My Big Secret

((News: CatsLady and Jeanette, you two gals won a pack of note cards, from my "Name the Plumber Contest" Please shoot me your snail mail address at christie@christie-craig.com.))


((More News: I just found out that I was nominated for two awards from All About Romance in their Annual Reader Poll. I'm tickled pink!
I'm listed in: Favorite Funny and in the Best Cabin Romance. They are open for votes. Go check it out and vote for your favorites. The current standing of votes (final before last vote):
http://www.likesbooks.com/interim2007_2008.html (scroll down to last poll of 2/4/08)
Link to Vote: http://www.likesbooks.com/ballotannualpoll.html))

And now...


It’s time. Time to unveil my big secret.
But wait. Don’t jump to any conclusions about the topic. There are some things I won’t tell. Stuff that you don’t want to know. This secret does not include personal data. Oh, like I haven’t told you personal data, before.

However, now that I think about personal data, I remember I promised to tell you about the time I was caught by six of LAPD’s finest, guns drawn, in a Pizza Hut with lots of cash strewn around me on a bad hair day. (The bad hair is just an added little detail that some wouldn’t consider important, but hey, let’s face it, if all eyes, all attention, guns included, are going to be focused on you, don’t you want your hair to look its best?) As it happens, the money/gun event was just the beginning of a bad day, because believe it or not, it went downhill after that.

I worked at Pizza Hut--shift leader, in the big city of Los Angeles. I had also just gotten a new perm. Let’s just say the hairdresser could have uncurled me about an hour earlier than she did. I woke up late on said day, and instead of getting dressed in my uniform, I pulled on a pair of shorts under my huge T-shirt that read “Bad Girl” that I substituted as a nightshirt, and headed to work with my hair literally looking like I’d just stuck my at least four fingers in an electric outlet--four from the same hand because one side was curlier than the other.

Anyway, I’m at work, a southern gal in the big city, and other than getting dressed and taking a pee break, the only thing I have left to do is count out the register drawer. Only when I open the thirty-minute safe, I see tons of unorganized money stuffed into the safe. The weekend manager had failed to make deposits, so I had thousands of dollars to count and deposits to fill out. I’m furious. I’m pissed. I toss the money in the middle of the Pizza Hut floor, and start trying to make heads and tails out of the cash register receipts. I’m still trying to count when I hear a tap on the window to my right.

I look up and the first thing I see is a gun. Now, I’ve never had a gun pointed at me in my entire life, so I’m not taking this too well. Then I see the man behind the gun. He’s wearing a police uniform, so I relax a smidgeon, but then I hear another tap. On the window to my left is another officer, with another gun. Let’s just say, there were several more taps before I was: 1) motioned to get up, 2) hold my hands in the air, 3) go answer the ringing phone. (Have you ever tried to answer a phone with hands in the air?)

Turned out, my cook, working in the back, had accidentally set off the alarm. The alarm company calls in the police. The police saw a crazy woman in shorts and a slept-in “Bad Girl” T-shirt with one-sided electric-styled hair, sitting in the middle of the store, slinging money and they assumed the worst.

After motioning me to the phone and after a ten-minute conversation trying to convince them I actually worked there, I was removed from gunpoint and left to return to work. Their farewell warning: I didn’t have an alarm until the alarm company came and reset it. Fine, I said. I had bigger problems, I’d peed in my pants when I saw the first gun and really needed to change clothes.

Anyway, it was after the lunch crowd, empty restaurant and time for a quick bathroom break, when a man came in and wanted his credit card that my manager had made him leave due to his lack of cash the week before. We didn’t take credit cards. However, it just so happened that I’d called to see if the card was stolen. Surprise. It was. And if I cut it in half and sent it in, I would receive a two hundred dollar reward. Cool, right?

Wrong.

This guy wanted his stolen card back. I didn’t’ want to explain that I was waiting for my two hundred dollar reward, so instead I did what most of you would have done. I lied. I said the card was in the safe, and I pointed to the sign that stated I had a thirty-minute safe, and that he would have to wait until it opened. He wasn’t happy, but agreed to wait. Then as if to make his “not-happy” point clear, he pulled out a huge, really huge, hunting knife and proceeded to clean his nails. So, I did what any normal woman with bad hair would have done. I smiled, pretended not to be panicked by his oversized fingernail cleaner, peed my pants again, and hit the silent alarm. But opps…the alarm didn’t work, remember?

So I went to the phone and pretended to answer an order, with my back to the armed credit card thief, (imagine me thinking he was right behind me with knife ready to plunge) and called 911. They gave me a great piece of advice. Hit the alarm.

Then the operator asked one question. Was anyone in the restaurant? I told him no and he said to get my cook, who was in the back of the restaurant making dough, and run out the back door. I was about to do that when a woman came in with a baby and seated herself in one of the booths. Now, I’ve always been the “save yourself” kind of person, especially when I blamed the woman for not noticing the man cleaning his nails with a knife big enough to skin Bambi, but . . . there was the baby.

I walked to the booth and in a very low voice asked her to leave through the emergency door. I turned around to get the cook and run out the back when two guys walked in. They looked kind of shady. For a second, I thought they were with the credit card thief. But nope, one of the two men came sauntering toward me and the other headed toward the bathroom--which reminded me that I needed to go too.

I was prepared to explain that we were . . . out of dough or needed to close the restaurant for mold inspection, anything to get them to leave so I could escape the big knife. Didn’t happen. Instead, the shady looking man pulled out a big gun (yep, another honest to goodness real gun which I’d never seen one close up until that day.) Then in an equally shady voice, he told me to get behind the counter. (See what I mean about it being a bad day?)

I promptly made up my mind. If I lived through this, and I seriously didn’t think I would, my pizza and perm days were over and I was buying stock in big-people diapers. I ran behind the counter, babbling something about a thirty-minute safe. The second lucky man, who appeared to have gone to the bathroom, (yeah, I was actually envious of him for making the bathroom in time) came charging around the corner with his gun drawn, and then they both turned their guns on the knife-wielding credit card thief. Yup, they just happened to be undercover cops.

I proceeded to drop to the floor, bad hair and all, and had myself a good long, very long cry.

Looking back, I think the whole bad-hair, knife, and gun experience was the catalyst for my writing humorous romantic suspense. Not that I thought it was all that funny then.

However, this brings me back to my big secret. It’s time to unveil my new book. Yep, Weddings Can Be Murder is scheduled to be released May 27. Here is the cover and my book video.

Katie Ray, my heroine in Weddings, has a very bad day in the book, but you know, I liked her too much to give her bad hair. So what about you guys? Ever had a really sucky day? Ever had a gun pointed at you?

Crime Scene Christie

The video: Weddings Can Be Murder