Fade the Heat (22 page)

“We don’t know Beau did that,” Reagan said. “He could have broken in the next day, before I had the locks changed and the security system set up. There’s no way Beau could have been the one to—to hurt your sister.”

“Why not? He sure as hell showed no compunction when it came to hitting you.”

“Jack, Beau’s a firefi—”

“Beau’s in deep shit, that’s what he is, if I find him before the cops.” Jack thought of Paulo’s offer, how he had friends who could doubtless rearrange LaRouche’s pretty face. It would serve him right, too, a man who would beat up on women, who would set the walls ablaze with a bloody wash of hatred.

But in the back of his mind, Jack knew that calling
in that kind of favor from Paulo would cost him dearly. Besides, as badly as Jack wanted vengeance at the moment, he knew that justice was the goal he should pursue.

“So which is it going to be?” he asked Reagan grimly. “Are we going to the authorities with this, or am I taking care of Beau myself?”

Reagan had never taken well to ultimatums. At least, that was what she told herself when she asked Jack to leave.

“I’ll be sure and talk to Beau, though. Face to face.” As Reagan spoke, she avoided Jack’s eyes, which reminded her all too clearly of an evening in the boxing ring last winter. She still recalled the crowd’s gasp when she’d clocked Darcy Gordon with a left jab followed by a crushing uppercut. In the split second before she went down, Darcy had worn an expression of utter astonishment, even hurt, that a lesser boxer had popped off a lucky shot.

But surprised or not, Jack Montoya didn’t hit the mat. Instead, he put down the tool he’d used to repair her disposal and repeated, “You want me to go?”

She nodded, keeping her eyes on his instead of allowing her gaze to drop to his broad chest, with its sprinkling of coarse, dark hair. A memory of his muscles beneath her fingertips nearly stole her breath away. She wondered if he’d been an athlete, or if he
spent a lot of his time off in a gym. Where else would he come by such a set of fine, hard muscles?

Ruthlessly she dragged her mind back on track by turning and stalking to the guest room to retrieve his shirt. But the damned bed was still rumpled, and the air was heavy with the unmistakable scent of sex.

Great sex. Sex that had touched her on levels so deep it scared her.

Swallowing hard, she hurried from the room and tossed him the T-shirt. She breathed a sigh of relief when he took the hint and pulled it on as he followed her into the living room.

“You need some time to calm down,” she said, “and think through all this stuff about Beau and your sister.”

“This guy tried to kick down your door today,” Jack argued. “And now you want to see him? No.”

Irritation made her close in on him, even though it put her far too close to his lips—and the memory of the things he knew how to do with them. “Did you just tell me
no
?”

“Seems to me I just told you I loved you, not two hours ago. I really meant it, Reag, and I’m not going to stand back and let you get hurt, or worse—”

“So you think you
own
me now? Is that what all this means? First you try to make your sister’s decisions for her, and now you want to make mine? Because if that’s the way it works when you love someone, then you can count me out.”

The pain flashing over his face made her realize she had hit below the belt. But before she could think of some way to backtrack, or at least soften what she’d said, Jack was heading toward the door.

Pausing, he glared back at her over his shoulder. “I’m starting to wonder, Reagan. Are you protecting
Beau because he’s another firefighter? Or is there some reason he’s been jealous? Were you really sleeping with him first?”

“Do you honestly believe that?” she demanded. “Because if that’s what you think, you can—”

“No.” As he slowly turned back toward her, his gaze lingered on the photos on her bookcase.

“No,
what?
” she asked.

“No, I really don’t believe you’ve slept with Beau,” Jack said, “just the way I don’t believe your kicking me out has anything to do with what I said about him. You know what I really think? I think you’re frightened. Not so much about the break-in as about what’s happening between us.”

She tensed, feeling a stab of apprehension, perhaps a prescient warning of the blow to come.

“I think you’ve barricaded yourself behind a memory,” Jack continued, “and you’re scared to death to let anyone get past it—because you don’t want them to find out how sad and stunted a soul can be when it grows in the shadow of a tombstone.”

