“Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. Oh what fun…” The twang of a singer is a mellifluous undertone in the bustling bar. Someone laughs loudly, like the striking of a chord, and the tune of the jukebox changes to Elvis’ rendition of “Silent Night”. With each open and close of the door, the smell of lit cigarettes wafts into the crowded room and thickens into a smoky cloud over the heads of the bar’s patrons.

Christopher Pike lowers the cell phone from his ear and the noise around him dips then swells again before returning to its regular tempo. He gingerly lays the phone on the bar countertop and considers briefly putting his head down beside it. The better option seems like reaching for the unopened brandy in front of him. He removes the cap with one decisive twist and takes the first swallow of liquor straight from the bottle. A bartender, a young man in his twenties, looks from Pike to the bottle to the empty shot glass and shakes his head slightly. No doubt the sight of a weary face drowning its woes on a lonely Christmas Eve is nothing new.

If only Chris’s troubles were that simple. He replays the conversation with the caller in his head as the brandy leaves a fiery trail from esophagus to stomach.

“Hey, Dad,” Jim had said, shouting over a din of noise, “bad news—I’m sorta in jail!”

There is no ‘sorta’ when it comes to incarceration. They both know it because, first of all, Chris Pike is an officer of the law and, second, Jim has spent equally as much time on one side of the iron bars of a jail cell as on the other. Suffice to say, the boy’s teenage years were hell. Amazing, really, that Chris survived it.

Getting arrested has never bothered Jim much, as a child or an adult. The experience, in the past, was often more traumatic for the city police department (i.e. dealing with a sulky teen who had the finely honed skills of a professional escape artist—no one ever successfully kept Jim in handcuffs for more than twenty minutes) and in particular for Pike, who had been conditioned since his second year of parenthood to check the arrest roster immediately after he came off a shift. Each time Jim’s name was on that list—such was a regular event every few months or so—Chris’s distress gradually turned towards resignation. No amount of sympathetic pats to his shoulder by other officers with families and the repeated assurance of “Don’t worry, it’s just a stage, he’ll grow out of it” eased his suffering. So he threw out every parenting book in his house and decided his life with Jim was a new standard. Somehow he adapted. They both did.

“Adolescent stage, my ass,” Pike mutters, returning his thoughts to the present. With regret, he puts aside the only thing which could successfully calm his nerves. He needs to be sober to drive.

Jim is old enough to have finished college and is, in fact, living in a college town. Pike has moments of pride when he thinks of how responsible his son is now. Then he has moments of gut-churning fear because Jim is on his own. If the boy had moved out-of-state rather than an hour away, Pike wouldn’t know how to cope. He is not overprotective; he’s simply of the belief he is the universe’s sole restraining influence over the one and only Jim Kirk. And, as fate would see fit to have it, Jim has an unholy penchant for attracting trouble wherever he goes. Thus it is a fact of life they need each other: Pike because he loves the boy, and Jim because—because who else besides Chris would cancel his holiday plans (without yelling, he might add) and drive eighty miles in sleeting conditions on the simple request of “Can you come?”

Pinching the bridge of his nose and standing up, he pays his tab and leaves the bartender a generous tip in addition to the change. “Merry Christmas,” the young man tells Pike, smiling as he collects his money.

Chris responds with a sigh. Christmas was looking merry until about fifteen minutes ago, when he asked his son, “How bad is it?” Jim had hesitated over the answer, and that alone still wreaks havoc with Chris’s blood pressure. The hesitation means, no matter how Jim downplays what is going on, the charges must be more serious than the usual slap on the wrist for disorderly conduct.

He zips up his jacket and tries not to conjure horrific scenarios on too little information, wrapping his fingers around the car keys in one of the jacket’s pockets. Before leaving, Chris catches and holds the bartender’s attention. “If anybody gives you trouble—”

“—call the cops,” the bartender finishes. “I got it. G’night, Detective.”

“You too, kid.”

