Fade the Heat (23 page)

Anger heated his words. “Forgive me if I don’t think you’re the best person to offer me advice on romance.”

He felt like the planet’s lowest life form when her good hand reached for another handful of tissues. Though he’d saved his sanity by learning to ignore his mother’s crocodile tears, he’d never been able to inure himself to any woman’s real pain. And even if he someday built an impenetrable fortress around the territory of his heart, he had long ago turned over its keys to Luz Maria.

Sitting down beside her, he hugged her to him and stroked her wavy hair, the way he had when she was a child.

Your sister’s a grown woman
, he heard Reagan’s voice remind him. It had been a sore point between them, the way he tried to both protect and make the best decisions for Luz Maria.

Maybe it was past time that he stopped. Drawing away from his sister, he moved back to the computer chair where he’d been sitting.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’ll tell you what, let’s make a deal. I won’t bring up Sergio if you don’t mention Reagan.”

Nodding, Luz Maria wiped her eyes. Tears had clumped her lashes, and the edges of her nostrils were chapped and reddened. “Truce,” she promised.

“All right. But I need to talk to you about that job in
the Valley. I didn’t mention this before, but you’ve got a stake in this decision, too.”

She crumpled the tissue and tossed it in her trash can. “How’s that?”

Handing Isaac Mailer’s card to her, he recounted the details of their conversation—along with his misgivings about the mayor’s campaign manager.

“That seems really strange,” she said. “I’ve been praying for some good to come of my mistakes, but this—it sounds almost
too
good. And pretty conveniently timed, too, since the election’s in—what—is it two days?”

“Three. Today’s Saturday.”

For the first time since her injury, the fire returned to Luz Maria’s dark eyes. Distracted from her guilt, she quizzed him about details of both Isaac Mailer’s offer and his conversations with Sabrina McMillan.

Afterward, she frowned. “I want this, Jack, for both of us. But not without understanding what the price is. Call the woman. Go meet with her if that’s what it takes. While you’re doing that, I’ll check out this foundation on the Internet.”

As Jack rose, she took a seat at the computer, the air around her fairly crackling with impatience. He smiled at the sight, relieved that she was moving toward recovery—and equally pleased that “The Piranha” would tear into this research with the same stubborn intensity she’d used to tackle problems in the past.

Kissing her crown as a good-bye, he said, “Some good
has
come of your mistakes already. For one thing, I’m realizing how much I’ve underestimated you.”

Luz Maria smiled at him. “All I can say,” she told him, “is it’s about damned time.”

Laughing, he left his sister—and prepared to beard the mayor’s lioness in her den.

As she sat alone in the darkness of the watch office, Reagan could hear men’s laughter from the station’s kitchen. She smiled and idly wondered what prank she was missing, but although her new coworkers had done nothing to make her feel unwelcome, she didn’t go out and join in the fun.

She had a call to make and, for once, the privacy to do it. Picking up the telephone, she dialed, her fingers hurried by the knowledge that at any moment she could be interrupted by a series of tones and one of the dispatch computer system’s nearly unintelligible, but almost always urgent, summons.

Her heart pounded within her rib cage, thumping out the message,
Maybe you should be calling Jack instead.

At least his messages had left her certain that, unlike the person she was calling, Jack wouldn’t hang up on her. In a way, she’d like to talk to him, to get his take on Beau’s denial about breaking into her place. But he could call until the end of time before she’d forgive him for what he had said about her father.

“Sad and stunted soul, my ass,” she muttered as her mother’s line rang once, twice, and then a third time.

They’re off on that cruise after all.

With a grateful sigh, Reagan moved to return the receiver to its cradle. Then froze at the sound of someone picking up, followed by a warm and feminine “Hello?”

Her mother sounded cheerful and mildly expectant, as if she anticipated a pleasant social call. Obviously, thought Reagan, she hadn’t checked her caller ID unit, if she even had one on her phone.

For half a beat, Reagan considered hanging up, but instead she plunged ahead with the words she’d been rehearsing. “Mother—Mom, it’s me, Reagan. I—I’ve been thinking, it’s been too long, way too long, since we’ve talked.”

She didn’t count the brief call after Joe Rozinski’s death. Certainly, it hadn’t qualified as conversation.

