Die in Plain Sight (16 page)

When he could see again, he discovered that he was braced on the table and she was collapsed against him, breathing like a sprinter. So was he. He smiled, savoring her female heat, scent, and textures.

“First my jacket, now my jeans,” he said against her hair. “Hope you have a washing machine around here. Or at least a dryer.”

She took a breath. “You bragging or complaining?”

“Bragging. You mind?”

“I’d need a brain to mind. I must have lost it with my dress.”

“Your dress is around your neck. Kind of.”

She blew against his chin. “How about my brain?”

He tipped her mouth up and gave her a gentle, thorough kiss. “Sexy. Female. Really fine.”

“My brain?”

“Yeah.”

She tilted her head back and smiled up at him. “I like you a lot, Ian Lapstrake.”

Amused, he glanced down to where they were still interlocked. “I figured that out.”

“No, I mean even after, uh…”

“The itch is scratched?”

She nodded. “Usually, well…”

“Same here. Things change afterward. Not bad, just different, because you know it’s not what you wondered it would be like before.”

Her lips brushed his. “Yeah. And this time it was.”

“Would you believe I followed that?”

“Right now, I’d believe anything you tell me.”

“Water flows uphill,” he said.

“Naturally.”

“Black is white.”

“Always.”

“One plus one is five.”

“Of course.”

“I only have one condom.”

“What?
Damn.
I stopped keeping them because I couldn’t find anyone to wear them with.” She stuck out her lower lip and blew hard enough to make the curls against her temple fly. “Guess we’ll get to brush up on our heavy petting skills.”

Ian threw back his head and laughed without restraint. “I really like you a lot, Lacey Quinn.”

The kiss he gave her started slow and ended deep. Finally he lifted his head and said, “I have enough condoms to kill us.”

“Standard equipment?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“Susa gave them to me when she kicked me out.”

Lacey’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”

He shook his head.

She smiled slowly. “We’ll have to think of a way to thank her.”

“I’ll bet she’s hard to buy gifts for.”

“Good thing we have all night to think about it.”

“Yeah.” Slowly Ian stepped back until they were separate again. As he lifted Lacey off the table, he looked down at her breasts flattened against his shirt and harness. “Next time I want to be naked, too.”

“Only if I get to paint you that way.”

His eyebrows shot up. “That would be another first.”

“This is your lucky night, neighbor. C’mon, strip. We’ll throw everything
but the gun and holster in the washer. Won’t do diddly for the oil stains, but the rest should come out just fine.”

When she turned around and headed for the washer, he saw that her butt was both firm and rainbow-colored from the paint table. Grinning in anticipation, he followed her, peeling off clothes every step of the way.

Newport Beach

3
A.M.
Friday morning

T
he man had been around enough to know how street people moved—slow, a little bent over, uneven, careful. Kind of like a drunk pushing a three-wheeled shopping cart full of junk. Except the real drunks would be off the streets by now, passed out in a doorway with an empty pint tossed nearby. Newport PD didn’t hassle the street people unless someone complained a lot or the local liberals started a drive to round up the homeless and give everyone a bath, a blanket, and shoes or wheelchairs or whatever. It didn’t matter. Within a day or two everything but the bath would end up in a pawnshop and the money would go straight to the mini-marts that sold fortified wine; but it’s the thought that counts.

Since it wasn’t election time, nobody had been counting or thinking about the homeless lately. He’d passed two old ladies barricaded behind their rusty shopping carts and third-world luggage. Then he passed a guy trash-diving behind a local deli for a late-night snack. A couple of alley
cats also watched with interest. A rat’s eyes gleamed from beneath the wheeled trash bin.

When the man reached the last street before his destination, he waited until nothing moved, not even a rat, before he crossed in the darkness between two distant streetlights. The wind off the ocean was cold enough to make bones ache, but it didn’t matter to him. He’d be warm in a little while.

And Lacey Quinn would be a hell of a lot hotter than warm.

With a narrow smile, he walked past the back of Lost Treasures Found to the trash piled up behind the cottage that was painted blue in the front and peeled down to bare, scoured planks in the back. Pressed between buildings on either side of the alley, the wind poured through the opening in an invisible, restless stream.

After a quick look around to be certain he was alone, he selected an area that was about six feet from the narrow opening between the two old houses that had been converted to shops. Not so close to Lost Treasures Found that anyone would guess it was the target, and not so far away that the shop would survive the coming fire. Satisfied, he reached into his coat, pulled out one handful after another of compressed paraffin-soaked sawdust, and scattered the chunks through some cardboard and packing material that was heaped between the two houses.

When only a handful was left, he pulled a quart bottle of gasoline out of a deep coat pocket. Using all but about half a cup from the bottle, he saturated the loose pile of trash. Next he pulled over a cracked, battered plastic trash can that stood drunkenly in back of Cosmic Energy. Then he gathered enough other cardboard debris to make the kind of bonfire that homeless people started on nights like these to keep warm. In case the local cops couldn’t figure that angle out on their own, he shoved all the trash into the can, emptied the rest of the gas on it, threw in the bottle, added more paper, and lit it off. As soon as the flames bit down into the gasoline, the fire settled in to burn hot and bright.

He counted to sixty and pushed over the can with his foot. Flaming trash flowed out toward Cosmic Energy like a dragon’s forked tongue. The back of the old clapboard house started to burn like the tinder it was. Another part of the tongue flicked out hungrily, licking toward the gasoline-soaked pile between the two houses.

