Fade the Heat

by Colleen Thompson

  “No, no,” Winter was telling a second security officer while dabbing at his nose with a handkerchief. “I won’t be pressing charges, and I won’t need medical treatment either. This is a private matter, and it’s over now.”

  Amazed, Jack jerked his gaze toward the speaker, who caught his eye and asked, “Isn’t it, Dr. Montoya?”

  Winter pasted on a let’s-be-reasonable-adults look and extended his free hand toward Jack. “I’m terribly sorry about your sister, and about anything I said in the—uh—the heat of the moment that may have offended your lovely friend here. Please, let’s put all this unpleasantness behind us.”

  Bowled over by the suddenness of the man’s change of attitude, Jack glanced at Reagan, who tipped her head in the direction of the gathering crowd of onlookers. In a flash, Jack understood completely.

  If this incident reached the ears of reporters—as it was almost certain to—Winter would rather project a magnanimous persona than allow the public to see him as the self-serving, trash-talking crybaby he was. And Winter was a man who knew exactly how to play the media. Unless Jack shook his hand and mumbled some sort of apology himself, he was bound to look like a hot-tempered thug, the poster boy for every negative stereotype about Hispanic males and their machismo.

  Yet Jack found that his pride was the bitterest pill he’d had to swallow in some time.

  Such a bitter pill that he almost choked on his words as he got out the apology. But rather than taking Winter’s hand, Jack clenched his own into a rock-hard fist and quickly turned away.

  Chapter Twenty

  At the sight of Luz Maria, looking so small and fragile in her hospital gown, Jack shoved aside his fury and frustration.

  Backing down and telling Winter he was sorry had been as painful as spitting out a mouthful of blood and broken teeth, but it was nothing—absolutely nothing—compared to seeing the way bruises and abrasions had blossomed on his little sister’s face. Her eyes were closed, but he couldn’t be certain whether her air-bag-abraded eyelids had swollen shut or she was sleeping.

  Unable to bring himself to speak, he studied the bandaged arm that had been elevated on a mound of pillows to reduce the swelling. He’d been told the bones would need setting before a cast could be put on, but the doctors wouldn’t risk putting Luz Maria under until they felt more certain about the extent of her head injuries. For the same reason, she’d been given only the mildest of over-the-counter pain relievers.

  No question about it, when she did wake, she’d be hurting. And in spite of the terrible consequences of the mistakes she’d made, Jack wanted more than anything to soothe her, to fold his little sister into his arms the way he had when she’d awakened with night terrors as a child. He needed to rock her and murmur to her, “Shhh…hush now, mi princesa. I’ve scared off all the monsters, so you’re safe now, I promise.”

  His eyes burned and his vision blurred with the realization that the monsters had come back, fiercer and more ravenous than ever. And this time, he’d been powerless to banish them. But I will see them punished, he swore. I’ll make sure they pay.

  A nurse came in, a woman with short dark hair and turquoise contacts that made her eyes look bright as jewels. “I’ll be waking her for a neuro check,” she told him. “Then you can let her know you’re here.”

  As Luz Maria muttered a complaint about being awakened, Jack released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. As she answered the nurse’s questions, his sister sounded tired and grumpy—the way she always did when someone roused her after she’d been out late. Though quieter than usual, she seemed like the Luz Maria he knew—until she slitted her eyes wide enough to see him watching.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  She turned her head to look away, wincing as though the effort cost her.

  The nurse took her vitals, then flashed Jack a tight smile before leaving the two of them alone.

  “I’m tired,” Luz Maria said. “I have to sleep now…”

  “Do you know why you’re here?” he asked.

  “So tired.”

  Jack decided to press, at least a little. “Do you remember the accident at all? Luz Maria?”

  She frowned, but her lips trembled as if she were fighting back tears. “I know about the baby, Jack. They told me the baby’s gone.”

  Bending over her, he softly kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry.”

  She shrank away from him. “Are you, really? Or do you just feel relieved?”

