40. Brian

FORTY

brian

“Motherfucker!” I shout, causing gasps from several mothers and one disgruntled dad.

The boy that was sitting on my lap starts to cry, and Mina quickly removes him and takes him back to his mother.

“He peed on me!” I hiss, when she returns.

Mina stifles a laugh.

Wait, I should probably back up and set this scene properly. Finding a way directly in to Dante’s organization to do proper recon has proven to be impossible. I overestimated my ability to get close enough to him to get what I need to plan a proper hit.

The chance encounter that officially put him on my kill list wasn’t something easily repeated. I imagine there are a lot of people besides me who want Dante dead, and he’s determined not to make it easy.

Almost every target has some sort of weak spot, or a way to take a job doing some menial task with the real intent to get close enough to take him out. But Dante is far too paranoid for that. He runs the kind of background checks on household staff that you would expect to see in a highly classified government job. And he knows my face.

If he hired through an agency and didn’t pay attention—like most of these arrogant assholes do—I’d be in and out with another notch on my gun belt in an afternoon. But no, there’s no escaping Valentino’s hard scrutiny and endless layers and levels of security protection.

I wish I had access to Drake Windsor’s inside guy, but with Windsor gone, so is the mole. And even if I could get to him, he probably wouldn’t know anything. I’m sure he wouldn’t have information about weeks worth of Dante’s schedule. That’s the kind of convenient set-up you only see in a movie.

So, Mina and I decided to try a back door. One of Valentino’s close friends owns a department store and keeps a private office on site. We somehow thought the best opportunity to look into this guy’s computer files would be if I were playing Santa for the holidays. Correction, Mina thought this. I think she just has a weird Santa kink.

This is like every bad holiday movie rolled into one, and it’s a testament to how hard Dante is to get to that I’ve resorted to this slapstick comedy solution.

I hate this Santa suit, and the beard is itchy. If I break out in a rash I’m going to torture the motherfucker slowly before I kill him. Assuming I’m ever able to get the man in a room alone.

“Santa’s going to take a little break, kids,” Mina says, putting up a gold glitter sign.

Somehow despite my shouted expletive, these kids are still eager to tell me what they want for Christmas. They all groan in disappointment.

“We’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” My little elf says brightly.

She doesn’t look like the classic Santa helper elf. Instead of pointy ears and hat and red and green, she’s wearing gold and white and doesn’t have a hat at all—pointy or otherwise. She looks more like a fairy, but it was what they had in the costume closet. I don’t even want to think about who else has worn these costumes before us and how much or little they’ve been washed in between.

“You can take a quick shower and go change into a new Santa suit.” She says. She leans down when she whispers these words, and I get lost in the view of her cleavage for several long seconds.

We’ve been at this for five days now, and I haven’t had an opportunity to get into the office. I’m sure with him being so close to Dante that there will be some informational trail I can follow to find out Valentino’s schedule and how Mina and I can coincidentally be in his path long enough for me to politely murder him.

“We should call this a bust and try a new strategy. I would so rather be Krampus right now,” I say.

She presses a kiss to my forehead and the kids make “ooooooh” noises. And I’m sure they’ll break out into the “Kissing in a tree” chant at any moment.

But I go.

I dutifully go back, take a quick shower, and change into a new Santa suit. The fact that there are so many Santa suits makes me wonder how many kids pee or puke on the Jolly Old Elf in any given holiday season. I don’t want to find out.

When I return, I don’t see Mina, but I sit in the big Santa chair anyway. It looks more like a candy throne. How the fuck did I get here? Where in my life did I go wrong?

A kid wanders up to me without Mina’s guidance, and I startle when I realize it’s Aidan. I work to school my features even though he can’t see them behind the white beard. I look back in the crowd to find none other than Uncle Martin has brought him down to see Santa. I haven’t had time to check in on the kid since Halloween. It makes me uncomfortable to realize this. Something could have happened to him, and I don’t want to think about why I even care about that.

