Fade the Heat

by Colleen Thompson

  “Damn it all,” he said aloud, his suspicion settling on the woman who’d been on his mind. As he had followed her to the door to be certain she left without a fuss, hadn’t she accused him of not caring that her life was being ruined? And she’d seemed furious enough to do almost anything to get even.

  Well, wrecking his truck sure as hell wasn’t going to win him over to her cause. Jack shoved his damp hair from his eyes, surveyed the damage, and tried the crumpled door without success.

  Swearing again, he thought of having Reagan Hurley arrested. The green streaks that stood out against the red paint would help identify the car that had hit his. When the cops found that her paint matched and heard his testimony about her behavior, they ought to…

  He sighed, remembering the little girl who’d had grit enough to hurl rocks at Paulo—who weighed in at one-eighty at the age of thirteen—for his cruelty. Jack could still smell the lighter fluid, could still see the big bastard setting fire to his little brother’s GI Joe and hear him hooting with laughter and squealing gleefully, “I’m melting, Reagan. Save me!” as if it were hilarious that the girl’s dad had died fighting a warehouse blaze a few days before Christmas. Jack remembered, too, how he’d come home, beaten bloody by Paulo after stopping his furious friend from doing God-knows-what to pay her back for the purple knot she’d left on his forehead.

  After that day, Jack had never gone back to that wooded bend of the brown bayou, no matter how many times Paulo told him he was over Jack’s “betrayal” there. Oh, they’d hung together now and then—in their neighborhood, having Paulo as an ally definitely increased a teenager’s chances of survival—but things had never really been the same between them.

  And Jack had never again felt quite the same way about the skinny blond pain-in-the-butt who’d followed him—much to his thirteen-year-old horror—to the bayou that windy January day. Even now, he didn’t want to hurt Reagan, didn’t want trouble over his damaged Explorer to force her out of the job she obviously loved.

  Besides, he told himself, if the media whipped up some scandal linking him to a feud with a beautiful blond firefighter, it would heap more fuel on the blaze Winter’s accusations had ignited. Fuel enough to see him fired and this desperately needed clinic closed.

  So instead of calling the police, he let himself back inside the locked clinic and rummaged through the day’s charts until he found Reagan Hurley’s. Opening it on a clerk’s desk, he found a piece of scratch paper and copied the address and phone number.

  As he wrote, the telephone beside his elbow began ringing. Figuring it was probably another reporter, Jack ignored it—until he heard the gruff voice on the answering machine.

  “This is Paul Rodriguez calling for Jack Montoya.”

  Jack stared at the machine, shaken to hear the same Paulo he had thought of only moments earlier. Not that the towering adult, who these days favored sharp suits and expensive haircuts, bore much resemblance to the troublemaking teen…

  “Jack—you gotta put a stop to this,” the speaker barked. “They’re trashing the neighborhood’s reputation with all this talk about illegals, acting like we’re nothing but a bunch of goddamn wetbacks. You call back that fucking Winter and set him straight before he—”

  Unable to find the right button to disconnect the call, Jack snatched up the receiver.

  “Hey, ’mano,” Jack said, though it had been a lot of years—and a lot of water under the bridge—since the two of them had run the streets together. Even then, Paulo had pounded Jack at least as often as he’d seen fit to help, punishing him for everything from helping his landlord’s little girl to suddenly choosing school over la vida, the street life.

  Fumbling with the answering machine, Jack managed to stop its recording. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s what you can do for this neighborhood, not me,” Paulo shot back. “That Darren Winter Show—the man is tearing down our people. You gotta stop it now, before we lose all our investors.”

  Investors. Of course. Jack should have known his old friend’s motives weren’t completely altruistic. Though Paulo—or Paul, as he now called himself—had turned his rough energies from tormenting little girls and stripping stolen cars to expanding Cheap Wheelz, the small, cut-rate auto rental chain he’d inherited from his grandfather, he was always on the lookout for the next big score.

