The Mike Murphy Files and Other Stories (10 page)

“Ready, team?” said Snix.

He and Herk and Jerzy were all toting black backpacks they had taken from the Camaro’s trunk.

“Ready!” barked Herk and Jerzy. Maybe it was my imagination, but they both seemed to be quivering so fast that they were slightly blurry. Then again, they’d been downing espressos ever since we left Hawaii.

“Stay in radio contact,” said Snix. “Avoid detection. Reconnoiter the place and neutralize any imminent threats. Find the sled and the sack, secure them, and then call for backup. Got it?”

“Got it!”

“Seems overly complicated,” I said. “Why don’t we just find Mr. Gambini and ask him to return my things?”

The elves gave me a withering look, as if to say that I was a fathead. Then they each dropped down a chimney. I sighed and jumped into the last chimney. It was a long trip down. That mansion had five stories. I landed in a pile of ashes on a marble hearth. I poked my head out and took a look around. Whatever anyone had to say about this Gambini fellow, he really knew how to decorate in velvet. Mostly red velvet.

I strolled through the mansion, admiring the antiques and the many fine paintings. There were quite a few Matisses. I suppose Gambini, in addition to red velvet, really liked Matisse. In fact, he had five of the same exact Matisse hanging right next to each other in one room. I stopped to admire them. Forgeries, obviously, but whoever had done them had managed to make them look exactly alike. I peered closer. Precisely one hundred percent alike. Even the old wooden frames were exactly the same. Right down to the chip in the lower right-hand corner.

I froze.

The sack! Someone had figured out how to use the Supreme Santa Sack Version 3.0 with fifth-dimensional sourcing. Someone had cranked out these Matisses. And not just any old someone. A Mafia don.

That’s when someone stuck a gun in my lower back.

“Reach for the sky!” growled a voice.

I about jumped out of my shoes. But then I realized there was something odd about the voice. It was high and squeaky. I risked a look over my shoulder. Oddly enough, there was no one in sight. But then I looked down and saw him. Gambini Junior. He had an Acme Super-Duper-Fun Machine Gun in one hand and a chocolate bar in the other.

My job takes me all over the world, and I encounter a lot of children. All sorts of different children. Gambini Junior, however, was in a class by himself. He only came up to my knee, but he was built on overly generous lines, sort of like a tank. He scowled up at me and bit into the chocolate bar.

“You’re a thief,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m Santa Claus. I don’t take, I give.”

“Then gimme your wallet.”

“I don’t carry a wallet.”

“No ID? Then you can’t prove you’re Santa. You must be a thief. I think I’ll have Uncle Guido kneecap you.”

Gambini Junior prodded me in the knee with his gun as if to test the resilience of my leg. That was when Snix peeked around the corner and shot him in the back. Granted, it was with a Taser, but he still shot him. Gambini Junior twitched a few dozen times and then flopped over.

“What are you doing?” I snapped. “You can’t shoot kids.”

“Says who. Look at the size of this lunk. He’s bigger than me. C’mon, boss. Let’s get out of here. There’s no one here except this kid and those goons out front.”

“Look at this, Snix. Someone figured out how to use the. . .”

“. . . Supreme Santa Sack Version 3.0,” gulped the elf, staring up at the Matisses. “Boss, we’ve gotta stop them before they start pulling out things they shouldn’t be pulling out.”

“Things like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, death rays, atom bombs? There’s a hot market for that sort of thing.”

Snix’s radio crackled with Jerzy’s voice. “Behind the house, now! They’re getting away!”

We made it out the back door just in time to see my sled go sputtering across the lawn. It was filled with whooping and hollering Mafia thugs. An older, fatter version of Gambini Junior was at the controls. He must’ve finally figured it out because the sled suddenly shot up into the air with a roar.

“We’re too late!” said Herk, dancing around in a frenzy of rage.

Snix whipped something out of his backpack. It looked sort of like a shotgun, except the barrel was made out of quartz. He swung around, aimed at the top of the mansion, and fired. A black rope with a grappling hook on the end shot up into the air.

