Stalls at idle

I have a 1999 mercury cougar with 109,000 miles on it. It is an automatic and every time I come home it smells like burnt rubber. I just had my brake pads replaced so it can't be those.
My main problem is when I try to start it up in the morning the RPMs go way up and then go all the way down to zero and the car dies.
I think that if I manually raise the RPMs that will fix my problem. Can you tell me how to do this on my car?