Fade the Heat (13 page)

“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 gliding 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.

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.”

She’d mentioned the ME, Jack thought as he backed toward the entrance. The medical examiner, who would need to identify a body.

Inside Jack something melted, leaked down through his legs, and cemented his feet to the spot. Reagan glanced in his direction, then walked away from him, talking in hushed tones as she moved. He stared after her, struggling to read meaning in the cant of her hand, the movements of her legs and shoulders, the way she stepped from the light into a band of deeper shadow. He wanted to rush to her, but he remained so firmly rooted he wondered how he would ever move again. So instead, he threw desperate prayers up to the heavens: jumbled snatches of the rosary, half-remembered Latin phrases, insane offers to God, as if the Creator took plea bargains. And through the tangle wove the desperate refrain:
Please, God, no. Don’t take Luz Maria. Please.

Reagan turned and walked toward him, the darkness hiding her expression until she’d nearly reached him. When the light from the glass door at his back fi
nally touched her, he wondered if her grave expression was the same one he slapped on when he had to give a patient bad news.

“This may be nothing,” she said. “Probably, it is.”

It was the same line he told people when he referred them to oncologists. When he knew, deep in his bones, that it
was
something, something terrible and deadly.

“When she’s not snapping shots of kids’ soccer teams, Peaches works part-time as a forensic photographer for the medical examiner. She got called in to do an acci—well, I guess you’d call it a crime scene, involving a young female, possibly Hispanic. But there’s no ID on the victim, nothing to indicate it’s—”

“She’s
dead?
”

Reagan hesitated for a moment that stretched out far too long. Jack tried to hold her gaze, but she looked away, seeking out the safer territory of an ambulance backing into the nearest loading area.

“You said you’d tell me everything you knew,” he reminded her. “You swore it.”

He heard her sigh before she spoke. “The victim’s clearly DOA,” she said, looking him in the eye now. “But we won’t know who she is until they finish—”

“Where is she?” Jack demanded.

“I can’t tell you that. You’ll have to wait and find—”

“Like hell I will. If it’s Luz Maria—if—if it’s really…” He couldn’t force out the words, couldn’t even bring himself to think them. She was his little sister. He’d just seen her. She’d told him she was going to have a baby.

And she’d said she was coming back home before midnight.

When he glanced down at his watch, he had to blink away hot moisture before he could make out the dial.

The time was 1:38
A
.
M
., and Mama hadn’t called to
say his sister had come home. And Reagan had heard a scream that came from Luz Maria’s cell phone.

He pushed past the nausea and wrenched his mind open to the unthinkable.

Laying his palm on Reagan’s upper arm, he told her, “Take me there now, to the scene, and I promise, I’ll never ask another thing of you again.”

“They aren’t going to let you see her. You understand that, don’t you? For one thing, your sister’s not even a missing person at this point. And they can’t allow a civilian to compromise the scene.”

“We’ll cross that bridge later,” he said. “Let’s just worry about getting there for now.”

Reagan shook her head, but she pulled her keys out of her pocket. “I should have my head examined…but I have to know, too. That call…I keep praying it was only a fender bender, and that she’s been too distracted since then to pick the phone up off the floorboard.”

Though Jack remembered that Luz Maria had told Reagan’s friend someone was following her, he said, “That’s probably it.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it is,” Reagan answered, as the two of them headed back toward the parking garage.

But Jack would bet his last dime she didn’t believe it any more than he did.

As they turned onto Binz on their way to Highway 288, Reagan prayed that Peaches would beat them there. If not, the cops would likely send them packing before she could even pull out her fire department ID.

Maybe it would be better if they did. Maybe then Jack could be spared a sight no family member ought to see.

Reagan knew she had to warn him, had to talk him out of attempting to pull strings to get his way.

“They think the woman was pushed out of a speeding car on 288,” she told him. “Although that may or may not be what killed her.”

For a long time he said nothing as they sat at a red light while an HFD ladder truck raced by in the opposite direction, the wail of its siren at odds with the preternatural silence of the hour. When she resumed driving, he spoke, his voice as flat as the EKG of a cadaver. “She was wearing a light-orange top, with jeans. I think she had her silver watch and maybe silver earrings.”

“The body—whose-ever it was—was found nude.” Chalk-dry in her throat, her words were barely audible, but when she saw him flinch, she knew he’d heard.

“It isn’t Luz Maria,” she repeated.

“It can’t be.”

Once more, they fell silent as the Trans Am drifted over the eerily empty streets.

“I—uh—I’ve lived here all my life,” Jack told her. “But I’ve never driven through this neighborhood.”

Reagan grasped the change of subject as if it were a lifeline. Perhaps, for him, it was.

“It’s part of my territory,” she said. “I hear it was really something once.”

She turned a corner, and they passed huge brick homes that had fallen on hard times. Derelict cars, many missing tires, were parked haphazardly in front of sagging porches, lit only by those streetlights that hadn’t been shot out. Beside the doors and windows, bushy oleanders and overgrown azaleas crouched, serving better as cover for criminals than landscaping.

“We get a lot of calls from senior citizens out here,” Reagan explained, more to fill the dark void than because she thought he cared. “Most of these houses look
good on the outside, but the interiors are falling down around their owners’ ears. But the area’s getting gentri-fied along the edges—yuppies buying the properties and fixing them up, driving up the prices. It’s happening all over the inner loop.”

“Good for the neighborhoods,” Jack said absently.

She shrugged. “Good for the yuppies and the houses, but not the original residents. Their taxes shoot up so high they have no choice except to leave. I always wonder where those seniors end up—in nursing homes or some little apartment near a son or daughter out of town. How many of those elderly transplants take root—and how many just wither and die?”

