Fade the Heat

by Colleen Thompson

  “Those are called excuses,” Peaches told her. “My ex-wife was full of them.”

  Swallowing hard, Reagan did a double take. This was a revelation, one that, from the sly look in Peaches’s brown eyes, had been dropped purposely as a distraction.

  Even though Reagan realized that, she couldn’t resist the bait. “Your ex-wife?” she echoed.

  Peaches favored her with a calculating smile. “Eat your soup, sister. Then we’ll talk.”

  Reagan hurried to comply, as much because the soup’s flavor had awakened her appetite as out of curiosity. As she ate, she found she had to focus on the mechanics of raising her spoon, chewing, and swallowing. Otherwise, she could not keep thoughts of Joe Rozinski, Donna, Beau, and Jack Montoya from choking her.

  Once the bowl was empty, Peaches poured her a glass of merlot. But before Reagan could take a sip or ask about the mysterious marriage, the cell phone lying on the kitchen counter rang.

  Jack’s cell phone, which he’d called earlier to ask about.

  “That’s not mine—” she started, but it was too late. Peaches was already launching into her routine.

  “Reagan ‘Hellcat’ Hurley’s line. Manager Peaches Tarleton speaking.”

  Reagan grimaced, and the room’s temperature zoomed up to sweltering in an instant. How many times did she have to tell her neighbor that she despised that sexist nickname and she didn’t need a manager?

  But behind Peaches’s mask of makeup, her skin was going gray. White rimmed her wide eyes, and the hand holding the phone appeared to spasm.

  Reagan rushed around the counter, her training convincing her that her neighbor was suffering a heart attack, maybe a stroke.

  “Peaches,” she said sharply. When there was no response, she tried, “James Tarleton.”

  “Who—who is this?” Peaches stammered. “What—what can I do?”

  Something in her voice made Reagan grab the cell phone and press it to her ear. “This is Reagan Hurley,” she said, “are you calling for Jack—”

  But her words were interrupted by the caller’s sobs, a loud crash, and a shrill, truncated scream.

  Halloween wouldn’t take place for another week, but the big strawberry blonde who answered Reagan’s door looked enough like Ginger from Gilligan’s Island that Jack wondered if she was on her way to or from a costume party.

  She didn’t appear to be in a party mood, however. From the way her forehead crinkled and the dampness gathered in her wide-set eyes, she looked as if she was about to burst into tears.

  She stood there looking at him with a deer-in-the-headlights expression until Reagan, who was standing in the living room some ten feet behind her, said, “Come in, Jack. I have to talk to you.”

  She set the cordless telephone on the lamp table by the sofa.

  “Do you have my phone?” he asked her.

  But as he edged past the tall woman, he got a clear view of Reagan’s face. “Jesus, Reag, what happened?”

  A purple contusion had bloomed along her cheekbone, the mark standing in stark contrast to the sweaty pallor of her face. She seemed unsteady on her feet, too, as she moved toward him.

  The white greyhound pressed close by her side, his ears pinned back and his tail tucked far between his legs.

  When she didn’t answer, Jack took Reagan’s hand. “Did someone hurt you? Was it that guy this morning? Beau?”

  He thought that was what she’d called the guy. The firefighter had been furious, but Jack had been certain that by leaving, he could defuse the situation. Had he instead abandoned Reagan to the bastard’s fury?

  Reagan shook her head. “That’s not important, not now. A few minutes ago, someone called your phone here.”

  With a shaking hand, she gestured toward the open doorway to the kitchen, where he could see it lying on the countertop.

  “I think—I’m almost certain—it was Luz Maria.”

  “What do you mean you’re almost sure?” he asked. “She didn’t say?”

  “She was screaming, Jack, screaming that she was scared. And then there was this horrible noise, a crash and—”

  An electric jolt of panic shot through his system. “Did she hang up? Is the connection still good?”

