by Mark Teppo
Ring glanced from me to Rudolph. "Oh, there," he said. "Nope. Didn't embarrass you. Didn't embarrass myself either. No one saw me."
"How could you be the diversion if nobody saw you?" Rudolph asked.
Ring scrambled. "Well, I mean, nobody saw me. They saw something, but they didn't know it was me. You know? It's ‘cause I'm fast. Real fast. Faster than lightning. That's me."
"Fast talking is more like it," Rudolph interjected.
Ring looked hurt, his ears drooping. "Nobody saw me," he repeated plaintively. "I know the rules."
It was my turn to be the big softie, and I held out a hand to Ring. "Come here," I said, and he leaned over me. I scratched the side of his head, just behind the base of his horns. "Just be careful, will you? You're Lead Deer. Don't get hurt. Okay?"
He leaned into my fingers. "Okay," he purred.
I slapped him gently on the neck. "Keep an eye on the others. Make sure they stay out of trouble."
"Okay boss." He leaped happily up the stairs, missing the top one and stumbling, nearly cracking his skull on the arm of a chair. He recovered quickly enough and vanished before I could remind him about injuries.
Rudolph tried to look stern when he noticed Barb was looking at him, a smile tugging at her lips. "I was never that goofy," he said.
"Of course not," she replied. Her smiled widened, and she gave him a very big-eyed, innocent look.
Rudolph glared at me next, daring me to disagree. I ignored him. I was too busy watching the show.
Dress rehearsal. This was our last chance.
The chairs had arrived. We were going to make it.
Rudolph might not have ever been that clumsy or goofy, but this musical certainly was. And I hoped it was goofy enough, because there is nothing more unfunny than satire that doesn't swing for the fences.
And then it was midnight. The last touch-up rehearsal had been worse than the previous practice, and I knew we had gone far enough. No one had anything left. It was time to sleep, dream of sugarplums, and hope for the best.
I repaired to my hotel, filled up the bathtub with expensive bubbly stuff, and submerged myself to the ears. Rudolph was in the other room, sprawled on the bed, watching Pay-Per-View. We were both exhausted. The show was going to open tomorrow. We hadn't had time to do a final dress rehearsal with press and guests in attendance. Everyone was going to see it for the first time tomorrow night, and it would either work or not. There was no intermediate position.
I still wasn't sure which way it would go.
The show was still darker than the inside of a kitten in a box. I could tell Rudolph wasn't pleased by the way he kept grinding his teeth. One of the crew had already come to me about missing tools, and it had been easier to promise the kid a new set than explain that the fired steel of a good wrench did a lot to calm an irradiated reindeer's stomach. And one of the reindeer dancers had twisted her ankle during the last run-through. She had assured me that she'd be all right by the first show—it wasn't anything that a lot of ice, some aspirin, and an ankle wrap couldn't fix—but it was just the sort of little accident that popped up to remind us that we didn't have much of a safety net. Random chance could still make for a lot more excitement and panic than we needed right now.
I made a shark with my hand and swam through the layers of bubbles. I had done everything I could. The seating from Ohio had arrived, and we managed to get it all bolted down. I was assured by our carpenter that the molding would all be in place by the time we got back to the theater in the morning. The company was starting to move like a unit on stage, and Bucky had gotten over his annoyance about the floppy reindeer suit. And the show was starting to elicit laughs in a few spots. It was like the last three hours before Zero Hour at the Pole. There was nothing else that could be done. All that was left was the waiting, and even after all these years, I was bad at waiting.
Rudolph poked his head into the bathroom. "There's nothing on," he said. "You want to disable the parental lock on the porn channel?"
"No," I said.
"Why not?" he asked. "It's not that expensive."
"How about room service?" I offered, changing the subject. "The flatware in this hotel is really nice."
"I'm not hungry," he said as he clopped into the bathroom and arranged himself on the tile floor. He leaned up against the tub, and tasted the bubbles.
I retreated to the far side of the roomy bathtub.
