The Kid Who Stole Christmas (25 page)

He permitted himself one small return hug, then squirmed to be set free. “Gee, Shannon. Not in front of the guys.”

“Oops. Sorry.” She ruffled his fine blond hair and let him go. He promptly smoothed it. “Are you okay?”

“Sure,” he exclaimed. “We came to rescue you, didn’t we, guys?” He strutted proudly over to where Irv and Joey were standing near the couch. “And now, we can go save the Arnies.”

Rick was eyeing the two men warily. “How about a little briefing first? We’re not up to speed on this situation.”

Joey looked at him appreciatively. “Hey. That’s good. I like this guy, Irv,” he told him.

Irv nodded. “Me, too. Who is he?”

“This is Rick, you goof,” Joey replied, punching Irv on the arm. “You remember. Angela’s ex-husband. We saw him a couple of days ago at Lyon’s.”

“Right.” But Irv seemed puzzled. “I thought we didn’t like him then.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like him. I said I didn’t like it that he was there. But now, Pop says...” Joey trailed off with a sigh of exasperation. “Skip it. Just take my word for it. He’s cool, okay?”

“Okay.”

Rick was shaking his head. “Do I know you two?”

“We’ve never met,” Joey replied. “But we, uh, sort of kept an eye on you for Nathan a few times. Back when you were still in Phoenix. No offense.” He held out his hand. “I’m Joey, and this is my brother, Irv.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Rick said, shaking both their hands. “At least I think I am. Do you still work for Nathan?”

Joey laughed. “No, that arrangement has officially been terminated, I believe. I guess you could say we work for Pop now. In a way, we have for quite some time.” He shrugged. “It’s a long story, and we’re supposed to get you back to Denver to see Pop pronto. He’ll explain it all.”

Shannon was still smiling, for Leo’s sake, but there was no mistaking the anger in her voice. “Somebody better! Because if I don’t get an explanation soon, I will personally pluck out all of your eyebrows hair by hair until I do!”

Irv winced. “Ouch. I guess it’s true.”

“What’s that, Irv?” Joey asked patiently.

“Redheads really do have bad tempers.”

* * *

N
ATHAN CONFRONTED
his wayward wife the moment she came through the door. “Stop right there, Angela. I want the Lyon boy, a truckful of Arnies and that cheating little weasel of a driver. If you don’t have at least one of those, you might as well just march your cute rear end back out into the cold and get them for me.”

Angela scowled at him. “What on earth are you talking about, Nathan?” She sniffed the air. “You’ve been drinking. So help me, if Todd and Chelsea see you like this—”

“Shut up! They’re with the nanny.”

There was such vehemence in his voice that Angela took a step backward. “Nathan! What’s gotten into you?”

“Some sense,” he replied. “At last.”

“If you say so.” She edged past him toward the living room, looking for a suitable weapon to use in case this got out of hand. The fireplace poker would do. When she was close to it, she continued. “But to me it sounds as if you’ve taken leave of your senses. I don’t have the boy.”

“Then who does?”

She shrugged delicately. “I’m sure I don’t know. But I think that by now it’s a foregone conclusion that your longtime henchmen, Joey and Irv, have sold you out.”

Nathan muttered several choice epithets under his breath. “And how about you, Angela?” he asked in a sullen, threatening tone. “Did you sell me out, too?”

“Now, what possible reason would I have to do that, dear?”

“Emilio.”

Her eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

“You’re having an affair with him, aren’t you?”

“Me? With Emilio?” Angela managed a convincing laugh. “You must be joking, my love. He’s gay.”

“It certainly sounded as if he liked women well enough when I called you this afternoon at the lodge.”

Angela’s eyes narrowed, and she stepped closer to him, thoughts of bashing him on the head temporarily forgotten. “Now you’ve really lost me. I haven’t spoken with you since last night, Nathan. In fact, I believe I left the phone off the hook up there. Your constant whining was driving me quite insane and I needed a break.”

Nathan seemed confused. “Then who did all the moaning?”

“I have no idea. But it wasn’t me. Obviously, someone is toying with us.” She went to their wet bar and poured herself a stiff drink. “What Emilio and I were doing this afternoon was taking care of business. He had hired one of those sleazy sources of his to keep an eye on Rick. It paid off, eventually, and we found the Arnies in a warehouse near downtown.”

