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jackofknavesTitle: 'Tis the Season for Murder: A Christmas Caper
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tripatch
Rating: PG
Pairing: Gen
Summary: A mall Santa is murdered and Nick is on the case. The problem? Monroe seems to think it might be a real Santa.
Notes: I did some minor editing to reflect actual police procedures. Thanks to my brother, who helped me out on that! Also thanks tobe_merry for the quick beta. You're a doll!
The station was as busy as ever, patrol officers leading suspects in handcuffs and complainants to chairs to take down reports. There was a loudly arguing couple on one side of the station, a few kids who looked more scared than tough, and a woman noisily smacking her gum as she pointed indignantly at the beleaguered officer taking down notes and nodding miserably as the woman berated him. Nick dodged Oglesby, a younger officer, as he marched one man in handcuffs past who kept shouting that he knew his rights.
“Yeah, yeah,” Oglesby muttered as he walked past. “You also had the right to not steal that car, but you didn’t exercise that one, did you?”
Nick hid a grin as he walked straight into Wu, carrying an armful of records.
“Watch it!” he snapped before he saw who it was. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Don’t sound so glad to see me,” Nick said.
“I’ll try to restrain myself,” Wu replied impassively. He jerked his head toward the hallway, past the posters warning officers to drive safely and new procedure memos adorning the walls. “Harper called. Said she’s got something for you two.”
“Already?” Hank arched his eyebrows at Nick. “She’s getting better in her old age.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that.”
The morgue was never a pleasant place, and despite spending a good amount of time down there, Nick still felt a shiver every time he walked into the room, and not entirely from the cold. Unlike the warm wood banisters and dark walls of upstairs, the morgue was sterile concrete and coated in the pale green institutions could never fully escape from. Harper glanced up from her paperwork as they walked in.
“Got something for us, Doc?”
“Maybe,” she said, beckoning them over to the corpse. The sheet was tented over his body, bulging upward from the stomach.
“Looks like Stan was hitting the milk and cookies pretty hard,” Hank noted.
Doctor Harper sent him a wry look. “If the wound hadn’t done him it, I would have given him a year before a heart attack did him in. I haven’t done a full autopsy yet, but from a preliminary, I’d say that the murder weapon hit the subclavian artery and he bled out. It looks like there are some other wounds, but that was the one that killed him.”
“Murder weapon?” Nick looked up from his study of the body. “Anything to suggest it wasn’t a knife wound?”
“Again, boys, you’ll have to wait until I do the full autopsy, but if I were a betting woman, I’d say that it was something less conventional.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look here,” she gestured to a series of shallow wounds decorating the man’s shoulder. The edges looked like tattered rubber and blue in the fluorescent lighting. “See the tracks made? It almost looks like claw marks.”
“Or talons,” Nick said softly, remembering Spicer’s long, thin fingers.
She glanced up, a surprised look on her face. “Possibly. Though I doubt our victim was killed by a rogue bird.”
“Maybe Santa flew through a flock while he was on his sleigh,” Hank grinned. Nick and Doctor Harper gave him long-suffering looks and he held up his hands defensively. “What?”
“They would have to be some very unusual birds,” Doctor Harper said dryly. “The depth of the wound that killed him indicates a long weapon plunged directly into his shoulder. I also pulled this out, thought you may want to take a look.”
She handed over a specimen jar with small filings in it, barely larger than Nick’s little fingernail. “What are we looking at?” he asked, holding the jar up and peering inside. They were a dull yellow, with dustings of black around the edges.
“No idea. I’m sending some to the lab for analysis. But it’s definitely not any kind of knife shavings I’ve seen. I’d say the material is organic judging by the fungus that’s growing on it.”
Hank, who had taken the shavings from Nick and was looking at them intently, pulled back and returned it to Harper with a disgusted look on his face.
“Anything else you can tell us?”
Doctor Harper glanced over her chart and shook her head. “Nothing that I can think of, but I thought you should see those,” she nodded toward the jar, “as soon as possible.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Nick said.
She waved them away and they left her to her reports, climbing the long staircase to their desks.
“So what do you think we’re looking at?” Hank asked.
Nick shook his head slowly. “Not sure. I didn’t see anything like those shavings at the scene.” Spicer’s long, wickedly sharp talons flashed back to him and he shook it away.