He was gone before she could recover, leaving her to realize that she might have gotten in a couple of bruising shots, but it was Jack Montoya who had scored the TKO.

It took days for Reagan to make herself call Beau, days before she could do much of anything except survive the reverberations of her last conversation with Jack.

Oh, she went through the motions well enough. She took Frank Lee to the nursing home, where she passed out Halloween treats, and then to the dog park, where he disgraced his heritage by wallowing in a mudhole instead of running. She also returned to work after
learning that her transfer had been expedited by the district chief. She even allowed a couple of old friends to talk her into a lunch date at their favorite little Guatemalan restaurant. But she was lousy company—lousy at everything but fantasizing about making love with Jack—and then kicking herself at the memory of how he’d wounded her.

But none of that lessened her need to confront Beau on the diploma issue, so after getting home from work one brilliantly sunny morning, she gave him a call. Though it was not yet seven
A
.
M
., she didn’t care if she woke him.

He picked up on the second ring, and she didn’t waste a second on false pleasantries. “I need to talk to you.”

He hesitated, but only for a moment. “I’m on my way.”

“No, Beau. We can talk about it on the…” Reagan let the words trail off. He had already hung up.

Great. Now she’d get to piss him off in person.

She grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from her closet, then decided to hold off on changing out of her uniform. If nothing else, it would serve to remind Beau that she might have moved back to an ambulance, but she was still very much a part of the department. A part of the department that could have his ass fired for hitting her.

She was having a cup of coffee on the bench in her back yard when his souped-up old Camaro pulled into the driveway. As soon as he climbed out of the silver coupe, she called for him to join her. Better that than going with him back inside the house.

From the branches of a live oak, a mockingbird sang a medley of greatest hits from other species, while high above, an airplane painted vapor trails across the sky. Sitting in a warm patch of sunshine and watching
Beau walk toward her, smiling and dressed for a visit to the gym, Reagan could almost pretend the events of the past two weeks hadn’t happened.

Almost.

“This bullshit’s going to stop,” she told him.

The smile curdled, and he stopped in his tracks.

While she had him at a loss, she decided to make sure he was clear that she was no one’s doormat. “If you want me to hold my tongue about what you’ve been up to, I’ll expect you to quit running me down around the department. And I mean it, Beau. People are calling me and ratting you out. I’ve had enough of it.”

He glanced up at the bird and then at the neighbor’s yellow cat, which was watching from its habitual perch atop a long-unused doghouse. He looked everywhere except at Reagan as he sat down on the far end of the bench.

Noisily he cleared his throat. “I—uh—I was sort of hoping you’d called to say you missed seeing me around. We had some good times, Reagan.”

He sounded pathetic, but she didn’t waste a moment feeling sorry for him. “You’ll be paying for the door you dented. I’ve decided I want a new one. And you’re damned lucky I don’t bill you for another garbage disposal while I’m at it.”

He looked up at her. “The door I get, and yeah, I’ll take care of it. But you’re blaming me for breaking your disposal?”

“That’s what happens when you shove papers down one. A diploma, for example. Beau, you broke into my house.” Try as she might over the past few days, she hadn’t been able to come up with any other possibility. But she still couldn’t wrap her brain around the idea of him going after Luz Maria.

His expression shifted from hangdog to sullen at warp speed. “Look, I told you I was sorry that I knocked you on your ass. But if you think I’m some sicko who breaks into women’s houses and paws through panties and—”

“Ugh. You went through my underwear drawer, too?”

He shot to his feet, his fists clenching. “Ever since you’ve been screwing that Montoya, you’ve been acting like a goddamned bit—”

“Why, Beau LaRouche. You bad,
bad
boy.” Peaches let herself and Frank Lee inside the gate, then unclipped the white greyhound from his leash.

Instead of bounding to the rookie firefighter as he usually did, the dog hid behind Peaches’s legs, which were currently shrink-wrapped in violet-colored aerobics tights.

As Beau’s glare turned on Peaches, Reagan latched onto the interruption. “You’re up awfully early,” she said to her neighbor.

