Fade the Heat

by Colleen Thompson

  Jack flinched, more at the hate implicit than the ethnic slur.

  “So the injured firefighter—” Jack began.

  “Captain Rozinski and his crew were conducting a search-and-rescue sweep when the structure partially collapsed,” said the man with the comb-over as the younger firefighter rejoined them.

  “I’m so sorry he was hurt,” Jack said. “Have you heard anything about his condition?”

  The firefighters’ gazes met, and he saw a nod of what looked like approval pass between them.

  “We appreciate your concern.” The district chief then introduced both himself and the younger firefighter. After they shook hands, he added, “According to the paramedics, Rozinski’s injuries appear life-threatening. He was down for ten minutes, his mask knocked off his face, and the hot gases…” Breaking off, he shook his head. “This is one of the best trauma centers in the country.”

  Jack nodded. “If I were seriously injured, this is where I’d want to be.”

  “You have any idea who the caller could have been, or what this is all about? You have an enemy?”

  “Apparently,” Jack said. “Someone vandalized my truck this afternoon in the parking lot of the clinic where I work. One of your firefighters, Reagan Hurley, may have seen the man as he was leaving.”

  “Hurley?” the district chief echoed.

  The younger man said, “Patrick Hurley’s girl. Remember him? On-duty death in the mid-eighties, that big warehouse fire off of Washington Avenue. She joined the department a few years back. Real gung-ho type, from what I hear.”

  The district chief nodded, and Jack said, “I’ve had some trouble lately. It seems that someone at my clinic either gave or sold Darren Winter one of my patient’s medical records, and he’s called my diagnosis into question.”

  The younger man whistled through his teeth, and the district chief said, “So you’re the guy. The police are going to want to speak to you—to both you and Ms. Hurley, I imagine. But they won’t be the only interested parties. You’ll have to talk with investigators from Houston PD, arson, the state fire marshals, maybe even the feds, depending on what comes up in the investigation. I’m afraid this is going to be a very long night for everyone involved.”

  Jack nodded, numb with the thought of how his life had spun out of control. A man lay near death, he and his neighbors had lost their homes, and now, it seemed, every detective in the region would be burrowing into the case, masticating details like a host of strong-jawed beetles chewing a fallen tree to pulp.

  If he’d had any chance of keeping his treatment of the other children from the media, it had just gone up in flames…along with what was left of his career.

  Chapter Five

  “We had to call in the feds,” Reagan heard an arson investigator say to the HPD detective outside the administrative office where they had left her waiting. In spite of the odious detective’s demands that she stay put, she had edged near the open doorway in hopes of slipping out for an update on Rozinski. Instead, she’d found the two men conversing about eight feet down the corridor.

  Unlike suppression firefighters and EMTs, the guy from the arson division—she thought she’d heard him called Salinas—wore cowboy boots and a denim shirt with a pair of jeans that fit his long, lean body to perfection. “That joint task force’ll be all over this now that BorderFree’s faxed a statement to the media.”

  Could he mean BorderFree-4-All? A sick chill gave Reagan gooseflesh at the thought of the bombing in San Antonio. She remembered the images from the news as if it had happened yesterday and not last spring: survivors screaming, a mosaic of shattered glass glittering on the sidewalk, three bodies being carried out of the Immigration and Naturalization Service District Office under bloodstained sheets, hooded militants sending videotaped demands for open borders to the television stations. Terrorism right here in Texas.

  She had to bite her tongue to keep from running through the door and demanding to know what a radical, anti-immigration-law group could possibly have to do with the fire at Jack Montoya’s apartment. Could it be, despite the vandalism and Winter’s radio attacks, that Jack had never been the target in the first place? After all, what did an East End Clinic doctor have to do with U.S. policy?

  “We probably have a half hour before the FBI and ATF get here,” the pale and lumpy Detective Norman Worth grumbled to the arson investigator. “I would’ve rather hauled ’em both downtown for interviews, but we might as well get what we can while the getting’s good, ’cause you and I both know the feds won’t give us shit once they take over.”