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked. “Madre de dios, I’ve been worried sick about you.”

  “I need sleep, Jack. I can’t…I don’t want to feel—”

  “Who did this to you?” he demanded. “Do you know who caused the accident? Who moved you to Reagan’s house?”

  Her eyes closed, and she remained quiet for a long while, so long Jack was certain she had fled him in the only way left to her.

  He touched her temple gingerly and whispered, “Sleep well, mi princesa.”

  But before he could reach the door, she muttered, “Sergio…”

  Sergio what? Had that bastard been the one, despite his claims of innocence? Though he was shaking with rage, Jack swallowed back his questions. With her eyes still closed, he couldn’t know whether his sister was sleeping or awake, yet either way, he feared that a single word might break the fragile spell of her cooperation.

  Luz Maria was murmuring again, so quietly that he leaned close to hear the words.

  “He said you wouldn’t be hurt. He promised me—he swore it,” she murmured.

  Jack wanted to ask, was Luz Maria referring to the fire, the damage to his career, or was BorderFree planning something else—something even worse? And why would the pro-immigration group be involved with faking hate crimes against him?

  Or was it something else entirely? He remembered what Sergio had told Reagan last night, before the man had fled.

  “You want to know who torched that building? Then follow the money. At the end of the trail, I’ll bet you’ll find a can of gasoline.”

  As his sister’s breaths deepened into those of true sleep, Jack thought about it. Who would profit from the arson, the bizarre tableau in which Luz Maria had been found, maybe even his own death?

  Figure that out, he told himself, and you’ve got yourself a murderer. Fail to—and you may be the next one killed.

  Jack was already on his way when Paloma del Valle called a second time. “Apure, por favor,” she pleaded, begging him to hurry.

  Though her daughter, Cristina, had started wheezing, Paloma wanted no part of his suggestion to call an ambulance. “No, no,” she’d insisted before switching to her thickly accented English. “You fix. You fix quick now.”

  He thought of calling for an ambulance himself, but since he was no more than ten minutes away, he decided he could get there just as quickly.

  By the time Jack reached the Las Casitas Village apartment complex, darkness had descended over Houston. But nowhere he had ever driven seemed as dark as these anonymous, two-story rows of tan-brick apartments built back in the early eighties.

  In another age, they would have been called tenements. In any period, they would be termed dangerous, with pockets of addicts, criminals, and far too many unsupervised, half-grown kids living among families struggling to work their way out to a safer neighborhood. In addition, the lower floors were as prone to flooding as was the adjacent, long-abandoned Plaza del Sol. As Jack searched for a parking space near one of the few working security lights, he could still smell the fetid dampness that lingered from last spring’s record-setting deluge. Moisture remained evident in the weedy low spots—quagmires, really—that surrounded the complex and doubtless provided cover for both rodents and snakes.

  It was a damned shame to see the area this way. When Jack was a kid, the Plaza del Sol, with its mostly Hispanic-owned businesses, featured not only indigenous Central and South American crafts, but a variety of stylish restaurants and shops selling merchandis
e ranging from fashionable clothing to designer kitchenware. Its reputation as a fun and funky alternative to homogenous malls drew a variety of customers from all over Greater Houston, and its growing success had become a tremendous source of pride to the community. The once-blighted area underwent a boom, with numerous apartments, grocery stores, and strip centers crowding around the plaza.

  That boom ultimately destroyed it, for as the area was built up, developers covered so much of it with concrete and asphalt that Southeast Texas’s frequent heavy rainfalls had no place to run off. Coupled with a severe economic downturn, three floods within two years had sealed the plaza’s fate.

  As Jack climbed out of his mother’s station wagon, he wondered if the rising waters were taking the same toll on the area’s residents. Luz Maria had been the one to point out to him that many children he’d diagnosed with respiratory problems lived in this neighborhood, and one look at the water-stained, graffiti-laden exterior walls made him wonder if the problem was related to something inside the buildings instead of the general environment.