  Reagan shook her head. “It cut out. I’m so sorry—”

  “I picked up the phone,” the Ginger clone said. Her voice was deep, throaty, thickened with emotion. “She was crying and shouting, ‘He’s right behind me. I can’t shake him.’ ”

  “Oh, God,” Jack said, running shaking fingers through his hair. “I need to call her. Let me use your phone right now.”

  “We tried,” said Reagan. “It rang and rang, but there was no answer. The number on the screen matched the one stored in memory under ‘Luz Maria’s cell.’ I—I called 911 to report what we heard. I even spoke to a police supervisor, but because there’s not a live call, there’s no way to pinpoint her location. I’mnotevensureifshewasathomeorinacar.”

  “Probably, she was driving. I let her take my rental just a few hours ago.” He fumbled with the keys to his mother’s Buick as he dragged them out of his pocket. “I have to find her.”

  Reagan grabbed his hands and held on to them tightly. “Listen to me, Jack. The dispatch supervisor and the firefighters in telemetry will be listening for accident reports. If something happens—if they find her, we’re going to get a call here.”

  “But what if they don’t find her? She could be anywhere.”

  “You don’t have any idea where she was going? If we can narrow down the location—”

  “I don’t know.” Why hadn’t he made her tell him? Why had he let her go at all? How could he have been so stupid as to imagine she’d be safe going to Sergio? “I have to find my sister. I—I’ll go and check the hospitals.”

  “You’re not thinking straight, Jack. You should stay here. We can contact the hospitals on your phone.”

  “Not my phone. Luz Maria could call back any minute.”

  “Then we’ll use my cell,” she said. “When I dropped it last night, a piece snapped off, but it’s still working. That way, we’ll leave the landline open in case the dispatcher calls back.”

  “I can’t just wait around,” he said. “I’m the one who let her go. I never should have—”

  “Your sister’s a grown woman,” Reagan interrupted. “I doubt she needs or wants your permission to go anywhere.”

  “She damn well needed my car.” Even as he said it, he could almost hear Reagan thinking what an idiot he’d been, after the apparent attempt on his life only yesterday. And she didn’t even know the worst, about the kind of man her sister had been on her way to see.

  But the father of her baby wouldn’t hurt her…would he?

  “I’ll drive over to Memorial Hermann, then to Ben Taub,” he said, naming the two big trauma centers. “She could be en route now, in an ambulance, but maybe by the time I get there—”

  Before he could react, she snapped the keys out of his hands. “Yesterday you knew enough to keep me from driving. You don’t need to be behind the wheel.”

  “Damn it, Reagan.” He reached for the keys, but she’d stepped back, looking far calmer than she had moments before. She was pulling herself together for his sake, he realized. Either that or drawing on her experience in emergencies.

  “If you have to go, I’ll take you.” Turning to the taller woman, she said, “Peaches, I know you had other plans, but could I get you to stay here? Then if anyone calls, you can either take a message or give them the number to my cell phone.”

  The woman stepped out of a pair of extra-large stilettos. “After that call, I couldn’t go out anyway. Not with that poor girl out there somewhere. Frank and I’ll stay here and hold down the fort.”

  Reagan gave her a hug. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Just remember that,” Peaches said in a low growl, “the next time you even think of calling me James Tarleton.”

  A few minutes later, Reagan and Jack were glid
ing in her Trans Am beneath a night sky gone pink and starless with the haze of light pollution. As she made the corner of 18th and Heights, she struggled to tamp down thoughts of their drive to Memorial Hermann Hospital the night before. How she’d never even gotten the chance to see Joe Rozinski. How she’d been pulled into an investigation, then left the hospital without ever telling him what he had meant to her.

  The chill that overtook her had nothing to do with the cooling night air. And everything to do with the echo of Beau’s words when he’d seen Jack Montoya at her house this morning. “You told me you weren’t seeing him, that you weren’t involved in this.”

  She’d said that she wasn’t, but the thought occurred to her that she had either lied or been mistaken. That some kind of freak twister had dropped down from the clouds yesterday and sucked both her and Jack into its vortex. The spiral might be whirling them around, ripping their lives to tatters and shredding sanity, but those same winds had also trapped the two of them together.

