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Being closer, I could see the Misfit balloon was barely together, its seams were connected by a hodgepodge of string, ribbon, wrapping tape and Band-Aids. All I had to do was find a weak spot and blast away. If I got it right, the Misfits would drop like a sack of hammers before getting to Santa’s sleigh.

I didn’t quite get it right.

I lined up the sight on the Red Ryder with an ugly seam on the front flank of the body and squeezed the trigger. The BB shot into the air and hit the seam, bull’s-eye, and caused a hole to rip open, about the size of a bale of hay. But instead of a slow leak and sink, the balloon started zipping around the sky like a crazed comet, the hot air spewing out of the hole thundering like a rocket engine. The Misfit balloon was out of control: dipping, climbing, looping left and right, taking out Kringle Town roofs one second, big chunks of buildings the next. Elves were mowed down on the ground and in the air. In one whipping zigzag across the square, Dingleberry was scooped up right into the Crocodile Cobra’s mouth and, a second later, was up to his innocent neck in demented Misfits. Santa, Rosebud and anybody who’d had the guts to look up before turned their heads to keep their eyes from being burned from the horrible sight. But anywhere you turned was ugly, heartbreaking lunacy and I had caused it. Somehow, I had managed to make things worse. Again.

I was mad and sunk. This had to be rock bottom. I ripped off my coat out of temper and to get ready for another fight. When I did, out came the parts of Sherlock Stetson I had picked up. The mangled little toy stared at me and seemed to be mocking. I ripped it to shreds and threw the pieces as hard as I could in every direction, but I was still mad. “Why does this keep happening to me?!?!” I screamed.

“Because you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons,” a little voice answered me. I turned, and sitting just as pretty as you please on the roof ledge was a little kid, about seven or eight, although he could have been younger because most kids that old were done with sucking their thumb and carrying a blanket. This kid did both, but his habits must have brought him a fair amount of peace because he didn’t seem concerned at all about the pandemonium exploding all around us.

“What did you say, kid?”

“You keep messing up because you’re doing things for the wrong reasons.”

The Misfit balloon careened through the air and took out the Kringle Town clock tower, and bricks rained down on the elves that couldn’t fly. I didn’t have time for games. “Who are you?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Why have you been doing all this?” the kid asked instead of answering. “Why do you do anything? For instance, why did you start the Coal Patrol?”

“To keep everything fair,” I said. “The meaning of Santa wasn’t getting through to the hardheaded bad kids. They needed a wake-up call, a kick in the rear. I thought there needed to be a little justice.”

“How did it work out for you?” the kid asked.

“Don’t be such a wise guy, kid,” I said. “The Coal Patrol did a lot of good work. A lot of bad kids got the message and went straight. Justice served.”

The kid worked his thumb for a moment and said, “True, some kids did learn the lesson, but the Naughty List kept growing, didn’t it, Gumdrop? It wasn’t as simple as delivering a rock anymore. Kids still needed something. So you decided to go after parents, didn’t you?”

I didn’t know who this kid was, but he was putting me on trial and I didn’t much like it. “That’s right,” I snapped back. “When I got fired, I promised Santa that I would leave the kids alone, but I never said nothing about not cleaning the clock of a bad parent who didn’t have the guts to jerk a knot in their own kids’ heads. If the bad kid grew up to be a bad parent, they were fair game.”

“And justice would be served,” the kids said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Sounds a lot like something you’d hear in Pottersville,” the kid said. That