“Man, I haven’t seen anything like that ever, except when my grandma cuts her toenails.”
“Thanks for that lovely image,” Wu said from behind them. They both glanced up to where he was standing, holding a folder in one of his hands. He dropped a thick file onto Nick’s keyboard. “I just came by to drop this off.”
“Thanks, Wu,” Nick said, grabbing the file and reading through it.
He waved a hand. “Yeah, yeah, I missed my calling as an errand boy.”
“You’d be great at it!” Hank shouted after him, ignoring the crude gesture he received in response. “What’s it say?”
“Mr. Stan A. Alcuse,” Nick read from the report. “Sixty-two years old, originally from Eugene. He owned a small carpentry business and apparently was an avid woodworker. He was married once, but his wife died three years ago from natural causes. No children. Get this: he’s volunteered as a Santa every year for the past thirty years and made toys in his spare time which he donated to local charities.”
“This guy was a saint,” Hank said with a whistle. “Who would want to kill him?”
“Apparently someone had a grudge.” Nick tossed the file to Hank to read and leaned back in his chair.
“Against people helping out orphans and rescuing kittens from trees? Yeah, I hate those guys, too.”
“Everyone has their secrets.”
“Even you?” Hank joked.
Nick looked down at his desk, the easy camaraderie fading under the weight of investigating yet another murder beyond the scope of normal police work. Lately it seemed every case connected back to some creature, something to do with the Grimm heritage that he had never known about. Sometimes he almost thought wistfully of the relatively straightforward, simple homicides he used to work, before all this was dropped into his lap, ones he could work with his partner and not have to hide things or make up stories in his reports about links in a chain that he shouldn't have. He had told Marie he couldn’t have ignored his Grimm ancestry even if he had wanted to, and lately he was starting to wonder if he hadn’t been more right than he had thought.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Even me.”
After work, he dropped by the location he had left Aunt Marie’s trailer. The trailer sat bathed in the soft light from the streetlamps and Nick stared at it for a moment, struck by the way it seemed so small and innocuous from the outside. It was amazing how something as mundane as a beat-up Airstream could contain so many secrets. He shook off the feeling and unlocked the door, stepping into the small space and checking it. Everything was where he had left it the last time. The leather-bound book full of sketches and delicate, curling handwriting was lying on the desk, waiting for him to search through it. He settled in and began flipping through the pages.
It took him over half an hour, and he almost missed it, but there on the left-hand page was a tiny sketch in the corner of the bird-like creature he had seen in Mr. Spicer.
“The Cinomolgus,” he read aloud from the short paragraph penned in beside the picture. “The Cinnamon Bird. Collects cinnamon for its nest and will defend its young against most enemies. Otherwise harmless. There have been no cases of unprovoked attacks.”
“That’s it?” he said, leaning back and shoving the book away. He scrubbed his face with his hands, suddenly feeling very tired. A quick look at his watch told him he had time to make another trip, one that would hopefully prove more useful. Locking up, he took one last glance at the trailer and got back into his car.
He had to knock five times before the door finally opened.
“You have got to stop doing this,” Monroe said with a serious expression. He glanced at one of the clocks hanging on the wall. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
Nick pushed his way past him and stood in the entryway. “I’m really sorry, but I need some information.”
Yawning widely, Monroe padded into the kitchen in his socks. “What else is new? I was just about to go to bed, so make it quick. What is it this week? A nachzehrer? Selkies? Pixies?”
“No, it’s—“ Nick stopped short and blinked. “Pixies?”
Monroe gave him a look that told him he was being an idiot, a look that Nick had learned early on in their relationship when it had shown up at least twice a conversation. “It’s time for all good, reformed blutbaden to be going beddie-byes, so spit it out.”
“Sorry,” Nick apologized. He pulled out the sketch he had made and handed it over, allowing Monroe to glance over it. “Recognize it?”
“A cinnamon bird? Man, I haven’t seen one of those in ages.”
“You’ve seen one?”
Monroe handed back the paper with a shrug. “Once in a while. They’re not as common as they used to be. For a while there, everyone thought they had died out completely, been hunted to extinction, probably by Grimms.” He gave Nick a pointed look, which Nick ignored. Though Monroe was gradually beginning to warm up to the late-night informational sessions, despite his churlish attitude whenever Nick arrived, there was still an underlying tension in the fact that, technically, according to all the rulebooks, they were supposed to be mortal enemies. It was a hard fact to reconcile over a beer and a football game, complaining about the weather.