  “You really think Montoya could be good for it—or at least involved?” the arson guy asked.

  Worth gave a sloppy shrug. “Why not? It’ll make his pal Winter, who’s been rippin’ him a new one on the air day after day, look like an irresponsible bigot. Besides, Montoya wouldn’t be the first guy who decided to take one for the team.”

  “You’re saying that ’cause he’s Hispanic?” Salinas bristled, squaring his shoulders and raising his voice slightly. “You figure we’re all in league or something?”

  “Here’s what I figure,” Worth said. “Right now you’re wasting time asking the wrong guy questions. As long as the witnesses are cooperating, let’s keep at ’em while we can.”

  As the police detective turned toward her, Reagan slunk back to her seat and picked up the lukewarm Dr. Pepper she’d been nursing for the past hour. A moment later, Worth closed the door behind him and fished a cigarette out of the pocket of a worn and tweedy sports jacket. He took a seat behind the big desk and pressed a button on his microcassette recorder to resume the taping.

  “So how long have you been seeing Dr. Montoya?” Ignoring the hospital’s rules, he lit up and puffed, closing his eyes with the pleasure of it.

  Reagan hoped some kamikaze night-shift clerk would come running at the smell of smoke. She’d enjoy watching this dough-bellied cop, with his pasty face and his snotty attitude, get taken down a peg or two.

  Besides, the cigarette smoke was making it difficult to breathe. She coughed, maybe louder than she needed to, but instead of taking the hint, he looked around the desk he had commandeered until he found a coffee mug colorfully decorated with the words “World’s Best Mom.” Without batting an eye, he flicked the ashes into some kid’s gift. Next to his ersatz ashtray, the glowing red numbers on a digital desk clock changed to 1:08 A.M.

  “Like I told you before you stepped out, I’m not seeing Jack Montoya, or anybody else,” Reagan repeated, pissed that no matter how many times she denied it, the same question kept popping up, as persistent and annoying as fire-ant mounds after rainstorms. “Don’t you want to hear about the green car or the driver?”

  Waving to dispel a silvery mouthful of smoke, he glanced down at his notes. “Not unless you’ve come up with something new to add this time.”

  Come up with. She narrowed her eyes, not liking the turn of phrase. As a firefighter, she’d worked around enough cops at scenes of accidents, assaults, and murders to know skepticism when she heard it.

  “What I want to know,” the detective went on, “is how long your friend Dr. Montoya has been wrapped up with BorderFree-4-All.”

  Did he honestly believe Jack was involved? Try as she might, she could not suppress a shudder.

  “What makes you think that?” she asked. The idea was so outlandish, so far-fetched, that she couldn’t wrap her brain around it.

  He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth and looked her over in a way that made her skin crawl. “What do you know about it?”

  “Nothing. Why should I?” It was really getting to her, the way this detective was talking to her and staring at her as if she were a suspect.

  “Look, I’m trying to be patient,” she burst out, “but all I want to do is go back out there with my captain’s wife and the guys from my crew.”

  Several of them had arranged relief so they could come stand vigil. She belonged with them—her family, to all intents and p
urposes—not cooped up in this makeshift interview room answering the same damned questions all night.

  “There’s been no change in Captain Rozinski’s condition. I checked on my way back from the men’s room.”

  Liar, she wanted to scream. She knew damned well he hadn’t gone anywhere except to confer with the arson investigator. But accusing him wasn’t going to get her out of here any faster.

  “You said Jack Montoya was at your house when the two of you heard about the fire,” Detective Worth continued. “Since doctors don’t make house calls and you look the way—the way you do, I’ve gotta figure he had some other reason to drop by.”

  Narrowing her eyes at him, she forced herself to speak slowly and distinctly. “He’s an old friend, that’s all.” Reagan uncrossed her legs after she noticed Worth studying the nervous jiggling of her foot. “My parents owned a rental house, and his folks were our tenants back when we were kids. But that was a long time ago. I haven’t even seen him in—I don’t know—twenty years or so. Until today.”

