Burn All Alike

by Nene Adams

  Insects kamikaze dived at the brightly glowing, loudly humming neon on the roof: the shape of a reclining, large-breasted woman kicking her legs in the air. The tubes forming her head and face had gone dark or been busted, essentially decapitating her.

  “Oh, good Lord.” Mackenzie stared at the handwritten sign tacked to the door. “It’s Chickenshit Bingo night.”

  Veronica chuckled. “That’s actually kind of fun, if you’re in the mood.” She opened the door. Her next words were drowned out in a blast of hard-driving music.

  Inside the roadhouse, Mackenzie had to stop and wait for her vision to adjust to the dim, smoky atmosphere. Little appeared to have changed. The tar papered walls were still covered in beer bottle caps driven in by the fists of drunkards over many decades and every surface seemed to be covered in a thin film of grease and desperation. “Fire code, my ass,” she muttered, looking in vain for an EXIT sign.

  To the right ran the bar with a new addition on the end: a cage built of chicken wire and two by fours. Inside the cage, a white hen scratched for seeds, clucked and suddenly paused. The feathered tail lowered. The hen stood and stalked away.

  “B-12,” yelled a middle-aged woman wearing a dangerously uncertain tube top.

  Several people at tables marked their bingo cards.

  Mackenzie refused to take a printed card from the stack by the door. She and Veronica were here on business, not to get hammered and cheer an incontinent bird.

  To her left stood a jukebox and a couple of pool tables. The central area held battered tables and chairs in front of a raised stage sporting a stripper pole. Her memories of Debbie Lou doing an impromptu striptease to Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” were mercifully blurred.

  Between the crowd packed into the space and the jukebox blaring some weird mix of gangster rap and bluegrass at earsplitting volume, Mackenzie could barely hear herself think.

  “Come on, we’ll sit at the bar,” Veronica shouted, moving in that direction.

  “Do we have to?” Mackenzie moaned. Despite her protest, she followed.

  At the bar, Veronica ordered a couple of Snakehead Brown Ales.

  A scruffy bartender sidled over with the sweating bottles. “You know the law drinks free, Deputy. House rules.”

  Mackenzie noticed the other bartender talking on a cell phone.

  “Thank you kindly.” Veronica pulled out her wallet. “But I’d rather pay.” She offered him a bill, which he took between thumb and forefinger as though he might get bit. “This isn’t an official or unofficial police visit. I’m just here with a friend having a drink,” she went on, giving their cover story without so much as a twitch.

  He made a brusque nod and returned to the other end of the bar.

  “I think he bought it.” Mackenzie spoke directly in Veronica’s ear to be certain she was heard over the music.

  She and Veronica had decided earlier the chances of getting the owner to close down the roadhouse were zilch and nada. They planned to hang around and see what, if anything, happened. At the same time, Veronica wanted to quietly check if the roadhouse was prepared in case of fire. The plan had flaws, but it was the best they could come up with.

  Before Veronica had a chance to respond, Wayne “Big Boy” Swayle—a banty rooster of a man and the roadhouse’s owner—appeared at her shoulder, his Texas-sized cowboy belt buckle glinting in the low light. The jukebox fell silent as if on cue.

  “My, my, my, if it isn’t Ms. Kenzie Cross,” he drawled. “Don’t see you around the place as much these days. That hurts my feelings.”

  Mackenzie shrugged and took a sip of ale. Swayle thought he was God’s gift to women. She wished she had a receipt so she could return him. “Debbie Lou and I broke up.”

  Swayle grinned, showing a missing right incisor. The expression combined with his red hair and freckles to give him the appearance of a pugnacious Howdy Doody. “Shame. You ever want to find out how a real man makes love, darlin’, you look me up, y’hear?” He patted his crotch, paying no attention to her glare, and propped an elbow on the bar to turn his attention to Veronica. “What can I do for you, Deputy Birdwell?”

  Veronica regarded him steadily. “This is a drinking establishment, isn’t it?”

  He raised both eyebrows and made a broad gesture with his hand, indicating the bar.

  “Well, I’m drinking.” Veronica suited actions to words by lifting the brown bottle to her lips and taking a long swallow. She set the half-empty bottle on the bar top.

