"Well, as you can see I have my ghost fully in check, Police Constable Thicke." Bucket drew in a deep lungful of air. It was cold and rank with the smells of the city, but it swept through his brain like a broom clearing out cobwebs. "Not that I believe in ghosts, of course."
"His eyes!" a hoarse, tortured voice shrieked.
Bucket and Thicke turned to see Constable Dimm and another officer dragging Cratchit to the police ambulance.
"His horrible, horrible eyes!" Cratchit sobbed, struggling feebly as the constables shoved him in the back and padlocked the door. "Eyes made out of coal!"
"I must admit," Thicke said to Bucket, "I'm looking forward to reading your report."
"I daresay it will make even the works of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe seem positively mundane." Bucket slowly drew himself to his feet and began dusting himself off. "But it's a story you'll have to wait for, as will everyone at E Division. Only the good Mrs. Bucket will be graced with my tale tonight. She won't let me sleep till it's all told-and what's more, she's earned the right to hear it first. They can hold Mr. Cratchit for assaulting an officer for now. I'll write up the rest tomorrow." The detective popped his top hat onto his head. "I'm going home."
"Are you sure you're up for that, sir?"
"I'll be fine."
Bucket turned toward the ambulance. Dimm was watching him sullenly, awaiting the fate he knew he couldn't escape.
"Police Constable Dimm won't mind making a little side trip to Bloomsbury on his way to headquarters. Isn't that right, Police Constable Dimm?"
Dimm didn't say whether he minded or not (though his growl might have been considered an answer by some).
Once again, Bucket rode up top with the constable. He found the frigid slap of the wind against his face refreshing, and the opium fog that had nearly smothered his mind dispersed more with each passing gaslight. His head ached, his nose was tender and bruised, his forefinger throbbed from overuse, and he'd been subjected to fantastical, horrific visions that might scar the psyche of another man.
And Bucket was cheerful.
He knew his head would clear, his nose would heal, his forefinger would be rested and ready for the chase soon enough. He put no stock in phantasms, and the disturbing visions he'd seen held no power over him now.
His good spirits came from what he knew to be reaclass="underline" a bottle of sherry, a bowl of nuts, a pipe, a most excellent partner, all waiting just for him. He would stay up enjoying them until the clock struck twelve. And beyond.
NAUGHTY
If you think about it, Santa Claus is a little like Batman. He's a vigilante. He decides who's good and who's bad and he does something about it on his own terms. Goody-goody kids get toys. Brats get squat-or lumps of coal, though I think that got dropped in, like, the 1950s.
When I was a little girl, I'd start worrying about whether I'd been good enough that year sometime around Thanksgiving, and for the next month I was a little angel. It was scary to think I might not get any toys… but it was sort of reassuring, too. If Santa was really out there rewarding the nice and punishing the naughty, it meant things were fair. There was some kind of justice in the universe.
Well, that didn't last long. I mean, you try to get through elementary school believing life's fair. It can't be done. I stayed nice, though. Maybe it was just a habit by then.
I finally broke the habit this December. Life just pushed me too far, and I decided I was done with nice. Nice sucked. Santa wasn't watching, so what was the point?
It was time to give naughty a try.
I graduated from IU in the spring, so this was supposed to be my first Christmas as a bona fide, official, independent adult. A year ago, I would've pictured myself flying home for the holidays from New York or Chicago or wherever it was I'd have my cool gig and my funky bachelorette pad. But when the holidays rolled around, I didn't have to fly back to Indiana-I was still there. I hadn't found a gig, cool or uncool, and my mom's apartment hardly counts as a "funky bachelorette pad," even if she is a bachelorette again thanks to That Man.
"That Man" is what my mom calls my dad. He was spending Christmas in his new house in Atlanta with "That Woman," a.k.a. "That Girl," a.k.a. "That Blonde Slut," a.k.a. "That Little Bitch." I got a Christmas card from That Man with a check for fifty bucks in it. Mom didn't get a card or a check, which was typical. That Man owed my mom a lot of checks, which is why she'd gone from living in a big house on Knob Hill to a not-so-big house in town to a dinky apartment building between an auto parts store and a porn shop.
I was in that dinky apartment building with her because New York and Chicago aren't exactly clamoring for recently graduated liberal arts majors. In fact, nobody's clamoring for recently graduated liberal arts majors. When I was at IU, I thought I'd end up in publishing, communications or journalism, but it didn't take long in "the real world" to figure out that my only prospects were in food service, retail or prostitution. I told my mom once that I'd pick that last option over the first two in a heartbeat, and she just gave me this sad look that said, "Oh, honey-all those years, all that money… for an English degree?"
Fortunately for us, one of our old neighbors, Dr. Roth, had taken mercy on Mom and given her a job as a receptionist. That covered the rent. Barely. So there was big-time pressure for me to "pull my own weight." I kept hoping to see an ad in the classifieds that suited me. You know. "Over-Educated Smart-Ass Wanted to Talk About Books and Movies and Stuff." But of course that never happened.
So half a year after graduating from college, I gave up and took a job I knew I'd hate. I gave myself a built-in out, though: The job would only last one month. After four brutal, mind-numbing weeks wrapping Christmas presents at Fendler's department store, I'd escape minimum wage Hell and return to the relative bliss of unemployment.
I knew it would be bad, but I had no idea how bad. I'd been a wrapper at J.C. Penney a few Christmases before, so I was prepared for the tedium. But it wasn't boredom that tortured me. It was embarrassment.
At least twice a day, I saw someone I knew-a kid from my high school, somebody's mom or dad, a teacher, people like that. Sometimes I even had to wrap their presents, which was when things got really painful. The chitchat was always like, "Courtney gets back from San Francisco tomorrow. You know she moved there after finishing up at Princeton, don't you? She's an assistant editor at Chronicle Books, and she just loves it. So… ummmm… what have you been doing? Oh, and could you wrap the bathrobe and the slippers in the same box?"
Did I mention that I was Dreiser High valedictorian?
In the afternoon, another wrapper came in to help me-a chatty old woman named Mavis who highjacked every conversation within earshot with anecdotes about her son's adopted Guatemalan children. I had to hear about how little Tomás wet his pants on a mall Santa's knee about a thousand times a day. But that was fine so long as it switched the topic to something other than me.
Before Mavis came in, though, there was no buffer. I was all alone at my little "gift wrap station" near the jewelry department. So of course that's when he came up.
He was good looking, in a middle-aged TV anchorman kind of way. Tall, full-bodied but not fat, with a jutting jaw and perfect white teeth and thick hair that was just starting to go gray. He was a slick dresser, too, wearing a fleece-lined suede jacket over a black turtleneck and snug black jeans. My mom would've thought he was a total hottie.
It wasn't his looks that caught my attention, though. It was how familiar he seemed. And the way he was looking at me.