Fade the Heat

by Colleen Thompson

  As if they were no more than children, and leftover beans and fried rolled tacos could bring a halt to Armageddon. When Jack heard his mother walk back toward the kitchen, he turned toward Luz Maria. Her face had grown wax-pale, with tears streaming down like the melted droplets dripping down a candle’s sides.

  But all he could think of was the flame—the fire he’d seen ripping through his apartment building on the news. “You betrayed me, Luz Maria. God damn it, you threw me to the wolves. And somehow, what you did caused a dozen families to lose their homes and a firefighter to—”

  “The—the cause is bigger than the problems of the individual. Compared to freedom, each of us is nothing, no more than a single ant toiling to build a greater good—”

  “Don’t you hear yourself? Do you actually believe that bullshit you’re spouting? Or were you so hot to get Sergio between your legs that you handed him the keys to your brain?”

  She reached toward him, but didn’t dare to touch. “Please, Jack. I swear, it wasn’t like that. What’s happening along the Mexican border is nothing short of murder. Our father died because of—”

  “You don’t even remember him.” Jack didn’t bother trying to keep the disgust from his voice. “If you did, you’d know that family meant everything to him. Hell, he was killed trying to go and see his mama. And I can tell you, he’d be sickened that his own daughter would sell out her brother. He’d be shamed that a firefighter had to die because—”

  She stood and faced him, tears giving way to some fierce passion that made her face flush and her eyes gleam. “BorderFree-4-All didn’t set that fire. We only wanted to start a public discourse. We never intended for some loco criminal to hurt people—but don’t you understand? Maybe now they’ll see it. Maybe now the truth will come out after all.”

  She gestured toward the monitor, and though the screen saver had replaced the image with a slide show featuring tropical sunsets, he understood she was referring to the media.

  “Every struggle,” she said, “every cause worth fighting for creates some collateral damage.”

  “Collateral damage?” Jack exploded, certain she was parroting her lover’s garbage. “Tell that to Reagan Hurley. Explain that to her captain’s family and his friends.”

  Though the door remained closed, he became aware of the aromas of his mother’s cooking: the cumin and onion from the beans, the frying corn tortillas of the flautas. Five minutes earlier, he’d been starving; now the thought of eating made him want to vomit.

  His sister was a criminal. Or at the very least, she’d been brainwashed into stealing medical records for a group of terrorists. The authorities had to be told. And there would be no way to spare their mother.

  Luz Maria sank into the desk chair, where she held her forehead in one hand and grabbed a fresh tissue with the other. She looked as if her outburst had drained the energy from her. Or as if she, too, had started thinking of the consequences to her own life. “I am sorry for that poor man,” she said softly. “And I’m sorry, too, that you’ve been hurt by what I did. I never meant—”

  Jack gave her no quarter. “How long has this been going on?” he asked. “How long have you been involved with BorderFree?”

  If Luz Maria’s association went no further than copying a medical record and sending it to Winter, she’d lose her job for certain, maybe even her career in social work, but he couldn’t see her doing jail time. But if she had had anything to do with last spring’s bombing or last night’s deadly fire, would that make her an accessory to murder?

  At the thought, his stomach lurched. He wanted to take back the questions, but she was already answering.

  “I’m not exactly involved with them. I only…” She gave a hopeless shrug, bringing to mind the girl she’d been so recently. “I just love Sergio, you know? From the first time I met him a few months ago, he’s made me feel…he makes me feel I can do something important. I can change things. I don’t have to sit there in that clinic day after day, listening to people’s problems, patting hands and spouting useless platitudes.”

  Jack breathed again. “So you haven’t met the others?”

  She shook her head. “He never let me. But he says those people who blew up the INS office weren’t what BorderFree is all about. He says they’ve been kicked out, they’ve left the country, and—”

  “You’re going to have to tell the task force, the ones I spoke with today.” Jack plunged on, ignoring the way her face drained of color. Yet he remained her brother, despite the foolishness of her mistakes. “You’re going to have to tell them about Sergio, about how he made you take that file—”

  “No.” Once more, she jumped to her feet. “I’m not about to lie to anyone, and I will never, never give Sergio up.”

