator it triggered a pulley system. The banner now hangs from the ceiling above her parking spot, dripping with thick, brown pudding that falls off in loud gloups. That’s when Jennifer sees the message on the banner. It says:

  God Bless Us Every One

  “That’s what Tiny Tim says,” Jennifer says, trying to bring Jake’s attention to the banner rather than his soiled uniform, which he’s attempting to wipe clean.

  “What is with this person and pudding?” Jake annoyingly asks, as he clears a handful of it out from under his belt.

  “Jake,” Jennifer says firmly to get his attention, “the words on the banner are the final words in A Christmas Carol.”

  When Jake’s eyes fall on the banner, his shoulders also fall. “This person is a total whack-job,” he says. Then, remembering his duty as a Lieutenant, he says, “I’ll call it in. You go get cleaned up and packed.”

  “Packed?” Jennifer asks.

  “Yes. You’re coming to my house. Your place is too dangerous for either of us. In fact, I’m walking you upstairs and then I’ll come back down and call this in,” Jake says, definitively.

  By the time Jennifer is showered, cleaned, and packed -- having her bag mainly filled with skeins of yarn for the Christmas presents she hasn’t even started -- the pudding on Jake’s body and uniform has formed into a crusted shell.

  Jennifer meets Jake back in the parking garage, but he’s no longer alone. There are a handful of officers taping off her parking spot and Captain Sharb is standing next to Jake. Red-faced, annoyed, and tight-eyed Captain Sharb stares right at Jennifer as she walks over to them.

  “Here,” Jennifer says, handing Jake the towel she promised him.

  Jake moves over to his police car, dumps his bottle of water on the towel, and rubs away some pudding from his face and neck.

  Jennifer awkwardly stands next to Sharb, who won’t stop dead-eyeing her.

  “You just can’t keep your nose out of police business, can you?” Sharb asks when Jennifer refuses to make eye contact with him. His accusation breaks her aloof stance.

  She turns toward Sharb and looks him right in the eye. “In case you haven’t noticed, this happened to me. It’s not like I asked for someone to come and pudding my parking space.”

  “But why would this perpetrator and possible murderer feel the need to target you?” Sharb asks accusingly. “In all my years as an officer, a Lieutenant, and a Captain in the police force, there’s only two reasons someone does something like this.”

  Jennifer feels her insides twist when Sharb keeps his eyes directly on her. He wants her to confess something, but she keeps her mouth shut.

  “Either the perpetrator wants to scare someone out of following their trail or the victim has something the perpetrator wants. Now, neither of those should apply to you, but why do I get the feeling that they both apply to you?”

  It takes all her might, but Jennifer keeps quiet.

  She knows that Sharb is correct; both of those things do apply to her. She’s getting closer and closer to solving these murders; she can feel it. And she also knows that in her bag -- buried deep below the yarn, her clothes, the cookie cutters, her crochet hooks, and her toiletries -- is the book from Matt’s house. The book that seems to be the key to everything, even if it’s filled with numbers that currently don’t make any sense to her.

  “I asked you a question,” Sharb says, moving and standing directly in front of Jennifer. He folds his hot dog fingers in front of him and devilishly says, “Because, the way I see it, you shouldn’t even be known to the murderer, and yet, here we are.”

  He’s going to keep pushing her. She can feel it. He’ll push and push until she breaks.

  “Jen,” Jake yells from his car. “I have to get home and shower. There is pudding literally in my ear.”

  Seeing her escape route, Jennifer puts a hand on Sharb’s shoulder and says, “Wish I could help,” and then she slips right past him. Yet, as she walks to Jake’s squad car and slides into the passenger seat, she feels Sharb’s judgmental and suspicious eyes remain on her.

  It’s not until they pull out of the parking garage and Jake starts talking that Jennifer shakes Sharb’s beady-eyed look out of her mind.

  “My dad called while you were in your place,” Jake says, pulling out onto main street. “They picked up Kiley and got the books. Turns out he had thirteen copies of A Christmas Carol.”

  “Fourteen, technically,” Jennifer says, referencing the book in her bag. “Are his eyes okay?” Jennifer asks, still worried that her pepper spraying of Matt makes her more like an impulsive skunk than a rational human.

  Jake looks over at her as he turn
s down Fern Street. “Yes, his eyes are completely fine,” he says, “but I need to tell you something.” Jake’s voice is as straight as a horizon line, which means that the “something” he has to tell her, is serious. Jennifer turns toward him and readies herself for the news.

  “Kiley’s alibi he gave for yesterday, during the car chase, Sharb says it all checks out.”

  Jennifer shrugs. “We knew that,” she says. “We didn’t have his alibi cleared, but his story checked out.”

  Jake awkwardly adjusts in his seat and takes a deep breath. That’s when Jennifer realizes that Kiley’s car-chase alibi isn’t the serious news. There’s more.

  “Well, he also gave an alibi for the books. And it also checks out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jake turns down his street, and it’s the one time Jennifer has ever wanted Jake to live farther away. She doesn’t want anything to interrupt what he’s about to tell her.

  “Kiley says the books are a gift. He says his parents give him a copy of A Christmas Carol every year. They send it to him a week or so before Christmas as a tradition. My dad contacted the parents, they confirmed, and they said they even have a receipt for the book they bought this year.”

  Jennifer looks down at her hands. It’s official, she thinks. I’m a monster. I pepper sprayed a completely innocent guy.

  “You couldn’t have known,” Jake says, knowing that her conscience is diving head first into a pool of guilt. “You did what you thought was right--”

  “What book?” Jennifer asks, cutting off Jake’s comforting words.

  “What?”

  “Which copy of A Christmas Carol did his parents send him this year?” Jennifer’s mind becomes hyper-focused. She feels terrible about Matt, and she can’t even venture into analyzing the fact that she pepper sprayed the only thing resembling a date she’s had in over a year. Her only option is to make this better. She needs to solve this crime and apologize to Matt for the rest of her life.