As a social worker, Luz Maria had dealt with dozens of charities. Most relied on positive press to help them garner donations, improve the images of their corporate sponsors, and publicize the organizations’ goals to those who would benefit from their help. It seemed strange to find so little information on this trust, as if it operated in an otherworldly vacuum, separate from the desperate struggles most groups faced.
Or as if the organization were some kind of facade, with little substance of its own.
Luz Maria’s pulse quickened. Hadn’t she seen something about that on a television news show not long ago? Though the report had focused on radical groups that raised funds under innocuous-sounding aliases, wasn’t it possible that such organizations might use the same ruse to disguise their giving?
Another look at the programs the fund had bankrolled sparked a new idea. Returning to her Internet search engine, Luz Maria typed El Fondo de Servicio Compasivo, a translation of the trust’s name.
As she skimmed through hits, she tapped her chipped nails on the desk’s edge restlessly. Nada. She hadn’t found a single thing that looked like—
“Wait a minute,” Luz Maria muttered to herself. Her fingers popped along the keyboard as she tried various substitutions—the Spanish word for “foundation” instead of “trust,” “caring” as opposed to “compassionate.”
She tried perhaps a dozen variations before she finally struck pay dirt with El Instituto de Servicio Humanitario. The name instantly popped up, not in articles lauding its generosity, but on a website known as Bucktracker, which sifted through public records to trace the funding of what it considered subversive or even criminal groups.
A disclaimer page insisted that many otherwise-reputable individuals and foundations were duped into contributing to questionable causes. Clicking past the legalese, she accessed a link to El Instituto…
And absorbed the shocking contents, her heart sinking with each word—and her right hand already groping for the cordless phone, along with the ivory business card that Jack had left her.
“Recognize that address?” asked Reagan’s partner and driver, Ernie “Magoo” Flores.
Reagan had heard he’d come by the nickname after a late-night accident two years earlier, when he had driven the ambulance into the path of a waste disposal truck that he claimed he hadn’t seen. Though investigators later concluded the truck had been running without lights, Flores would doubtless take the appellation—inspired by a blind cartoon character—to his grave. Not that it seemed to bother the easygoing veteran.
“Sure, I know it,” Reagan answered. “It didn’t take me two shifts to figure we’d be seeing a hell of a lot of the stately manses at Las Casitas.”
Magoo slurped from a cup of Dr. Pepper as expansive as his waistline before nodding his approval. “That’s what I like about you, Hurley. Quick on the uptake. Plus, you don’t stink up the cab half as much as Townsend.”
Eager to prevent him from winding up again on the subject of Townsend’s gastrointestinal excesses, she opted on a change of subject. Glancing at a decaying row of abandoned shotgun houses, she asked, “You think this area will ever come back? I mean, look at all the building going on. Some of the worst neighborhoods in the city are breaking out in high-class town homes.”
“Shit, no,” said Magoo. “Not unless they get that bazillion-dollar flood abatement project. But what are the odds of city council putting that ahead of another new sports venue? Ask yourself who has more clout, a bunch of crackheads, illegals, and poor minorities or the fat cats who show up dripping with diamonds and donations at political fund-raisers? ’Cause that’s exactly who’s lobbying for the new arena.”
They pulled into the complex’s parking lot, and a group of young men scattered as the ambulance’s headlights touched them. Where they had been assembled, a late-model Accord sat with its doors flung open, its body listing, since its driver-side tires had been removed.
“Should I call that in to HPD?” asked Reagan.
Magoo shook his head. “Let’s see what we have inside first.”
As Reagan gathered her equipment, she wondered if the reluctance she heard in her partner’s voice had less to do with getting to their patient quickly than with some unspoken truce he had developed with these thugs. Uncomfortable with the idea, she made a mental note to talk with him about it later.
Reagan hated trying to find apartments in this hellhole. As they took the crumbling sidewalk that wound between the buildings, she saw that at least half of the numbers on the apartment doors were missing. To make matters worse, many of the security lights were either broken or burned out, and the stretcher she was wheeling kept jarring her shoulder as its wheels caught in the breaks in the concrete. A movement in the shadows caught her attention, and someone unseen made vulgar kissing noises.