  “Sergio’s a criminal. I have no doubt that he’s wanted. If you don’t want to risk jail—”

  “I can’t let them do that to me,” said Luz Maria, her voice faltering even as her gaze dropped. “And I won’t help them catch the father of my child.”

  It took several moments for her meaning to sink in, for the knife to twist and hollow out his wound. She was pregnant, Luz Maria. The same bastard who’d corrupted her ideals had put his baby in her.

  Jack’s vision blurred with tears. She looked at him, frozen, waiting to hear what he would say. Scared, too, judging from the way she’d stepped back. Did she imagine he would strike her?

  Mama’s footsteps preceded her voice in the hallway. “Joaquín y Luz Maria, come and eat some dinner. And whatever you two fight about, I don’t want to hear it at my table.”

  She didn’t. For his part, Jack stumbled through the obligatory compliments of their mother’s cooking, though every bite went down like a mouthful of ground glass. As promised, he gave a halting, half-coherent summary of the hours he had spent being interviewed by several law enforcement teams. The customer’s genius attorney son, he assured her, had acquitted himself admirably, advising Jack of what he should and shouldn’t say.

  Luz Maria, too, picked at her dinner, occasionally sneaking a glance his way, but looking down whenever their gazes collided. Other than “Pass the salsa,” she said nothing until later, when the two of them teamed up to do the dishes while their mother took a call from her sister in Galveston.

  Jack kept his voice low. “When did you find out?”

  Luz Maria plunged her hands into the hot dishwater. “Two days ago.”

  Was that why she’d seemed so distracted and upset yesterday? “Did you tell him last night?”

  On the kitchen window in front of her, one of the Virgin of Guadalupe candles flickered, shifting the shadows as it moved.

  She shook her head. “I wanted to. I meant to, but he was so distracted. And then I got to thinking, what kind of position is he in to be a father?”

  “Don’t you think you should have thought about that sooner? Didn’t you have sense enough to use protection?”

  Though she continued washing, Luz Maria nailed him with a look.

  “All right, all right,” he said, drying a platter. “Forget I asked. Doesn’t make much difference anyway now. Do you know how far along you are?”

  That shrug again, the one that broke his heart. “Six weeks, maybe. No more.”

  He took a deep breath. “Have you decided what to do?”

  Be the doctor, not the brother, he tried to tell himself, but when he thought of an abortion, Father Renaldo’s words set up an ancient echo in his brain: a mortal sin, amoral sin, immortal sin.

  Yet it was not his right to judge, nor could he tell Luz Maria what to do with the baby if she chose to have it. He could only be there to support her choice. And he would, he realized, for no matter what she’d done to him, she was still his baby sister.

  “I won’t end the pregnancy, I know that,” Luz Maria answered. “I just can’t imagine doing it, living with that decision either. But, God, Jack. I don’t know…”

  Her tears splashed into the dishwater, each one setting off a chain of ripp
les that disappeared into soap bubbles.

  “No matter what, you’re still going to have to speak to the authorities before they come looking for you. They will, too. From what little I could gather, there’s a lot of pressure on this task force. They need to hang someone for BorderFree’s crimes. Don’t let it be you, Luz Maria. And don’t let that baby suffer for it, either.”

  For several minutes, she said nothing. The house went so still, they could hear their mother in her bedroom speaking rapid-fire Spanish on the telephone, telling all she knew about Jack’s situation. What would she say when she learned of her daughter’s?

  “We’ll call my lawyer. ‘Genius’ or not, he really does seem to know his business,” Jack said. “And then we’ll go see the investigators from the task force.”

  When his sister looked up at him, there was panic in her eyes. “I have to see him first. I have to talk to Sergio.”

  Jack shook his head. “No way. I know it’s hard, but you need to cut your ties now.”

  Cut your losses, he was thinking, but he had the good sense not to say it.

