Have Yourself a Naughty Little Santa

by Karin Tabke

  The silence was so pronounced that she thought they had lost their connection. “Nick?”

  “Look,” he started, “what is done is done and it’s worked out to our benefit. What we need is the name of the consortium. Do you have it?”

  Now it was her turn to pause. That little voice she always listened to scratched madly at her belly. “I think I have an idea.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “A consortium out of Lodi. I’m working on it.”

  She could hear Nick tapping his pen on the edge of his inlaid mahogany desk, which he had had hand-crafted by a Venetian artist. He only did that when he was perturbed. “Time is money, Kimberly.”

  She sighed and looked back toward Leti’s house. Enrique stood at the unbroken window, next to the one that was boarded up, his dark gaze locked on her. “I know. I know.”

  Kim hung up and turned back toward the center of town. Her body stiffened more. Ricco was walking straight toward her. She turned and crossed the street, then walked toward him on the other side. She’d grab a bite to eat at the teahouse, then come back for the shoot, and hopefully after that be a fly on the wall at the town hall meeting.

  By the time she got to the teahouse, there was a flurry of chatter about the crime spree in Evergreen. Kim felt bad for Maddy; it was obvious she didn’t want to hear about it. Talking about it kept it alive.

  “Are y’all going to come down to the ice rink tonight for the skate with Santa-thon?” she asked a group of ladies sitting by the front door, their hands tightly grasped around their purses. Kim couldn’t help a smile. It wasn’t like lightning would strike twice.

  “I don’t know how to ice-skate,” one of them said.

  Maddy grinned and said, “Well, sugarplum, that’s the beauty of it. We have some really hunky Santas and you want them to hold you close and teach you a few moves.” She winked and looked at Kim, then said, “Just ask her about how hunky our Santas are. She has firsthand knowledge.”

  Kim felt the heat rise in her cheeks, and just as she was going to agree, the bell to the shop tinkled and all eyes turned to see who was coming through the door. A collective gasp rose from every woman in the small shop. A tall man dressed in casual clothes with a ski mask pulled over his face entered, wagging a semiautomatic pistol in front of him.

  “Good morning, ladies. Don’t make a scene, or my buddy outside will have to come in and help me shut you up.”

  All eyes darted to the lone man standing guard at the door, casually sipping a cup of coffee. He was dressed like the man inside—tourist casual—except the man out front didn’t have his ski mask pulled down, covering his face. But all Kim could see was the back of his dark head.

  “Give me your wallets and your jewelry. Do it now, do it quick, and do it quiet.”

  Just as Kim handed over the cash in her pocket, the masked man shook his head. He pointed the barrel of his gun at her throat. “Necklace goes too.”

  She grasped it. “No!” He grabbed her hand and yanked it from her neck. Kim seethed; she didn’t fight for her locket only because she didn’t want to get anyone hurt. As the bad guy made his last sweep, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Ricco walking toward the shop. Her heart rate accelerated. She wanted him to come in and save the day, but she was also afraid for him. Holding her breath, she watched him glance at the guy out front, then into the shop. Then he kept going. And she knew then that he knew.

  The guy out front poked his head in and locked eyes with Kim. She, along with every other woman in the place, had a picture-perfect look at his face. Caucasian male, midtwenties, brown hair, brown eyes, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times. When his thin lips pulled back from his teeth, she noticed that his bottom front teeth were chipped. “We just got made,” he said in a flat, unaccented voice.

  In a twinkle they were gone, and just as fast Ricco was after them.

  Kim ran to the edge of the boardwalk and watched the two men split. Ricco went after the guy with the gun. When he turned and started shooting, she screamed. Ricco, along with every other person in proximity, hit the ground. But what Ricco did next amazed her. On his belly, he returned fire! When had he started carrying a gun? To her horror and amazement, the thug went down with a thud, just like the reindeer had the day before. Her body began to shake uncontrollably; suddenly the stakes had gone too high. Something insidious had taken over this sleepy little town, and it was now just a matter of time before one of its residents was seriously injured or killed. Tentatively Kim ventured off the boardwalk, not knowing what to do. But she did what her gut told her, and that was to go to Ricco. He was kneeling down beside the bad guy, feeling for a pulse. But she knew the minute she looked at the hardening, muddy eyes that he was dead.

