Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

department will be here, won’t they?
    But until then, all she had was fear and prayer and chemicals and shaking hands. And Ian, a dark figure lit by flames as he ran toward her from the front of Cosmic Energy.
    “Deadbolts and bars all over the front of the shop,” he said. “Hope it isn’t the same back here.”
    It wasn’t. He’d never figured out why people didn’t bar the alley door as heavily as the front, but most of them didn’t. He kicked in the back door of Cosmic Energy and vanished inside. Although the exterior of the shop was only moments away from full conflagration, there was surprisingly little fire visible inside. The smoke more than made up for it. Breathing through the wet towel, he headed for where he thought the stairway might be. It wasn’t. All he found was smoke, blinding, choking, smothering. He spun and hurried in the opposite direction, found the stairway, and raced up, bending almost double to get below the smoke. He didn’t need the crackle of flames to tell him that the fire was worse upstairs. He could see it across the back of the house, pouring in the heat-shattered hall window.
    One of the two rooms upstairs was empty. The other, overlooking the alley, was locked and barred. Smoke curled out from the cracks around the door. The panels were blistering hot to the touch. Whoever opened that door without full fire-fighting gear would get a lethal blast of flame.
    Nor was there any reason to go farther. From the smell of it, whoever was in that room had already swallowed the dragon and died.
    Crouching low, Ian ran for the staircase and air that didn’t gag him to breathe.
    Outside, the fire sighed and flared in fluid, deadly beauty. Lacey watched in horrified fascination as wind-driven flames leaped to consume the second-floor apartment.
    I’ll make sure your neighbor’s out.
    A new kind of fear streaked through Lacey, a razor slice of panic. Her brain knew that someone had to check on her neighbor, but the primitive part of her screamed that Ian mattered more than the drunken cosmic pothead whose carelessness likely had started the fire in the first place.
    “Ian!”
    He didn’t answer.
    Lacey grabbed a second extinguisher and ran toward the shattered back door of Cosmic Energy, canisters banging with every step. She emptied the first extinguisher on the doorway, readied the second, and leaped over the smoldering barrier.
    “Ian! Where are you?”
    He heard her before he saw her silhouette outlined by the flaming doorway. His heart stopped and then kicked in at twice the speed. He took her low and over his shoulder, slamming out through the doorway into the smoke-filled alley that smelled like paradise after the ghastly house.
    “Of all the crazy—” he began fiercely, coughed. “I’ll chew you out later. Is the extinguisher I brought down still loaded?” he asked hoarsely.
    “No.”
    “Any more?” he asked, coughing again.
    “In the shop.”
    “Where?”
    “Here.” She shoved the good extinguisher at him and sprinted for her back door. Getting them herself was easier than telling him how to.
    He started to object and decided to save his breath for coughing and dragging at oxygen. While he did both, he figured out the extinguisher, triggered it, and damped down the flames in the trash piled between the two houses. The hose still sprayed on everything it could, but it wasn’t enough. He repositioned the hose so that it would throw water at the roof of Lacey’s shop, where windblown flames were starting to reach out hungrily from the burning house next door.
    Two fire extinguishers clanked down nearby. He threw away the empty and went to work with a fresh one.
    In the distance, sirens wailed their song of bad luck and death.
    Lacey stood for a moment, fighting for breath, unaware that she was shaking from adrenaline and fear. The two old cottages looked like a study in light and darkness, fire and waiting. Beyond the reach of hose or chemicals, wood smoked and shimmered into flame. Some of the flames were licking at her eaves.
    For the first time she understood that she was losing her shop and her home to fire.
    “No,” she screamed. “No!”
    Ian braced the extinguisher with one arm and with the other pulled her close for the only kind of comfort he could offer.
    “Grandpa’s paintings! I can’t let them burn!”
    Before he could prevent it, she twisted away from him and lunged back into her shop. Breathing smoke and fear every step of the way, she