Cooked Goose

feet away. Watching me. Coming this way.”
    Savannah broke into a run. She still couldn’t see around the damned truck.
    “ Savannah !” Tammy sounded like she was about to cry. “ Savannah , I... oh... shit! Help!”
    “Dirk! The kid’s in trouble!” Savannah shouted. “Hurry!”
    “I know!” he yelled back, panting. “I’m only halfway there.”
    Damn him. 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 son of a bitch,” 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, screw 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, damn, that hurts!”
    “Hurts?” Savannah looked down at her groaning, moaning Santa lookalike. 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... owww... it’s shorting out or something... I... owwwww!”
    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 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