“You took them?” Nathan asked, suddenly alert.

“Yes. For all the good it did us,” she replied with disgust. “They were fakes. Of course, we didn’t find that out until we tried to sell them to another of Emilio’s contacts, this one a pipeline to the black market. He was not pleased.”

“What?” Nathan cried. “Who authorized—”

“I did,” Angela interrupted. “Did you honestly think I would allow you to jeopardize our position by selling this particular load of stolen merchandise at Bayer’s? I’m sure that’s just what Rick had in mind for us all along.”

Nathan shook his head as if to clear it. Obviously, she had been more on top of this operation than he’d thought. But that wasn’t what troubled him. “What’s all this about Rick? What’s his connection?”

“I don’t know. But it’s a solid one.” She sipped her drink and smiled. It was a particularly evil smile. “And that, jealous husband, is our ace in the hole. He has real Arnies around, I’m sure, or can get them. And when he does, we’ll take them for ourselves—or better yet, his profits.”

“How?”

“The same way we got everything else he ever owned, my darling,” she told him sweetly. “Blackmail.”

Nathan came closer to her, breathing in her perfume. “I’m sorry for flying off the handle like that. But the thought of you and that little...I mean, you’re enough woman to make any man change his affiliation, you know.”

She patted his cheek. “Honestly, Nathan, you’re such a Neanderthal sometimes. It just doesn’t work that way,” she told him. “Besides, if I were having an affair with the man, would I have left him stranded with a truckful of stolen merchandise, at the mercy of a very irritated hood?”

Chapter Twenty-One

W
hatever else Joey was, he could certainly drive well. Of course, having a fancy vehicle with a snowplow blade didn’t hurt. The two combined to get what Leo was now calling the spider brigade to downtown Denver in record time, in spite of several inches of snow left behind by the dwindling storm.

Still, by then, it was after eleven, and Leo himself was down for the count. Paul unlocked the doors to let them into the store and they put him on the couch in Pop’s outer office without so much as a peep out of him. Then they all trouped in to see Pop, with a very determined Shannon in the lead.

“You owe me an explanation,” she told him without any preamble. “And it had better be good.”

He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Not much to explain, really, Shannon. It was actually more of a sequence of events that took on a life of their own.”

“Then perhaps you’d better start at the beginning.”

She sat down on the old leather sofa. Rick sat beside her, while Joey and Irv settled for chairs near Pop’s desk. Irv looked decidedly worried.

“She’s going to pull out all our eyebrows if you don’t, Pop,” he told him. “And she’ll do it, too.”

Pop smiled at him. “Yes, Irv, I believe she would. But I think we can forestall that unhappy probability by simply being honest with her.” He then gazed directly at Rick. “All of us. Don’t you agree...Mr. Bonner?”

Rick paled slightly. He didn’t have to look at Shannon to know that her eyes were focused on him now, too. So he nodded his head in agreement. “I think that’s wise.”

“Good.” Pop wheeled himself to a position where he could see the four of them comfortably. “First, it would be helpful for you to know that Joey’s given name is Joseph, after his father, the late Joe Bayer.”

“I didn’t know Nathan had a brother!” Shannon exclaimed.

“Neither does Nathan,” Joey replied. “Daddy dearest was quite a ladies’ man, you see. I’m Nathan’s half brother, the result of an affair Joe had with my mother. He saw to it that she was taken care of, and later hired me to do odd jobs, but never acknowledged my link to the Bayer family. Or the Bayer family fortune, naturally.”

“Irv, by the way, is the product of another union,” Pop interjected. “And that’s about as much honesty as is needed in his case.”

Joey shrugged. “What can I say? Mom got around, too.”

“Joey brought me up,” Irv said. “Didn’t you, Joey?”

“Yeah, Irv.” He grinned and punched him playfully on the arm. “But don’t hold it against me, huh?”

“Nah.”

“I think I’m getting the picture here,” Shannon said. “I assume there is no love lost between you and Nathan, Joey?”

“Correct. He’s done okay with the business, I’ll say that for him. But only because he is, in most other ways, a slime. I am ashamed to say that I have done some things in his employ of which I am not proud.”

Rick was nodding. “Like follow me during the divorce?”

