Andrea Lepri - The Last Christmas On Earth

"You know, the shoemaker always wears the worst shoes ... how about you, instead, you keep going around with the usual grinder?" He replied, and James nodded with a smile. Bob was in his sixties, he was portly and had a beard so white and thick that if it hadn't always been dirty with grease it could have been the envy of "Santa Claus" . And above all, he had two huge hands, so big that even then James wondered how a man with such stubby fingers could work as a mechanic.

"So what happened last night?" Straight to the point. Bob's lips tightened in anger because he was still a long way from having bitten the bullet. "How the hell did you get your car fooled?" James insisted, rubbing salt into his wound.

"Don't make me think about it," Bob said, slamming a wrench on a workbench; he did it with such violence that a big cylinder just bored jumped and fell to the ground, and he swore because now it would be his turn to polish it again. "Among alarms and chains, pitfalls and padlocks, the only one who in theory could have managed to set foot here tonight without causing hell were me! And instead they screwed me a whole car, can you believe it? A car that didn't even get in motion, what the hell did they do to take it away? But now I'll get organized, even if this means sleeping here for the rest of my life! If only they try again, I get all the tools up their ass, from the smallest to the largest. One by one! »He concluded, banging the wrench on the counter again.

At that moment a boy with a pale and sleepy appearance shuffled in, he was so tall and thin that he looked curved and had long straight bleached hair.

" Morning Bob," he mumbled in a faint voice.

"You were late last night too, eh?" Bob scolded him. "You have to stick in your thick head that rock and roll won't give you food! Arrive late one more time and I'll send you home forever, understood?"

"Sorry boss, you're right ..."

"And don't call me "boss" ," I've told you a thousand times. Come on, get to work. The overhaul of that Chevrolet has to be finished, in half an hour they'll come to pick it up and now I am busy with James, "said Bob, entering his little office. He turned on the machine to heat the coffee and James stared at it, admiring the office walls. They were plastered with calendars depicting half-naked girls posing in sexy poses and he thought with some regret that he probably would never find anything like this hidden in his son's books of Egyptology.

"How much sugar?"

"... What?"

"Come back to us, I asked you how much sugar you want."

"Two teaspoons, thanks," said James as he sat down.

The mechanic spilled the sugar in the cafes using a dispenser, then mixed his own with a screwdriver and then handed it to James.

"I'm sorry, but I used the last spoon to do a job on a Freelander," he justified himself, then wiped his mouth full of tobacco with his fingers.

"Don't worry, it's fine ... I hope that at least now the car works," James said with a shrug.

"Damn if it works ..." the mechanic replied, then took a sip of coffee.

"We'll talk about the theft later, now I want you to tell me about the Cadillac. What was so special about the car that made you call us last night so we could see it?"

Bob came to the door to check that the boy was quite distant and busy that he couldn't hear. He saw him sitting in front of the computer analyzing the smoke discharge and found him strangely still. The Chevrolet had been on for some time and was booming, the workshop was filling up with smoke and he had to run to activate the vacuum cleaner.

"Fred, you wretch!" He yelled with all his breath. The boy jumped on the chair and looked around alienated, then hurriedly turned off the car.

"It's unbelievable, he fell asleep another time! If it were not that he is the son of a dear friend of mine ... "Bob explained to James, showing him a clenched fist, then leaned over the table to get as close as possible and looked him straight in his eyes. "That car didn't belong to ordinary people, I think those two deaths were secret agents or something," he whispered.

"What makes you think so?"

"I had set to work to find the fault, I had sworn I would have found it at the cost of removing bolt after bolt. I started with the engine, it was perfect but it showed no signs of life. I put it on the bridge and started looking at it from beneath, looking for an idea, and finally, I realized what was wrong with it. That car had two mufflers but instead, that production model has only one.

I took them apart and discovered, as I had suspected, that one of the two was fake ... it was a hidden storage compartment."

"Are you serious?"

Bob nodded.

"And what did it contain?"

"What did it contain?" Bob echoed emphatically. "When I opened it, I found everything in it: fake licenses and documents headed to those two who have died, license plates, bundles of banknotes for a few thousand dollars, some very strange devices, three Glocks and even a laser rifle."

"... a rifle what?"

"A laser rifle."

"Have you ever seen a laser rifle before?"

"Of course not, where do you want me to have seen it?"

"So how do you know it was really a laser rifle?" James asked him, showing him all his perplexity. In response, the other pointed to the outline of a perfectly cut wrench in a sheet of steel of one inch thick. James made such an absurd expression that Bob had to try hard not to laugh in his face.

"At least did you take some pictures?" James asked, but knowing him, he hadn't hoped so much for that.

"No, honestly I didn't really think about it. And then who was expecting that in a few hours they would have taken everything away from me?" Replied the other one.

"So you don't have anything left of all the stuff you listed before ..."

"I had put everything in the safe, when I went into the office this morning and found it open, I almost fell off my feet. Luckily they only took their things without touching my money, otherwise, it would have been trouble. However, this means that they were people who knew exactly what they were looking for, as professionals. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been able to get in here so easily."

"You're probably right ..." agreed James.

"Of course I'm right! Surely someone is doing a nice clean-up to cancel the evidence of some kind of inexplicable event, I wouldn't be surprised if those two corpses have even disappeared," hypothesized Bob. James shuddered, because as Helen had dared to say it was not excluded that Harry had somehow been involved in that strange story.

"Maybe your theory isn't completely wrong, but now you're exaggerating!" Whether they are professionals or not, it seems impossible to me that they could even take away two bodies from inside a police station! "He replied.

"On television, you can hear so many stories..."

"Anyway, didn't you notice anything strange yesterday?"

"Nothing, all those who passed by the workshop yesterday were people I know well. Ah, damn it, I was about to forget it!" He added, rummaging in a pocket of his suit.

He pulled out a metal object as big as a matchbox, placed it on the table and pushed it towards him. "There is only this one left, I took it home last night to show it to my son," he explained.

James grabbed him by two opposing edges and examine it: it seemed hermetically closed on all sides, but no welds; it looked like a printed block and, weighing it, he found it very light.

"What is it?" He asked his friend after trying in vain to open it, the other shook his head.

"I have no idea," he replied.

James studied the metal box for a few moments curiously, waved it and then took it near to his ear to hear if by chance it made some noise, finally put it in a transparent nylon bag and put it in his pocket.