Killing off the Ho,Ho,Ho's

I saw none of this.

Or rather I saw it but I was far too focused on the fact I had a two inch wide, five-inch-long knife embedded hilt-deep in my right lung. Falling to the floor, I lay there looking across the few feet separating us, into his eyes. We each were trying for the same breaths of air.

I couldn't help but pull that burning piece of metal from my skin. Probably not the smartest thing since I started to bleed like a stuck pig. Somehow I kept myself awake till I saw Craig pass out from lack of breath. I was feeling the heavy thump of police shoes on the floor boards, vibrating my ear.

Or perhaps that was my own heartbeat.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

I awoke in a hospital bed. The ceiling above wasn't familiar, so this wasn't one of the couple of dozen rooms I've been in before. Those ceiling's I know with intimate levels of detail.

Leia was standing beside me. My lovely Princess.

I've never been able to tell her just how beautiful she is to me. She has known me when I was a half-dead drunk trying to kill his own brain with bottle after bottle Everclear. She had seen me at my worst, my best and everything in between. And she had never flinched from me, no matter how grizzly or how bad the madness that is my life became. Every moment of that time is forever flawless crystal in my memories and that alone keeps me going from day to day. But how can you huddle at the feet of a Goddess, a crawling worm even among your fellow worms, and tell her you think she is beautiful? If she hears that praise and humbles herself enough to respond, wouldn't her words sear that pitiful lost worm-like the summer sun on asphalt?

"John?"

"Yeah lovely?"

"You still owe me an apology, dinner, a gift, and an orgasm." Her hand slipped under the blanket covering me, to my bare leg, up under the hospital gown, and she gripped me in too tight a hand. "And I will not take possibly mortal wounds as a viable excuse for not making my toes curl."

She leaned in and kissed me. A long passionate kiss.

Then she was gone, leaving me to pant painful breaths and look at the new ceiling above me.

Nurses came and went, the vampiric feeding of a secret race that hide among us, wearing their perky colored scrubs. I wasn't awake for the surgeon's visit, but then I wasn't looking for a conversation with someone that cuts open people for a living. I've had too many of those talks in my life, mostly with hit men true, but the occasional scalpel welders as well.

I wasn't under arrest.

But I also wasn't here under my own name or under the name the Witness protection guys set up for me. My chart said, Ernest Bernstein. And, according to it, the cause of my injury it says I fell putting up Christmas lights. A Jewish guy hurt putting up Christmas lights? Remind me to find and slap whichever person has that particular sense of humor.

The morning of my release, I awoke to a pot of flowers on the table beside my bed. Christmas Rose ... black hellebore, or to be more specific Helleborus niger niger.

Sitting up, I looked at the poisonous plant from southern Germany, knowing the meaning of it. The many and various meanings.

Getting up, I let my ass show to the world as I went to the closet and retrieved my phone from my pants I dialed the number of my Goddess.

"Leia. The German is here in town. Go to ground."

"John?"

I hung up on her. It becomes habit forming.

Standing by the hospital window, holding my forgotten phone, I watched the fireworks of New Year's exploding over my city. I knew that out there somewhere, under those bright flowers of gunpowder, was my worst enemy. A man with abilities similar to my own, but who took delight in causing pain. And I knew ... knew with all my black little heart.

"It's going to be a hell of a New Year."

** ** ** ** ** ** **

"And that kids is how the great detective, John Taline, saved Christmas and the Ho, Ho, Ho's from Santa."

"Ah! Uncle James, tell us about the German!'

The cluster of related to me kids gathered around me all voiced their agreement with my oldest nephew. I smiled, shook my head, and was about to answer when one of the ladies in the kitchen called out.

"Dinner."

Not even the great and powerful detective Taline could hold the attention of kids when there were tables full of food waiting. They sprang away to the dining room. Ready to be served way too much food on plastic plates at a cluster of small card tables. Red solo cups of Kool-Aid were being filled before they even arrived.

"James."

I turned to see my second cousin looming over me. She was a fierce woman with all of our grandmother's features just none of the decades of time to polish them smooth and matching.

"I don't think you need to be telling children that age such stories. They don't need to hear about murdered hookers, killers, and guns."

"I figured after the presidential election, all that would be well known to them."

She rolled her eyes and stalked off to the dining room filling up quickly with people.

Ignoring that press of hunger driven Humanity, second only to Black Friday in madness, I walked to the window to look out at the falling snow. My mind was filled with the story I had been reading to the kids. The darkness and snow was not comforting, or Christmassy. It hid gunmen behind every tree and crazed killers under the snow covered shrubs.

"James. Come on, dinner's getting cold."

For a moment more I ignored the mundanity of Christmas dinner for the darker side of the street. The places where a detective could earn a living and where a reflection in a window, seen in a crime scene photo, had told John Taline exactly who killed a hooker named Candy Samples. My eyes met my own pale reflection, and for a moment I wished it was me that owed the sexy Medical Examiner Leia Morgain a toe-curling orgasm.

"James!"

Time to carve the turkey.