“Are they dangerous?”
“Are you kidding me? They’re nervous little critters, really live up to their bird roots, y’know, flittering around and taking off at the first sign of trouble. They’re supposedly really vicious if you attack their chicks, but they’re so rare nowadays that a brood pair would be almost unheard of. Where’d you dig this one up?”
Nick sat heavily on a couch and resisted the urge to sink back into the plush furniture and fall asleep. “Case I’m working on,” he said with a sigh. “A mall Santa was murdered today and our ME said the wounds were irregular. The manager there is a Cinnamon bird. I thought…”
“No way, man, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” Monroe shook his head. Nick opened his mouth to make a truly terrible pun when Monroe held up a finger. “Not one word or you don’t get any coffee.”
Nick’s mouth snapped shut. Monroe’s coffee really was good, about twenty times better than the cheap Maxwell he bought at home or worse, the sludge that managed to be thick as Mississippi mud and weak as rainwater that they had at the station. Monroe poured himself a cup of coffee and handed another one to Nick, who accepted the mug gratefully. “They’re definitely not your stone-cold murder types.”
“Unless he has young,” Nick said.
“Yeah, but like I said, what are the chances of that?”
Nick didn’t say anything, just sipped his coffee as he turned it over in his head. A thought hit him suddenly and he looked over at Monroe. “Where do they nest?”
“Up high, usually in very isolated locations. The parents would want it secure, but somewhere they could get to easily just in case. It would have to be warm, too, or else the eggs wouldn’t hatch.”
“Like a ventilation shaft?” Nick asked. It was definitely high enough, and though the mall itself was not very isolated, he doubted many maintenance workers crawled through the dusty ducts very often. It was too high for most people to reach without a ladder, but a bird could fly up there easily. And with the holiday season, and the cold, fast approaching and settling in, the mall’s heating had been working on overdrive to provide a comfortable shopping atmosphere for its customers. It would actually be perfect.
“That might work,” said Monroe with a thoughtful nod. “It’d be a tight squeeze, but I could see it.”
Nick made a mental note to check the blueprints of the mall’s ventilation system for the dimensions, and possibly talk with Juliette about whether a bird could fit into small spaces. He remembered finding a bird once wedged into a sewer drain barely big enough for it while walking from school one day, so it seemed plausible, though that didn’t explain why Mr. Spicer would have told him it was too small for anyone to go through. He must have known that Nick would check to see if cinnamon birds could fit in there.
“Doesn’t explain how Alcuse found it, though,” Nick thought out loud. “He couldn’t have just stumbled on it.”
“Alcuse?”
“Our vic,” Nick said absently, still fitting the pieces together in his head. “Guy was the next best thing to a saint. Hank and I spent all day going through bank records, legal papers, talking to people, and no one had anything bad to say about the guy.”
“Oh, he was a santa,” Monroe nodded sagely.
“Yeah, worked as a mall Santa for thirty years.”
“No,” Monroe said slowly, as if speaking to a small child, “I mean he was a santa.”
Nick quirked a questioning eyebrow at him. For a few years after college, he had woken up from dreams where he had walked into a classroom only to find there was an exam that he hadn’t studied for. Sometimes he thought coming into Grimm-hood so late was probably quite similar to those dreams, and he never had that feeling more acutely than while talking to Monroe.
“I swear, sometimes it’s like talking to a bar of marzipan,” Monroe said impatiently, compounding the feeling that Nick was hopelessly behind the curve. Monroe stuck out his hands in front of his face, miming a beard and a round, protruding stomach. “He was a santa. You know, the red cheeks, button nose, bowlful of jelly types? Though the ones I’ve met have always had more of a tub-full, if you know what I mean.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” Nick said honestly.
“Don’t you have a manual for this kind of stuff? Santas. Pretty friendly, supposed to spread good cheer and all that around, usually work as social workers or something altruistic during their off-months. Always smell like mistletoe and eggnog, too,” Monroe added, wrinkling his nose.
Nick stared at him, finally starting to make sense of what Monroe was saying.
He leaned forward, his empty cup of coffee nearly slipping from his grasp.
“Are you telling me,” he said, an undercurrent of excitement thrumming in his voice, “that Santa is real?”
