Cooked Goose

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 classic Camaro, 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 brokendown 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 King 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