  “Are you all right?” she softly asked Ricco.

  He looked up at her and squinted against the glare of the morning sun. “I’m fine. Did he hurt you or anyone else in there?”

  She shook her head. “No, he just took our wallets and jewelry.” She pointed to the satchel a few yards from where the body lay. Several wallets and pieces of jewelry littered the ground near it.

  “Okay. I want you to go back to the shop and wait for Jeff and Peyton. You don’t need to see this.” His voice was deep and unusually calm. Kim knelt down next to him and looked into his face to find not a man who had a problem with what he did but a man attending to his business. But how did you kill someone—even a bad guy—and not have it affect you?

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Ricco smiled. “I’ve been down this road before. I have no problem going to bed after a righteous shoot.”

  She stood and looked down at the dead man again. “Okay, but if you need anything…”

  “I’ll be fine. Now go tell the guys what happened.”

  Carefully, as if she’d been barefoot and treading on broken glass, Kim made her way back to the gathered crowd. Assumptions, recantations, and speculation abounded, but one common thread was clear. The tourists were done with Christmas in Evergreen. And Kim couldn’t blame them. She wanted to leave too. And she would have, except…her gaze roamed across the crime scene to the tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed man who stared back. Except for him.

  Several hours later, after the body was put in the coroner’s van and everyone was questioned, Kim waited for Ricco. The sun had begun its set in the western sky. While life had seemed to stand still for Kim those few hours, it had not for Esmeralda. Her world had darkened. Right after the shooting, Town & Country had pulled up stakes and left town. Kim was now Esmeralda’s only guest, and the town’s seasonal population was reduced to a small percentage of what it had only been three days before. The town hall meeting was scheduled for eight that night. It had been scheduled for that time so the merchants could keep their doors open for every sale, then meet when they closed for the night. But Evergreen was now a ghost town. It didn’t matter.

  Kimberly felt an incredible sense of loss for these people. As she walked with Leticia and her daughters, she felt as if she’d been walking to the gallows. As she entered the courtroom in city hall, she watched as the townsfolk filed in. She saw resignation, anger, and pure depression scribbled across the many faces.

  As she sat down, her cell phone vibrated. She looked at the number. Nick. Quickly she answered and excused herself from the room.

  “Hey, they’re just getting the meeting started,” Kim said out of earshot of any lingering townsfolk.

  “I just made another offer. The Tomlinsons will have it. Make sure when those folks bust a vein you convince them that in your business experience it’s their best recourse.”

  Kim’s mouth went dry. “I thought we agreed no more backroom offers?”

  Nick laughed. “Baby, you are losing your objectivity.”

  She set her jaw. “What’s the offer?”

  Nick laughed, the sound diabolic. She could just see him rubbing his hands together, then twisting his Snidely Whiplash mustache as he gloated over his
good fortune and their loss. “Forty cents on the dollar.”

  “Nick! That’s unethical!”

  “Unethical? Are you kidding me? What the hell, Kimberly? Last week you would have been giving me gold stars for the maneuver, now you tell me I’m unethical?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve gotten to know these people. It’s their lives.”

  “Well, their lives just went on sale. And I’m buying.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No buts. Are you in this with me or not?”

  She shook her head, not wanting to continue. She wanted out, she wanted to pack up and drive fast and far. But if she did, what was the alternative? Failure? To miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime? “I’m in,” she slowly said.

  “Good girl. Now, I want details when it’s over.”