On the way to the exit, he avoids meeting the gaze of the brunette with whom he had previously fantasized he might share a drink. Disappointment is a sharp bone in his throat but he swallows it. Family comes first, Pike knows, even when that family has gotten himself thrown in jail on the jolliest night of the year. He is still reflecting upon that thought in the parking lot as he starts his truck. Inevitably he wonders if Jim’s housemate (and proclaimed best friend) is aware of where the kid has landed himself.

The roads are streaks of dark, salted pavement in a wintry landscape. All is silent except for the low hum of his Ford’s engine, the methodical click-clack of wiper-blades and the occasional passing car. Twin ghoulish beams of light from his headlamps cut through the soft snowfall and reflect against icy patches along the roadside. He can distinguish shapes no more than ten yards out, but what he can see is enough to help him navigate the interstate.

To stay safe, Chris drives at half his normal speed. Jim can take the extra hour to sit and think about how grown men are supposed to act—not like buffoons—and how much trouble he is going to be in—a lot, which for some reason is a thought that rarely occurs to the boy. (Sadly, Pike suspects he has failed to become an intimidating parent.) Chris entertains himself on the long drive by imagining Jim’s sudden heartfelt regret for being a troublesome son; he takes his imagination one step further and has Jim say to him, “Dad, you are right. You are always right. Thank god for you!” He suspects this is the validation most parents want from their children.

Sighing forlornly, Chris squints through the windshield at yet another car abandoned by the road. It is difficult to tell if the car is occupied; it sits idle, like a lump of snow, blending into the white night. No hazard lights. Reluctantly Chris returns his attention to the highway, speeds up, and presses on.

The thirty-mile marker triggers a memory out-of-the-blue. Chris is taken back to a casual phone conversation with his son some weeks ago. Jim had talked enthusiastically about his new job (that is, his third job in six months, which is partly the cause of Jim’s father’s endless headaches), new co-workers, and holiday schedule. They had tried to figure out when would be the best time for Chris to visit, and Jim had mentioned Leonard might spend the holidays with them too since McCoy could not go home to Georgia due to the timing of a much-awaited hospital internship.

Both amused and nearing abject despair, Chris tightens his grip on the steering wheel and draws a conclusion as inevitable as two plus two equals four. He groans. Leonard is with Jim for Christmas, and Jim is in jail. Therefore Leonard is in jail too. That answers the question whether or not McCoy knows where Jim is.

“Damn,” he tells the interior of his truck. His retirement savings account is going to be a lot lighter come Christmas morning. Chris attempts rather masochistically in that moment to add up all of the income he has lost to bail fees. If he cries a little over the grand total, well, there is no one around to judge him for the tears.

Forty miles of depressingly upbeat Christmas songs and heavy sighs later, a road sign illuminated by his headlights looms out of the dark, announcing the invisible change of county lines. Utilizing the memory of his last visit to this part of the state and a myriad of street signs, he manages to find a location that looks vaguely like the center of town draped beneath a white blanket. From there, the Sheriff’s department stands out like the beacon of a lighthouse next to the sea and Chris drives toward it. The light feels less welcoming once he pulls into a near-empty parking lot edged with wet snow and exits his vehicle. Pike lingers for a half of a minute by his truck, releasing one white-plumed breath after another into the air. He wipes at his eyes and finally steels himself to do what eons of parents have steeled themselves to do before him—saving offspring from regrettable folly. Then he trudges toward the double-door entrance, a thin layer of newly frozen ice crunching under his boots.

The air inside the Sheriff’s department is blazing hot. Chris immediately sheds his jacket. After eyeing the unmanned receptionist desk, he considers both ends of a gloomy hallway and heads toward the muted sound of a radio. At the turn of the corner is another corridor leading into a large, open room of the building. Pike pauses just within threshold of its swinging door to make a quick assessment what he sees. Desks are crammed together on either side of a wide walkway, two of which are occupied by hunched figures. A battered-looking copier is tucked between a long table and a wall with built-in mailboxes. By another wall, this one windowless, a middle-aged, balding man in uniform rummages through a filing cabinet. The room smells strongly of burnt coffee and pine-scented potpourri.