“Ditch the fat dude, baby, and we’ll show you how to spend a Saturday night,” one hissed before a beer bottle exploded near Reagan’s feet.
Ignoring the rough laughter that followed, Reagan followed Magoo. Thank God he seemed to know where he was going.
“Pain-in-the-ass kids,” he said of the catcallers. “You aren’t cut, are you?”
“I’m fine.” Heaven only knew, she’d heard worse upon occasion. What was a Saturday night on the meat box without a few drunken assholes?
Magoo looked from side to side, orienting himself before he began to pound on an unmarked apartment door.
From inside, Reagan heard a torrent of frantic-sounding Spanish, far too fast for comprehension. Fortunately, Magoo didn’t miss a beat.
“Son los bomberos,” he called, identifying them as firefighters. “Abra la puerta, por favor.”
Reagan was relieved when the woman complied with his request, opening the door and beckoning them inside.
A girl of eight or nine was hunched forward on a threadbare sofa, her skinny arm maintaining a death grip on a stuffed owl. Despite her mother’s rapid-fire—and unintelligible—explanation to Magoo and a tiny girl who whined as she clutched the woman’s knees, Reagan could hear a harsh rasp that made her own lungs squeeze in sympathy.
Kneeling beside the older child, Reagan let Magoo handle the mother while she began primary patient assessment.
The girl looked up, her brown eyes nearly as wide as the stuffed owl’s. “Who—who are you?” she asked in English.
Reagan introduced herself and then added, “I’m here to help you feel better. Can you tell me your name?”
“Cri-Cristina. Del—del Valle. I—I used my medicina—for the asthma.” She paused to catch her breath. “Just like Doctor Jack said when he came.”
Reagan’s attention ratcheted up a notch. “Doctor Jack?” she asked, even as she checked the child’s pulse.
Cristina’s expression brightened. “Dr. Montoya—he lets—lets me call him that. He—he brings me my ’halers. He—he brung that ma-ma-machine once, too, but…but we don’t have it no more.”
Noting that her pauses were lengthening, Reagan used her stethoscope to listen to the girl’s breathing. In addition to the wheezes she expected, Reagan detected the light crackling known as rales, which indicated possible fluid in the lungs. Though her lips and nail beds weren’t yet blue and she was still alert and oriented, little Cristina wasn’t getting nearly enough air.
A nebulizer treatment was indicated, but their ambulance lacked the required paramedic to administer a dose. If the girl went further downhill, they could be in trouble. “Do you…do you have your inhaler here now?” Reagan asked, hoping to keep the patient stable until they could get a squad here.
She tried to ignore the tightness building in her own chest, something she had noticed during several of the calls she’d made to Las Casitas. She told herself it was all in her mind, a result of running across patients with respiratory symptoms.
“Mama?” called the child before asking haltingly, in Spanish, where her mother had put the medicina.
“We need to call a squad with a paramedic,” Reag
an told her partner after asking the child a few more questions about her history, “but in the meantime, I think we’d better prepare to load and go.” Their term for a quick transport to an ER, a necessity if a paramedic couldn’t respond quickly.
While Cristina’s mother left the room to search for the girl’s inhaler, Magoo gave his walkie-talkie a sharp rap. “It’s cut out on me. I think the batteries are dead, or maybe the thing’s broken.”
When he started toward the door, Reagan said, “Why don’t—why don’t you let me radio it in? I—I can’t understand—a word—Ms.—Ms. del Valle’s—say—saying anyway.”
Magoo squinted at her. “You all right?”
Reagan had begun taking daily medications to help control her asthma, but Magoo had nonetheless caught her with her rescue inhaler earlier this week, after they’d made a run to a house infested with about a million half-wild cats. Instead of making a big deal of it, he’d only rubbed his reddened eyes and said, “I’m allergic to the damned things, too. That old lady needs an exterminator, not an ambulance.”
