The Christmas MEGAPACK ®. Nina Kiriki Hoffman

they knew each other.”

      “Did you ever see this man before?” I asked.

      Mr. and Mrs. Page shook their heads no, just as they had when I asked them this same question before.

      “Did this guy have a hand in his pocket?” I asked.

      “No, I don’t think so,” Mrs. Page said.

      “Not at all,” her husband added sure-fire.

      I nodded. I thought, okay, so maybe no gun. Leastways, not visible. Couldn’t rule it out though. Which meant Fats might not have gone along willingly to get close to the kidnapper as I had first thought. In fact, it could be that he might not have suspected the guy at all! That put a different slant on things.

      I tried to figure how the guy could get Fats—still wearing that damn red Santa suit—out of a store full of shoppers without anyone seeing anything. Thompson’s Department Store was huge and full of people. It seemed impossible. Then I thought about how huge the store actually was, recalling it had to have a basement, and probably a sub-basement. A lot of the older stores had them. There were also a lot of back stairs, service elevators, old unused exits, fire doors, truck bays, storage areas, all throughout the store. Plenty of places to hide.

      I looked back to the Pages, “Do you remember anything about that short, fat, bald man that could help me? Any distinguishing marks? Tattoos? Was he wearing a hat? A suit? A uniform? How long did you get a look at him?”

      Mrs. Page just shook her head.

      Her husband said, “I don’t know how long we waited. It wasn’t long. We’d missed that elevator so we had to wait for the next one. It came pretty soon.”

      “They have five of them in Thompson’s,” Mrs. Page added proudly, as if she was part-owner of the store. “Fancy new ones, that don’t even need operators.”

      “That’s wonderful. So you were just standing there, waiting for the next car?”

      “Yes,” they both chimed in.

      “Did you see where that elevator went? Did it go down to the first floor lobby and stop?” I asked, adding, “or did it go down to the basement or sub-basement and stop there?”

      Mr. and Mrs. Page looked at me, then at each other. Mrs. Page said, “Oh, no, officer....”

      “Detective, ma’am,” I corrected.

      “...Ah, yes, well, they didn’t go down at all. Right, Roger?” She looked over to Mr. Page and he nodded like a pro.

      I felt the earth shake beneath my feet. I asked, “You sure?”

      “Sure, I’m sure,” Mrs. Page continued. “The elevator car they were in didn’t go down. It went up.”

      “That’s right,” Mr. Page added, in total agreement with his wife. “We were going to the basement sale, but we missed the car because it went up.”

      “Up?” I said softly to myself, wondering what it might mean. And then I knew. I asked the Pages, “So it went up, all the way to the tenth floor?”

      “Why, yes,” Mrs. Page replied. “It went all the way up to the top.”

      “What’s up there, detective?” Mr. Page asked me.

      “The penthouse,” I said softly. Trying to think it through. That’s where Gerald Thompson, the kooky, reclusive owner lived—and now I knew, that’s where Fats and the other snatched Santas were probably being held. Gerald Thompson, a short, fat, bald man with a bad attitude and a worse temper who was a reclusive crackpot. Why the hell was he abducting Santas all over Bay City?

      I thanked the Pages, said good-bye, then sent them on their way. They said they had a lot of shopping to do. I went on my way too.

      * * * *

      I checked my gun. Took a deep breath, Took the elevator up to the tenth-floor penthouse. Thompson’s Department Store was an old building, but it was full of the new electronic automatic elevators that didn’t need a human operator. You just had to have faith the thing wouldn’t jam, and that if it did, that someone would come and get you out before you turned old, like some rotten sardine trapped in a tin can. Elevators did that a lot in the old days. It was lousy to be trapped in one.

      Once the elevator hit the tenth floor, the doors opened and I found myself in a plush lobby. Expensive paintings of old bearded guys were hung all over the walls. Obviously earlier Thompsons—the founder, his sons, brothers—as grim a looking bunch of angry curmudgeons as you’d ever want to see. Not a smile or friendly look among any of them.

      There was a curvy receptionist behind a desk. She had a red Santa elf cap on her head. The end came to a point with a little red ball. She looked cute as hell. I figured she was there for window dressing and didn’t know anything about any of this. I showed her my badge, gave her the shush sign and put her back into the elevator and then pressed Lobby. “Stay there until I tell you that you can come back up. Now go!”

      I figured there had to be another elevator, a special private elevator somewhere in Thompson’s suite. I’d find that, but first I’d find Fats. And the others. If they were really here. Which I hoped to discover for sure soon enough.

      It was near dinner time. I knew Fats would be getting mighty hungry real soon now. The thought of that mighty appetite of his running wild chilled me and at the same time it brought a smile to my face. Fats hadn’t missed a meal in ten years, I sure didn’t want him to start now.

      There was a door behind the receptionist’s desk. No doubt it opened into Gerald Thompson’s private suite of offices, and his own personal apartment. He had the entire tenth-floor penthouse. It was a huge area. I’d read where the rich and well-connected had some mighty fine parties up here in the old days. I could see it was the hot party type of place, where anything went, and did. The kind of place guys like Fats and I would never be invited to. I could not see it as the focus of a lot of sex and sin but not the center of some crazy Bay City Santa Claus-napping scheme. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time—but there wasn’t any kind of prerequisite for crime back then in Bay City. Or for that matter, for a lot of crime today either.

      So I opened the door, stepped into the huge room, and stood there amazed as I looked upon the damnedest situation I’d ever seen in my entire life!

      I had my gun drawn as I entered Thompson’s private suite of luxurious rooms. It was a magnificent area, lavishly furnished. There was a gorgeous Persian rug that ran the entire expanse of the room. The rug must have measured fifty feet by a hundred. Upon it were five guys all in full-dress Santa Claus outfits: baggy red trousers, thick black belt and ankle-high black boots, bright red shirts, white suspenders, thick long white beards, funny little pointy red caps with the traditional snowball at the point. The really weird thing was that these five Santas were all on the floor in a general wild melee—each one beating the living crap out of the other! They were punching, kicking, biting, pushing, cursing, growling, screaming, crying, jumping, hitting, and falling all over each other. It was a mess.

      It took me a minute to pick out Fats from the pack of brawlers. Once I did, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Then I picked out McConnell. Drunk as a skunk and giving Fats a hard time as usual. I noticed the original Thompson’s Department Store Santa, a guy named Jake Stanton, and another fellow named Davis, who I knew played Santa at the Hermitage. Then there was the remaining Santa, and they all seemed to be fighting him. More or less. At least Fats was fighting. The others didn’t seem to know what they were doing or care who they were doing it to. It was a general punching, kicking, biting melee of incredible confusion, a totally out of control free-for-all with the drunken McConnell hitting wildly at everyone.

      I could see Fats was having a hard time of it. That last Santa, who I figured had to be Gerald Thompson himself, was hitting on Fats pretty good, while McConnell was interfering by lashing out drunkenly at anyone. Including Fats—who’d gone in there risking his life and was trying to rescue the idiot, by the way. I could see McConnell was so damn drunk he had no idea who