Nearest to Pike are two male teenagers on a bench. One is contemplating his handcuffs with a mouth drooping at the corners, and the other has his eyes closed and chin touching his chest. Drool drips slowly onto a thin t-shirt. At the back of the room is another overly large door, and Chris guesses this leads to the rest of the department: the evidence room, the lab and lockers, various offices, and holding cells. He walks over to a sectioned area that resembles an unkempt booking station and waits for an attendant. But no one comes to greet him.

Feeling the beginnings of a headache, Chris pivots slowly in a circle and weighs his options. He could talk to the deputy at the desk three strides away, who has at least five empty McDonald’s chicken nugget containers scattered on top of his paperwork, or he could interrupt the older fellow slamming the filing cabinet drawers with a viciousness that indicates anger management issues, a bad divorce, or both. Chris doesn’t consider talking to the obviously new deputy (the rookie, most would call him) because said young man is not looking at his desk but at his lap, where he is playing a handheld video game.

The awake and aware delinquent on the bench whispers at Pike, “Man—hey, man, you got a smoke?”

“Smoking is bad. You’re a minor,” Chris responds offhandedly and moves toward Chicken McNugget Deputy.

“Narc!” the kid cries to Pike’s back.

Somewhere a door opens and an irritable voice growls, “Shut it, kid!” Pike turns in the direction of the booming voice, relieved that the chances of speaking to a competent individual may have possibly improved. After a brief silence the disembodied voice rumbles louder than ever, “Well, fuck me, if it isn’t Christopher Pike!”

Pike raises his eyebrows as a shadow shapes itself out of a doorway into a man of average height and a face Chris hasn’t seen in years. In seconds, he’s grinning. “Jonathan Archer,” he names the man, taking a hold of a proffered hand and pumping it. “It’s been a while.”

“Since the Academy?”

“Not that long. We attended the same law enforcement convention at the capitol fourteen years ago.”

Archer grins too. “Oh, yeah, I remember now! You passed up on drinks to study for your exam.” He looks Pike over. “I heard you made senior detective by the age of thirty-four. Always did like making the rest of us look bad, didn’t you, Pike?”

“Not a hard thing to do in your case, Jon.”

Jonathan laughs, slapping him unnecessarily hard on the back. “You realize I outrank you, right? I’m a sheriff now.”

“I had noticed,” Chris replies dryly. Only a blind man could miss the emblazoned SHERIFF stamped on Archer’s jacket. “Congratulations on the re-election.”

Archer looks pleased. “So you have been keeping tabs on me.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Pike catches the curious look of the young deputy, who had been invested in his Nintendo only moments ago. “Kind of quiet in here tonight.”

“It’s only ten,” the sheriff says, “and this is a college town. The kiddies are barely past their first round of drinks. Things will liven up.”

Chris sobers at that, remembering his reason for standing in the department in the first place. Perhaps Archer notices the change in his expression because the man asks, lowering his voice, “What brings you to my neck of the woods, Detective?”

He draws in a deep breath. “My son, actually, who I’ve been told is currently locked up in your jail.”

Jon’s reactions are mixed—disbelief, amusement, and an odd resolve—before his face finally settles into a grim visage. “…No.”

Pike’s shoulders sink slightly. “Yes, I’m afraid.”

“Oh god,” Jon asks, “which one is yours? Wait. It’s the broody one. Gotta be. He looks like he’s been sucking on a lemon since the age of two.”

Pike’s mouth quirks up and down because he doesn’t know whether to smile or frown. “Damn, I can’t decide who you’re really trying to insult. And no, he’s not mine. Kirk is.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Thank you,” he says, perversely amused, “that’s the kindest thing anyone has said to me on that score.”

Jonathan squeezes Chris’s shoulder with one of his broad hands, a sudden, sharp look in his eyes. “Why don’t we go into my office?”