Author:
tripatchRating: PG
Pairing: Gen
Summary: A mall Santa is murdered and Nick is on the case. The problem? Monroe seems to think it might be a real Santa.
Notes: I did some minor editing to reflect actual police procedures. Thanks to my brother, who helped me out on that! Also thanks to
be_merry for the quick beta. You're a doll!| Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 |
| Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 |
| Chapter 7 | Author’s Notes | Teaser |
The station was as busy as ever, patrol officers leading suspects in handcuffs and complainants to chairs to take down reports. There was a loudly arguing couple on one side of the station, a few kids who looked more scared than tough, and a woman noisily smacking her gum as she pointed indignantly at the beleaguered officer taking down notes and nodding miserably as the woman berated him. Nick dodged Oglesby, a younger officer, as he marched one man in handcuffs past who kept shouting that he knew his rights.
“Yeah, yeah,” Oglesby muttered as he walked past. “You also had the right to not steal that car, but you didn’t exercise that one, did you?”
Nick hid a grin as he walked straight into Wu, carrying an armful of records.
“Watch it!” he snapped before he saw who it was. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Don’t sound so glad to see me,” Nick said.
“I’ll try to restrain myself,” Wu replied impassively. He jerked his head toward the hallway, past the posters warning officers to drive safely and new procedure memos adorning the walls. “Harper called. Said she’s got something for you two.”
“Already?” Hank arched his eyebrows at Nick. “She’s getting better in her old age.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that.”
The morgue was never a pleasant place, and despite spending a good amount of time down there, Nick still felt a shiver every time he walked into the room, and not entirely from the cold. Unlike the warm wood banisters and dark walls of upstairs, the morgue was sterile concrete and coated in the pale green institutions could never fully escape from. Harper glanced up from her paperwork as they walked in.
“Got something for us, Doc?”
“Maybe,” she said, beckoning them over to the corpse. The sheet was tented over his body, bulging upward from the stomach.
“Looks like Stan was hitting the milk and cookies pretty hard,” Hank noted.
Doctor Harper sent him a wry look. “If the wound hadn’t done him it, I would have given him a year before a heart attack did him in. I haven’t done a full autopsy yet, but from a preliminary, I’d say that the murder weapon hit the subclavian artery and he bled out. It looks like there are some other wounds, but that was the one that killed him.”
“Murder weapon?” Nick looked up from his study of the body. “Anything to suggest it wasn’t a knife wound?”
“Again, boys, you’ll have to wait until I do the full autopsy, but if I were a betting woman, I’d say that it was something less conventional.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look here,” she gestured to a series of shallow wounds decorating the man’s shoulder. The edges looked like tattered rubber and blue in the fluorescent lighting. “See the tracks made? It almost looks like claw marks.”
“Or talons,” Nick said softly, remembering Spicer’s long, thin fingers.
She glanced up, a surprised look on her face. “Possibly. Though I doubt our victim was killed by a rogue bird.”
“Maybe Santa flew through a flock while he was on his sleigh,” Hank grinned. Nick and Doctor Harper gave him long-suffering looks and he held up his hands defensively. “What?”
“They would have to be some very unusual birds,” Doctor Harper said dryly. “The depth of the wound that killed him indicates a long weapon plunged directly into his shoulder. I also pulled this out, thought you may want to take a look.”
She handed over a specimen jar with small filings in it, barely larger than Nick’s little fingernail. “What are we looking at?” he asked, holding the jar up and peering inside. They were a dull yellow, with dustings of black around the edges.
“No idea. I’m sending some to the lab for analysis. But it’s definitely not any kind of knife shavings I’ve seen. I’d say the material is organic judging by the fungus that’s growing on it.”
Hank, who had taken the shavings from Nick and was looking at them intently, pulled back and returned it to Harper with a disgusted look on his face.
“Anything else you can tell us?”
Doctor Harper glanced over her chart and shook her head. “Nothing that I can think of, but I thought you should see those,” she nodded toward the jar, “as soon as possible.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Nick said.
She waved them away and they left her to her reports, climbing the long staircase to their desks.
“So what do you think we’re looking at?” Hank asked.
Nick shook his head slowly. “Not sure. I didn’t see anything like those shavings at the scene.” Spicer’s long, wickedly sharp talons flashed back to him and he shook it away.
“Man, I haven’t seen anything like that ever, except when my grandma cuts her toenails.”