"You ever wonder if we're doing the right thing, Bernie?" he asked, a splotch of bubbles on his nose.
"What do you mean? We're saving Christmas. We're getting pretty good at it, don't you think?"
"Yeah, but at what point are we just making more trouble than we're fixing? I mean, when do we become part of the problem?"
"Like this is somehow all our fault?"
"Isn't it?" he asked. "Didn't all of this start because we went to purgatory after that soul?"
I frowned and made more shark movements through the bubbles. "I suppose you could see it that way," I said. "Sure, if we hadn't gone after David Anderson, then maybe Satan wouldn't have come after Santa, and so on and so on. But that's the What If? game, and come on, you know better than to get caught up in that."
This was the worst part of waiting. Those last hours when all you had left was time to think. Time to doubt yourself.
"You think maybe we've been trying so hard to save Christmas these last few years that maybe we've forgotten what it's all about? That we've gotten so worked up about what's wrong with it that we can't see what's right anymore."
"Like that time in Boston?" I asked. I didn't really want to bring it up, because I knew better. You don't feed the doubt in the last hours. You focus on happy thoughts, like puppies and kittens, sliding down rainbows. But the words came out of my mouth before I could stop them.
He licked the edge of the tub a few times and tapped his teeth against it. "Maybe," he said finally. "It was the moose comment, you know. That's what set me off."
"I know," I said. "He was a piece of work."
"I get it," Rudolph said. "Culpepper had lived in the city all his life. Probably had never even been to one of those publicly funded animal prisons. But it doesn't really matter. He was trying to piss me off, and I let him get to me. And it wasn't that comment, really. I remember thinking that we couldn't let this guy win. We couldn't let him smear Christmas like he wanted. Nothing else mattered."
"We could have hurt him," I said.
Rudolph kept tapping the porcelain like he was searching for a weak spot. "I know," he said finally. I waited for him to add something, and after a few moments of silence he looked up at me. "What?" he asked.
"Nothing," I said.
"Were you waiting for me to apologize or something?"
"I thought . . . maybe . . . well, yeah, a little bit."
"We didn't get that far in my anger management sessions," Rudolph said. He blew into the tub, and a plume of bubbles shot into the air. "I'm not sorry I melted his stupid tchotchkes."
"It's okay," I said.
"It solved the problem, didn't it?"
"Yeah, but . . ." I left the rest of the sentence unsaid.
He rested his head on the edge of the tub. "I know. Once you go down that road bla bla bla. It's my way or the highway sort of nonsense. Any means to the end as long as it is my end and all."
"Yeah," I said. "That's where that goes."
"It's going to be Christmas soon," he said. "Less than two weeks. Are you looking forward to it?"
I was tired, wearier than I had been in a long time. "No," I admitted. "I'm just going to be glad when it's over."
He nodded. "Yeah, me too. And that's what worries me."
December 13th
A half hour before the curtain went up, I asked the company to join me in the backstage shop for a final pep talk. I was wearing a new suit, and my face was already tired from smiling. "In less than thirty minutes, it's going to get a little nutty back here," I said when everyone was assembled. "And so I jus
t wanted to thank you all now for the immense effort everyone has put into this show over the last few months. We're doing something that has never been done before, and not everyone is going to like it, but that's the price groundbreaking visionaries always pay."
That got a few titters of laughter. I looked over the faces, noticing who was smiling and nodding and who I still had to convince. Barb and Nancy were standing on chairs at the back, and it was nice to look out over the whole crowd and see them smiling at me.
"Say what you will about Erma Raeddicker," I continued, "but she was good at separating people from their money. Before we had this recent bit of publicity—because bad press is still better than no press, right?—Erma had actually managed to presell a full house opening weekend. Even though we pushed the show back two days, and there was that snarky piece in The Stranger's arts section, we haven't had a lot of cancellations. I'm sort of hoping three-quarters of these people don't bother showing up and never try to ask for a refund. That would be sort of awesome, right?"
Bucky—who was already in costume because he was that sort of Method actor—screwed up his face like he was going to argue with me, but I pressed on.