  Rumor had it he was hungrier than ever, thanks to some sort of family medical situation. Jack had never seen Paulo’s son, but word was that not long after Paulo’s common-law wife ran off, the three-year-old was diagnosed with some serious disorder—Jack thought it might be autism or mental retardation. But sorry as he was about the man’s problems, Jack wasn’t about to shoulder responsibility for Winter’s political agenda.

  “What makes you think I have any control over that loudmouth?” asked Jack. “If I did, do you really think I’d let him make me trouble?”

  “Tell him you’re going to sue,” Paulo suggested. “Me and my backers, we’ll even foot the bill. We’re trying to get federal funds to revitalize the Plaza del Sol center, but we can’t do it with him running down the neighborho—”

  “I don’t have time for this,” Jack said, though some part of him thought of all the jobs and money that would come back to the area if the flood-damaged shopping center were reopened. “Somebody trashed my SUV, and I’ve got to—”

  “Somebody messing with you? ’Cause I still got connections, connections that want to keep good doctors in the neighborhood, want to keep our people healthy. You’re one of our own, ’mano. You say the word, we take care of you. You want to use a car, I got it. You need something else, we’re up for that, too.”

  A cold wave detonated in Jack’s nervous system, rolling outward to the tips of his fingers and his toes. From the day a hard-ass assistant principal had mocked his goals, Jack had turned himself inside out to show the sorry SOB he would not only graduate, but go to college. In retrospect, the man’s scorn had done Jack more good than a whole truckload of softhearted counselors, but none of his friends had a clue that his newfound studiousness was his own brand of rebellion.

  Especially not Paulo and his friends, who had stuck with raising hell the old-fashioned way. Though Jack occasionally ran into one or another of his former compadres, they rarely acknowledged his existence with more than a tight nod. Yet now, all these years after they’d become men, it seemed he had finally won some measure of their approval.

  Now that he couldn’t remember why he’d ever wanted such a thing in the first place.

  “Thanks,” he said carefully, “but I’d rather take care of this myself.”

  “Just so you do take care of it, man—and I was serious about helping you, if you think your old amigo’s good enough.”

  “Of course I do,” Jack told him, before saying goodbye. Though he had no intention of involving himself with Paulo’s business dealings, he’d be a fool to dismiss the offer out of hand. Especially since he hadn’t missed the undertone of threat…

  When someone cleared a throat behind him, he jerked, pulse pounding, and spun toward what he prayed was not some cranked-up thief looking for drugs.

  “Pendejo! Luz Maria, you scared the liver out of me.”

  “All that schooling and you give me no better than gutter talk?” His little sister wrinkled her nose and deadpanned an impression of their mother, though no one would have mistaken the twenty-three-year-old social worker, with her dancer’s body and her fiery temper, for Candelaria Esmeralda de Vaca Montoya, the reigning queen of suffering. But never, regrettably, of suffering in silence.

  “I figured you’d left for the day when I didn’t see your car outside,” he said. “It hasn’t been stolen, has it? Someone did a real number on mine.”

  Luz Maria sighed. “I wish someone would take the thing. It’s in the shop again. Piece of trash failed the stupid smog inspection.”

  “Score one for Houston’s air quality index.” Luz Maria’s ugly orange hatchback had been belch
ing black clouds for months.

  “Sure, that’s gonna cure the city’s problem.” Her sarcasm had lost all trace of playfulness. “And you don’t have to foot the bill on a lowly social worker’s salary.”

  “It’s not like my salary’s making a huge dent in my student loans—and now I’ll have a deductible to pay on my Explorer.” Jack’s medical school loans loomed like the national debt in his nightmares. But Luz Maria looked so troubled, he couldn’t put his heart into their habitual drive-by potshots. “You need a ride? I’ll even spring for dinner if you can stand a frozen pizza.”

  Maybe then she would tell him what, besides her car, was wrong and help take his mind off his own problems.

  Shaking her head, she settled into a stained, off-kilter desk chair and rubbed her palms on her jeans. “Frozen pizza, huh? It’s no wonder you’re not dating.”

  He’d taken a break from women after his last couple of girlfriends, having figured out what a doctor’s life was all about, decided to shoot for oil-company executives instead. “Hey, if you were a real girl instead of just a sister, I’d bite the bullet and call out for delivery.”