“Thanks for that lovely image,” Wu said from behind them. They both glanced up to where he was standing, holding a folder in one of his hands. He dropped a thick file onto Nick’s keyboard. “I just came by to drop this off.”
“Thanks, Wu,” Nick said, grabbing the file and reading through it.
He waved a hand. “Yeah, yeah, I missed my calling as an errand boy.”
“You’d be great at it!” Hank shouted after him, ignoring the crude gesture he received in response. “What’s it say?”
“Mr. Stan A. Alcuse,” Nick read from the report. “Sixty-two years old, originally from Eugene. He owned a small carpentry business and apparently was an avid woodworker. He was married once, but his wife died three years ago from natural causes. No children. Get this: he’s volunteered as a Santa every year for the past thirty years and made toys in his spare time which he donated to local charities.”
“This guy was a saint,” Hank said with a whistle. “Who would want to kill him?”
“Apparently someone had a grudge.” Nick tossed the file to Hank to read and leaned back in his chair.
“Against people helping out orphans and rescuing kittens from trees? Yeah, I hate those guys, too.”
“Everyone has their secrets.”
“Even you?” Hank joked.
Nick looked down at his desk, the easy camaraderie fading under the weight of investigating yet another murder beyond the scope of normal police work. Lately it seemed every case connected back to some creature, something to do with the Grimm heritage that he had never known about. Sometimes he almost thought wistfully of the relatively straightforward, simple homicides he used to work, before all this was dropped into his lap, ones he could work with his partner and not have to hide things or make up stories in his reports about links in a chain that he shouldn't have. He had told Marie he couldn’t have ignored his Grimm ancestry even if he had wanted to, and lately he was starting to wonder if he hadn’t been more right than he had thought.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Even me.”
After work, he dropped by the location he had left Aunt Marie’s trailer. The trailer sat bathed in the soft light from the streetlamps and Nick stared at it for a moment, struck by the way it seemed so small and innocuous from the outside. It was amazing how something as mundane as a beat-up Airstream could contain so many secrets. He shook off the feeling and unlocked the door, stepping into the small space and checking it. Everything was where he had left it the last time. The leather-bound book full of sketches and delicate, curling handwriting was lying on the desk, waiting for him to search through it. He settled in and began flipping through the pages.
It took him over half an hour, and he almost missed it, but there on the left-hand page was a tiny sketch in the corner of the bird-like creature he had seen in Mr. Spicer.
“The Cinomolgus,” he read aloud from the short paragraph penned in beside the picture. “The Cinnamon Bird. Collects cinnamon for its nest and will defend its young against most enemies. Otherwise harmless. There have been no cases of unprovoked attacks.”
“That’s it?” he said, leaning back and shoving the book away. He scrubbed his face with his hands, suddenly feeling very tired. A quick look at his watch told him he had time to make another trip, one that would hopefully prove more useful. Locking up, he took one last glance at the trailer and got back into his car.
He had to knock five times before the door finally opened.
“You have got to stop doing this,” Monroe said with a serious expression. He glanced at one of the clocks hanging on the wall. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
Nick pushed his way past him and stood in the entryway. “I’m really sorry, but I need some information.”
Yawning widely, Monroe padded into the kitchen in his socks. “What else is new? I was just about to go to bed, so make it quick. What is it this week? A nachzehrer? Selkies? Pixies?”
“No, it’s—“ Nick stopped short and blinked. “Pixies?”
Monroe gave him a look that told him he was being an idiot, a look that Nick had learned early on in their relationship when it had shown up at least twice a conversation. “It’s time for all good, reformed blutbaden to be going beddie-byes, so spit it out.”
“Sorry,” Nick apologized. He pulled out the sketch he had made and handed it over, allowing Monroe to glance over it. “Recognize it?”
“A cinnamon bird? Man, I haven’t seen one of those in ages.”
“You’ve seen one?”
Monroe handed back the paper with a shrug. “Once in a while. They’re not as common as they used to be. For a while there, everyone thought they had died out completely, been hunted to extinction, probably by Grimms.” He gave Nick a pointed look, which Nick ignored. Though Monroe was gradually beginning to warm up to the late-night informational sessions, despite his churlish attitude whenever Nick arrived, there was still an underlying tension in the fact that, technically, according to all the rulebooks, they were supposed to be mortal enemies. It was a hard fact to reconcile over a beer and a football game, complaining about the weather.