“Exactly,” Joey agreed. “I have to tell you, though. I was pulling for you. That Angela is a real...” He trailed off with a glance at Shannon. “Well, I guess we all know what she is, don’t we? If you ask me, you were justified in popping her one.”

“But I didn’t hit her,” Rick vowed.

“Then who did?” Joey asked.

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be sitting here now.” He frowned at the thought, and put his hand on Shannon’s knee. “Which makes it all worth it, I suppose.”

Shannon took his hand in hers, lifted it and dropped it in his own lap. “Speak for yourself, Mr. Bonner.”

“That’s just an alias,” Rick assured her. “One I took on to hide my business dealings from the Bayers.” He glared at Pop. “And mentioning it now is just a ploy designed to divert your attention from the real culprit here.”

Pop held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m only interested in bringing out the truth, Rick.”

“Then get on with it.”

“Yes,” Shannon agreed. “Please do.”

“Very well,” Pop said. “As you may or may not know, at one time, that old coot Joe Bayer took a run at my wife, as the current phrasing goes. She repelled his advances, thank heaven, because he repelled her. From that day forward, I made it my business to know who he was seeing, with the intention of blackmailing him at some point.”

Shannon was flabbergasted. “Pop!”

“Sorry, but this is the honesty hour, after all,” he told her. “And anyway, my sordid plans came to naught. He was a cagey man. I didn’t learn he had sired a son out of wedlock until it was too late. He died before I could put the information to good use.” Pop rapped his cane sharply on the floor. “Damn his eyes!”

Shannon didn’t know why she should be so surprised. The rivalry between the two men was legendary. “But you did get in touch with Joey, I assume.”

“Actually, I got in touch with Pop,” Joey said. “For all his faults, at least my father admitted that I was his son and treated me as fairly as he could. After he died and Nathan took over, I just became the trashman, cleaning up after his messes. He also pays lousy. Knowing that I was in the position to help Lyon’s from time to time, I offered my services to Pop.” He grinned. “For a fee, natch.”

Pop nodded. “It has been an equitable arrangement over the years. Since I was privy to Nathan’s dirty deals, I was able to steer Lyon’s on a safe path. Of course, that allowed him to become a very wealthy man, while I simply got by—”

“Pop,” Shannon interrupted. “Honesty, remember?”

He cleared his throat. “All right. I became a wealthy man, too. But you know what I mean.”

“Yes. You’ve done very well by all of us at Lyon’s, and we appreciate it.”

“You’re my family,” he explained simply.

“Was this kidnapping and plan to take over the Arnies one of those things Joey told you about?” Rick asked.

“It was. And I told you.” Pop smiled. “Or rather, your company, Mr. Bonner. Anonymously, of course.”

Rick chuckled and shook his head. The old man had been arranging this for a long time. “So you’re the one. We had other hints that something was going on. Odd little inquiries, that sort of stuff. But it was the anonymous tip that made it clear who was doing the asking, and I came running.”

“As I knew you would. Or rather, I knew someone would come. I didn’t know you from Adam when Shannon introduced you to me. And you did give me pause, with your bluster and bold assurances that you would find Leo. I realized then that you could ruin everything.” His smile grew broader. “But I also saw your potential, and that made it worth the risk.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I had more than one intention when I took over the kidnapping, so to speak,” Pop informed him. He turned his dancing eyes to Shannon. “First and foremost, I intended to make Nathan look like a fool. Second, I knew the publicity might garner Lyon’s some sympathy points.”

“
You
leaked the story to the paper!” Shannon cried.

“I did.”

“All that complaining and those dramatics over the ruthless media.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You missed your calling, Pop. You should have been an actor.”

“Precisely what a good salesman is, my dear. I sold you on the veracity of the kidnapping, too. Because that was necessary to achieve my third objective.”

“Which was?”

“I am not a young man, obviously. Leo is going to need a guardian, and the closest living family member is his great-aunt Alice, whom he despises. You were always a candidate, but I worried about your ability to handle a crisis.”

She sighed. “Because of the way I completely collapsed when I lost my daughter?” she asked sadly.

“Yes. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but the truth of the matter is, terrible things can happen to any one of us at any given time. It is a fact of life we must learn to cope with, and I am happy to see that your unfortunate experience taught you well. You steeled your nerve and went after Leo with a vengeance. But that alone is not enough.”