Reagan said, “I’m okay,”then gave Magoo a rundown on Cristina’s condition and suggested he start her on humidified oxygen. By this time, Reagan knew she needed to get out of this apartment—before Magoo had to summon an additional ambulance for her.
So great was her hurry to leave that she stepped on one of the younger child’s toys—a ball or something—and began to fall hard, her ankle twisting. With a sharp cry, she stuck out her hand, meaning to catch herself against the wall.
But her hand punched through the rotten wallboard, and she ended up falling anyway—and landing facedown on the pink carpet, which smelled so musty that she began to choke.
“Jesus—you okay, Grace?” asked Magoo—and Reagan had a premonition that she’d just acquired a nickname of her own.
“Yeah—yeah,” she said between coughs, though she could no longer disguise her breathing problem.
Magoo reached to help her up, but in her embarrassment, Reagan ignored his outstretched hand and stood without assistance.
“Look at this,” he told her, his gaze locked on the hole her hand had made in the wall.
“I—I know. I’m a—real klutz—” Reagan started, until she saw the mold.
Blackish-green and slimy, it looked like an oil slick inside the broken Sheetrock. Magoo gave the section below the break a light kick, and more plaster crumbled, revealing sludge-thick layers. Grabbing a loose corner of the carpet, he peeled it back to expose a stained and stinking pad.
“From the flood—the flood last spring,” rasped Reagan. “The—complex never made—never made repairs.”
Nodding, Magoo said, “You go on out—right now. Call for backup. Use your inhaler. I’ll get the patient’s medicine and get her out of here. The whole family, too, if I can talk the senora into it.”
“Thanks,” said Reagan. She hobbled in the direction of the ambulance, pausing only long enough to take a puff from the inhaler in her pocket.
As she retraced her earlier path, it seemed even darker and the rutted sidewalk more determined to bring her to her knees. She stepped carefully, some paranoid corner of her mind hissing a warning that if she went down here, the lowlifes who’d thrown the bottle would appear from nowhere to swarm over her like vermin. Shuddering at the thought, she picked up her pace.
It was just after ten-thirty on a moonlit Saturday evening, yet she saw no one about. She heard plenty, though, from inside the apartments: snatches of raucous Mexican music, the blaring of a TV, and the unmistakable sounds of a couple arguing, although they shouted in a language that might be Vietnamese. Speaking more familiar Spanish, one woman warned another, “Ojo, es el carro del patrón. Él está aquí para su dinero.”
Look out, Reagan mentally translated, her high-school Spanish kicking in. That car belongs to el patrón—whoever that might be. He’s here for his money.
By the time Reagan reached the parking lot, her breathing had eased somewhat, and she had no difficulty calling for support. As she opened the back of the ambulance, she reached into her pocket to pull out the inhaler for one more hit, but a car parked nearby attracted her attention. Not the half-stripped Honda, which sat abandoned with all four doors flung open, but a larger sedan two spaces down.
Forgetting the inhaler, she limped toward the dented Ford, an ancient beater that was in worse shape than her Trans Am. After first checking to be sure the car was empty, she pulled a slim flashlight from her breast pocket, then shone its thin beam along the crumpled fender.
With that spot of light, she saw that the car was the avocado green she had expected, the exact shade of the sedan she’d spotted leaving Jack Montoya’s clinic two weeks earlier. Moving around to the front, she ignored the Oklahoma plates—probably stolen—and stared at the same grill that had come so close to running her down in the clinic lot. She repositioned her light to find several spots on the chrome bumper that were scarred with bright red paint.
Paint from Jack’s Explorer, unless she missed her guess.
Her breath hissing, she took a step back—a step directly into something huge and solid that exploded into motion, wrapping a thick arm around her throat.
Adrenaline surged through her like a jolt from a defibrillator. Unable to scream, she fought like the hellcat Peaches had once named her, striking backward with her elbow, bringing her booted foot down hard on his, and biting the bastard’s forearm until she heard him scream.
