Cooked Goose (2 page)

“It’s a little hard to get into the Christmas spirit,” she muttered to herself, “when it’s eighty degrees and the hills are aflame.”

She licked her forefinger and stuck it in the air. The breeze was coming from the ocean, an on-shore flow. That was a good thing, especially for the San Carmelita citizens who lived in the fancy houses with the best views in town—the ones at the top of the semi-charred hill. As long as the wind continued to blow east, they might sleep through the night without that knock at the front door, a fire department representative announcing an unscheduled, emergency evacuation.

Ah, the joys of being an upper-middle-class Californian
, Savannah thought, congratulating herself on having the good fortune to be a lower-middle-class private detective. She lived smack in the middle of town, far away from the ocean view lots, with their fire hazards, or the seaside properties, with their potential for high-tide flooding.

Yep. Savannah was damned lucky to be poor. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

Switching into her professional “Come-And-Get-Me-You-Ugly-Sucker” mode, she tucked her few packages under her arm and sauntered toward her car, which was parked in the far rear of the lot. She tried to look harried, absentminded, dog-tired and as wimpy as possible. A rapist’s idea of the perfect date.

In her peripheral vision she watched an elderly lady climbing into her Cadillac parked in the handicapped space, the young couple pushing a baby stroller with a screeching child inside, and her most likely suspect, a scruffy guy wearing a T-shirt upon which had been scrawled in black marker the warm sentiment, “Shoot ’em all and let God sort ’em out!” The guy had his head stuck under the opened hood of an equally scruffy, long-past-its-prime Dodge Dart. As Savannah walked by on the way to her 1965 Mustang, he eyed her so lasciviously that she half expected him to start drooling down the front of his offensive shirt.

“White trash,” she muttered as she passed him, echoing her Granny Reid’s sentiments about men who couldn’t keep their eyes in their sockets when a pair of boobs bounced by.

“What did you say?” Dirk asked in her earpiece.

“Nothing,” she whispered. “Just talking to myself. Where are you?”

“By the food court.”

“Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? And how about you, Tammy? Is your unit working okay?”

“Yeah,” came the reply. “I can hear you in my ear instead of in my blouse.”

“That’s an improvement.”

“So, does anybody see our friend?” Dirk asked.

“I don’t,” Tammy answered. “The most suspicious character I see over here is a Girl Scout selling cookies and a Salvation Army lady ringing a bell.”

“Nobody here either,” Savannah replied, giving up on the yahoo with the broken-down Dart. Now that he had enjoyed his little “out of body experience” with her, he was back to scraping the corroded terminals of his battery.

“Wait a minute. I see somebody,” Tammy said.

Savannah could hear the excitement mixed with fear in her voice. This might be for real.

“What is it?” she heard Dirk ask.

Instantly, Savannah whirled around and started back toward the mall. The jerk under the hood gave her an expectant look as she hurried by him, as though hopeful that she had changed her mind.

“A guy in a red and green plaid lumberjack’s shirt,” Tammy whispered. “With a long white beard!”

The Santa Rapist, as the newspapers were calling him, had abducted half a dozen women from this mall parking lot in the past month. The women had been driven to nearby orange groves, raped and badly beaten. All six victims had claimed the attacker wore a fake Santa’s beard as a disguise.

“He’s watching me,” Tammy said as Savannah rushed back into the mall, past Burger Bonanza and out the front door. “He’s coming this way.”

“Just be calm, sweetie,” Savannah told her. “We’re on our way. Head for your car, just like we talked about. Open the trunk and slowly, calmly put your bags inside. But don’t actually get into the car. Wait for us.”

Savannah scanned the parking lot, looking for her assistant, but a big, yellow, Ryder truck was blocking her vision and the streetlamps were situated too far apart for good lighting and visibility.

“Is your car still in the front row, near the road, where we told you to put it?” Dirk asked.

Savannah could tell from his huffing and puffing he was running from the food court.

“Yes,” Tammy mumbled. “I’m putting the stuff in the trunk. He’s about thirty feet away. Watching me. Coming this way.”