  He’d driven here before, on two occasions when Paloma, a single mother, had convinced him her daughter was too sick for the bus ride to the clinic. The last time, he’d even let her talk him into treating a toddler whose parents feared deportation if they set foot in a health-care facility. But for all of that, he’d never seriously considered the building where his patients lived as the possible source of the children’s lung ailments. Like most doctors, he had succumbed to the temptation to treat the afflicted organ, or the disease, instead of the whole patient—a shortcoming his social-worker sister had been quick to point out.

  “Seeing the whole person is only the first step to solving the problem.” Her words floated through his mind, but only now did he realize what she had meant.

  Near the open, lighted doorway of a laundry room, Jack passed a trio of teenaged boys, two of whom wore hard looks and black T-shirts that appeared to be hand-painted with a silver insignia of some sort. Gang logo, he decided, and he felt his body go on high alert for some kind of shakedown. Years ago, he’d been jumped and robbed at knifepoint in a parking lot outside of med school, and the tension and watchfulness came back to him like a recurrent nightmare.

  Yet when he came close enough to make out what the boys were studying so intently, he felt heat rush to his face. It was a physics book, he realized, and the “gang logo” was the silver panther of the very high school from which Jack had graduated.

  “How’d you do it?” the curly-haired one asked another in perfectly unaccented English as he planted a finger halfway down the page. “Come on, ’mano. Give it up and show me how to do the problem. If my grades don’t come up, I’m off the team for three more weeks.”

  Once Jack passed the trio, he shook his head, disgusted that he’d leapt to the conclusion that a bad neighborhood necessarily spawned bad kids. He’d seen enough gang logos among the graffiti to know the criminal element was here, but even in the worst spots, hope glimmered like a shiny penny at the bottom of a swamp.

  Before he could knock, Senora del Valle opened her door and ushered him into an apartment with a stained pink carpet and walls with peeling paint. The furniture looked both worn and inexpensive, and a houseplant atop the TV had turned yellow, but despite the scattered toys, the ratty carpet had been freshly vacuumed and he didn’t spot a speck of dust.

  “Dónde está Cristina?” he asked needlessly, as her wheezing gave away her location. Following the sound, he went to the kitchen and found the big-eyed nine-year-old sitting at a chipped Formica table, her neck muscles straining with her efforts to breathe. A list of spelling words was laid out in front of her, along with half-completed homework. On her lap sat a worn, stuffed toy owl, which watched over the proceedings.

  Though she didn’t bother with her usual perky greeting, Jack was relieved to see her color still looked good. He’d been dreading finding blue lips—a replay of Agustín Romero in the hours before his death.

  “How was school today? Did you see any cute boys?” he asked, hoping to gauge the severity of her attack by the length of her response. When she was well, the brown-haired little cutie could talk his ears off. According to her mama, she had never known a stranger and was always getting notes home from la maestra complaining that Cristina was chattering away in class.

  So when she merely wrinkled her nose and said, “Boys…are gross,” he knew, before he even pulled out his stethoscope or the peak air-flow meter he’d packed, that she wasn’t getting sufficient oxygen.

  “Where’s the nebulizer?” he asked the child’s mother as he pulled open the bag containing the premixed solution for the machine.

  Paloma del Valle ducked her head, casting her gaze toward the floor. From a bedroom, her younger daughter started crying, and she rushed off to tend the toddler.

  “Don’t have it,” said Cristina, and she, too, looked away. “Not anymore.”

  Jack bit back a curse, realizing that Cristina’s mother must have either sold the nebulizer or given it away—despite the fact her daughter needed it so much that Jack had bought her a used machine with his own money.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been burned in such a way, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. He wasted a moment wondering if things like this ever happened to suburban doctors, who spoke to their patients across gleaming desks while in covered spaces outside, their sleek black Jaguars waited smugly.

  You could do it still, he told himself. If his current situation didn’t cost him his license to practice in the state of Texas, Dr. Rick Aldrich had made it clear that his offer to come work in his Galleria-area practice still stood.

