Have Yourself a Naughty Little Santa (20 page)

“You do the same thing my son does, and I continue to do.”

“You don’t know anything about me.” Kim shook her head at the old man, disgust filling her so thoroughly she could barely look at him. She completely understood how Ricco felt. Enrique was the scum of the earth and would never change. As she strode past him, she stiffened at his parting shot: “You run away when the pressure gets too much. You’re a coward!”

She resisted the urge to turn and tell the man she didn’t run from pressure, she thrived on it! And to prove it to herself, as soon as she stepped out of Leti’s house, she took her cell phone out of her pocket and punched Nick’s speed-dial number.

“G
OLD.”

Kim scowled. So they were back to that, were they? “It’s Kimberly Michaels.”

“I know that.”

“Then act like it!”

“Jesus Christ, Kimberly, what the hell is going on up there? From the minute you landed in Reno you’ve been acting like a hormonal teenager.”

Kim paced the sidewalk, wanting to tell him that maybe she’d like a little emotion from her almost fiancé. Yanno, a “Hey babe, how are you?” Or “I can’t wait to see you.” Or at the very least, acknowledge her importance by not saying his last name when he answered the phone!

“Maybe, Nicholas, I’m having a bit of a midlife crisis up here. Did it ever occur to you that I might be a little bit more than a giant money generator? That I might just have a few feelings?”

“Okay,” he slowly said.

“Forget it. Look, this town is on the fringe of self-imploding. Tourists are leaving in droves, and the townsfolk are sick of worrying about money. Later today there is an open town hall meeting. The council is going to discuss a course of action to save freakin’ Christmas!”

“Sounds to me like Christmas is going to be a thing of the past for them.”

“Yeah, no shit. Give them a few more days of this crime wave and they’ll be paying us to take their property off their hands.”

“How do you explain what’s happening? I thought crime was nil there.”

Kim took a deep breath and slowed her headlong descent into running away from Evergreen and the people in it. “I wanted to talk to you about that, Nick. It seems too coincidental, this so-called crime wave.”

“What are you implying?”

“I’m implying that if there is any behind-the-scenes nudging going on, it had better stop before someone gets hurt.”

“I’m getting a little offended here, Kimberly.”

“Good. Let’s keep everything honest and win the old-fashioned way, by outmaneuvering our opponent.”

The silence was so pronounced that she thought they had lost their connection. “Nick?”

“Look,” he started, “what is done is done and it’s worked out to our benefit. What we need is the name of the consortium. Do you have it?”

Now it was her turn to pause. That little voice she always listened to scratched madly at her belly. “I think I have an idea.”

“Do you have a name?”

“A consortium out of Lodi. I’m working on it.”

She could hear Nick tapping his pen on the edge of his inlaid mahogany desk, which he had had hand-crafted by a Venetian artist. He only did that when he was perturbed. “Time is money, Kimberly.”

She sighed and looked back toward Leti’s house. Enrique stood at the unbroken window, next to the one that was boarded up, his dark gaze locked on her. “I know. I know.”

Kim hung up and turned back toward the center of town. Her body stiffened more. Ricco was walking straight toward her. She turned and crossed the street, then walked toward him on the other side. She’d grab a bite to eat at the teahouse, then come back for the shoot, and hopefully after that be a fly on the wall at the town hall meeting.

By the time she got to the teahouse, there was a flurry of chatter about the crime spree in Evergreen. Kim felt bad for Maddy; it was obvious she didn’t want to hear about it. Talking about it kept it alive.

“Are y’all going to come down to the ice rink tonight for the skate with Santa-thon?” she asked a group of ladies sitting by the front door, their hands tightly grasped around their purses. Kim couldn’t help a smile. It wasn’t like lightning would strike twice.

“I don’t know how to ice-skate,” one of them said.

Maddy grinned and said, “Well, sugarplum, that’s the beauty of it. We have some really hunky Santas and you
want
them to hold you close and teach you a few moves.” She winked and looked at Kim, then said, “Just ask her about how hunky our Santas are. She has firsthand knowledge.”