  “I see.” Swayle’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. He glanced at Mackenzie. “You got anything to add, Kenzie?”

  “Nope,” she answered. “Can’t a couple of gals get plastered in peace around here?”

  Swayle huffed. He pointed a finger at Veronica and raised his voice. “Drink all you want as long as you pay the tab, but you pull any legal bullshit on me, Deputy, and I’ll get my lawyer involved. That guy has chunks of assistant prosecutors in his stool.” He stalked off.

  Mackenzie saw several patrons slip out the front door. Probably dealers, she thought, and the reason why Swayle had practically shouted Veronica’s presence to the entire bar.

  “N-44,” came a shout greeted by a smattering of happy cries from the people clustered around the chicken’s cage.

  Veronica swiveled in her seat to survey the interior. “What do you think would happen if this place ignited?”

  “I don’t see any fire extinguishers,” Mackenzie pointed out with a nervous quiver in her stomach. “Swayle probably only trots them out when it’s time for the annual safety inspection, otherwise some of these idiots would beat each other to death with them—” She broke off on a gasp, clutching Veronica’s forearm and staring sidelong at a hateful black silhouette surrounded by flames.

  Osame.

  A lick of fire ran up the wall behind the bar, reaching greedily for the liquor bottles.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Mackenzie jumped off her stool. “Just our luck. The bitch is here.”

  “Bingo!” yelled a drunken man, clearly oblivious to the danger.

  “Fire!” someone else screamed shrilly.

  Silence fell, as though the entire room held its breath. A shocked hush later, more screaming began, and a mad scramble for the door.

  Veronica slid off the stool, planted a hand on the bar top and vaulted over it with a grace that made Mackenzie incredibly envious and incredibly horny at the same time. When this was over, she’d peel those tight black jeans off that magnificent ass and—

  Dirty red and orange flames suddenly roared to the ceiling. A liquor bottle shattered on the shelf. Another. And another. The bartenders scrabbled to escape the flying glass.

  While Veronica wet a bar towel and began slapping at the fire, Mackenzie dialed 911 on her cell phone. Ending the call, she leaned over the bar to retrieve the sawed-off shotgun kept by the owner to break up fights threatening to turn homicidal. She’d seen the business end of the weapon more than a few times while dating Debbie Lou Erskine, the most cantankerous dipsomaniac in Mitford County.

  A large clump of owl-eyed drunks and scantily clad dancers and waitresses formed a bottleneck at the front door, the only exit. The people in the back shoved forward so hard, people at the head of the crowd couldn’t open the door. Any second, someone would snap and the whole human herd would descend into hysterical, violent, uncontrollable panic.

  Ignoring the fire behind her, Mackenzie clambered onto the bar top with considerable less agility than Veronica. She pointed the shotgun at the ceiling and fired.

  The recoil nearly knocked her over, but the shockingly loud roar and the bits of insulation floating through the air got the crowd’s undivided attention. A crazy woman holding a pump action shotgun at point-blank range took precedence over the threat of fire.

  “All y’all take a step back!” Mackenzie yelled, racking the slide to load another round for the satisfaction of seeing people wince. “Quit pushing, or I swear to God, I’ll clear the way with double-
aught shot! You over there with the soul patch and the Coors Light shirt—no, not you, the other guy—open the damned door. Everybody else, form a line. Do it!”

  Above her, she glimpsed Osame’s silhouette. She felt the spirit’s sulfurous eyes on her, a baleful regard scrubbing at her exposed skin like wire wool. “Scram!” she ordered the crowd the second the door flew open.

  The bar patrons and employees finally started shuffling out the doorway in a more or less orderly fashion. Behind them lay a trail of abandoned baseball caps, beer bottles, dollar bills, peanut shells and sequins torn off cheap lingerie.

  Mackenzie glanced over her shoulder at Veronica, still whapping at the fire on the wall with that damned bar rag—an action as fruitless as farting in a gale. “Ronnie, let’s go!”

  Veronica yelled something about checking the restrooms and disappeared through a doorway in the back.