  “And you decided to renew this acquaintance because…”

  She wished she were facing Detective Dough Gut in the boxing ring instead of across a desk. Blood and teeth would be flying, and none of them would be hers. “As I mentioned earlier, I needed a release to return to work signed, so I went by his clinic.”

  Worth made a show of flipping through his little notepad. “Where you had some sort of altercation?”

  “A minor disagreement,” she amended. Altercation sounded like something a cop would write on an arrest report. “And he came by my place later to get things straightened out. For old time’s sake, I suppose.”

  Detective Worth raised an incredulous eyebrow, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from swearing.

  “He ask you out before the news story came up?” he asked.

  She snorted a humorless laugh, thinking of how angry Jack had been with her—and how irritated when she’d mentioned his mother’s nieto plans. “Not hardly.”

  “Guess he hadn’t gotten to that part yet,” Worth said. “So you don’t know anything about his friends at BorderFree-4-All?”

  She thought of what Jack had said on the way here in the car. I never cared about the politics, never gave a rat’s ass where they came from. All I wanted to do was keep some kids alive.

  “No way is Montoya tied up in that stuff,” she said. “All he cares about is helping patients, especially the kids.”

  “But you said you haven’t seen him in decades.”

  One left hook. That’s all she’d need to knock this turkey on his ass. It would damn sure be easier than explaining a gut feeling.

  “You know I’m with HFD,” she reminded him. “Like the cops, we’re on the streets all hours, and we meet a lot of citizens, most of them on the worst days of their lives.”

  He nodded.

  “When people are under stress,” she said, “they say things and do things that give you a feel for who they are. The defense attorneys of this world would probably say you’re making snap decisions, but on the streets you have to, don’t you? Otherwise, how do you know the guy who meets your ambulance at the scene of a stabbing isn’t about to whip out his knife to finish off the vic? How do you know he isn’t gonna take a crack at some bystander—or at you?”

  As a detective, he’d undoubtedly once worked in uniform. He knew the score as well as she did, and she saw the agreement in his blue-gray eyes, saw, too, the realization that the two of them had certain experiences in common.

  “You do get an instinct for it,” he conceded. “You have to, to make it on the streets.”

  “Well, my instinct tells me that Jack Montoya’s about the furthest thing you can imagine from a killer. Even as a kid, he was such a decent sort—but this is about now, and everything I’ve seen tells me there’s no connection.”

  Worth tapped more ash into the day clerk’s mommy mug and shrugged. “Maybe. But what I’d like to know—and what the feds are going to be damned interested in learning—is why BorderFree released a statement praising Montoya’s ‘acts of defiance against an unjust law’ and calling him a ‘martyr to the cause.’ ”

  She thought about it for a moment before speaking. “Aren’t martyrs usually dead? Why would they think that unless they were the ones trying to kill him—”

  “Every possibility will be investigated.”

  Including that of Jack’s collusion in some kind of plot to ruin Winter, Reagan added mentally. She didn’t bother arguing the point, though. Otherwise, this detective would undoubtedly jot “hysterical girlfriend” next to her name on his pad.

  Standing, she rubbed the small of her back, then twisted until she felt a satisfying pop. “Is the inquisition over? I’ve been sitting here forever, and I could really use a break.”

  He shrugged and flipped through his notepad once more. “I think I have all I need for now. But arson wants to speak with you again.”

  She groaned. She’d talked to those guys twice already, and she had nothing else to add. “Not before I find a ladies’. Unless some of you folks want to follow me there, too.”

  “Be my guest,” he told her.

  She hotfooted it out of there before he could change his mind—or some other investigator could jump in. She supposed they were tag teaming, switching off between her and Jack, and she wondered how much more pointed, even accusatory, their questions were to him.

  And why, exactly, she should care.