  She didn’t even crack a smile, and her gaze slid away from his. “Yeah, well, all I can say is Sergio’s gonna have to spring for something better if he knows what’s good for him. He’s an hour late to pick me up.”

  No wonder she was brooding. Sergio Cardenas was the latest love of Luz Maria’s life. She’d been going on about him for several months now, a marked change from her previous relationships, some of which had lasted only hours. Jack tamped down a comment. Luz Maria often reminded him that he was her older brother, not her papa. Still, he figured that Sergio’s standing her up on a Friday evening didn’t bode well for their future.

  Though he hated to see her hurting, Jack didn’t worry much about her love life. She was still too young, in both years and maturity, to get serious about any one man.

  Jack perched on the edge of a scuffed and dented metal desk and resigned himself to waiting. No way was he leaving his sister alone in this neighborhood. Even his mother had finally given up on the area, at his and Luz Maria’s urging, and moved to a small house in a safer location, nearer to her shop.

  “Sure you don’t want to come with me?” he asked. “Rockets are on the tube tonight, and there’s cold beer in the fridge. If you need a break from Mama, you’re welcome to crash on the pull-out tonight.”

  “No, thanks. Sergio called with some story about being stuck in traffic. He should be here in about ten minutes, and I really need to talk to him.” As if her thoughts had wandered somewhere she didn’t want her brother following, she abruptly changed the subject. “Did you say somebody messed up your Explorer?”

  “Pissed-off patient, I think.”

  “The rubia?” she guessed—the blonde. “I was greeting a client when I saw her storm out. She looked mad enough to stomp kittens. What’d you do to her? Is she a psych case or a druggie or what?”

  Jack frowned at the memory of Reagan Hurley, that unsettling combination of guileless beauty and hair-trigger temper. It came as no surprise that his sister didn’t recall Reagan, as Luz Maria had been no more than three the year Mrs. Hurley had moved her daughter to the suburbs.

  “She needed me to sign a return-to-work release, and I couldn’t do it.”

  “How come?”

  Jack shook his head. “Can’t discuss it,” he said, and she nodded in understanding. Though she’d only worked in social services for eighteen months and inside this clinic for the last three, she had professional confidences of her own she must keep private.

  Like a drop of oil on a puddle’s surface, a slow smile spread across Luz Maria’s face. She grabbed the slip of paper on top of Reagan’s chart. “Well, well. What do we have here? Is Dr. Big Spender planning a personal peace mission? She might have been pissed, but she was hot—very caliente. Even I could see that.”

  Before Jack could toss off a denial, Luz Maria suddenly added, “Wait a minute. You didn’t hit on her, did you? That wasn’t why she was so—”

  “What do you take me for? She’s a patient—and a deranged one, if the damage to my Explorer’s any proof.”

  Yet something inside him whispered that Reagan Hurley was not his patient, that he’d refused her service here today. To his chagrin, it was the same normally penned-up something that had been ogling her body during his examination, so he snapped a mental padlock on its cage.

  Luz Maria’s good humor shifted into reverse with jarring speed. After thrusting the paper back at him, she threw up her hands, flashing long nails painted a blistering red-orange. “Handle it however you want. There’s no need to get snotty.”

  Once more, Jack was struck by the thought that something serious was bothering her. “What is it, Luz Maria? What’s the problem? Don’t dare tell me it’s nothing, or I’ll put Mama on the scent.”

  “It’s this job.” Luz Maria’s hands darted about like startled birds as she explained. “Not just the job, the system—all of it. You know how we’ve been talking about all those kids who keep coming in with trouble breathing…?”

  Jack shifted uncomfortably at the reminder, wondering for the thousandth time which clinic worker had leaked the copy of little Elena Suarez’s charts to Winter, and why someone who saw this suffering every day would do such a thing.

  “No one from the health department wants to look into the spike in respiratory ailments or listen to what I have to say about those addresses,” Luz Maria said. “And someone there must have complained to my supervisor that I keep calling. Now she’s all over my pompis, telling me to worry about my own cases and stay off everybody else’s.”

