The guy’s arms were folded casually across his chest and he grinned from ear to ear. Even with the padded Santa suit, she just knew he didn’t have a paunch.
“Give me my money,” she demanded, turning back to Frank as she felt the situation deteriorating around her. “I’m not leaving without my thirty-nine ninety-five, dammit.”
“Tsk-tsk, nuns aren’t supposed to swear,” Santa chided.
“Tell it to your reindeer, bozo.”
She had no choice then, she had to show she was in control. She aimed for the Little Debbie cupcake stand over to the left. Although she fired two shots, the second one came up blank. That must mean the gun was empty.
But, more important, instead of hitting Little Debbie, she winged the pyramid display of Buzzy Burp Bears. Immediately brown fur flew everywhere as stuffed animals careened to the floor and a chorus of bears began burping to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” It was a scene out of the Three Stooges, or her worst nightmare.
Jessica groaned.
Everyone’s mouth dropped open in surprise, including the jerk Santa’s.
“Now…give…me…my…thirty-nine ninety-five,” she spat out evenly in her best Clint Eastwood voice, and tacked on in a gravelly rumble, just for effect, “or make my day.”
Frank didn’t hesitate. With quivering fingers he counted out the bills and coins and shoved them across the counter.
She put the money in her pocket and was about to leave when she saw a flash of dark blue race through the exit door. A security guard. Immediately a loud alarm began to ring throughout the store. Oh, great! What should I do? What should I do?
Jessica tried to think what a genuine robber might do. A hostage. I need a hostage. Quickly Jessica scanned her possibilities: Frank, the wino, the cross-dresser, the sales clerk, the two customers, or Brad Pitt.
“You’re coming with me,” she yelled at good ol’ Brad.
“No, I’m not,” he said, backing up.
“Yes, you are. You’re my hostage.” She leveled her now-empty gun at him—first, at his chest, then lower. Yep, a guy like him would care more about protecting those assets than his heart. Her upper lip curled with disdain. “Listen, Mr. Legend-of-the-Fall, I’m in the middle of my Christmas Curse, and I’d hate to see your dead body be my bad luck this year.”
“Curse?” Brad barked with disbelief. “You’re pulling a heist because of PMS?”
She blinked at him with confusion. “Oh, you idiot! Not that kind of curse. My Christmas Curse is the real kind—black magic, evil eyes, that sort of thing.”
“Give me a break!”
“Really. My parents died in an automobile accident on December twentieth when I was ten. The following yule season, I was in the foster home from hell. I broke my leg on Christmas Eve when I was twenty.”
“Coincidences.”
“Oh, yeah? Then how about the time my dog Fred impregnated a pedigree poodle at that fancy private kennel five years ago, even though he was fixed? That curse cost me a thousand dollars in legal fines.”
“Apparently Fred’s fix-job leaked.” His hazel eyes twinkled with humor.
She sliced him a sneer of disgust. “I will never forget my Christmas-party blind date last year with the guy who arrived wearing a plaid hunting cap with ear flaps. The wheels of his pickup truck were so high I had a nosebleed for a week.”
“I once had a blind date with a girl who had tattoos on three-fourths of her body,” he contributed irrelevantly. “Does that qualify as a curse?”
“Quit stalling,” she ordered, realizing that he was trying to keep her talking until the police arrived. Even though she knew her bullets were gone, her hand still shook when she raised the gun in a threatening manner.
He said a foul word under his breath as his eyes darted to her trembling fingers. She could practically see the gears grinding in his chauvinistic brain. He was probably worrying about her panicking, or her fingers slipping.
Raising his arms above his head, Brad surrendered. “All right, all right, take it easy, babe. I’m all yours.” It was a real Kodak moment.
Actually, there was probably a security camera filming it for posterity. But she couldn’t think about that now. With the barrel of her pistol pressed into the back of the guy’s neck, she pushed him forward through the doors, yelling over her shoulder, “If anyone follows me, this creep is dead. Do you hear me?”
At first, Luke Carter had been amused by Dirty Harriet. But not anymore. He walked compliantly out of the grocery store, his arms upraised, a gun crammed into his nape, but he was really, really pissed. It was humiliating for a man of his background to be kidnapped by a dingbat Santa.
And he just knew that the six o’clock news tomorrow was going to have a stillframe from the security tape of Santa being taken hostage by Santa. The news media would make him the laughing stock of the country.
Luke could have taken the woman down in a flash…in the beginning…before she’d started ripping out bullets. Hell, he was a bodyguard. And he was wearing a bulletproof vest, having just come off of an assignment. It was his job to disarm potential political assassins or crazy celebrity fans. He’d been trained in the CIA, and had done very well these past five years, thank you very much, operating his own private bodyguard business, “Watchdogs, Inc.”
But the worst danger in the security business was a looney-bird. And if a woman—who might, indeed, be a nun—dressed as Santa Claus, wielding a forty-five, ranting about Christmas Curses, and robbing a supermarket for thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents wasn’t a looney-bird, he didn’t know what was.
It was all his sister’s fault, and he was going to tell her so, too…if he was alive after tonight. Since he’d already rented the Santa outfit for his gig protecting Janet Jackson at her concert today at the Spectrum in South Philly, Ellie had talked him into playing the jolly ol’ fellow for her third graders’ Christmas party afterward. It had seemed reasonable to zip on over to the elementary school where Ellie taught, and it had been fun, too.
Later they’d gone out for pizza and she’d berated him ad nauseam about the dismal state of his personal life. Too many women—“bimbos” was her exact word; no commitments—“How long are you going to mourn Ginny? She’s been dead five years”; his biological clock ticking away with no children in sight—“Men don’t have biological clocks,” he’d pointed out; dirty laundry up the kazoo—okay, she had a point about the laundry piled up in the back of his car; and on, and on, and on. So Ellie was responsible for his present predicament. If not for her nagging, he never would have come out at midnight to do his laundry and met Ms. Psycho Santa.