  Cursing, Mackenzie scrambled off the bar just as a huge wave of roiling, sooty fire rolled across the ceiling like a breaker slamming into shore on a high spring tide. Smoke hit her, a toxic blend of fumes instantly cramping her lungs. She dropped the shotgun and raised her arm to cover her nose and mouth with her shirt sleeve.

  She staggered forward, blinking to clear her watery vision. Her outstretched hand hit something that felt flimsy—the chicken cage on the end of the bar. The hen lay unmoving on the cage floor, a pitiful heap of ruffled white feathers. Hardly knowing what she did, she wrenched open the door, picked up the hen and tucked the limp bird under her free arm.

  “Mac!” she heard Veronica cry.

  Mackenzie squinted through the blur of smoke and tears, but couldn’t see much. When she inhaled a cautious breath, intending to shout a reply, the only thing that came out of her mouth was a throat-searing, chest-aching coughing fit.

  Crowned by fire, Osame floated in her peripheral vision. Dozens of long, skinny, restless black tendrils undulated from the top of the silhouette, like tentacles blindly questing for prey. Her skin prickled in the heat even as cold terror flooded through her. The tentacles—no, Osame’s hair, she corrected herself—drifted closer. All around her, the room burned.

  “Mac!”

  In front of her she watched Osame transform to the image she must have presented in life: a young and delicately pretty girl whose upswept black hair was pinned with a comb, a dainty figure wearing a pink and white cherry blossom kimono. Osame stared at her with smoke-filled, greedy eyes. The pale ghost’s lips split apart. The mouth opened to show a sliver of red tongue that became a tiny, dancing flame.

  Shockingly, Osame’s mouth cracked wider, splitting open to the angle of the jaw. Mackenzie’s stomach lurched. The little flame grew bigger, bigger and still bigger until an impossible river of scarlet and yellow fire belched out of the gaping mouth to splash on the floor, curl against the baseboards and hungrily sweep over the tables and chairs.

  Osame’s broken mouth hung open, her chin resting on her chest. She seemed pleased when the cherry blossoms patterned on her kimono flew off one by one, each turning into brightly blazing sparks igniting the stage. The silver tinsel curtain went up in a dazzling flash.

  “Mackenzie Lorelei Cross!”

  She tried to gasp when a strong arm encircled her waist, but she couldn’t draw more than a shallow breath. Dizzy, she let her head fall back as someone dragged her through the open door into the parking lot.

  “Over here!” a man shouted close to her ear.

  Big Boy Swayle, Mackenzie identified him.

  An oxygen mask was jammed against her face. The air smelled funny, but her aching lungs were grateful. Her mind wandered, absently trying to pluck meaning from Swayle’s presence. Had he saved her? But if he had—oh, God.

  “For such a skinny girl, you’re damned solid,” Swayle remarked.

  She tore off the mask. “Ron—” she got out before she started coughing. A fireman tried to reapply the mask. She avoided him and grabbed Swayle’s wrist, forcing the man around and willing him to understand. “Ron…nie,” she choked.

  The fireman muttered about shock, took the mask out of her hand and placed it firmly over her mouth and nose.

  Swayle’s face was covered in soot. He ran both dirty hands through his red hair, which only made him appear filthier. “Deputy Birdwell’s still in there? Shit!”

  Mackenzie nodded. The movement of her head made the vertigo worse. She bent over at the waist, clutching at Swayle for balance, and heaved until spots swam in her vision. Vomit splattered the ground. She gagged on the faint smell of Snakehead ale.

  The fireman detached her hand from Swayle’s arm, led her to a seat on the ambulance’s bumper and ran off shouting. A paramedic put an emergency blanket around her shoulders. She locked her gaze on the burning roadhouse, on the flashing red and white lights, on the fire department volunteers plying their hoses. Silently, she began to pray. To which god—the pagan deities of Myrtle Johnson’s Wiccan religion, the stern Father of the Christian faith, or the universe itself—she didn’t know and didn’t care. Please let Ronnie be all right. Please.

  The roof suddenly collapsed, sending a shower of red-gold sparks into the night sky. The fallen neon sign exploded with loud pops and cracks sounding like rifle shots.

  If Veronica was still in there, if the best thing that had ever happened to her died trying to save some idiot too drunk to save himself… Mackenzie’s heart contracted into a small, tight ball of worry and despair.

