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 leave--even 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 barren house and the old guy would trot off to them. No luck.
)
What's a cop to do on Christmas Eve when a man in a red suit and white beard claims he's being threatened?
