Cooked Goose

attendant, a bleary-eyed, middle-aged woman who appeared to be suffering from Holiday Overtime Meltdown Syndrome.
    “Here you go.” Tammy shoved three shirts and a dress in the attendant’s direction along with the red, plastic tag bearing the number 5. “I’m keeping the jeans.”
    The woman took the unwanted garments from Tammy and tossed them onto a heap behind her counter. “Merry Christmas,” she muttered in the same tone of voice usually reserved for bidding someone a speedy bon voyage to Hades.
    Savannah was about to return the blessing, when a male voice began to speak... from the vicinity of Tammy’s chest.
    “What are you broads doing in there...” The words were gruff and static-fried. “...buying out the whole damned store while I’m roasting my chestnuts out here in the parking lot?”
    “Oh, my God! What was that?” The attendant’s eyes bugged as though she had just witnessed irrefutable evidence of demon possession. Several plastic tags that she had been holding fluttered to the floor. “Did your... your bra just say something?”
    “Naw,” Savannah told her in a lazy, Dixie drawl, “it’s just her right boob. Sometimes it has political arguments with the other one about being too far left.”
    Tammy snickered, but the attendant gave Savannah the same animated look of a stale fish market trout.
    “Cute,” Tammy whispered to Savannah as they walked away from the woman without further explanation. “But I don’t think she got your joke.”
    “Nope. Sailed over her head like an origami airplane. But she did have a point. Why are we hearing Dirk? He’s only supposed to come through on the earpiece.”
    Ducking behind a rack of coats, Tammy pulled back her shirt lapel and exposed the tiny communication unit taped to her breast. “Dirk’s police department reject equipment is fritzing out again... big surprise there.”
    “It’s not my equipment’s fault,” said the voice that sounded like it was broadcasting from a pan of sizzling bacon. “It’s the ding-a-ling that’s using it. You probably pulled the earpiece out when you were trying on all those clothes.”
    Tammy traced the thin wire from the plug in her ear, beneath her hair and to the disconnected jack in her bra.
    “He’s right,” she said. Dropping her voice to a stage whisper, she added, “Dam... did he hear what I said about thongs.”
    “Yeah, but he’s half deaf,” Savannah replied. “He probably thought you said songs.”
    “I don’t care what songs you’re singing in there,” Dirk returned. “Get out here so you can be mugged, raped, abducted, or whatever. I ain’t got all day, you know.”
    Tammy reached down and put her hand over the microphone. “I know he’s your best friend, but that guy really gets on my nerves sometimes.”
    Savannah chuckled and guided Tammy toward the checkout stand. “He gets on everybody’s nerves sometimes. Let’s buy those jeans and get outta here. He sounds like he’s about at the end of his three-inch patience tether. Besides, we’ve got a rapist who’s not exactly spreading holiday cheer. And nabbing his mangy ass would really make my day.”

    4:47 p.m.

    Savannah and Tammy parted ways at the south end of the mall, near Burger King, with Savannah heading for the back parking lot, while Tammy and her carefully chosen purchases took the front.
    They had been “mock shopping” all day, but now that the sun had set, Savannah insisted on patrolling the back where fewer shoppers, thick shrubbery and reduced lighting increased the likelihood of an attempted nabbing by the rapist. Tammy had made only a feeble objection; this gig was her first true decoy assignment and she, as well as Savannah , knew her limitations.
    The moment Savannah opened the back door and stepped into the late afternoon winter darkness outside, she thought for half a second it was snowing. Then she caught a whiff of smoke and knew the flakes that were falling from the California December sky were ashes, the result of an out-of-control brush-fire on the hill. From where she stood she could see, several miles away, the eerie, bloodred line of glowing flames that lit the dark horizon on the east side of town. Like some sort of grotesque, luminous serpent, it wriggled its path up the black hill, consuming a decade’s growth of sage, marguerites, and miscellaneous scrub brush.
    “It’s a little hard to get into the Christmas spirit,” she muttered to herself, “when it’s eighty