Stalking Death (45 page)
Authors: Kate Flora
I wiped my eyes, blew my nose, and picked up the phone to call Andre.
The End
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Want more from Kate Flora?
Here's an excerpt from
DEATH WARMED OVER
A Thea Kozak Mystery
Book Eight
~
I retraced my steps through the dining room and the entry hall and shoved back the heavy pocket doors. The huge, bright, front-to-back living room was painted a soothing, soft gray-green. Light streamed in through a wall of windows at the end. In the center sat a single chair. The chair was surrounded by a circle of space heaters, each of them glowing fiery red, connected to outlets by long orange tails of extension cords. Our realtor, Ginger Stevens, was tied to the chair, a thick strip of shiny silver duct tape wrapped around her head and her mouth. Her skin was blackening red and blistered. Her clothes were charred and smoking.
As fresh air whooshed through the door with me, her clothes burst into little tongues of flame and her long russet-brown braid caught fire. Above the smoke and flames, her eyes, wide with pain and terror, fixed on me. She mumbled behind the tape as I stood and stared, frozen in place, trying to process what I was seeing. The horror. The incongruity. The utterly incomprehensible nature of what was happening. I stood in the doorway, paralyzed. Ginger was being cooked.
Then I dove into action.
I sprinted toward the circle. Heat and hot metal seared my ankles as I kicked the nearest heaters out of the way. I grabbed the back of the chair, the paint blistering hot under my fingers. As tongues of flame licked at me, I dragged her into a cooler part of the room. I tore off my jacket, balled it up to protect my hands, and used it to smother the flames from her still-burning clothing and her hair. Then I tore at the tape that covered her mouth and nearly covered her nose, gagging from the smell of burned flesh and singed hair and the horror of realizing that I hadn't smelled barbecue at all. I'd smelled this woman, Ginger Stevens, my kind, sweet, sometimes too chatty realtor, being burned alive.
As I pulled out my phone and dialed 9-1-1, Ginger tried to speak.
"Hush," I said. "Hold on. Hold on. I'm calling for help. I'm going to get someone here to help you. We're going to get you to a hospital, Ginger. It's going to be okay."
I wished I believed what I was saying.
Her mouth moved. Dry split lips. Her swollen tongue trying to form words. I bent down so my mouth was close. A faint mumble I could barely make out. A few sounds that seemed like words.
"Don't try to talk," I said, because the effort was so clearly painful. But her effort was extreme. There was something she had to tell me.
"...airy," she gasped. "Bobby." Her blackened hands clawed at the air. "So long. Safe." A grasp for the strength to go on, and then, "Sorry."
As the operator answered and went through her spiel, this call is being recorded, blah, blah, I tried to give her the details. My name. The address of this house. The awful scene, a woman being burned alive. Our need for an ambulance and EMTS. Our need for cops, for a crime scene team because this was no accident.
Now that the tape was off her mouth and she'd delivered her incomprehensible message, Ginger's muffled sounds had become a ceaseless high-pitched scream, a primitive, animal cry of agony. Most people know what a burn feels like. Multiply that times a thousand and you wouldn't even come close. Her eyes had a dulled glaze that made me fear she was dying. That she'd die here before help could arrive.
I could barely hear the operator over the screaming. She kept asking me questions I couldn't answer. Finally, I gave up.
"Just send help," I said. I repeated my number and the address. "Send help. And please, for God's sake, have someone call me and tell what I should be doing for her. If there's any way to help her."
"Please stay on the line," she began.
"Don't be stupid," I said. "I can't stay on the line. I've got to go unplug those damned heaters before the whole place burns down."
The ones I'd kicked over were already scorching the floor, heating up the shiny new finish and adding a hot chemical reek to the already fouled air. It was only a matter of moments before the whole place caught fire.
She was starting to say something about staying out of a burning building when I disconnected. Emergency operators can be amazing. They can talk people in crisis through a lot, they can help people deliver babies and save someone who's choking, but in this case what she had to say wasn't helpful. She didn't understand the situation I was in and it was way too bizarre to explain.
I dropped the phone in my pocket and ran around the room, jerking on the cords and unplugging all of the heaters. It was so hot I felt like I was in an oven. Where they'd been burned, my ankles and hands felt raw and sore. I raced back to Ginger's chair and dragged her out into the hall where it was cooler, the chair legs leaving ugly scrapes on the shiny floor.
I tore at the knots, trying to get them undone, wanting to set her free, but they were too tight. Not that she would notice. They were all that was holding her up now. Her body had collapsed and she slumped against them, only semi-conscious. I figured that I couldn't get her out of the chair anyway. There was no place I could touch her that wouldn't be agonizing. And those knots, those rather strange knots, might be evidence. There might be DNA on them.
Dammit. I was hopeless. Thea Kozak. The woman who couldn't stop being a detective, even when she'd sworn she'd left all that behind her.
The screaming didn't stop. Ginger screamed like I had never heard screaming before, screams of such awful intensity I wanted to cover my ears. I wanted to scream myself. I wanted to beg her to please stop, even though I knew she couldn't, because I knew I would never be able to get those screams out of my head.
I couldn't leave her. I couldn't do anything for her. I couldn't even take her hand or touch her to lend some comfort. The only thing I could do was talk to her. Keep my voice calm and reassuring and remind her to hold on. To hold on and stay with me because help was coming.
It felt like I knelt there in the foyer and tried to say comforting things for about four lifetimes, using my charred jacket as padding because the hardwood floor was becoming a torture to my knees, while the smell of burned flesh imbedded itself in my hair, my clothes, my lungs, and my brain.
~
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Death Warmed Over
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~
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Kate Flora first developed her fascination with people's criminal tendencies as a lawyer in the Maine attorney general's office. Deadbeat dads, people who beat and neglected their kids, and employers hateful acts of discrimination led to a deep curiosity about human psychology that's led to fourteen books including seven "strong woman" Thea Kozak mysteries and four gritty police procedurals in her star-reviewed Joe Burgess series. She thanks Nancy Drew, Sara Paretsky, and Dick Francis for her inspiration. She's been an Edgar, Derringer, Agatha and Anthony finalist and twice won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Her nonfiction won the Public Safety Writers Association Award in 2015.
When she's not writing, or teaching writing at Grub Street in Boston, she's usually found in her garden, where she wages a constant battle against critters, pests, and her husband's lawnmower. She's been married for 35 years to a man who can still make her laugh. She has two wonderful sons, a movie editor and a scientist, two lovely daughters-in-law, a perfect grandson, and four rescue "granddogs," Frances, Otis, Harvey, and Daisy.
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