The Fat Man by Ken Harmon Read Free Book Online Page B

with a famous Myrrh-Maid. It seems the Myrrh maven is musing a scheme to turn myrrh into a new perfume! It sounds like someone’s created Frankincensestein! Next, nosy nightlife spies said a certain reindeer was really kicking up her hoofs recently at the Hustle & Bustle club. Witnesses say the little vixen staggered home, mumbling, “I’ll never do that for two bucks again!” Finally, word has it that a BIG ELF ON CAMPUS has a bad case of puppy love for one of my fellow newshounds. Little snowbirds tell me that the lucky frail is covered in rosebuds, trinkets and candy canes because the chap thinks the she-porter is asking him all those questions for a personal purpose. Stay tuned!
    A fter everything I had been through with Little Raymond, Raymond Hall Senior was the obvious choice for a visit. Big Ray was not going to win any parenting awards, because he had been such a rotten kid himself. When he was little, Raymond broke a bat on Johnny’s head; somebody snitched on him. He hid a frog in his sister’s bed; somebody snitched on him. With each sin, somebody stooled on Raymond, and, every Christmas morning, Raymond had more coal in his stocking than a West Virginia miner. But Raymond didn’t learn. As he got older, his crimes went beyond putting tacks in the teacher’s chair and tying knots in Susie’s hair. Raymond got into cheating on exams, putting sawdust in the gas tanks of enemies and slipping Mickeys into a coed’s beer. Raymond’s sins continued when he became a titan of industry, pioneering the on-hold messaging business. Not only did he send up the blood pressure of anyone who had ever been put on hold and had to listen to some canned ad of baloney instead of a live person, Raymond ran Don’t Hang Up with the scruples of a raccoon. Profits were high, wages were low and dames in the office had more fingerprints than the glass on a candy case.
    Raymond married Cynthia, a college sweetheart who didn’t focus on Raymond’s shortcomings because the monkey on her back kept her eyes blurry. Together, they birthed Little Ray. Raymond’s interest in his son ended at the first dirty diaper, causing the poor kid to grow into a completely charmless cherub who deserved to be beaten every day like a rabid piñata. If I did my job right, Raymond would wake up and put on his papa pants. Even a hard-boiled elf like me can see if a kid has potential and, if his father gave half a damn, Little Ray had a chance of being a decent person. That was the plan.
    At the Don’t Hang Up headquarters, Raymond surrounded himself with a bunch of toothy cronies, grinning yes-men who knew a good seat on the gravy train when they saw one. Keeping the boss man happy kept their hands in the cookie jar, so several of them spent their entire days trying to think of a way to curry favor with the king. Years ago, one suck-up thought it might be clever to honor Raymond and his Don’t Hang Up legacy with an old-fashioned telephone. He presented Raymond with a sleek, gleaming beauty with a rotary dial; it was as big as a boulder. Raymond loved it and rewarded the fellow with a promotion and a fat raise, so that started a tradition of who could find the boss other swell telephones. These eggs scoured flea markets and antiques shops across the globe coming up with every kind of ringer you could imagine—foreign jobs, spy phones, phone relics, the phones that belonged to gangsters and movie stars and stupid phones shaped like windmills and wiener dogs. Raymond loved them all and created a special room in his mansion for his collection. It was in that room that I would pay my own call to Raymond Hall.
    None of the telephones were wired, but that’s not a problem for an elf with a little magic up his sleeve. I slipped into Raymond’s house about midnight and ambled into the phone room. Not a creature was stirring. The Halls were nestled all snug in their beds while visions that I didn’t give a flip about danced in their heads.
    Each phone