“The Prototype,” breathed Jerzy, his eyes wide.

“Quick!” said Snix. “Grab hold!”

“What?” I said.

“It’s a reverse bungee.” His expression implied that only idiots and concrete garden gnomes didn’t know what a reverse bungee was.

“Oh, right.”

I grabbed hold along with the three elves, right as the rope contracted. It sent us sailing up into the air, right up to the top of the roof and right next to the Camaro. We piled in and Snix gunned the motor. We blasted off the roof with a roar.

“At your nine o’clock!” yelled Jerzy.

Snix pushed it over into a dive and the sled hissed by overhead. Gambini and his goons stared down at us goggle-eyed as they zipped past. They must’ve seen me, because one of the goons started waving his arms around. He got out a blackjack and did a pretty good imitation of whacking someone over the head. His little Marcel Marceau impersonation must’ve worked, because they all got pretty excited at that point. Several of them even drew their guns and began firing in our direction. Gambini was wrestling with the controls. He wasn’t having a lot of luck, and the sled went corkscrewing up into the clouds.

That sled is a sleek but complicated piece of machinery. My dad’s old head of R&D invented the first prototype several decades ago when the reindeer went on strike. I used to sneak the old sled out for joyrides when I was a kid. It had twin jet engines and could do Mach 3, but it was kind of noisy. The new sled, my sled, had a pint-sized cold-fusion reactor that powered a matter-displacement drive. Real cutting-edge stuff. It could do about double the speed of light. You need that kind of horsepower when you’re in my line of work. Otherwise, you have unhappy kids and you’re still delivering presents by the time New Year’s Day rolls around.

Thankfully, it looked like Gambini and his goons hadn’t figured out the matter-displacement drive yet and were just flying the thing with its backup engine. That was barely good for zero to one hundred in point oh six seconds, with a cruising speed of two twenty.

“Stay on ‘em, Snix!” hollered Herk.

“What do you think I’m doing?” snarled Snix. “Driving in the slow lane? We need to get that sled back. If those yahoos crash it, that means six months’ hard work to build another one, and I, for one, am going on vacation! A long vacation, right, boss? Unless you get thrown in jail again and need rescuing.”

“Er, right,” I said lamely.

It was then that they started shooting rocket-propelled grenades at us. Explosions flowered around us in sudden blooms of fire. Our back window blew out in a rain of shattered glass. Snix made some very elf-like comments and whipped the Camaro around in a banking turn. I double-checked my seat belt.

“I’m hit!” screeched Jerzy. “Blood! I’m hit! Medic! Oh, wait. It’s just my espresso. I guess I spilled some. Sorry.”

The sled was right on our tail. I peered back over the top of my seat. Gambini Senior was crouched over the controls, grinning like a fiend. The goon next to him reached down into a red sack and pulled out something long and green.

“My sack!” I said, my jaw dropping. “They’re using my sack for weapons.”

“That’s a bazooka,” said Herk. “Which, as you might now know, boss, is simply a recoilless rocket antitank weapon. The model he’s got is the M45 Six-Shot Bazooka with retractable sight. Very nice piece of hardware.”

“What’s nice about it?”

“Oh, the lovely, hand-polished finish, the optional walnut inlay on the stock, and its heat-seeking capabilities.”

“Heat-seeking?!”

Snix immediately took the Camaro through a series of maneuvers that would’ve made any fighter pilot proud. Myself, I was proud I managed to not throw up.

“They’re still on our tail,” said Herk.

“I can see that,” snapped Snix.

“They’re pulling something else out of the sack. Something really big. Ah, yes. It’s a Patriot missile. They’re going for something else. Hang on! It looks dangerous! Oh, it’s a platter of tiramisu. I guess they’re going to snack on tiramisu while they blow us away with that missile. I could really go for some tiramisu.”

“Jerzy! It’s time for the Prototype! Now!”

Jerzy grabbed Snix’s backpack with a chortle and pulled out the strange shotgun-looking device. He aimed through the nonexistent back window, one eye shut.

“I thought your Prototype thing fires reverse bungees,” I said.