  Or so she told herself, as if she couldn’t have let Jack drive off to search for his sister on his own. What was it to her if in his hurry, he ended up smeared across some intersection because he ran a stop light? People wrecked cars all the time in Houston. She’d scraped them up, bandaged and hauled them, even hosed their blood and brain matter off the streets. She’d had to learn to handle it, to stop taking each accident personally—to face such everyday tragedy with the stoicism or gallows humor that enabled emergency workers to survive to do their duties.

  Yet certain things still shook her: a grown man in his prime, reduced to crying for his mama; a child in pain, with no living parent to console her; a carload of teenaged victims of alcohol, inexperience, and their own youthful delusions of immortality. Each time one of these slammed up against Reagan’s wall of ice, invisible fault lines spread out. But this evening, Luz Maria’s phone call had wedged a crowbar in the cracks and brought her defenses tumbling down.

  Reagan was used to picking up the pieces for the citizens of Houston after the worst happened, doing the best she could to get people through the first few hours. But Jack’s sister had screamed in the moments before the blow fell, in the face of the terrified realization that something horrible was bearing down. Something Luz Maria could not escape, no matter how she tried.

  Reagan swallowed hard and glanced at Jack in the passenger seat, saw him staring at his cell phone as if his will alone could make Luz Maria call to say that she was safe.

  “Maybe I’m overreacting,” Reagan offered. “It could be that her phone broke—or the battery died. She might be looking for a pay phone now.”

  It was a stupid explanation and Reagan knew it, but she didn’t give a damn. If denial could ease Jack’s mind for a single moment, let him have it. The truth would be there anyway, lying in wait for the instant he dared to look it in the eye.

  And once faced, no matter how hard a person tried, he couldn’t look away. Couldn’t un-know what had been accepted. Couldn’t unravel threads woven into the fabric of grief.

  Reagan’s eyes burned worse than ever, and her lungs—her damned, pathetic lungs—began to shrivel like a pair of empty plastic bags inside her chest.

  Don’t be a wimp, she told herself. Fight past it. There wasn’t any smoke here, no hairy cats or dust mites either, and she hadn’t run up a flight of stairs with all her gear.

  Which makes it mental. Which means that I can stop it if I set my mind to it.

  Reagan had played the same game with herself on a number of occasions. Sometimes she won. Other times, the sensation of weight crushing her chest or the panic of not being able to gulp enough oxygen got to her, and as gray spots swarmed her vision, she reached for the inhaler. Or even worse, strapped on her mask and allowed the noisy nebulizer to deliver her a mist that eased the tightness so she could get back to sleep.

  That relief proved, she finally admitted to herself, that she had asthma, for as a previous doctor had informed her, one of the main hallmarks of the disease was that it responded to asthma medications.

  “I should—I should call my mother,” Jack said. “If—if someone phones the house, she needs to—needs to be prepared. And someone should be with her.”

  Reagan nodded, seeing the good sense of his suggestion. Though members of the fire department would stay with Donna Rozinski around the clock if need be, it was her mother and sister, who had both flown in from her home state of Alabama, who would get her through the coming days emotionally. “Does your mom have family nearby, or a close friend?”

  “There’s a sister here in Houston, my tía Rosario. I’ll call her, too, but…”

  Another glance found him still looking at his phone. Reagan fished hers out of her pocket and handed it to him. “Use mine. Peaches will know to leave a message if she can’t get through. Go ahead, Jack.”

  “But what if you’re right?” he asked. “What if it does turn out to be nothing? Then I’ll have upset my mother for no reason—”

  “She’d want to know, Jack.”

  “I—I guess,” he said.

  Reagan couldn’t help hearing his side of the conversations with his mother and his aunt. How he told both that maybe, just possibly, his sister might have had some sort of mishap, that he was checking on her now and would let them know as soon as possible.

