Kristmas Collins (12 page)

Jacqueline handed her phone to Scroggie. “I took these photos this morning. He sits outside her house and just watches her … he’s like a lovesick puppy.”

“You said you wouldn’t hurt Kris. That’s part of the deal,” Candi called out, her voice desperate.

Scroggie held up the phone and displayed the image of a red-haired woman who was waiting for the school bus with her two children. “You’re right, Candi, I did say that. And my word is good. But I never said anything about this woman.

I held on for dear life as the helicopter descended through the morning sky. I shut my eyes, and didn’t open them until we came to a soft landing in a snow-covered meadow. It wasn’t actually the North Pole, but for our purposes, Harry Crawford’s two-thousand-acre ranch in the White River Valley of Vermont was one and the same.

My hands were still shaking when my feet finally touched the ground. Even though Alyson constantly assured me that the Bell 206 Jet Ranger was the safest model on the market, and that she’d had hundreds of hours flying in the army, my nerves remained skeptical.

Even bundled in a heavy coat over a heavy Scottish plaid flannel, I could still feel the chill of the sharp wind cutting through me. But while the weather was not delightful, the scenery was. An orange haze of sun was beginning to peek through the cloud cover over the horizon. The view was endless—I felt like I could see all the way to the real North Pole, or at least New Hampshire.

“Why are we here again?” I asked between teeth chatters.

“Because I know you, Collins.”

“You know me so well that you thought I’d like to risk my life to travel to one of the few places in the country that’s actually colder than New York?”

“I remembered how you would get before a big case—and you’ve been acting the same way the last few days. You have to feel like you’re in control, double and triple checking everything until you drive everyone around you crazy. So my choice was either to bring you here for a final inspection, or kill you. I chose this.”

“You’re a good friend.”

“Not really—the way I figured it, there’s enough people out there willing to do the deed, so why risk a prison sentence.”

She was right, and not just about the lengthy list of those who wanted to get rid of me. Despite my reputation in the legal world of flying by the seat of my pants, when it came to my cases I always obsessed over the details, which often made the difference to the outcome. In some ways Alyson and I had more in common than I wanted to admit.

A Jeep appeared in the distance, careening over the frozen tundra. When it pulled to a stop in front of us, Harry Crawford got out and greeted us with a big smile. But it faded when he got a look at the remodeling work done on Alyson’s nose. “What happened to you, Rudi?”

“You should see the other guy, Harry.”

“I’m not sure I want to,” he said in his measured, easy-going style, but with obvious concern. He’d first met Alyson when she assisted me on his trial, and both he and his wife Ginny became instant fans. Harry recently hired her to be his personal pilot for his helicopter. Of course, he rarely left the ranch, so we were able to use it for other purposes.

If this were as close to the North Pole as I’d ever get, Harry was probably as close to Santa Claus as I would ever meet. And he had some similar physical characteristics, with his gray beard and long white hair, which he hadn’t cut since his Ginny died. But on the other hand, in no depiction of Santa had I ever read of him being pole-thin, or with his hair pulled back into a ponytail.

Even though he would always put on a good front, I could see the sadness behind his smile. It had been present since he lost Ginny, and I doubted that it would ever change. He would also occasionally stare off into the distance with a look of stunned disbelief. Even though the doctors gave Ginny no hope to survive, Harry never lost faith until the day that she was buried on this very property. They hadn’t been apart since they were teenagers in Northern California, and he couldn’t fathom the idea of her not being here.

Harry wasn’t the only one who thought Ginny was indestructible. Most of the world did—since the character Gin Rumy had always faced the longest of odds, and always pulled through. Harry had openly used Ginny as the basis for the Gin Rumy heroine in his novels, and the reason his legion of fans connected with the characters was that they were based on the real life love of Harry and Ginny … except for the whole time-traveling astronaut, saving the world thing. And when Ginny got sick, and eventually lost her fight, so did the character. That was the last chapter that Harry Crawford ever wrote.

We piled into the Jeep and headed across the property. The place was technically a farm, but I’d never seen any agriculture, dairy, or grazing animals. The only thing I remembered him growing was a few acres of marijuana, which was the reason we’d met.

When the drones discovered the illegal substance growing on his property, Harry claimed it must be growing wild, and that he was unaware of it. But when the search warrant revealed a treasure chest of paraphernalia used for cultivating and smoking, Harry needed a lawyer, and since his novels had made him a celebrity, albeit a reluctant and reclusive one, he called the lawyer to the stars.

The truth was, Ginny and Harry were a couple of Deadheads who happened to like smoking marijuana in the privacy of their secluded ranch. This put them in violation of the laws of the state of Vermont. But Harry’s lawyer played on the heartstrings of jurors, even putting Ginny—then a gaunt woman of seventy-five pounds who wore a bandana over her bald head—on the stand, claiming that she used it to “ease her pain” in dealing with her disease. It was her idea, and I’m doubtful that the jury bought it, but they liked Harry, and they loved Ginny, and in the end they chose not to do what the cancer would eventually do, which was to break them apart.

We passed by tapped sugar bush, an apple orchard that was taking a long winter’s nap, and the frozen trout pond where Harry spent much of his time during the lazy days of summer. And of course, I spotted the customary wild animals—this time it was a white-tailed deer and a moose. On one trip we came in contact with a black bear, which reminded me how happy I was that Alyson and her gun were along for the ride.

Harry’s home was not the gaudy mansion that one might expect from a man who’d sold more than three hundred million books. It was a simple cape house that was tucked into a snowy hillside.