Reagan winced, realizing that the conversation she’d meant as a distraction had plunged back into gloom. For the rest of the drive, she kept her mouth shut and simply left him to his thoughts.

Once they hit the freeway, they ran into more traffic, which had slowed due to rubbernecking near the line of emergency vehicles. A fire truck was parked farthest back, partially in the right lane, its lights flashing to protect the scene from the bleary late-night—or early-morning—drivers crawling by. Reagan passed the cop cars, the ambulance supervisor’s SUV, and the ME’s van before identifying herself to a black female cop directing traffic. She pulled in front of Peaches’ ancient Saab and a second fire truck.

When Jack reached for the door handle, she grabbed his arm.

“Wait for me,” she said before picking her purse off the floorboards and digging for her fire department ID. “Let me talk to Peaches or those firefighters and see what I can find out before you go charging in.”

She thought she saw him nod, but she must have
been wrong, because by the time she’d introduced herself to a burly bear of a fireman with thick, protruding eyebrows and a woolly red-gray mustache, Jack was standing next to her.

She shot him a warning look before the driver, who had called himself Red McGaughey, asked, “Hurley? Are you Patrick Hurley’s daughter?”

At her nod, he explained, “I worked with Pat back when I was a rookie. Damned good firefighter.”

It was all the opening she needed. After thanking him, she launched into a brief explanation of why they were there and what they wanted. “Do you know any more than we do?”

The veteran firefighter shot Jack a wary glance.

“I spent a lot of time in Hermann’s ER,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of Friday nights.”

Apparently, Red decided Jack was “in” too, because he shook his head and told them, “It’s a fucking shame, a goddamn crime, what filth will up and do. God knows if the poor thing was dead when she hit the road, but she by-God was once a couple of cars ran over her. I didn’t see much of it—been in this long enough that I don’t look any more than I have to, I can tell you. But what I saw was pretty bad. I hope like hell it’s not your sister.”

Reagan was struck by the shifting of the pronoun, the way a person went from “she” to “it” in death. She’d doubtless made the same transition in her own speech on dozens, maybe hundreds, of occasions, but she wasn’t ready to make the transition this time…not with Luz Maria’s very live scream still echoing through her brain.

“Long black hair?” Jack asked him. “Maybe in a ponytail. Silver watch, and possibly silver earrings,
too. And she has a tiny tattoo, a little fairy on her shoulder blade. The left one.”

Glancing at Reagan, he flashed a weak smile that did nothing to dim the pain in his dark eyes. “It was World War Three when Mama saw she’d done it.”

From the fireman came another head shake, a pursing of the lips, a string of curses about the waste of it. And then: “I don’t know. Can’t say for sure. Could have had black hair. Might have been a white girl or Hispanic. Might have been a lot of things.”

Without another word, Jack started walking toward the floodlit knot of cops and other personnel.

“Hey, wait, Jack. Stop.” Reagan trotted up behind him and hooked his bent elbow with one hand.

Tearing his arm away, he turned on her, his eyes reflecting the lurid flash of scarlet lights. “If you think for one damned second that I’m sitting here this close and—”

“You want to get arrested?” she demanded. “You want to add that to everything else the cops and lawyers have to sort out? ’Cause I’m not bailing your ass out tonight, and I doubt your mother can handle it at this point.”

His arms dropped to his sides, and he simply stood there, defeated…for the moment.

“Let me go in, tell them what we know. Maybe I can talk the investigators into letting us take a look. For one thing, if we can ID the body, it’ll make their job easier, and the investigation will go faster. You wait here, and this time I mean stay still. Or I’ll tell ’em to arrest you myself.”

She wasn’t sure how long her threat would hold him, but she hurried away and found a couple of cops and another firefighter. After she explained the cir
cumstances, the firefighter, Dan Berryhill from her class at the academy, was all for letting her and Jack look at the corpse. One of the police officers agreed, but the other was a stiff-necked weasel who insisted upon calling a superior for approval.

When he went to his unit to contact the station, his partner griped, “Tight-assed little shit-wad has to have a signed note every time he takes a dump.”

She shrugged and waited, then introduced Jack when—big surprise—he showed up to join them. Finally, the pinch-faced weasel returned and gave them a reluctant go-ahead.

“If you ask me, though,” he bitched, “if Lieutenant Scheffield weren’t off on vacation, he’d never go for this.”

The man’s partner and the firefighter escorted them to the spot where Peaches was busy taking pictures of something behind a tarp held by two firefighters to shield the body from the view of passersby. Reagan barely recognized her neighbor, as she’d changed into a pair of jeans and a white blouse, pulled her strawberry-blond hair into a no-nonsense ponytail, and held an outsized digital camera with major-league attachments in front of her face.

After the officer said something to Peaches, she shot Reagan and Jack an agonized look before snapping the lens cover on her camera and turning away.

Reagan took Jack’s hand and gave it a squeeze, then told him one more time, “It won’t be her.”

Jack looked at her so hard she could read the naked fear behind his eyes. And then, without another word, he let go of her hand and walked behind the orange tarp.

Reagan followed, her stomach pulled into a tight
knot, though she tried to tell herself she’d doubtless seen worse.

But the bearlike fireman, Red McGaughey, had been right. This was bad. No one, no matter how young or vibrant or attractive, left a pretty corpse once struck by multiple cars cruising at freeway speeds. It was hard to look past the damage, the limbs twisted at impossible angles, the flattened sack of abdomen, the split flesh and the leaking fluids. And nearly impossible to compare this corpse to the beautiful woman she had met that morning, especially when moisture kept blurring Reagan’s vision, no matter how many times she wiped her eyes.