Pike realizes then they have the attention of the few occupants of the room. And he has the feeling whatever Archer has to say about Jim’s arrest is best not shared with the world. So he follows Archer through a winding path between the desks and into an office with an antiquated interior design. Jonathan closes the door then the blinds over the windows.

Immediately Chris turns to face him, dread turning his hands cold. “It’s serious?”

Archer is silent for a long minute.

“Jonathan,” Chris squares his shoulders, “Jim may be my son but I’m not here to bargain if—” He rephrases what he wants to say. “—I uphold the law. I can be objective about this. Give me some credit, officer to officer.” He hates that that last part might sound like a plea.

“We’ve got a tradition here,” Archer says at last, “and it’s pretty important to a lot of people. Because of that, the crime isn’t as trivial as it seems on paper. Otherwise I’d have booted him and his buddies outta here hours ago.”

“Explain.”

“Maybe you should sit down.”

“Don’t pussyfoot around!” Pike snaps. “Tell me.”

“What do you know about our Christmas parade?” Jonathan asks slowly.

Chris restrains his temper and answers, “I was here for it a few years back.” When Jim left for college, he doesn’t add. He remembers there being too many people for the size of the town, close to a thousand of them, in a one-block radius. It seemed like a big affair.

“People come from all over the county for it,” Jon says, as if he knows what Pike is thinking. “Did you stay until the end?”

“No.”

The other man sighs and leans against the doorframe. “Then I don’t expect you would know about the importance of the North Star.”

Chris has some difficulty making sense of that statement. “North Star?”

“It’s a town tradition to put up this gigantic star on Christmas Day once the parade loops back to the Village. The damn thing itself is ancient but the tradition has been an annual event since the founding of the city. Mayor gives a speech ‘n everything.” A shadow crosses the sheriff’s face. “And your kid took it. Or at least it seems he did.”

“What?” Confused, Pike tightens his fists and wills away a bad feeling.

“It goes on the biggest goddamn Christmas tree in the state, if that tells you anything of our pride,” Archer finishes grimly. “So if the star isn’t back where it needs to be for the end of tomorrow’s parade, Jim Kirk will go down in the history books as the man who ruined Christmas for this county.”

Pike sinks into the nearest chair, words coming unbidden to his lips. “Jim wouldn’t do that.”

“From what I’ve been told,” the sheriff says gently, “he would. He hates Christmas, doesn’t he?”

“That’s personal,” Pike replies lowly, “and not enough reason to pin a theft on him.”

Jonathan spreads his hands, palms out. “I agree with you. I completely agree, but the mayor’s beyond pissed that somebody wants to ruin his party tomorrow, especially since he came so close to losing the election. Jim is the only lead we have right now.” He lowers his hands and narrows his eyes. “Listen, I know you’re a good cop and an even better detective. You make headlines often enough.”

Chris almost blurts out You buy our city paper? Geez, that’s not creepy at all, Jon. Then again, Jon has always had a bit of a competitive streak—even if the chosen opponent has no idea he is part of a competition.

“I want these kids to go home as much as you do,” his friend continues, “but unless they start talkin’, I don’t expect a one of ’em to wake up to Santa’s presents under the tree in the morning. They’ve already mutinied against me, and you can see how short-staffed I am tonight.”

“You’re saying you want my help. Jon, this isn’t my jurisdiction. I can’t—”

“Screw protocol.”

Chris’s mouth twitches. “I see you haven’t changed your ways.”

“I have a deadline and an angry politician riding my ass. I doubt anybody’s going to care how we find the star, only that we do.”

Pike walks to one of the wide windows of Archer’s office and peers through the drawn blinds. There is a tiny sprig of a tree branch decorated with two strings of stale popcorn by a beat-up old coffee pot, such a sad show of Christmas festivity, and beyond it, the dour faces of the three deputies who either unluckily drew the holiday shift or volunteered to come in because they have nowhere else to be. The two teenagers are gone and in their place, handcuffed to the bench, is an older male with an eye patch in a skin-tight outfit. Considering the looks the man is getting from the nearest deputies, he must be a prostitute.