  “Please don’t cry,” he told his mother, who had apparently read between the lines. “I promise, it will be all right. I swear it. Please…”

  By the time they’d finished, Reagan was pulling into the parking garage at Memorial Hermann. Unsettled by the raw emotion she’d heard in his conversations, she couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye.

  Inside, she trailed behind him as he went into the emergency room and found a curly-haired Hispanic nurse who appeared to be in her mid-thirties. Reagan thought she recognized the woman from the previous night.

  “I have reason to believe my sister has been involved in a serious car wreck,” Jack told her, then gave Luz Maria’s name and a brief description.

  The nurse’s dark eyes were sympathetic, but Reagan recognized the barricade that slid down like a garage door to shield her heart from grief. “Doesn’t sound familiar. But let me see what I can find out for you, Dr. Montoya.”

  She left them waiting in one of the small clusters of chairs that offered the illusion of privacy. Not far away, another grouping—a dark-skinned family whose women dressed in saris—stared blank-eyed at a television tuned to a nature show. Reagan felt a numbness set in, that familiar sense of the waiting room as an island out of time’s slipstream.

  The woman checked with the other triage nurses, called admissions, and even went so far as to contact the staff of Life Flight, the hospital’s helicopter transport service, but she found no record of either Luz Maria Montoya or a Jane Doe coming in this evening.

  When she returned with the news, Jack said, “Then we’ll go check with Ben Taub.”

  The nurse’s head shook. “I called over there, too. The only MVIs they’ve had this evening involved an elderly couple and a forty-three-year-old black man. No young females. I’m sorry. But this could be very good news. Probably, she’ll either call or show up at home.”

  Jack nodded numbly and returned to the seats, where he leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. Reagan thanked the nurse, whose name tag read A. Alvarez, before settling beside him, saying nothing, but feeling his anxiety in every cell.

  She thought of Beau, how he would doubtless see all this as some sort of half-assed justice, would say the universe was paying Jack Montoya back for his part in Joe Rozinski’s death. But Reagan couldn’t see it that way, couldn’t see how another wrong, another family’s grief, would serve to balance anything. Just as she couldn’t stop her hand from settling gently on Jack’s back.

  “Come on, Jack. Let me take you to your mother’s.”

  He didn’t look at her, but when he shook his head, his hair fell forward, nearly into his dark eyes.

  Once more, her
hand moved, seemingly of its own volition. And it seemed to her, she could already feel the bangs beneath her fingertips, coarser than her own hair, but smooth and clean and pleasant to the touch as she swept it back.

  At that moment the cell phone tucked inside her leather jacket played a familiar riff from “Highway to Hell.” And as it had been the last two times she’d answered it, the song turned out to be a fitting omen of the message she’d receive.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jack caught only a glimpse of Reagan’s face before she turned away from him. But in that split second, a shadow had darkened her blue eyes.

  “Wait,” she told the caller as she began to walk toward the ambulance bay doors. “I can’t talk here.”

  Something in her voice brought him to his feet, and he followed her outside, into the same area where the two of them had spoken the night before.

  “You’re sure?” she asked quietly. “Wrong side of town, but yeah, it’s possible if they jumped up on the freeway. God, no, Peaches—I can’t—he doesn’t need to see that. First let’s give the ME a chance to ID the body—”

  Jack could scarcely keep himself from ripping the phone out of her hand and demanding to know what the hell was going on. Perhaps he would have if his heart weren’t slamming so hard into his chest wall that his lungs were squeezed against the cage of ribs.

  Yet Reagan had stopped talking and glanced sharply his way. From the way her head jerked and her eyes flared, she clearly hadn’t known he’d been behind her.

  “Hang on a minute,” she said into the phone before she clamped a palm over the mouthpiece. “Go back inside, Jack. Right now. I need to finish this call, and I can’t do it with you—”

  “You know something about Luz Maria. I want to hear it, Reagan. No matter what it is, you have to—”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know anything right now, and I can’t find out if you won’t let me finish. If you’ll go inside, I swear I’ll tell you every single thing I know once I get the details.”