“Are they dangerous?”
“Are you kidding me? They’re nervous little critters, really live up to their bird roots, y’know, flittering around and taking off at the first sign of trouble. They’re supposedly really vicious if you attack their chicks, but they’re so rare nowadays that a brood pair would be almost unheard of. Where’d you dig this one up?”
Nick sat heavily on a couch and resisted the urge to sink back into the plush furniture and fall asleep. “Case I’m working on,” he said with a sigh. “A mall Santa was murdered today and our ME said the wounds were irregular. The manager there is a Cinnamon bird. I thought…”
“No way, man, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” Monroe shook his head. Nick opened his mouth to make a truly terrible pun when Monroe held up a finger. “Not one word or you don’t get any coffee.”
Nick’s mouth snapped shut. Monroe’s coffee really was good, about twenty times better than the cheap Maxwell he bought at home or worse, the sludge that managed to be thick as Mississippi mud and weak as rainwater that they had at the station. Monroe poured himself a cup of coffee and handed another one to Nick, who accepted the mug gratefully. “They’re definitely not your stone-cold murder types.”
“Unless he has young,” Nick said.
“Yeah, but like I said, what are the chances of that?”
Nick didn’t say anything, just sipped his coffee as he turned it over in his head. A thought hit him suddenly and he looked over at Monroe. “Where do they nest?”
“Up high, usually in very isolated locations. The parents would want it secure, but somewhere they could get to easily just in case. It would have to be warm, too, or else the eggs wouldn’t hatch.”
“Like a ventilation shaft?” Nick asked. It was definitely high enough, and though the mall itself was not very isolated, he doubted many maintenance workers crawled through the dusty ducts very often. It was too high for most people to reach without a ladder, but a bird could fly up there easily. And with the holiday season, and the cold, fast approaching and settling in, the mall’s heating had been working on overdrive to provide a comfortable shopping atmosphere for its customers. It would actually be perfect.
“That might work,” said Monroe with a thoughtful nod. “It’d be a tight squeeze, but I could see it.”
Nick made a mental note to check the blueprints of the mall’s ventilation system for the dimensions, and possibly talk with Juliette about whether a bird could fit into small spaces. He remembered finding a bird once wedged into a sewer drain barely big enough for it while walking from school one day, so it seemed plausible, though that didn’t explain why Mr. Spicer would have told him it was too small for anyone to go through. He must have known that Nick would check to see if cinnamon birds could fit in there.
“Doesn’t explain how Alcuse found it, though,” Nick thought out loud. “He couldn’t have just stumbled on it.”
“Alcuse?”
“Our vic,” Nick said absently, still fitting the pieces together in his head. “Guy was the next best thing to a saint. Hank and I spent all day going through bank records, legal papers, talking to people, and no one had anything bad to say about the guy.”
“Oh, he was a santa,” Monroe nodded sagely.
“Yeah, worked as a mall Santa for thirty years.”
“No,” Monroe said slowly, as if speaking to a small child, “I mean he was a santa.”
Nick quirked a questioning eyebrow at him. For a few years after college, he had woken up from dreams where he had walked into a classroom only to find there was an exam that he hadn’t studied for. Sometimes he thought coming into Grimm-hood so late was probably quite similar to those dreams, and he never had that feeling more acutely than while talking to Monroe.
“I swear, sometimes it’s like talking to a bar of marzipan,” Monroe said impatiently, compounding the feeling that Nick was hopelessly behind the curve. Monroe stuck out his hands in front of his face, miming a beard and a round, protruding stomach. “He was a santa. You know, the red cheeks, button nose, bowlful of jelly types? Though the ones I’ve met have always had more of a tub-full, if you know what I mean.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” Nick said honestly.
“Don’t you have a manual for this kind of stuff? Santas. Pretty friendly, supposed to spread good cheer and all that around, usually work as social workers or something altruistic during their off-months. Always smell like mistletoe and eggnog, too,” Monroe added, wrinkling his nose.
Nick stared at him, finally starting to make sense of what Monroe was saying.
He leaned forward, his empty cup of coffee nearly slipping from his grasp.
“Are you telling me,” he said, an undercurrent of excitement thrumming in his voice, “that Santa is real?”
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Date: 2011-12-06 05:17 am (UTC)