  She shook her head, her expression half disgust, half pity. “You don’t know a thing about love, do you? I’ll go with you, I swear it—but not until I talk to Sergio about the baby. I don’t care what you think of him. He’s the father, and he deserves to know.”

  “He deserves a fist down his damned throat,” Jack told her. “for what he did to you, for what he’s done to me. For what he’s cost a lot of other people. Besides the bombing in San Antonio, I can tell you the authorities are thinking BorderFree’s involved with last night’s—”

  “I told you it wasn’t Sergio who set that fire. It wasn’t BorderFree at all—” She flung out her hand, splattering him with drops as warm as tears. “Never mind about that. Just lend me your rental, will you?”

  He was instantly suspicious. “My rental? Why would you want Paulo’s car instead of Mama’s?”

  “The supertanker needs gas, for one thing, and I don’t want to stop.”

  He pulled the keys from the pocket of his jeans, but he didn’t give them to her. “You sure that’s the only reason? You aren’t planning to take off, are you? Because that would mean big trouble, and not only with the authorities. Paulo…well, I don’t have to tell you Paulo’s reputation. For dealing with people who abuse his trust.”

  He saw the spark of fear, gave it time to catch, and welcomed it, if it would make her think twice about driving off into the sunset with Sergio Cardenas. She had to understand that his way was the only way. She had to think smart, so they both could survive this. “It’s nine now. I’ll need you back by midnight—or I’m calling the head of the task force and giving them everything I know about your boyfriend.”

  The truth was, Jack knew precious little. A name and Sergio’s involvement with both BorderFree-4-All and Luz Maria. He had no idea where Sergio lived, what he did for a living. In retrospect, Jack saw that his sister had been vague from the start about the details.

  She looked him in the eyes and held his gaze. “I’ll come home soon. I promise.”

  Handing her the keys, he said, “Be sure to keep your phone turned on, too.”

  She nodded, then stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you for trusting me in this, Jack. I won’t forget it. Maybe—maybe while I’m gone, you should call your lawyer. I’ll want to talk to him when I get back.”

  After grabbing only a small purse—no packed travel bag, thank goodness—Luz Maria slipped out the back door. Jack stood at the back window, watching her and fighting the compulsion to run out and stop her.

  Later, he would wish to God he had.

  Chapter Ten

  The Firebug might have his areas of expertise, techniques he’d perfected over a decades-long career, but the driver of the beat-up green Ford was no slouch either. Experience was fine as far as it went, but it took another kind of mind entirely to see the potential in new shit and adapt it to purposes the brainiacs who made it never dreamed of.

  Take GPS, for instance. From what he’d seen in a story on the news, he’d learned that fishermen had been using Global Positioning Systems to locate exact spots on the open ocean. As it got cheaper, the new technology spread to regular Joes who considered stopping to ask directions about as manly as sitting down to take a piss. What the story neglected to mention was that you could also use it to find just about anyone, as long as you could get that person to carry a transmitter.

  Or as long as you could stick one under the bumper of the target’s car. In this case, a year-old black convertible from the Cheap Wheelz lot off Telephone.

  Now that the media was barking up the right tree, it was time, he thought, to stop playing with his quarry. Time to finish this shit, tell the Firebug his story, and get ready to enjoy the kind of life he deserved.

  A life where he could stop imagining the pungent smell of gas and kerosene…and the satisfying crackle of the flames as they devoured a man’s corpse.

  Standing six-two in stiletto heels, Miss Peaches leaned her heavily made-up face so close that Reagan had to fight the urge to draw back. Whatever her neighbor’s surgical and hormonal status (not yet and extra-estrogen-with-cherries-on-top, respectively), Reagan was never quite sure what to make of her.

  But then, even if Peaches had remained James Paul Tarleton of Amarillo, Reagan suspected that knowing her—or him, as the case might be—would remain a unique experience.

  “I still can’t believe that precious boy did that,” said Peaches.

  Reagan fingered the bruised swelling on her cheekbone, which she knew had long since peeped through the foundation she’d used to disguise it earlier. No one at the Rozinski home had remarked on it—in fact, no one had said much of anything to her—but it was possible they hadn’t noticed. Or if they had, they must have figured that, sick or not, she’d gone back to the gym for a little sparring practice.