Savannah broke into a run. She still couldn’t see around the truck.

“Savannah!” Tammy sounded like she was about to cry. “Savannah, I…oh! Help!”

“Dirk! The kid’s in trouble!” Savannah shouted. “Hurry!”

“I know!” he yelled back, panting. “I’m only halfway there.”

Damn his hide
, Savannah thought.
Great time to take a taco and nacho break, half a mall away!

Savannah threw down her packages and pulled her Beretta from the shoulder holster beneath her jacket as she ran. “I’m coming, Tammy! Hang on!”

Just as she was rounding the front of the truck, Savannah heard a scream that sent her heart pounding up into her throat. It was a shriek of pain and fear—nothing like the fake screams in the movies. This one was for real.

But when she cleared the truck, she saw something that made her heart nearly stop altogether.

Tammy was bent backward over the hood of her Volkswagen bug. A man—just as she had described, with a white beard, wearing a plaid shirt—was bending over her, ripping her blouse open, clawing at her chest.

Savannah let out a roar of rage and threw herself onto the man’s back. “Leave her alone, you dirty sonuvabitch!” she screamed as they both tumbled to the pavement.

She jumped to her feet and with karate expertise landed a solid kick directly to his groin. As he crumpled into a ball of pain, she gave him another chop to the back of his neck with her left hand.

It was only then she remembered she was holding her gun in her right. Proper procedure would have been to level the gun at him and calmly demand he release her assistant.

Yeah, well, to hell with proper procedure
, she quickly decided. Sometimes hands-on, up close and personal contact was the only kind that satisfied the soul.

“Are you all right, honey?” Savannah asked, taking her eyes off her suspect for half a second to check out Tammy, who was still lying across the VW’s hood.

“Oh, Savannah...” Tammy was fighting for breath. “You shouldn’t have. Owww! Oh, that hurts!”

“Hurts?” Savannah looked down at her groaning, moaning Santa look-alike. He was still writhing in the middle of a greasy oil slick on the asphalt pavement, holding his privates. “What are you talking about? What hurts?”

Tammy was tearing at her blouse, pulling the thing off. “It’s this stupid microphone it…ow-w-w! It’s shorting out or something…I…ow-w-w!”

Dirk ran up to them, his face Christmas crimson all the way back to his receding hairline, sweat dripping from the end of his nose. Perspiration stained his T-shirt with dark circles under the arms and in the center of his chest, making him look even more bedraggled than usual. Dirk was no lightweight himself, and the race had just about done him in.

“What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded as Tammy danced around, holding her now-shirtless chest and screeching.

“It’s shocking her!” Savannah told him, still holding the gun on her suspect. “Get it off her! Quick!”

Dirk might have been a bit out of shape, but after twenty-plus years on the police force, his reflexes were still sharp. In half a second he had ripped the offending unit and tape off Tammy’s chest, leaving her holding her bare breasts in her hands, blushing violently and deeply furious.

“And I suppose you enjoyed groping me while you were at it!” she yelled at him.

“What?”

“You just couldn’t pass up an opportunity like that! First you loan us lousy, faulty equipment, and then you molest me right here in front of everybody!”

He stared at her for a long time, then slowly shook his head. “You’re a dingbat, you know that, Hart? A first-rate, certified dingbat!”

He picked up her blouse from the ground and tossed it at her. She exposed a breast as she reached up to catch it. Hugging the garment to her, she began to softly cry.

“A nut job,” Dirk said, turning to Savannah. “That’s who you’ve got working for you.”

“Give her a break, Coulter,” Savannah said, handing him her gun to hold on the fellow who was still wriggling like a caterpillar under a sunlit magnifying glass. She hurried over to Tammy. “Are you all okay, sweetie?”

“No,” Tammy said between sobs. “It was awful!”