“You bitch!” With that, he slammed her forward with such force that her body folded over the sedan’s hood and her forehead slammed against the windshield. She must have hit her mouth, too, for it flooded with a wash that tasted like hot metal. Spitting blood, she struggled to push herself upright.
Run now. Scream, her brain ordered her aching body, but before she could do anything, her attacker’s big hand gripped the back of her neck, and her legs went loose as ribbons.
“He was fucking right,” the man screamed in her ear. “Fucking right I shoulda killed you.”
Deep and booming, the voice reverberated around the inside of her skull. The sound made Reagan want to vomit. There was a terrible groan, like metal twisting or an animal dying. She was the source, she realized, hurting so badly that it barely registered when he grabbed her around the waist and lifted her as if she were a sack of grapefruit. As her body drooped forward at the waist, Reagan’s vision grayed out.
“He goddamned always has to be right,” he muttered as he half carried and half dragged her. “I never should’ve let myself feel sorry for the bastard.”
A second wave of panic overwhelmed her. Now that she’d stopped screaming, the voice sounded familiar—and the suspicion that she knew her attacker convinced her she was in even worse trouble than she’d feared. Was he putting her in his car, taking her away to—? God, he would have no choice now but to kill her.
Would Magoo come out and save her? Or maybe the pumper and the paramedics she had called? Or someone, anyone who might help—even her earlier tormentors with their lewd suggestions and their bottles.
Her attacker stopped abruptly, and Reagan felt huge hands all over her body. With a cry of protest, she jerked toward full awareness and began to struggle. He clamped down on her throat again, cutting off her air, as his free hand finished emptying her pockets, taking her wallet, keys, inhaler, and God only knew what else.
But her hopes that this was merely a robbery faded when he hurled her things into the tall weeds beyond the parking lot.
An instant later, she felt herself tumbling forward. She held on to consciousness by a hairbreadth as the gray haze darkened to an inky blackness. Reagan groaned more loudly and lifted her arms in the hope of attracting someone’s attention as the brute lifted her and threw her into the car.
Her hands struck something solid. Nails tore as she scratched the metal over her head—along with the surface of the horrifying truth.
Her attacker hadn’t simply thrown her inside the old Ford. He had dumped and loc
ked her in the trunk, she realized—a split second before she heard the rumble of the engine turning over…
And the crackling pop of tires as the car began to move.
Chapter Twenty-six
“When I didn’t hear from you before,” Sabrina McMillan told Jack from across the candlelit table of her beautifully appointed high-rise condo, “I was afraid that perhaps your little friend had been spreading nasty gossip.”
It took him several beats to realize the mayor’s campaign manager was talking about Reagan. She was many things to him: beautiful, good-hearted, vulnerable, and stubborn, but his little friend? Laughing at the notion, he shook his head at Sabrina. “Why would she do that?”
Sabrina smiled seductively over the rim of her crystal wineglass. Waterford, she’d told Jack, apparently hoping he’d be bowled over by her good taste, as well as the condo’s panoramic view of the treetops of Hermann Park by moonlight. Jack tried to imagine Reagan in Sabrina’s place, her full lips painted the same crimson, her more toned and slender body hugged by the same form-fitting, sapphire-blue halter dress.
Dream on, Montoya, the fantasy-blonde told him as she donned a pair of boxing gloves. Probably to pop him.
“I was afraid she was a little jealous,” said Sabrina. “I sometimes have that effect on women. They rarely seem to like me.”
Well, duh, Reagan’s disembodied voice said from the sidelines.
Ignoring it, Jack told Sabrina, “Poor you.”
If she wanted to take it as flirting, he could live with that. The truth was, he wouldn’t touch the woman with asbestos gloves.
This time, her smile was as knowing as it was naughty. But this time, despite the candlelight, the expression clued him in that she was perhaps a decade older than she looked. Probably around forty, maybe even older, but still a gorgeous specimen in anybody’s book.
Fade the Heat Page 26