  Peaches’s tone turned naughty. “I may just have to take that young man over my knee and give him nine kinds of what for.”

  Whatever Reagan’s current feelings about Beau, this was not a mental image she liked to contemplate. So she turned back to the task of opening the bottle of merlot Peaches had brought over to share.

  Frank Lee’s ears pricked toward the sound of the cork popping, and an astringent, grapy scent perfumed the air. Reagan poured a glass for the blonde, but left her own empty.

  Her neighbor frowned, sinking onto a barstool and crossing a pair of shapely legs barely hidden beneath the sparkly skirt of an emerald-green dress. While Reagan meant to crawl into bed as soon as she grabbed a late-night snack and called Jack about the phone he’d left here, Miss Peaches was only getting started for the evening. “You aren’t going to join me in a glass? The goddess knows you need to wind down, after the day you’ve had.”

  Reagan shook her head and pulled a bowl down from the cupboard. “Don’t think so. Besides, red doesn’t go with P’Nut Crunchies.”

  When she took a box of the sugary kids’ cereal out of the pantry, Peaches splayed the scarlet nails of one hand across her chest dramatically. “No, no, no, Miss Reagan. This will not do—not when I would bet my best push-up bra that you didn’t eat a bite all day at Miz Rozinski’s.”

  Reagan didn’t argue when Peaches rose from the barstool and snatched away the bowl, then marched to the freezer and dug out a container of frozen vegetable-beef soup from the batch Reagan had put up a few weeks earlier. Peaches popped it into the microwave, then started it defrosting.

  Reagan let her. At forty-seven, Miss Peaches might be pushing the envelope of club-hopping vampdom, but she’d always done a creditable, if somewhat mindboggling, mom act. And like a lot of mothers, Peaches had a knack for reading minds. Between the time Reagan had spent at the FBI field office and the hours she’d spent helping Donna Rozinski take phone calls, coordinate arrangements for Monday’s memorial service and Tuesday’s private funeral, and act as a buffer when the flow of visitors grew overwhelming, Reagan had ha
d no time to eat anything more substantial than the apple she’d snagged from a fruit basket. Besides, eating a real meal would have meant stopping and sitting, maybe even thinking about the captain, or what Beau had said when she’d reached him on the telephone this morning.

  “All these months, we’ve been hanging out, talking all the time and going places, having a great time—and—and I was just waiting for the perfect moment to take things to the next level. I mean—I know you’re a few years older than me, but we’re so damned right together. Can’t you see it?”

  She closed her eyes, trying to tune out his words and listen to Peaches chattering about some transsexual she knew who’d gone ahead and had the surgery before an attractive woman convinced him—or her—to become a lesbian.

  “Confusing,” Reagan murmured, but what really baffled her was how she could have missed both Beau’s violent temper and his shifting feelings toward her. At twenty-eight, she really wasn’t so much older than he, but to her mind, they were worlds apart. And had he really thought of playing paintball as some kind of a date?

  “And then to find you were screwing that—that son of a bitch, Montoya—only a few hours after Joe died…”

  In spite of her denials, Beau had gone on from there, talking about how he’d like to smash Montoya’s face in, how he’d kill the guy and anyone else involved with the fire that had cost the captain his life.

  “It’s all talk,” she told herself, repeating what she’d thought when he said it.

  The microwave dinged, and Peaches asked, “I know very well you haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said. So what is it that’s ‘all talk’?”

  “Beau, carrying on about what he’s going to do to everybody. The big jerk’s just running his mouth.”

  Peaches arched a brow that had been tweezed to within an inch of its life. “You mean, the way he was when he hit you? Did he even apologize for that?”

  “Not exactly. Come to think of it, all he did was list his reasons,” Reagan said as Peaches set the bowl of soup and a spoon in front of her. The beef, tomato, and oregano aroma smelled far better than stale cereal. She lifted the first bite to her mouth.