Chris thinks of his boy, who never celebrated Christmas because the anniversary of his birth father’s death until Pike adopted him.

“All right,” he says, “I’ll do it.”

Archer clasps a friendly hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good man, Christopher.”

“Remind me of that in a couple of hours,” he remarks dryly, shrugging out of his jacket. The chances that Jim, Pike’s wonderful and disturbingly ill-fortuned son, isn’t involved in the town catastrophe in some ridiculous and migraine-producing way are slim. Very slim. He isn’t foolish enough to think otherwise.

Jon steps back. “You know, of course, I have to draw the line at letting you talk to Kirk, given the conflict of interest.”

“Your scruples are unbelievably incongruous, Sheriff, but I have to say right now that’s for the best.” If he gets his hands on Jim while on these premises, he will wind up handcuffed next to the hooker for child abuse—even if his son is nearly twenty-four.

“I’ll take you to the back.” Archer turns for the door, only to pause with his hand on the doorknob, expression bemused. “How’d you end up with a kid anyway?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Entertain me.”

“Jim was eleven the first time I met him. He was living at a boys’ home and had stolen the new director’s Corvette. I was on highway patrol.”

Archer whistles and opens the door. They skirt a wall, go through the swinging door opposite of the office and enter a hallway, only to stand aside to make room for a newly arrived deputy herding a single-file line of DUIs. The DUIs wobble by like baby ducklings, looking more bewildered than drunk.

“Good,” Jon mutters, rubbing his hands together with glee, “the roadblocks are working. So, eleven, huh?” He snorts. “I’ve pulled over a fourteen year-old before. I bet the kid was pissed that you caught him.”

That had been an astonishing moment in Chris’s life, to be idling in the usual stakeout spot to catch speeding motorists, only to have a red sports car shoot by at ninety miles an hour with the crown of the driver’s golden head barely topping the steering wheel. It had been more astonishing what had happened next. “I didn’t catch him. He drove the car straight off a highway embankment into the pond behind a Walmart.”

“…Well, shit. Is this one of those stories that gets worse the longer you tell it? Was he drunk?”

Chris snorts. “No.” But the story was worse than that, actually. He had learned later Jim hadn’t been breaking the law simply for the sake of joy-riding in a stolen vehicle. It had been with the attitude that the completion of his mission (to destroy the car) was do-or-die, regardless of the police pursing him. Pike’s heart had been in his throat as the car swung off the highway at a break-neck speed. He realized in that moment something terrible was going to happen (like a person committing suicide in front of him) and he wasn’t in a position to stop it; then the driver-side door of the Corvette had swung open and the boy threw himself clear. Only the car met its demise in the shallow man-made pond that day.

Pike relives that moment in his nightmares, though less often now than he used to. Sometimes Jim doesn’t make it out of the car before impact, and Chris is standing over a grave. He will jerk awake, sweat pooling under his body and a loud ringing in his ears.

“The director wanted Jim sent to Juvie but it was a first offense.”

He remembers how unsteady his hands had been when he checked the child over for injuries (of which there were none other than superficial scrapes from doing a dive-roll across a gravel parking lot) and demanded a name. Jim had identified himself readily, eyes bright and daring: “James Tiberius Kirk.” He said it like Pike ought to know the name; like the world should know who James Tiberius Kirk is and moreover the world ought to be terrified.

Pike had decided then Jim wasn’t simply a stupid, under-privileged kid with a huge chip on his shoulder. He was a sun that was going to burn itself out before its time if no one intervened. So Jim got the kindest judge in the county at the hearing, courtesy of a few called-in favors, and six months later Officer Christopher Pike had an adopted son.