“Is everything all right?” Her mother’s voice had lost its carefree innocence of a moment earlier. She sounded guarded now and worried, as if she feared more bad news—or an attack.

“I’m fine,” said Reagan, though she really didn’t feel it. She’d been so damned confused of late, shaken and sleepless with so many doubts. But she thought she’d figured out this one thing, and she meant to say the words before she lost her nerve. “I just wanted to tell you that I…that I finally understand. Why you got rid of Dad’s things. Why you couldn’t stand to listen to me talk about him and make plans to follow in his footsteps. I was so focused on the way your reaction hurt me, I never saw the bigger picture. I never really tried to put myself in your shoes.”

Her mother whispered, “For-forgive me, Reagan. I was so weak…and so wrong.”

In the background, Reagan heard her stepfather asking, “What’s going on? Who is that, Georgina?”

But instead of breaking the connection, her mother told him, “It’s all right, Matthias. I want…I need…to talk to her.”

Gratitude welled up in Reagan. That, and the desire to prove Jack Montoya wrong. She’d faced fires, fought boxing opponents far more talented than she; hell, she’d even challenged a man who’d held a gun on her. What were a few mundane emotions compared to that?

Though her heart was pounding, she forced herself to say the words she’d kept locked up. “I love you. I love you and I realize now, you’ve always loved me, too. And Matthias…he helped me. He helped me understand. I—I appreciate that.”

Even for her mother’s sake, Reagan couldn’t say she loved the man, but she figured that she owed him thanks, at least.

“Oh, God.” Her mother was crying now, but something in her voice had lifted, a darkness that had weighted it for all too many years. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited—oh, Reagan. I should have been the one to reach out first. But—but I’ve been so afraid, and so certain you were lost forever to me. And I was sure it was no more than I deserved.”

Reagan wiped away her own tears, but she was smiling, too—and breathing more easily than she had in a long time. “If we can both forgive each other, maybe—maybe it’s possible we can forgive ourselves while we’re at it. I’m really sorry—sorry for all the things I did to hurt you and to make your life more difficult.”

“Then it’s true, what I heard?” asked her mother. “You’re leaving the department?”

“
What?
” Reagan felt as if someone had hit her across the back with a lead pipe. “Who would say a thing like that?”

“I—I’ve kept tabs on you. I still know a couple of the wives. Women whose husbands worked with your father. P-Patrick.”

“Well, they’re wrong,” said Reagan, rising to her feet. “I don’t know where they got such an idea, but I’ll never—”

Then it happened. The alarm sounded, and a call
came—a 911 hang-up with an address near the old Plaza del Sol.

“Gotta catch this run,” said Reagan before she dropped the phone into its cradle.

Rushing toward the ambulance, she struggled to shift her focus to the call—which would more than likely prove to be some kid playing with the telephone—and away from the bile-bitter questions pushing themselves into her throat.

Had her mother’s love and forgiveness stemmed from Reagan’s phone call?

Or were they contingent on the hope, the same one that Reagan had just dashed, that she was putting not only firefighting, but the department, behind her once and for all?

Ignoring the ache in her left forearm, Luz Maria pulled a pair of reading glasses from her desk drawer. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t be caught dead in the things, but her eyes felt raw and sore from days of crying. Not so much for Sergio—she’d been stunned by how quickly the mirage of their love faded in his absence—but out of shame at how caught up she’d been in the delusion that the justness of a cause excused every act done in its name, even those that harmed the innocent. She had been so firmly snared by the sticky webs of that false logic that she had been willing to sacrifice her own brother to the lie.

Though the events surrounding her accident remained a great, gaping hole within her memory, she had no doubt that somehow her own sins had set it in motion—and led directly to the loss of the most innocent life of all.

At the thought of her miscarriage, she shoved aside the soup bowl her mother had brought in. Luz Maria
was surprised to see she’d finished all of it, though the broth had tasted as salty as her tears.

Once more, she felt grief’s sticky fingers, but this time, she shook them off and continued her one-handed typing. So far, her search for information on the Trust for Compassionate Service had proved frustrating. She had found no website and only a scant handful of mentions in a couple of articles from a Brownsville paper, where the trust was listed as a contributor to a childhood immunization program and to a grass-roots group teaching English to parents of school-age children.

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,” Reagan 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.