When we entered, the heat started to bring my limbs back to life. But before we got down to business, tradition won out. A visit to the ranch always began with a hearty plate of pancakes. It was really Ginny’s tradition—she always said that no day that began with a plate of pancakes could be a bad day. And who could argue with that?

I was hungry, having not eaten since Gooch shoved a few cookies down my throat last night. So I doused my stack with maple syrup and eagerly dug in. It was Ginny’s Maple Syrup, which was created from the trees on the ranch, and was sold at grocery stores across the country, with every cent going to a foundation for multiple myeloma research that was set up in her honor.

After breakfast, Harry took us to his study, which he used as his office back when he was a writer. In his calm, introspective style, he walked us through updates of each part of the preparations, step by step, as if it were an outline for one of his novels. He then led us down a set of creaky stairs and into the musty tunnels.

Much of the property was connected by tunnels, which had been put in by long-ago owners who were part of the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves. Harry often mentioned proudly that Vermont was the first state in the union to outlaw slavery, way back in 1777, almost ninety years before the Civil War. And when Harry felt that those police drones had invaded his privacy, he spent a mini-fortune to reconstruct the tunnels into a modern underground city, shielding him from any Orwellian influence. I liked them because whenever I stayed here in the winter I could walk to the guesthouse without leaving the warmth of inside.

The first room we entered was filled with so many technological gadgets it could have seconded as a NASA control center. There was one man present, madly typing away on a computer. His accommodations had improved since the time we were roommates—in jail.

When he finally noticed the intruders, he got up and ran to me like I was his lost love (fill in your own prison joke) and pulled me into a bear hug. “How you been, you son of a bitch?”

To answer his question, I was doing a lot better knowing that Marcus Hacker was on our side. The feds had sent him away for an extended vacation for hacking into a government computer that allegedly had some sensitive material on it. If Candi Kane grew up to be a
Candy Striper
, and Marcus Hacker a computer hacker, I sure hoped that I’d never meet a Joe Murderer. I already had too many people trying to kill me.

“I’ve got into almost all the current email accounts and bank accounts,” he said, handing me a thick bound document. “I made a list for each Kerstman family with the information you wanted—and account numbers. It also includes their up-to-date plans for Christmas Eve, so we can target which ones will need to be lured out.”

I nodded, not feeling good about what we did. But it had to be done, and it was too late to turn back now.

“Let’s go see the elves,” Harry said, and walked us to our final stop—a warehouse-like room that was situated underneath one of the barns on the property. It was filled with merchandise, which would rightfully make Agent Falcone very suspicious. Men, many of whom looked like they’d just arrived from the 1960s, were working diligently to box the items, and load them onto an eighteen-wheel truck that was parked in the middle of the cavernous room.

Well, a couple of them were working, but most of the workers were goofing around. Some were dancing on bubble-wrap, while others were sucking on helium, and singing along to the Grateful Dead’s version of “Run Run Rudolph,” in high-pitched voices. And to show they were in the Christmas spirit, they were passing around a corncob pipe.

I felt queasy, and not just from the heavy marijuana smell. We had less than forty-eight hours to go, and I realized that my fate was connected to a bunch of sixty-something, tie-dyed relics who called themselves the Puff Daddies. Not to mention, they seemed more interested in getting stoned than saving me from the clutches of Stone Scroggie. But Harry had known these guys since forever, and he swore by them. When it came to his inner circle, Harry was the most loyal man I’d ever met. The ironic thing was that if Kerstman would have just gone to Harry for a loan in the first place, all of this could have been avoided. But his ego led him to try to prove that his company could thrive without Harry Crawford.

I wasn’t sure that this trip eased my concerns, or my fears about my inability to control the outcome. But if Harry Crawford, one of the great storytellers of his generation, couldn’t write the ending he wanted in life—having his happily-ever-after ripped away from him—then surely Kris Collins couldn’t either. Like it or not, I was at the mercy of the muses … and the Puff Daddies.

“I love a man in uniform,” the woman purred.

“What do you say I show Mrs. Claus my North Pole?” the mall Santa responded with a lustful look.

“It must be your lucky day,” she said, pulling him into the changing room in the bowels of the Yonkers Mall. The man was all smiles … until he ran into a three-hundred-pound brick wall.

“It really is your lucky day,” the large man boomed. “Because I’m gonna relieve you of your duties, Santa.”

The man looked perplexed. “Hey, you’re Justin Duma.”

He then accepted double the pay he would have received for spending his day bouncing little kids on his knee and granting bullshit wishes that he couldn’t deliver on, and was on his way. Not that he had much of a choice.

Duma looked at Wintry with a smile. “Mrs. Claus is lookin’ good. I guess two hundred is the new thirty.”

“Why don’t you save the charm for the kids, Santa. Speaking of which, you’re gonna be late.”

He stepped toward her, the gray wig and the granny glasses strangely a turn on. “I think Mrs. Claus should give Santa a little something for Christmas. He gets tired of being the one who’s doing all the giving.”

Her face wasn’t exactly screaming ‘come hither.’ “It’s Miss Claus to you … I don’t see no ring on this finger, Santa.”

He smiled. “I told you, baby, the reindeer will get jealous.”

“All I’m saying is it might get real cold up at the North Pole.” She patted his midsection. “Good thing you got that big Santa-belly.”

Since Santa was all knowing, he knew this wasn’t going to work out well for him, so he finished putting on his red uniform and itchy beard, and they headed out on their reconnaissance mission.

“You got the list?” Duma asked.

“Of course I do.”

“Can you just double check?”

She reached into her purse with annoyance and pulled out the folder. It had all the Kerstman families listed alphabetically, including all the pertinent information and pictures. She handed it to him.

“This is good … really organized,” he said, leafing through it.