He was three blocks away before the two fires joined.

Newport Beach

Very early Friday morning

L
acey and Ian woke up in a nightmarish clarity of adrenaline and smoke pouring through the open window.

Fire.

Neither knew who yelled it first. Their feet slapped on the wooden floor at the same time.

“Call 911!” Lacey said, grabbing for the fire extinguisher she kept by the bed.

Ian snatched up the bedside phone, punched in the numbers, and went through the maddening and necessary protocol of name, address, phone number, reason for call, etc., etc. While he answered questions, he yanked on jeans, shoes, and weapon harness. As he clipped his cell phone to his jeans, the emergency operator asked him to repeat the information.

“Play back the tape, I’m busy,” he said and threw the receiver on the bedside table. He stuck his head out the bedroom window to measure
the fire. “Oh shit, oh dear. Lacey!” he hollered. “We’ve got to move your car. Where are the keys?”

“On the hook by the back door. I’ll get them.”

“Do it before the car is toast.”
And so are we if that gas tank blows up in our faces.

Lacey didn’t answer. She just grabbed the keys and shot back out in the alley. Ian snatched her sandals and his shirt for her to wear and ran down the stairs. He paused long enough in the kitchen to snag some dish towels and another fire extinguisher. When he got outside, Lacey had just finished moving the car and was running back up the alley toward him. He dumped everything but the towels near the extinguisher she’d abandoned to get the car away from the flames.

“Put these on so you don’t get cut up or burned,” he said.

White-faced, she jammed on her sandals, pulled his T-shirt on, and bent down to pick up the fire extinguisher. Soon the
whoosh
of carbon dioxide and chemicals spewed out of the canister again. A tongue of flame snaked around the back corner of the shop, met a blast of foam, sputtered, and died. She followed the flame back to its source, a scattering of trash blown by the wind. Then she went to work on the next out-rider of fire climbing up the side of her shop.

“There’s a hose by the back steps,” she yelled to Ian.

“Got it.”

While she chased bold flames, he turned on the water and braced the nozzle so that liquid sprayed over the side of her shop and the aisle of burning trash between the two buildings. It was better than pissing on it, but not much.

Where are the lights and sirens, damn it!

Too much fire. Not enough time.

Grimly he soaked the kitchen towels in water. As smoke masks went, it was like the hose—better than nothing, but not much.

“Don’t go back in the shop,” Ian said as he headed for the old clapboard house next door. “I’ll go around to the front and make sure your neighbor’s out.”

Lacey’s mouth was too dry to answer. She’d seen another licking swirl of orange glide up the side of her shop beneath the veil of water. Heart hammering, hands sweating, she pointed the extinguisher nozzle and fired. Chemicals mixed with the biting smell of smoke. With every spurt
from the nozzle she thanked her grandfather’s paranoia about fire. When this extinguisher died, she had four more big ones inside.

Surely by the time these are used up, the fire 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 raced upstairs, grabbed sheets from her bed and frantically began wrapping up the paintings. Clutching them awkwardly, she turned around and ran smack into Ian.

“Give me those,” he snarled.

It was a voice she’d never heard from him. “They’re Grandpa’s. I couldn’t let—”

She was talking to herself. Ian had grabbed the paintings and was shouldering her out and down the stairs at a speed just short of break-neck. She turned for the back door of the shop, only to be yanked off her feet and shoved through the aisles of Lost Treasures Found toward the front door. She opened the locks automatically and stumbled out into the night, tripping over fear and grief. He caught her before she fell and hustled her across the street, upwind of the fire.

“I’m all right,” she said numbly. “The fire—”

“Will do just fine without you,” he cut in. “Stay here.”

“Only if you do.”

In the light of the streetlamp, he looked at her stubborn eyes and trembling lips and knew she would follow him the instant he turned his back.

“We have maybe two minutes,” he said. “What do you want saved?”

“Everything.” She smiled through tears. “Nothing. I have what’s important right here. All the rest can be replaced one way or another.”

“Computer records?”

“Duplicates in my car.”

“Clothes?”

“There are twelve garage sales this week.”

“Your paintings?”

She flinched. “More where they came from.”

But her expression said it wasn’t true.

“Guard these until I get back,” he said, pointing to the three canvases he’d put on the sidewalk.

He ran back into the shop before she could argue. He couldn’t save
all her work, but he could rescue some of it. He snatched the painting drying on the easel, scooped up others at random until he couldn’t carry any more, and clattered back down the stairs and out the shop door.

The night was alive with sirens and red lights and men yelling orders while laying hoses. He dumped the paintings at Lacey’s feet and turned to go get more before the cops who were screaming in from all sides could barricade the entrances.

“No!” Lacey’s surprisingly strong hands clamped over Ian’s forearm, nails digging in.

“There’s time.”

“You’re worth more than a few paintings.”

“There are more than a few paintings up there.”

Her lips trembled into a smile. “You’re still worth more.”

“Don’t tell the IRS.”

Then he pulled her close and held her, just held her, while squad cars slammed to a stop and uniformed cops poured out. Two of them spotted the couple on the sidewalk and came toward them.

Ian braced himself for the questions that would begin raining down. As he did, he wondered if the answers the cops eventually found would include who had started the fire.

And why.