The Last Noel

“Let’s all get the hell out of here,” Craig said. “Come on. You’ve got what you came for.”

“Wuss.” Quintin sniffed. “Or worse.”

“What do you mean, worse?” Scooter asked.

“Cop.”

“I’m no cop. I just don’t want to do life over a couple of lousy bracelets,” Craig said, but he felt a bead of sweat on his upper lip. Quintin was one scary SOB. His eyes were like glass. No emotion, empathy or remorse lay anywhere behind that stare.

“The old guy’s seen our faces, and thanks to Scooter—” he shot the man a scathing glance “—he knows where we’re going,” Quintin said.

“And he’s probably legally blind and totally deaf,” Craig argued.

“I’m not taking that chance,” Quintin said harshly.

“And I’m not going to be party to murder,” Craig said and turned to appeal to the other man. “Scooter, you’re an idiot if you listen to this thug,” he said. “We’ll all get locked away forever for murder, and I’m not as old as you guys. I don’t want to spend the next fifty years without a woman.”

Quintin started to laugh. “Don’t worry about it, kid. They lock up people like Martha Stewart. Killers, hell, they get to walk away free. Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Craig…we gotta do what Quintin says,” Scooter insisted.

“Even if what he says is stupid?” Craig asked.

“Fuck you,” Quintin said, casually pulling out a gun. “Keep talking like that and you won’t have to worry about jail.”

Craig assessed his situation. No question it was dire. He was probably in the best shape of his life, and he was the youngest of the three of them. In a fair fight, he could probably take out Quintin, no matter that the man was an ape. But there were two of them. And it wasn’t going to be a fair fight. Because they had guns. With bullets.

There would never be a fair fight with Quintin.

He turned to plead with Scooter again, but he was too late. Quintin, moving faster than Craig would have thought possible for a man his size, cracked Craig on the head with the butt of his gun.

Craig literally saw stars, and then the world went black.

As he sank to the ground, he heard the deafening sound of an explosion.

The blast of a gun…

He’d screwed up.

What a great, last thought to have—and on Christmas Eve.

As he sank into unconsciousness, he was certain he could hear the familiar refrain of a Christmas carol.

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

ONE

The stereo was on, playing songs of Christmas cheer. Skyler O’Boyle took a moment to listen to a woman with a high, clear voice who was singing, “Sleigh bells ring, are you lis’nin’…”

Then, even over the music and from her place in the kitchen, she heard the yelling.

“I said hold it. Hold the tree!”

Skyler winced.

Christmas. Home for the holidays, merry, merry, ho, ho, ho, family love, world peace.

In her family? Yeah, right.

The expected answer came, and the voice was just as loud. “I am holding it,” her eldest son insisted.

“Straight, dammit, Frazier. Hold it straight,” her husband, David, snapped irritably.

In her mind’s eye, Skyler could see them, David on the floor, trying to wedge the tree into the stand, and Frazier, standing, trying to hold the tree straight. That was what happened when you decided “home for the holidays” meant everyone gathering in the old family house out in the country. It meant throwing everything together at the last possible moment, because everyone had to juggle their school and work schedules with their holiday vacation.

“The frigging needles are poking my eyes. This is the best I can do,” Frazier complained in what sounded suspiciously like a growl.

His tone was sure to aggravate his father, she thought.

Some people got Christmas cheer; she got David and Frazier fighting over the tree.

Where the hell had the spirit of the season gone, at least in her family? Actually, if she wanted to get philosophical, where had the spirit of the season gone in a large part of the known world? There were no real Norman Rockwell paintings. People walked by the Salvation Army volunteers without a glance; it seemed as if the only reason anyone put money in the kettle was that they were burdened by so much change that it was actually too heavy for comfort. Then they beat each other up over the latest electronic toy to hit the market.

“It’s nowhere near straight,” David roared.

“Put up your own fucking tree, then,” Frazier shouted.

“Son of a bitch…” David swore.

“…walkin’ in a winter wonderland.”

Please, God, Skyler prayed silently, don’t let my husband and my son come to blows on Christmas Eve.

“Hey, Kat, you there?”

Great, Skyler thought. Now David was getting their daughter involved.

“Yeah, Dad, I’m here. But I can’t hold that tree any straighter. And I hope Brenda didn’t hear you two yelling,” Kat said.

Skyler headed out toward the living room, ready to head off a major family disaster, and paused just out of sight in the hall.

Had she been wrong? Should she have told her son he shouldn’t bring Brenda home for the holidays? He’d turned twenty-two. He could have told her that he wasn’t coming home, in that case, and was going to spend the holidays with Brenda’s family. And then she would have been without her first-born child. Of course, that was going to happen somewhere along the line anyway; that was life. With the kids getting older, it was already hard to get the entire family together.

“Oh, so now I have to worry—in my own house—about offending the girl who came here to sleep with my son?” David complained.

David wasn’t a bad man, Skyler thought. He wasn’t even a bad father. But he had different ideas about what was proper and what wasn’t. They had been children themselves, really, when they had gotten married. She had been eighteen, and he had been nineteen. But even as desperately in love as they had been, there was no way either of them could have told their parents that they were going to live together.

Current mores might be much wiser, she reflected. Most of her generation seemed to be divorced.