I should just let fate decide what happens to him and disengage from this unhealthy obsession I’ve developed.

He sits on my lap and tugs at my beard, clearly not a true believer. He is six after all. And given what he’s been through in his short little life it’s a miracle he just has mild skepticism.

“Ho, Ho, Ho,” I say in a deep voice, paranoid this kid is going to remember me from the night I killed his dad. “And what do you want for Christmas, Aidan?”

I don’t know what just came over me. It’s dangerous to use this kid’s name, but the way his eyes widen as he moves firmly back into the Santa is Real I just knew it! camp, makes it worth the risk.

“I want my mommy and daddy back,” he says quietly.

And if I had a heart, it would break right now. This kid.

“I’m afraid Santa isn’t in the business of miracles, kid. How about a new video game system?”

He looks disappointed but not surprised that I can’t magically bring his parents back from the dead. “What about that angel? Can I have her?”

“What angel?”

Aidan points, and I follow his line of sight to Mina at the other end of the store. I suspect she saw the kid and vacated the area for fear he’d recognize her. Too late. She’s standing under a spotlight in the lingerie department, and she really does look like an angel right now.

I have no idea what to say to this kid in response to his request. I mean, how would I even fit her under the tree? It takes everything in me not to petulantly state that No, she’s my angel and Aidan can’t have her.

“She protected me from the bad man a long time ago,” he states very seriously.

Oh to live in an age of innocence where five months is “a long time ago.” And I realize with sinking clarity, that I’m the bad man this angel protected him from. His memories are confused and muddled. After so much change and grief and trauma, he’s misremembering that night. He’s somehow conveniently forgotten Mina was shooting people, too. Or maybe he just never saw her until she was helping him. Maybe he was too focused on me and my carnage to notice her tiny ball of fury.

I imagine it would have made the night much less scary to think of her as an angel and not one of the bad guys, so he at least had one person on his side.

“I’m afraid I need her at my workshop so all the boys and girls get their presents in time. Can I get you something else?” I ask, sounding like I’m a Holiday waiter. “Isn’t there anything else you’d like, something you haven’t asked your Uncle for?”

Now I’m treading on very dangerous ice because there is every possibility that Aidan will excitedly tell his Uncle all about how much I seem to know about him. And for that reason, I’m retiring as Santa Claus just as soon as this kid is off my lap. We’ll just have to find another way to our target—it’s not like this was a winning strategy anyway.

He thinks for a few minutes, and some other kid that’s way too old to be visiting Santa tells Aidan to hurry up. I glare at the kid in question, and he backs down.

“Well,” Aidan says, “There is this one thing.”

He goes on to describe to me a sort of magnetic dinosaur building kit.

“I’ll see what I can do.” I’m about to disengage and send him on his way when he looks up at me, his face turning very serious once again.

“I know you can’t bring my parents back, but you’re magic, right? You fly through the sky with reindeer, so can you tell them something for me?”

“Sure, Kid.” I can’t deny his request twice. And anyway, he’s not going to know I don’t have direct access to his parents or that I never delivered his message to the great beyond.

“Tell them I’m going to be okay, and they don’t have to worry, and I hope they are doing okay, too.”

I nod, not trusting my voice. He gets off my lap and inexplicably gives me a high five, then runs off back to his uncle. I have to say, he’s coping remarkably well for only five months out from losing his dad. I expected we’d be in a much worse place right now. But then maybe it hasn’t fully hit him yet. He’s had a lot of changes the past few months.

With his aunt, he was just trying to avoid her rage. And then he got to move in with his favorite uncle, and the holiday season started. I’m betting he’s just very distracted by all of it.

We haven’t even begun to see the long term effects. I’m sure of that. It’s not that I want him to turn into a criminal. No, that’s not the truth. I do want him to turn into a criminal. I want to teach him everything I know someday.

But it’s a foolish and misplaced dream for a family that can never be. And men like me don’t get to have dreams like that. And the fact that I’d even want it is exactly the reason I’m not fit to be a father.