"Listen, all jokes aside, we're going to open with a nearly full house. And I hope they all do show up because we've done something amazing here. Nothing would make me happier than to pick up tomorrow's paper and see a review that—"
The shop door banged open, and there was some commotion at the back of the room. I tried to see what was going on, and the company parted like a chorus line opening up, revealing a man in a dirty trench holding a gun to Barb's head.
"Rosewood," he shouted. "Give me the codes."
"Are you kidding me?" I rubbed my face with my hands. "Haven't we been through this already?"
Ted Laslo—it had to be Ted; who else was left from that crew?—made a show of pulling back the hammer on the pistol. "Not like this," he said. "I'm serious. I want those codes."
"There isn't any money left, Ted," I said. "I spent it all. Cleaning up your mess."
"Bullshit." He pressed the gun harder against Barb's head. "I'm not fucking around, Rosewood. I don't have time for this."
"No, you don't," I said. "Why are you still here, Ted? Have you been hiding in the building this whole time?"
It was sort of a silly question because it was pretty obvious from his hollow-eyed stare and the way his hair was all stiff and spiky that Ted had been playing a longterm game of hide-and-seek. Which meant that he had had many hours to convince himself of this path, and I was remembering what Rudolph had said last night. Means to an end and all . . .
"Just put down the gun, Ted," I said. "Just walk out of here. It doesn't have to be like this. You can walk away."
"Not without that money," he snapped. "Without that money, I'm . . ." He tightened his grip on Barb. "I'm not going to jail. You're going to give me the code, and we're going to transfer the money, and then I'll disappear. That's what we're going to do."
Barb was staring at me, her mouth a firm line. She was afraid, but she wasn't going to let Ted know. She was waiting for me. I could tell she trusted me, but she was also ready in case something happened. It was up to me to make sure what happened wasn't Ted pulling the trigger.
I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth. There was some money left in the account. Less than fifty grand. Was it so bad to give in to his demands and give him the codes? I could send the reindeer after him. There was no place he could go where they couldn't follow.
Bucky stepped out of the crowd pressed against the walls of the shop and struck a pose, his floppy mittens on his hips. His bare arms gleamed. "What's your damage, Ted?"
Such a poor choice of words, I thought.
Ted laughed at Bucky. "My damage? You want to know what my damage is? What the fuck is your problem, Bucky? Are you damaged in the head or something?"
"You think money will solve your problems?" Bucky asked. "You think it'll buy you happiness?"
"I don't want to be happy," Ted shouted at him. "I just want to get out of this hellhole!"
"And you think killing someone is going to do that for you?" Bucky took a couple of steps toward the pair, flexing his biceps as he walked. "Is that your ticket to freedom?"
I couldn't believe this was happening. Mostly I couldn't believe Ted hadn't shot him already.
Ted pointed the pistol at Bucky. "I do," he said, tightening his grip on Barb. "I really do."
I raised my hands. "Ted," I said, trying to get his attention. "We don't need the gun. Let's put it away and we can talk about this."
"That's a good idea," Barb said. "You don't need the gun, Ted."
For a second, I thought Ted was actually listening to us. And then Bucky opened his mouth again.
"How many bullets you got in that gun, Ted?" Bucky asked. "That's a revolver. How many shots you got?" The cowling of the reindeer costume had fallen down over Bucky's face, and he imperiously swept it back with his floppy hand. "Six shots, Ted," Bucky said when he could see again. "You can only get six of us. What do you think the rest of us are going to do? Stand around and watch? You think you can kill six of us and walk out of here?"
"Why does he have to kill any of us?" Barb asked.
Ted started to think about it, and the barrel of the gun wavered back and forth. Finally, Ted figured out what he wanted, and the gun stopped wiggling, though it was now pointed at me. "Of course," I said. "Because it's not really Christmas until someone points a gun at me."
Ted gave me a ragged grin. "The codes, Rosewood." Focusing in on what really mattered to him.
I sighed. "Come on, Ted. Are you really going to shoot me if I don't give them to you? Think this through, would you?"