  She hung up. And looked up to see Ricco standing in the doorway, staring at her. She couldn’t meet his gaze. Instead she moved past him and into the courtroom. The debate was hot and heated. “It’s easy for you to say sit it out, Leticia, you have equity. You haven’t mortgaged your house,” challenged Ben, the owner of Santa’s Workshop.

  “It’s been six years since this town has been in the black. My loan is due the end of the year. I can’t pay it,” a merchant said.

  “Even if I could,” another person said, “it would clean me out for next year. I can barely pay my utility bills as it is. And forget about my taxes.”

  Leticia put her hands up and called for quiet. “Please, please, I hear what everyone is saying. We’re all in this together. Let’s find a way to pool our resources to help our neighbors.”

  “So we all go down?”

  “No, so we can all stay afloat.”

  “For how long? Did you see the line out of this place today?”

  “Ricco, Jeff, what the hell?”

  Ricco stepped forward. “I have information that might change your minds. It appears the thug who I killed, Joseph Watters, was a gun for hire out of L.A. The tags on the Suburban that used the pedestrians as target practice the other day were found ditched in Sparks. Watters’s fingerprints were all over it. The purse snatcher, out of L.A.”

  “What’s the L.A. connection?” Cal asked.

  “Where is Land’s Edge out of?” Ricco countered.

  “L.A.,” Kim whispered. Cold infiltrated her bones, and her breath wheezed out of her chest.

  And it all made perfect sense to her. Nick had lied to her! And, by association, she was an accomplice! Her shock quickly subsided as anger took hold of her. She hadn’t signed up for terrorism tactics. Not wanting to call attention to herself, Kim took a deep breath and steadied her shaking hands.

  The crowd became a swarming mass of fury. And despite her efforts to keep calm, Kim felt her blood pressure rise as well.

  “How do we prove it?” Jasmine demanded.

  Ricco shrugged. “It’s speculation right now. If the purse snatcher talks, which seems unlikely, since he’s lawyered up and has a shark of an attorney, we don’t have much to go on unless we strike a deal.” He glanced at Kim. “Have you heard of this company in your business dealings?”

  She swallowed hard and nodded. “They play hardball.”

  “No-rules hardball?”

  “No-rules hardball.” All seemed lost for the tiny Christmas town. She was about to recommend that the town capitulate when she looked up into Ricco’s dark eyes. Then she looked around the room, at his family and the townsfolk, and something deep inside her shifted. There was the right way to dismantle a property for acquisition and there was the wrong way, and what Nick was doing was wrong. “What’s the current offer on the table?” she asked instead.

  Donna Tomlinson stepped up. “I just got a call from the Land’s Edge representative. Now that I think about it, the timing is kind of interesting. It seems like each time there is criminal activity and we lose tourists, we get a call.”

  “What is it?” Kim asked again.

  “Forty cents for every dollar owed.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Robbery!”

  “Isn’t that against the law?”

  Kim shook her head. “No, but coercion and extortion are.”

  “So is murder,” Ricco said. He turned to Kim. In front of the entire town, he asked her, “Will you help us save Evergreen?”

  Fear, doubt, and the knowledge that if she agreed she would lose everything she had worked so hard for grabbed her hard by the throat. And for what? To keep a few Stepford folks out of the mouth of the big bad wolf? If the Evergreen deal fell through for Land’s Edge, there would be no marriage to Nick. That she could live with, but could she live with that man’s death on her conscience? Because of the information she had given Nick, he’d taken it upon himself to hike up the ante.

  She thought back to the most recent acquisition, the Sierra Resort in Laughlin. The place had been run down, but it had been operating in the black until the Banshee motorcycle gang had taken up residence and all hell had broken loose. Just like here. Had Nick resorted to terrorism to get what he’d wanted? In her gut she knew the answer.

  One way or another, she’d find out.

  “I need all of the numbers, the loan docs, everything financially attached to this town. Give me twenty-four hours and we’ll meet again,” Kim said softly, then added, “but I can’t promise you I can fix this.”

  Ricco smiled. “I know you can find a way.”