  That didn’t much surprise Jack. Since she’d been a tiny child, when Luz Maria zeroed in on something she wanted, she could grind like a belt sander. Besides, she had butted heads with her supervisor almost from day one, when the woman continually mispronounced her name, rhyming it with buzz instead of cruise.

  “I’ve called, too,” he told her. “But with all the budget battles, their manpower’s been cut to the bone. They said they’ll get to it.”

  “Eventually, right? But when’s eventually?” she shot back. “How many more kids from that block have to die?”

  She’d been the caseworker for the family of Agustín Romero, an eight-year-old whose father had carried him into the clinic, blue as death, when he’d stopped breathing. With paramedics en route, Jack had done everything he could to open the boy’s airway, but Agustín had been down too long. By the time they reached the hospital, his oxygen-deprived organs were failing one by one.

  It had been one of the longest nights of Jack’s life, waiting helplessly for that beautiful child to die. Especially after trying to explain to the weeping family why, only days before, another doctor from the clinic had turned them away, saying that the boy’s asthma was a chronic and not a communicable or life-threatening condition.

  Not life-threatening, my ass. Tell that to the Romero family.

  Since then, Jack had treated twelve more kids with breathing troubles at the clinic—and falsified the charts of every one, diagnosing contagious diseases instead of asthma, then slipping their parents drug-company samples for their treatment. And if Agustín’s death had hit him hard enough to push him to what might amount to professional suicide, what had it done to Luz Maria, who’d seen only a small fraction of the suffering he had witnessed?

  “Maybe we both need to get out of this cesspool,” he said bitterly. “We can find some nice, clean jobs in the suburbs, help nice, clean yuppie kids learn to deal with their own sense of entitlement.”

  Luz Maria’s eyes flashed. “Maybe that M.D. after your name cancels out who you are. Maybe it erases what happened to our papa, what’s happening to so many of our people still. But it will never, ever be that way with me.”

  He doubted she remembered their father at all; she’d been only a toddler when he disappeared. And yet she claimed his memory, held it to her like a merit badge of unre
membered suffering. Ten years older, Jack bit his tongue to keep himself from reminding her that he still bore scars from those days.

  Changing the subject, he said, “You’ve made a lot of friends since you’ve been here. Maybe you can tell me who hates me enough to send that photocopied file to Darren Winter?”

  She shook her head. “You have friends here, too, Jack. And all of them seem really mad about your getting in trouble. It’s a stupid law—a travesty—but those idiot reporters are making it sound like you did something terrible. And Winter—the man’s a—a complete…”

  She threw her hands up, clearly at a loss for words.

  “What about the clinic?” he asked. “Is there someone here who’d like to see it shut down? Someone, maybe, who’s angry over the hours or the lousy pay or the conditions?”

  She cracked a smile. “That would be all of us. But it’s not like most of the employees couldn’t find a job somewhere else. Especially the nurses. Do you know what kind of signing bonuses they’re paying at the suburban hospitals these days? Everybody’s crying for nurses.”

  “Ever make you wish you’d gone into medicine instead of social work?”

  She shook her head. “You know how blood makes me throw up and I faint when I see needles. But that’s okay. I’m better at shaking things up, getting things done for people.”

  “So I’m hearing—and seeing, too.” Since the hospital district had sent her here, she had been a strong and sure advocate for patients, helping them navigate the confusing maze of social services and charitable programs to keep their families fed and housed and clothed. Impressed, the nurses dubbed her “The Piranha,” for the fearless way she tore into her clients’ problems.

  At a rap against the security-glassed panel of the front door, Luz Maria looked up. “There’s Sergio. Want to say hi to him? And I do mean ‘hi,’ Jack, not the third degree. He gets too much of that from Mama as it is.”

  Jack smiled, imagining that whatever details Mama hadn’t ferreted out through her infamous cross-examinations, she had undoubtedly discovered through her contacts at the yerbería, the herb shop she’d owned for sixteen years. No matter whom her son or daughter might date, Mama could be counted on to know someone who knew someone who could provide the lowdown on the man or woman’s family, education, and potential earning power.