Kim felt the heat rise in her cheeks, and just as she was going to agree, the bell to the shop tinkled and all eyes turned to see who was coming through the door. A collective gasp rose from every woman in the small shop. A tall man dressed in casual clothes with a ski mask pulled over his face entered, wagging a semiautomatic pistol in front of him.

“Good morning, ladies. Don’t make a scene, or my buddy outside will have to come in and help me shut you up.”

All eyes darted to the lone man standing guard at the door, casually sipping a cup of coffee. He was dressed like the man inside—tourist casual—except the man out front didn’t have his ski mask pulled down, covering his face. But all Kim could see was the back of his dark head.

“Give me your wallets and your jewelry. Do it now, do it quick, and do it quiet.”

Just as Kim handed over the cash in her pocket, the masked man shook his head. He pointed the barrel of his gun at her throat. “Necklace goes too.”

She grasped it. “No!” He grabbed her hand and yanked it from her neck. Kim seethed; she didn’t fight for her locket only because she didn’t want to get anyone hurt. As the bad guy made his last sweep, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Ricco walking toward the shop. Her heart rate accelerated. She wanted him to come in and save the day, but she was also afraid for him. Holding her breath, she watched him glance at the guy out front, then into the shop. Then he kept going. And she knew then that he knew.

The guy out front poked his head in and locked eyes with Kim. She, along with every other woman in the place, had a picture-perfect look at his face. Caucasian male, midtwenties, brown hair, brown eyes, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times. When his thin lips pulled back from his teeth, she noticed that his bottom front teeth were chipped. “We just got made,” he said in a flat, unaccented voice.

In a twinkle they were gone, and just as fast Ricco was after them.

Kim ran to the edge of the boardwalk and watched the two men split. Ricco went after the guy with the gun. When he turned and started shooting, she screamed. Ricco, along with every other person in proximity, hit the ground. But what Ricco did next amazed her. On his belly, he returned fire! When had he started carrying a gun? To her horror and amazement, the thug went down with a thud, just like the reindeer had the day before. Her body began to shake uncontrollably; suddenly the stakes had gone too high. Something insidious had taken over this sleepy little town, and it was now just a matter of time before one of its residents was seriously injured or killed. Tentatively Kim ventured off the boardwalk, not knowing what to do. But she did what her gut told her, and that was to go to Ricco. He was kneeling down beside the bad guy, feeling for a pulse. But she knew the minute she looked at the hardening, muddy eyes that he was dead.

“Are you all right?” she softly asked Ricco.

He looked up at her and squinted against the glare of the morning sun. “I’m fine. Did he hurt you or anyone else in there?”

She shook her head. “No, he just took our wallets and jewelry.” She pointed to the satchel a few yards from where the body lay. Several wallets and pieces of jewelry littered the ground near it.

“Okay. I want you to go back to the shop and wait for Jeff and Peyton. You don’t need to see this.” His voice was deep and unusually calm. Kim knelt down next to him and looked into his face to find not a man who had a problem with what he did but a man attending to his business. But how did you kill someone—even a bad guy—and not have it affect you?

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Ricco smiled. “I’ve been down this road before. I have no problem going to bed after a righteous shoot.”

She stood and looked down at the dead man again. “Okay, but if you need anything…”

“I’ll be fine. Now go tell the guys what happened.”

Carefully, as if she’d been barefoot and treading on broken glass, Kim made her way back to the gathered crowd. Assumptions, recantations, and speculation abounded, but one common thread was clear. The tourists were done with Christmas in Evergreen. And Kim couldn’t blame them. She wanted to leave too. And she would have, except…her gaze roamed across the crime scene to the tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed man who stared back. Except for him.

Several hours later, after the body was put in the coroner’s van and everyone was questioned, Kim waited for Ricco. The sun had begun its set in the western sky. While life had seemed to stand still for Kim those few hours, it had not for Esmeralda. Her world had darkened. Right after the shooting,
Town & Country
had pulled up stakes and left town. Kim was now Esmeralda’s only guest, and the town’s seasonal population was reduced to a small percentage of what it had only been three days before. The town hall meeting was scheduled for eight that night. It had been scheduled for that time so the merchants could keep their doors open for every sale, then meet when they closed for the night. But Evergreen was now a ghost town. It didn’t matter.