To this day, he doesn’t ask himself why it mattered so much that he saved Jim (and only Jim, despite there being so many boys and girls who could have used his protection too) because the reason is slightly selfish. The outcome, though, has done both of them good—if one discounts the trials and tribulations of their everyday lives.

As he and Archer near the end of the hallway, Chris questions, “You implied there were multiple accomplices. How many did you bring in besides Jim and Leonard?”

“Huh, how’d you know about the McCoy kid?”

“One with the sour face, remember? Besides,” Chris adds with mild amusement, “where Jim is, there too shall McCoy be. And vice versa. I doubt you could have arrested one without having the other go ape-shit and get himself arrested too.”

“That’s just sad.” Archer’s mouth is curving.

“Pathetic more like.”

They share a small smile. He and Jon were that close once, long ago, before their career paths lead them to different counties and for a while different states. Sometimes Chris remembers his early twenties with fondness. Mostly he worries Jim is repeating the same mistakes he made as a young adult, or worse ones, and spends days on end trying to figure out a way to say “don’t do that or you’ll be sorry” without sounding condescending or parental. Jim has always had an aversion to thinking he might need a parent. Whether that is a fault of his willful personality or having no family to take him in at a young age, Pike does not know.

“Four,” Jon says as he inputs a code into a keypad by a thick metal door and the lock releases.

“Four?”

“Four perps besides the two joined at the hip.” The sound of their footsteps echo ahead of them. The temperature is significantly colder here than in the main building. Archer makes a sharp turn into a small room buzzing with live feeds from strategically placed security cameras. He points to one of the feeds.

Chris leans in to look. Right away he picks Jim out in the middle cell. The boy has his back to the camera but he is standing on his own two legs, arms crossed in a typical stance that means I-am-opposed-to-your-authority, one Pike has seen too many times to count. Kirk appears to be talking to someone in drag. Chris frowns and squints. No, not drag… A costume? The fuzzy black-and-white image does not lend any further explanation.

“That’s one of Santa’s little helpers,” Jon says smugly as he guesses where Pike’s attention is directed.

“You arrested elves?”

“Best arrest ever,” Jon tells him gleefully. “I never had so much fun crashing a Santa’s Village party! Usually we do a dope bust. The owner is paranoid about the habits of his employees.” But the man’s grin falters in another moment, and Chris watches in fascination as Jon begins to scowl.

“So which one got away from you?” he asks, already seeing where this is headed.

Archer curses. “Little bugger was fast and took off in a van during the chaos. But I’ll get him, Pike, mark my words. I’ve got four patrols out looking for ‘im.”

“Why so many?”

The air of menace dissipates slightly. “The owner got a call. Someone said they saw the star being loaded into the back of a company van.”

The reality of the situation kills the humorous mood, and Pike returns to staring at Jim on the tiny tv screen. Turn around, son, so I can see you, he begs silently. But Jim doesn’t.

Chris finally notices another familiar form, that which might be McCoy, but the person is sitting down with his head bowed so it is impossible to confirm the identity. Chris sighs through his nose and straightens with clear reluctance. “Okay, I’ve seen enough. We’ll pull them out one by one for questioning.”

“That’s not gonna phase ’em. They’ve already seen the inside of the interrogation room.”

It’s so easy to slip the mask on, to become the cop and instead of the father. “Not with me in it.”

Jon studies Chris with a mouth that does not laugh and an eerie, assessing calm in his eyes. Then the man nods once to signify some agreement, though Pike does not know if Jon is agreeing with the plan or with some unspoken decision of his own.

The sheriff pulls open the door. “Tell me what you need, Detective, and it’s yours.”

“I want to review the report and the statements first. Then I’ll let you know.”

Pike doesn’t ask himself what he will do if Jim is guilty. He tries his best not to think about his son at all once he puts his back to the security footage. There can be no room for inner turmoil. Christopher is on the clock now as a man of the law, of justice, and this is a case which must be solved, however it fell into his hands. Once the answers and the perpetrators of the crime are known, there will be time enough to feel as a father and to be relieved—or to fall to pieces.

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