He licked his lips. "You're right." He put the pistol back against Barb's head. "The codes," he repeated. "Or I shoot her."
"Oh, nice thinking there, Ted," Barb said through clenched teeth. The skin around the barrel of the gun was white from the pressure Ted was exerting against her head.
"No one's getting shot," I said.
"That's right," Bucky said, taking another step forward. "He kills one of us, he'll have to kill all of us."
Barb glared at him. "Will you knock that off?" she hissed.
"Look, I'll give you the codes," I said, trying to get Ted's attention back on me. I realized what Bucky was trying to do—as idiotic as it was—and he was almost close enough to Ted to do something even stupider. Which I was willing to bet he was going to do.
Much as I hated to admit it, Bucky's plan was probably the best one we had right now, though I tried not to think too much about what had happened the last time two men had wrestled with a gun in my presence.
"What?" Ted wasn't sure he had heard me correctly.
"The codes," I said again. "I'll give them to you. The account number is"—and I rattled off the eighteen digit number—"and the acccess code is 25000. They'll ask for a password and it is ‘resolute.' That's it. That's all you need."
Nobody moved. Ted blinked several times.
"What else do you need?" I asked. "I know you know how to transfer funds electronically, so what are you waiting for?"
"I don't believe you," Ted said. He shifted his grip on the pistol, and his eyes started flicking around the room. I realized that Ted hadn't actually thought his plan all the way through. "We had you down in the basement for days," he said, starting to fidget. "And you wouldn't give it up. Even after Franklin tortured you. You expect me to believe that now you're just going to give it up? Just like that?"
He punctuated his last question with a wiggle of the gun. He lifted it away from Barb's head and wiggled it in my direction.
Which was the mistake that Barb had been waiting for. She ducked and pulled away from Ted, wrenching herself out of his grasp. Ted turned, a look of alarm on his face, and that was when Bucky pounced.
The gun went off as Bucky went for a head-butt, clouting Ted on the forehead with the hard edge of the plastic-coated nose on his outfit.
Something tugged at my sleeve, and a warmth started to run down my arm.
Ted and Bucky were wrestling for the gun, and Bucky drove them both back against the wall of the shop. Ted gasped, and Bucky hammered on his face again with the red plastic nose. It was like getting beaten up by a clown, and it would have been funnier if there hadn't been a weapon involved.
The gun went off again and Bucky stiffened abruptly. He stepped back—or tried to at least—but his legs didn't work and he fell down. He curled up into a fetal position.
Ted stared down at Bucky. The gun was still in his hand, and he was momentarily shocked by what had happened to Bucky.
A moment was about all he got before Barb hit him in the head with a chair.
Rudolph found me in the stage right wing. Most of the cast was still in the building, as far as I knew. A lot of them, I suspected, were out on the loading dock, watching the EMTs load Bucky and Ted into ambulances. I stayed behind, and Barb fussed over the nick in my arm from the bullet.
"The audience is getting restless," Rudolph said. "We were supposed to raise the curtain ten minutes ago."
"We can't do the show," I said. "We're going to have to cancel it."
"We can't cancel the show," Rudolph said.
"How are we going to put it on?" I asked. "Our leading man just took a bullet in the leg. The EMT said it's likely his femur is broken. He's not walking today. Or next week. There's no way he can go onstage."
"We should have been ready," Rudolph snapped.
"For what? For the wacko who hid in a closet? None of us had any idea he'd been hiding out in the theater for the last week. None of us knew."
"We should have known." Rudolph kicked the wall lightly with his back hooves. "We should have tracked him down."
"Well, we didn't." Barb had dressed my wound nicely using the first aid kit, but there hadn't been any medicinal whiskey in it, which meant I was waiting for the aspirin to kick in. My arm hurt, and Rudolph's attitude wasn't helping. "Look, you know I'm a good planner. But I can't plan for everything. Who knew that Ted would freak out and hide in a closet somewhere? Or that he'd convince himself that an asinine play like this would actually work?"