It Must Be Christmas Read online

  She nodded, and he disappeared down the row again as her heart pounded.

  He would be okay. Nobody killed over toys, even Major MacGuffins. They wouldn’t do anything to him. She was almost sure. She bit her lip and waited, and then her cell phone rang, and she grabbed it and answered it before it could ring again.

  “Don’t do that,” she whispered into the phone.

  “You didn’t call me,” Courtney said. “You’re fifteen minutes late.”

  “Yeah, well there are guys after us,” Trudy whispered.

  “What guys?” Courtney said. “What us?”

  “Nolan and me. Reese’s got a ring of toy thieves here—”

  “Toy thieves? What are you talking about?”

  “Call nine-one-one,” Trudy said, and then realized Courtney didn’t know where they were. “We’re—”

  Somebody took her cell phone out of her hand, and she screamed and turned.

  “Let’s talk,” Reese said, and shut off her phone.

  “I’m not giving you the Mac,” Trudy said, holding her bags behind her.

  Reese sighed. “Trudy, I don’t know what Nolan’s told you, but I’m positive it’s not the truth.”

  “He’s a cop.” Trudy took a step back. “And boy, are you in trouble.”

  “He’s a double agent for the Chinese government,” Reese said.

  Trudy tightened her grip on her bags. “Whoa. You’ve got a better imagination than he does. He said you were a toy thief.”

  Reese looked taken aback. “A toy thief? Who the hell steals toys?”

  “The Grinch,” Trudy said. “I don’t know. It sounded plausible when he said it. It still sounds plausible compared to the Chinese-double-agent bit.”

  “I am not a toy thief,” Reese said.

  “But you don’t have a nephew, either. Because we’re in this warehouse and there are no Mac Twos, which means you had to get me here for some reason.”

  “The Chinese spy codes.” Reese nodded toward her bags. “They’re in that MacGuffin box. I’m with the CIA and I need them.”

  “Fat chance.” Trudy stepped back again. “I don’t care what alphabet you flash at me, you are not taking this Mac from me.”

  “Look on the box, Trudy,” Reese said patiently. “In the lower right-hand corner, there should be a black X.”

  “There isn’t,” Trudy said, holding the bag tighter.

  “It’s small,” Reese said. “Look for it.”

  Trudy hesitated, but he met her eyes without flinching. He’s telling the truth, she thought, and put her bags down. She took the Mac box out of the bag and stepped into the light to look at it.

  Sure enough, in the lower right-hand corner on the back was a small black X.

  “You put it there,” Trudy said, not wanting to believe Nolan was the bad guy.

  “When?” Reese said. “You haven’t let that box out of your hands since you got it.”

  “Oh, hell.” Trudy swallowed. “I need this doll, Reese.”

  “It’s okay,” Reese said. “I don’t need the doll. I just need the instruction sheet. That’s where the codes are. Deal?”

  Trudy bit her lip. Leroy didn’t need the instructions; he probably knew more about the toy by now than the designers did. Toy hijackers and Chinese double agents were both ridiculous; Leroy was real. “Okay.”

  Reese held out his hand for the box, and she tightened her grip.

  “Just the instructions.” She opened the lid and felt down the back of the box for the paper, but there was nothing there. “Damn.” She held the box into the pool of light cast by the fixture far above her and looked in. “It must have fallen under the doll.” She carefully pulled the doll out, still wired into the cardboard backing that showed explosions, and shook the box upside down.

  “Trudy,” Reese said, his voice grim.

  “I’m looking.” Trudy dropped the empty box to unwire the MacGuffin to see if the instructions had lodged behind it.

  Reese picked up the box and began to dissemble it, checking in all the folds. “It’s not here.”

  “It’s not here, either.” Trudy pulled the cardboard background away from the doll and handed it over, holding on to the Mac tightly. “And it was earlier.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Nolan checked—” She stopped, appalled.

  “Nolan opened the box and took out the instructions,” Reese said, sounding grim.

  “But he put them back, I saw him,” Trudy said. “He slipped them behind the cardboard and closed up the box.”

  “He palmed them, Trudy. He got the codes.”

  Trudy thought back. “He couldn’t have. I was watching him, right up to…”

  Reese looked at her patiently.

  “Right up to when you called to me in the checkout line,” Trudy said, clutching the Mac closer and feeling miserable. “I looked away to talk to you. Did you see him take them?”

  “No,” Reese said. “I was looking at you.”

  Trudy felt ill. “Can I have the box back? At least I can give the doll to Leroy for Christmas.” She bent, keeping the doll in one hand, and picked up the shopping bags with the cow and the Twinkletoes in them.

  “Look,” Reese said. “I need your help. Nolan’s a bad guy, and he’s somewhere in this warehouse with those codes, and he trusts you. You call to him, get him to come out to us, and we’ll take it from there.”

  Trudy stepped back. “You’ll hurt him.”

  Reese shook his head, moving closer. “You watch too many movies. Spies don’t hurt people, they just swap information. And that’s all we’re going to do. Take back the codes.” He smiled at her, his baby face reassuring. “Just call out for him, Trudy. He’ll come to you. He likes you. Then you can take the doll and go home, and you’ll have done a good thing for your country, too.” She hesitated and he said, “Of course, I’ll have to check the doll before you go to make sure there’s nothing else there.” He held out his hand for the MacGuffin.

  Of course you will, Trudy thought, and looked around him at the door. Could she shove him out of the way and get out?

  “Come on,” Reese said. “Who are you going to trust, me or the guy who lied to you and stole the instruction sheet?”

  Good question.

  She stuck the Mac under her arm, looped the two remaining shopping bags over her wrist, and opened her purse.

  “Trudy?” Reese said.

  “I’m gonna go with the guy who lied,” Trudy said, and Maced him.

  * * *

  Reese had stopped screaming by the time Trudy found the staircase again, which comforted her some. If he was really a CIA agent, she’d just Maced a good guy, but on the other hand …

  Actually, there wasn’t an other hand. She’d just Maced a good guy.

  “What the hell did you do to him?” Nolan whispered, and she jerked back, almost dropping her last two bags.

  The Mac she kept her grip on.

  “I Maced him. How’d you know I’d be here?”

  “I figured this is where you’d run to once the other guys blocked the door. You were supposed to get out.”

  “Yeah, well, you were supposed to be the good guy,” Trudy whispered back. “You took the instructions, you bastard.”

  “Yeah,” Nolan said. “So?”

  “So you’re not a cop,” Trudy said. “You’re a double agent for the Chinese, you rat—”

  “He told you that?”

  Trudy stopped. “That is pretty far-fetched.”

  “Trudy, he’s the double agent for the Chinese.”

  Trudy glared at where she thought he was in the darkness. “Do you guys just make this stuff up as you go?”

  “MacGuffins are made in China,” Nolan whispered. “They marked one box last year and sent it over to that toy store. We just found out that it went missing and never got picked up, which is why we had the toy store staked out.”

  “We who?” Trudy whispered back. “No, wait, I know this part. You’re the CIA. And