  “Thanks for saving Mrs. McCluck.” Swayle joined her on the bumper, indicating the white hen, which had revived to scratch and peck at the gravel.

  Mackenzie didn’t remember when she’d put the chicken on the ground, much less carrying the bird out of the roadhouse. She ignored Swayle. The crushing weight in her chest vanished when she spotted Veronica limping toward her, assisted by a fireman.

  Her heart buoyed, flying up like embers to the stars.

  “Ronnie!” she screamed—or tried to, but a tearing pain in her throat filled her mouth with the metallic taste of blood.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mackenzie paused in the act of sipping from a mug of salty, savory, garlic chicken broth. Swallowing hurt her raw throat. So did talking.

  She’d been advised at the hospital last night not to attempt speaking aloud yet since she might do worse damage to her vocal cords. At least her lungs no longer felt like ashtrays, she thought, staring into the slightly oily yellow liquid in the mug. Garlic-scented steam bathed her face. She tried another sip, sucking in air to cool the soup in her mouth.

  Beside her on the sofa, Veronica put down a half-eaten onion bagel with schmear and let out a hollow-sounding cough. “You didn’t have to go to Shapiro’s on my account,” she said hoarsely. “I could’ve scrounged up something for lunch.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mackenzie attempted. Even the small sound hurt her throat.

  She’d missed her usual weekly grocery run and didn’t have much food in the apartment. An executive decision had to be made to avoid the Donner party solution, so she’d taken a quick trip to Antioch’s only Jewish deli/restaurant while Veronica was in the shower. Her point-and-nod method at the counter had netted soup and bagels.

  Veronica heaved a put-upon sigh. “We need to do something about that ghost.”

  Mackenzie nodded in silent agreement, letting out her own sigh when Veronica settled a hand just above her wrist.

  “I’m going over to the Buddhist temple later,” Veronica went on. “Abbot Imamura wasn’t telling us the whole truth. He knows something. I want to talk to him. Want to go with me? The garden’s beautiful even at the end of summer. You should see the koi ponds.”

  Again, Mackenzie nodded. She felt like one of those silly bobblehead dolls. Glancing down at the place where Veronica’s hand rested on her forearm, she thought about the roadhouse fire, about loss, and about Osame and the hunger she’d seen in the vengeful spirit.

  Was revenge the only good reason to stay behind after death? she wondered. Granted, her experience
wasn’t vast, but so far, it seemed the spirits she’d encountered were single-minded in pursuit of their personal vendettas. Case in point: Annabel Coffin, the spirit of the woman whose mummified corpse had been walled up in Mackenzie’s office for years, had killed the man who murdered her in a particularly gruesome way.

  Mackenzie understood the desire for retribution. If anyone took Veronica from her, she’d hunt down the sorry son-of-a-bitch no matter where he tried to hide, even if she had to walk through Hell wearing gasoline drawers.

  She sipped the last of the cooling soup and took her mug to the kitchen.

  Osame, an innocent young woman who loved a young man, had suffered horribly in the last hours before her death. But the men who’d done those terrible things were gone, she supposed, except former sheriff Pharaoh DuPeret. He wasn’t much more than an accessory after the fact. If Osame was after justice for her murder, she was a few decades too late.

  Mackenzie swept bagel crumbs off the counter and into the sink while she considered what to do next. Visiting Imamura was a good idea. Recalling a subject she and Veronica had discussed earlier, she found the notepad she used to jot down grocery lists and scribbled a question. Taking the notepad to the living room, she held it in front of Veronica’s face.

  Veronica leaned forward to squint at the writing. “Yes, I made a couple of calls. The construction company working the Renaissance Three site did report finding human skeletal remains to Laxahatchee PD. The coroner ruled the remains were female and Asian, not recently deceased, not homicide and not of sufficient age to warrant an evaluation from the Historic Preservation Department. Laxahatchee PD gave the company the go-ahead to continue. Jane Doe was reburied in the county Potter’s Field behind Oak Grove Cemetery.”

  She scratched her pen across the page. Only one body?

  “They only found Osame’s body, Mac.”