  But the thought didn’t appeal to Jack, even if he would get the opportunity to work with his old mentor. And even if he could go the rest of his career without making another house call or buying some piece of medical equipment for a patient.

  As he plastered on a smile for the girl’s sake, he dug deeper in his bag. “Since you don’t have it anymore,” he told her, “we’ll just have to go with Plan B.”

  “Is that…is Plan B a shot?” she asked, her wheezing growing louder.

  “Ta-da,” he said as he whipped out an inhaler. “No shot this time, Cristina. Just a couple of puffs.”

  And if that doesn’t work, he added mentally, you’ll get to take a nice ride in an ambulance—with the lights and sirens going.

  They watched him leave the squalid apartment on the East End, watched the little girl with the stuffed owl run after him and hug the doc good-bye.

  “Some people never learn their lesson,” said the first man.

  The second shrugged broad shoulders. “It’s like they just can’t help themselves.”

  “Maybe this kind of thing’s addictive, bad as any other jones. Crack cocaine, video poker, and sticking it to the system to help out little kids: they’ll probably have support groups for all three soon.”

  His partner shook his head. “You’ve been in this job too damned long.”

  Dr. Montoya stopped to chat with three delinquents, and within moments, the whole damned crew was pointing and talking over something in a book. When a curly-topped reprobate reached for something in his pocket, both of the watchers instinctively bent their knees and gripped their guns’ butts, their wildly beating hearts pumping adrenaline throughout their bodies.

  Instead of the weapon they expected, a pencil emerged from the kid’s pocket. Both men chuckled nervously, sweat breaking out with the speed and severity of a virulent pox.

  “Jesus Christ,” one muttered. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

  “I can see it now,” the other told him, “the front-page headlines saying, ‘Promising Youth Gunned Down for Doing Homework.’ We’d be the ones who ended up doing time.”

  “Maybe not the only ones,” said his partner as he watched the doctor walking toward his car.

  “I think you’re wrong on that,” the other answered. “I don’t figure Jack Montoya’s ever going to serve a
day. Even if you could get a jury to convict him—which would be one hell of a trick—you can’t put a guy like that in prison.”

  “Why the hell not? He wouldn’t be the first doctor to do time.”

  “A doctor can, for certain, but how’re you going to put a dead man behind bars?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The following morning, before the memorial service started, Reagan drove to the transfer office and put in for an EMT position at one of the busiest stations in Houston. The ambulance job, located in a dilapidated East End station not far from the bungalow where she’d once lived, came open periodically, as soon as whatever unfortunate rookie assigned to it was able to transfer to a better position.

  The station was the kind of place that was either a firefighter/EMT’s first stop or the last, the kind of place where the shift captain—a half-derelict old slacker cruising toward retirement—wouldn’t ask too many questions about where she’d come from or why. He’d simply be grateful to have a warm body filling the position instead of a succession of fill-ins, all of whom most likely griped nonstop about being sent to what was popularly known as Hell’s Rat-Hole.

  Reagan had driven through the old neighborhood before she’d visited Jack’s clinic Friday, so she understood how far down the area had slid since the days she and her family had lived there, just as she knew that her patchwork of high-school and street Spanish would be pressed into daily use. But she couldn’t care less, as long as the move took her away from the station where she’d worked with Captain Joe Rozinski, Beau LaRouche, and her old crew. By changing shifts, she’d upped the odds of avoiding them almost indefinitely.

  Yet until the memorial service, Reagan didn’t fully comprehend how necessary such a transfer would turn out to be. As she cut through the sea of uniforms gathering at the head of the march route to the church, she ran into a number of people she knew from her days at the fire academy, along with men and women she had worked with during her time on the ambulance, and those she’d trained with for the annual competition with the cops. As these firefighters, EMTs, and paramedics offered quiet words of comfort, shook her hand or embraced her, Reagan for a time regained the feeling of belonging to something larger and far nobler than herself, a huge family that accepted her, for all her failings, because she was one of them.