Kimberly felt an incredible sense of loss for these people. As she walked with Leticia and her daughters, she felt as if she’d been walking to the gallows. As she entered the courtroom in city hall, she watched as the townsfolk filed in. She saw resignation, anger, and pure depression scribbled across the many faces.

As she sat down, her cell phone vibrated. She looked at the number. Nick. Quickly she answered and excused herself from the room.

“Hey, they’re just getting the meeting started,” Kim said out of earshot of any lingering townsfolk.

“I just made another offer. The Tomlinsons will have it. Make sure when those folks bust a vein you convince them that in your business experience it’s their best recourse.”

Kim’s mouth went dry. “I thought we agreed no more backroom offers?”

Nick laughed. “Baby, you are losing your objectivity.”

She set her jaw. “What’s the offer?”

Nick laughed, the sound diabolic. She could just see him rubbing his hands together, then twisting his Snidely Whiplash mustache as he gloated over his good fortune and their loss. “Forty cents on the dollar.”

“Nick! That’s unethical!”

“Unethical? Are you kidding me? What the hell, Kimberly? Last week you would have been giving me gold stars for the maneuver, now you tell me I’m unethical?”

She shook her head. “I’ve gotten to know these people. It’s their lives.”

“Well, their lives just went on sale. And I’m buying.”

“I know, but—”

“No buts. Are you in this with me or not?”

She shook her head, not wanting to continue. She wanted out, she wanted to pack up and drive fast and far. But if she did, what was the alternative? Failure? To miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime? “I’m in,” she slowly said.

“Good girl. Now, I want details when it’s over.”

She hung up. And looked up to see Ricco standing in the doorway, staring at her. She couldn’t meet his gaze. Instead she moved past him and into the courtroom. The debate was hot and heated. “It’s easy for you to say sit it out, Leticia, you have equity. You haven’t mortgaged your house,” challenged Ben, the owner of Santa’s Workshop.

“It’s been six years since this town has been in the black. My loan is due the end of the year. I can’t pay it,” a merchant said.

“Even if I could,” another person said, “it would clean me out for next year. I can barely pay my utility bills as it is. And forget about my taxes.”

Leticia put her hands up and called for quiet. “Please, please, I hear what everyone is saying. We’re all in this together. Let’s find a way to pool our resources to help our neighbors.”

“So we all go down?”

“No, so we can all stay afloat.”

“For how long? Did you see the line out of this place today?”

“Ricco, Jeff, what the hell?”

Ricco stepped forward. “I have information that might change your minds. It appears the thug who I killed, Joseph Watters, was a gun for hire out of L.A. The tags on the Suburban that used the pedestrians as target practice the other day were found ditched in Sparks. Watters’s fingerprints were all over it. The purse snatcher, out of L.A.”

“What’s the L.A. connection?” Cal asked.

“Where is Land’s Edge out of?” Ricco countered.

“L.A.,” Kim whispered. Cold infiltrated her bones, and her breath wheezed out of her chest.

And it all made perfect sense to her. Nick had lied to her! And, by association, she was an accomplice! Her shock quickly subsided as anger took hold of her. She hadn’t signed up for terrorism tactics. Not wanting to call attention to herself, Kim took a deep breath and steadied her shaking hands.

The crowd became a swarming mass of fury. And despite her efforts to keep calm, Kim felt her blood pressure rise as well.

“How do we prove it?” Jasmine demanded.

Ricco shrugged. “It’s speculation right now. If the purse snatcher talks, which seems unlikely, since he’s lawyered up and has a shark of an attorney, we don’t have much to go on unless we strike a deal.” He glanced at Kim. “Have you heard of this company in your business dealings?”

She swallowed hard and nodded. “They play hardball.”

“No-rules hardball?”

“No-rules hardball.” All seemed lost for the tiny Christmas town. She was about to recommend that the town capitulate when she looked up into Ricco’s dark eyes. Then she looked around the room, at his family and the townsfolk, and something deep inside her shifted. There was the right way to dismantle a property for acquisition and there was the wrong way, and what Nick was doing was wrong. “What’s the current offer on the table?” she asked instead.