  It was only the late hour, she told herself. That and the fact that since the two of them had been together when he’d learned about the fire and she’d heard about Rozinski, she had begun to feel almost as if they were comrades in arms.

  But despite what she had told Detective Worth, how could she know for certain that she and Jack were fighting on the same side? As Worth had reminded her, before this afternoon she hadn’t seen the guy in twenty years. Who was she to say what he had gotten into? And even if he had nothing to do with BorderFree-4-All, he hadn’t denied Winter’s charges. By sidestepping the legal guidelines for the treatment of undocumented aliens, hadn’t Jack Montoya set in motion everything that followed?

  Including, she realized with a sickening jolt, Joe Rozinski’s injuries.

  Her misgivings intensified when she stepped into the family consultation room. The captain’s wife had dozed off, leaning against an older woman who looked as if she might be Donna’s mother. But it was the way C.W., Beau LaRouche, and three other uniformed crewmembers looked at her that made Reagan’s stomach drop into her shoes.

  “Is there…has there been any news?” she asked, telling herself she was only imagining the suspicion in their faces.

  Beau raked his fingers through wavy, sandy-colored hair that was always an inch or so too long for regulation. Tanned, muscular, and younger looking than his twenty-four years, Beau generally put Reagan more in mind of some rich woman’s boy toy than a rookie firefighter who’d grown up in a rough north-side neighborhood. Tonight, though, his reddened eyes and nervous movements made him seem edgy and unpredictable, almost dangerous.

  During the nine months he’d been at the station, he and Rozinski had had their run-ins—usually over both his hair and his unauthorized variations on the official uniform. Even so, Beau would follow Rozinski to fight the fires of hell itself, and Reagan was almost sure he’d been with the captain during the building collapse. Knowing Beau as she did, she was certain, too, that if Rozinski died, Beau would blame himself.

  After darting a glance toward C.W. and the other firefighters, Beau gestured for her to follow him into the hallway.

  Her heart in her throat, she stepped outside and waited until he closed the door behind him. He opened his mouth to speak, but she was faster on the draw.

  “Has something happened?” she asked. “What did the doctors say?”

  He hesitated, some question in his deep brown eyes.

  When he finally did speak, toothpaste-commercial-white teeth flashed against his golden skin.
“They’re monitoring the oxygen levels in his blood. There’s damage to his lungs and trachea, and they’ve put him on a ventilator to keep him from losing any more ground.”

  She closed her eyes against the burning. “Do they think he’ll make it?”

  “They’re ‘cautiously optimistic,’ but he’s still critical.”

  Struck mute by disappointment, she swallowed past a painful lump. Maybe it was her exhaustion or the endless interviews, but the situation had taken on the feeling of a nightmare, one she prayed she would wake up from any minute.

  “What the hell happened?” she asked.

  Beau flinched, a sign that he’d already been asked this question more than once. “The captain, Zellers, and me were making our secondary sweep when part of the roof gave way. All this debris rained down and buried Rozinski. We couldn’t even find him ’til his PAS went off.”

  That would mean Rozinski had been down for thirty seconds, which would have triggered the personal alarm system. How much longer, Reagan wondered, before they’d dug him out and gotten him outside? She didn’t ask, though, for she trusted that Beau and Zellers, a seasoned, solid firefighter, had done everything they could—and because they would have to endure more than enough second-guessing as it was.

  Beau’s gaze flicked up to meet hers.

  “Everyone’s been wondering—why have they been questioning you?” The question tumbled out of him sounding bewildered—and more than slightly hostile. “What could you have to do with this? You weren’t even at the fire.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with it,” she said, “but I may have seen something earlier. I saw a man who might have vandalized Jack Montoya’s vehicle and could’ve set the fire, too. At least, that’s what the cops and arson seem to think.”

  “Montoya? Wasn’t he the guy we were looking for inside the apartment?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I happened to be in the neighborhood of his clinic today. He’s a doctor on the East End.”