  “What do we tell the Land’s Edge rep?” Donna asked.

  Kim caught her worried gaze. “Tell them to shove it up their ass,” she replied.

  The crowd erupted, but she saw more than a few doubting Thomases amongst the crowd. She wasn’t so sure either, but she knew how to bring a town down and take it apart; now she would have to find a way to do the opposite.

  With no guests to disturb her, Kim set up shop in Esmeralda’s kitchen. Booting up her laptop, she got to it with an adding machine and a mountain of paperwork. In short order she had each loan labeled and categorized, every one of them neatly stacked for easy reference. The more she dug, the deeper shit she found Evergreen in. At first she was angry at Leticia for allowing the town to get into such bad loans, but as she dug deeper she saw that Leticia had thought they would be able, with time and money to spare, to get out of debt. But the longer they took to repay and defer the interest, the more it accumulated. They needed over three million cash to just keep afloat for another month. And Nick knew it. She knew she shouldn’t have given him the consortium information. As a CPA, didn’t Leticia know that rule number one was always have an airtight contingency plan?

  Even if the town could come up with the cash at the end of the month, they would need the consortium to allow them to refinance the loans, no doubt at a desperation interest rate. The winds of recession were blowing fiercely across the country. Foreclosure was no longer a hush word; in California, it was as common as a housefly.

  Several times Esmeralda came in and asked if Kim needed anything. Ricco stayed away. But several times she looked up, feeling his gaze on her, to find the doorway empty.

  At midnight her cell phone rang. It was Nick. She ignored him. After he called back every minute for fifteen minutes straight, Kim answered. “What is it?”

  “What the hell is going on? My rep was told to take the offer and shove it up his ass!”

  Kim smiled. “I don’t doubt it. Evergreen is on to you, Nick.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Your hired thugs. Even for you that’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, stop it! One of your guys was shot in the back today. He’s dead! By the cop he was shooting at. Is that what you wanted? I was the victim of a mugging by the same creep right before he got his. He took my grandmother’s locket! When we searched the bag of loot it was gone. Who knows where it is!”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Kimberly!”

  “Th
at’s bullshit.” She took a long breath and exhaled. “Look, Nick, I didn’t sign up for terrorism.”

  “Kimberly, I swear to you, I did not hire anyone to strong-arm Evergreen into submission. It’s not my style. You know that.”

  “Did you hire that motorcycle gang in Laughlin?”

  “I swear to God, Kimberly, that was an ugly fluke that worked in our favor.”

  She wanted to believe him. Really she did. But something nagged at her intuition. Nick was not an innocent. To that end it was better for Evergreen and for herself to keep Nick’s confidence in her.

  “I want you to come home, Kimberly. There’s nothing left for you to do there. We have them by the short hairs. Let nature take its course now.”

  She’d let him think so. “You’re probably right.”

  His voice was low and soothing. She rubbed her temples, a sudden migraine erupting behind her eyeballs. “Do you want me to come get you?” he softly asked her.

  That was the last thing she wanted. “No. Actually, I’m going to head out of here tomorrow and go down to the La Playa in Carmel for a few days and regenerate.”

  “How about if I meet you there? We can get to know each other better.”

  A week ago she would have leapt at the opportunity. Now? She just wanted to be alone. “Nick, I think we need to talk when I get back to L.A.”

  “Are you having second thoughts about our marriage?”

  “I’m having second thoughts about a lot of things. I’ll call you when I get settled in Carmel. Give me a day or two?”

  She hung up the phone, laid her head down on the table, and closed her eyes.

  “Who’s Nick?” Ricco asked from the doorway.

  Her body stiffened, and her heart rate jumped.

  She turned her head on her hands. “You have no right to ask me anything.”

  He strode into the kitchen, his face contorted in fury. She sat up straight. What had he heard?

  “You’re right, I don’t—not about you personally, but I want to know how he fits in with the town I call home.”

  “Really? You call a place you hit and run for less than three weeks out of the year home?”