“Not exactly,” said Snix. “Wait for it, Jerzy! Wait for it!”

Gambini and company certainly weren’t waiting for it. That was when they fired the Patriot missile at us. It launched in a eruption of smoke. The platter of tiramisu went over the side. I thought I could hear some cursing in Italian. But that missile was coming at us fast. It screamed through the air, growing larger and larger until it surely was about to crash into us. Crash into us and blow us all to the proverbial smithereens.

“Fire!” hollered Snix.

Jerzy pulled the trigger. An enormous pink wad of I-don’t-know-what went flying through the air and slammed into the missile. It knocked the thing end over end, and the missile tumbled away toward the earth.

“What was that?” I said, peering out the window. The pink stuff looked like it was stuck all over the missile.

“One ton of wet, well-chewed bubblegum,” said Jerzy.

“What?”

“Are you crazy?” said Snix. “I let you use the Prototype and all you can think of is bubblegum?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Jerzy! They’ve pulling out another missile! They look mad. Probably because of the tiramisu. Quick!”

Jerzy aimed out the back window again. He took a deep breath and sighted down the barrel. His finger tightened on the trigger. Time seemed to slow. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day. The roofs and skyscrapers of Manhattan gleamed far below us. A Canada goose flew by. He glared at us. Jerzy fired.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I sure wasn’t expecting a boxing glove. An enormous boxing glove about as big as a family-sized igloo. It punched through the air and biffed my poor sled right on the money. Mafia goons went flying. Gambini Senior went flying. The sled went into a tailspin.

“The sled!” screeched Snix. “The sled!”

“I’ll get it!” shouted Herk. “Just get us closer!”

Snix spun the wheel of the Camaro and went into a steep dive. I hung grimly onto the dashboard. The clouds flew by in a blur. The sled grew closer. It was about a hundred yards below us. Herk climbed out the window and launched himself into the air. He dropped like a stone and, a few seconds later, slammed into the sled. It slid out of its tailspin and zoomed up toward us. Herk waved, grinning from ear to ear.

“Why does Herk get to have all the fun?” grumbled Jerzy.

Snix turned to glare over the seat. “A boxing glove? Is that the only thing you could think of? If you cracked the fusion reactor, I’m going to crack your head like an egg and turn you into an omelet for the polar bears.”

“It was pure genius. I could’ve used a hammer, you know. Or a turtle. I thought about using a turtle from the Galapagos Islands. Can you imagine one of those babies hurtling toward you at five hundred miles an hour?”

“I wish I had a turtle right now!” said Snix. “I know what I’d do with it.”

“I hate to interrupt your fascinating conversation,” I said, “but that Gambini fellow and his men will soon hit the ground at a rather high speed.”

“So?”

“So, I’m Santa Claus. You’re elves. Elves, for crying out loud! We make presents for kids. We don’t murder mafioso.”

Snix snorted. “Fine. Whatever, Mr. Santa Bleeding-Heart Claus. Your old man would’ve trampled them with the reindeer.”

He muttered a few more uncomplimentary things about my sanity, my lack of personal hygiene, and my taste in argyle socks. But Snix is a good elf at heart, mostly, and he put the pedal to the metal on the behalf of Gambini and his goons. He proceeded to do some real flying. Jerzy took careful aim out the window with the Prototype and shot a fishing net over each thug as we flew past. We soon had all five of them dangling from the back bumper, cursing and screaming and crying for their mamas. One of the thugs was still clutching the Supreme Santa Sack Version 3.0.

“What exactly is this Prototype of yours?” I said.

“Oh, well, it’s just this thing,” said Snix, looking a little embarrassed. “Your old pop thought it up when you were still a kid. You sort of were a, uh, fat kid. He thought you’d never fit down chimneys when you took over his job. Never dreamed you’d turn out skinnier than a flamingo. The Prototype works just like your Supreme Santa Sack Version 3.0. You can shoot anything you want out of it. You just gotta be thinking what you want when you pull the trigger. Your pop figured you could just stick it down chimneys and bang away presents down into the fireplace.”