“I can imagine.” She helped her slip on the blouse and button the front as though Tammy were a distraught kindergartner getting ready for a traumatic first day at school. “That nasty ol' thing shocking you and that scumbag attacking you. You must be—”

“Attacking me?” Tammy shook her head and sniffed. “He didn’t attack me. He was trying to help me get that thing off my chest. He was just—”

“Oh, damn.” The truth hit Savannah with a wallop somewhere in her solar plexus as she stared down at the fellow on the pavement.

He glared back at her with a mixture of rage and confusion in his blue eyes. Blue eyes. White beard. Rosy cheeks—well, his cheeks were sort of green now, but she was pretty sure they had been rosy a second before she had kicked him in the groin.

“You hurt Santa Claus,” said a sweet, wee voice behind them. Savannah turned to see a young boy, watching her with horror on his munchkin’s face. “You’re in big trouble, lady,” he went on to explain in painful detail. “I saw what you did! You kicked Santa Claus right in the balls!”

“Don’t say ‘balls,’ honey. It’s not nice,” his mother said, pulling her child closer to her and away from the crazed brunette and the other woman who had just disrobed in public. “We prefer to call them by their proper name, testicles.”

“Yeah,” the kid continued, wide-eyed. “And I saw that lady’s chesticles, too! Did you see them? They were hanging right there and—”

The outraged mother clamped one hand over her son’s mouth and the other over his eyes as she led him away.

“I’m-m-m...I’m-m-m-m...” croaked Santa Claus as he struggled to rise.

“What is it, sir?” Savannah graciously offered him her hand. He slapped it away.

A couple of fresh-faced security guards in black, wanna-be-cop uniforms came whizzing up in a glorified golf cart. “What’s going on here?” the tallest one demanded as he climbed out of the cart. “Oh, Mr. Wilcox,” he said, noticing the man on the ground, “it’s a good thing you’re here.” He consulted his watch. “Your shift starts in three minutes. Are you hurt?”

“I’m-m-m...I...ack-k-k-k-k.”

“Mr. Wilcox seems to have lost his voice for the moment,” Savannah said, trying to sound helpful, even cheerful. “In fact, I think he should probably be taken to a hospital. You said something about his shift. Does he work here?”

“Sure,” replied the short one. “He’s our five o’clock-'till-closing Santa.”

“Oh, crap,” Savannah whispered to Dirk, “I really did kick Santa in the balls.”

“Definitely classifies as a ‘naughty’ and not ‘nice’ gesture,” he replied dryly.

Still leaning against the VW, Tammy continued to quietly sob.

“I’m-m-m…I’m-m-m-m…” Once again, the not-particularly-jolly old elf tried to communicate with the world.

“Oh, Santa. I’m so sorry.” Savannah dropped to her knees beside him and clasped his cold, clammy hand between her own. “What is it, sir? What are you trying to tell us?”

“I’m-m-m…I’m-m-m…”

“That’s it. Just take a deep breath and say it.”

“I’m-m-m… gonna…sue…your ass off!”

* * *

6:15 p.m.

Having pulled his car deep into the orange grove, well out of sight from the main road, the driver cut the key. He pulled his backpack from the floorboard and yanked the zipper open. Inside he had packed duct tape, thin nylon rope, and a ten-inch butcher knife—the tools of his trade. Rape was a primal act; it didn’t require sophisticated, high-tech equipment.

Oh, yes, and the disguise. He was particularly proud of the red hat with its white fur trim and the snow white, luxuriously curly beard. Who said he didn’t have Christmas spirit? He grinned as he tossed his keys into the pack and zipped it closed.

When he swung the car door open, the sweet scent of tree-ripened citrus filled his head, triggering memories...of last time...of the time before...and the time before that. Lately, just the smell of his morning glass of orange juice got him aroused.

He glanced at his watch. Six-seventeen. He had to get to the bus stop. The last one ran at six-thirty. Stupid hick town. They folded up the sidewalks at eight.

But he’d be back. In an hour or less, he’d return. With company.

He took a deep breath, smelled the oranges, and felt his blood rush to his groin.

Oh, yeah. He’d be back. And then—party
 
time!