"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Nutball Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Nutball Season
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch


In my business, nutball season starts on Halloween, and goes to about Christmas. Oh, you get your
occasional Friday-the-Thirteenth run on the precinct, and you gotta pray you get every full moon off, but
the real serious wackos don't seem to surface until about the last week in October, and they don't
disappear until New Year's Day. What they do the rest of the year, I haven't the slightest. But up until
then, they're harassing me and mine, or folks just like us all over the country.

Every year, I got my favorite nut story. But last year's I don't talk about much. Because I ain't sure
exactly who the nut is, me or the geezer what started it all.

You see, he walked into the stationhouse a shade before midnight on December twenty-third, wearing a
red Santa suit and looking pasty and tired, that kinda tired we all get when we pull too many shifts in a
row. The house was empty that night. The desk sarge was handling some crisis, the dispatch was doing
his nails, for godssake, and most everyone else was either at their own homes or doing their beats.

Me, I was at my desk. I'd stopped in the precinct after a collar to finish up some paperwork before going
home to macaroni, cheese, and tuna, my specialty. Not that I minded. It was better than Cindy Lou's
meatloaf surprise, which I missed even less than I missed her. So I wasn't really in a hurry to leaveтАФeven
though soaking up the camaraderie of the stationhouse at that time of night was kinda like trying to sleep
in a rooms-by-the-hour motel.

The old guy came in as I was typing the last part of my report. He sat down in the metal chair before my
desk, leaned over the files like he owned the place, and said, "Excuse me."

I held up my hand, signaling he should wait until I was finished, hoping someone else would come into the
house and the old guy would trot off to them. No luck.

"Excuse me," he said again. "Where do I go to file a complaint?"

I knew I wasn't gonna get rid of him as easy as I wanted, so I said, "A complaint about what?"

"Mrs. Billings. She plans to shoot me if I land on her roof tomorrow night."

Now to understand that sentence, you had to know that the next night was Christmas Eve. And since it
was Christmas Eve, and he was an elderly guy with a long white beard dressed all in red, it was pretty
clear who he was gonna impersonate.

At least, that was how I thought of it at that moment. But I wasn't being quick on the uptake. I didn't
think about the implications of asking this guy a question. Which I did.

"Does this Mrs. Billings have a child?"

"Well, of course," the old guy said in his precise way, and I realized then and there that I should have
kept my mouth shut because I was buying into his fantasy.

Of course, my mouth hadn't stayed shut, and now I was in deep, and I tried to fix it, I really did. I told
him, you know, that maybe he could wait a day or stay off the roof or just plain get outta town.