“Had to shoot a crime scene last night. Afterwards, I wasn’t in the mood to party. Frank and I had popcorn and watched an old Bette Davis weepie on the sofa,” Peaches explained, but the towering strawberry blonde still hadn’t taken her eyes off Beau.

Marching toward him, she thumped the center of his chest with an index finger, then punctuated each word with another poke. “You…don’t ever again…mess with…my friend. Or any woman.”

Beau shoved her hand away and sneered into her face. “Well, I guess that leaves you out, you fucking freak-show reject.”

“Hey.” Reagan leapt up from her seat and grabbed Peaches’s arm just in time to keep her from throwing a very unladylike punch. “Don’t worry about this jackass. He was just leaving.”

And he was, for, exactly as he had before, Beau turned on his heel and stalked back toward his Camaro. But this time, he hesitated at the car’s door long enough to tell her, “You’re making a big mistake, Reagan. You have
no
idea how big.”

A moment later, the engine roared to life, and the gleaming car lurched backward to the street.

Which would have made for an impressive exit, had it not been for the crunching impact of a blue pickup truck striking the Camaro’s left rear bumper.

When Peaches broke up laughing at the fender bender, Reagan smiled and shook her head.

“Serves the jackass right,” she said. But she couldn’t properly enjoy Beau’s bad luck. Not with the memory of his last statement clouding her mood like a portent of a mighty storm to come.

“A person spends the best years of her life putting two children through college,” complained Candelaria Esmeralda de Vaca Montoya from the kitchen while she chopped onions—probably in the hopes of coaxing forth more guilt-inducing tears, “and the least—the very least—she should expect is to have them support her in her old age. And what do I have to show for all my hard work? Two good-for-nothings fired for bad choices, and not even a single
nieto
as consolation.”

Sitting cross-legged on her own bed, Luz Maria flinched at her mother’s mention of a grandchild. Though she hadn’t spoken of the miscarriage since that day in the hospital nearly two weeks earlier, Jack was almost certain she hadn’t gotten over it.

Quietly he closed her bedroom door so the two of them could finish their conversation in peace. Their mother’s fiesta of self-pity continued unabated, a
maudlin murmur from the kitchen as she worked on her tortilla soup. But now, at least, her children could not make out the words.

“You should explain to her that you weren’t fired,” LuzMaria told him. Perched on her bed, she put away the book she had been reading and looked directly at him, her reddened eyes wells of regret. Her left forearm, in its hot-pink cast, served as a vibrant reminder of the night he’d thought he’d lost her.

He shrugged. “It’s just a matter of semantics. ‘Encouraged to resign’ is pretty much the same thing.”

“God, Jack, I’m so sorry.
So
sorry about stirring all this up. I was such an idiot. I really thought he loved me, and I was so caught up in the idea of doing something noble that I totally lost sight of—”

“Hey, it’s all right, LuzMaria. We’ve been over this before.” She’d apologized about a hundred times, though she still stuck to her claims that she remembered almost nothing about her former lover or the organization he had convinced her to support. The feds had leaned hard on her, dangling the carrot of immunity for testimony. Their mutual lawyer advised them, however, that the authorities had little chance of getting an indictment against LuzMaria, especially considering the macabre nature of the assault against her—and the publicity that had followed.

Shaking her head, she grabbed more tissues from the nearly empty box beside her. Next to it sat an empty pint container of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream and a spoon. She’d emptied one a day since coming home. As far as Jack knew, the ice cream was the only thing she was eating, in spite of their mother’s efforts to tempt her appetite with healthy and delicious meals.

“It’ll never be all right,” said Luz Maria. “But at least
you’ve had another offer. I suppose you’ll be taking it and moving to the Valley.”

Jack stifled a sigh. “I don’t know. It’s a hell of an opportunity, but I’m not sure about it.”

Isaac Mailer, the director of the Trust for Compassionate Service, had called Jack personally to say the organization had been looking for someone to run a new clinic. It was to be built in one of the poorest pockets of the country, an overwhelmingly Hispanic section of the Lower Rio Grande Valley almost devoid of medical facilities. Though rich in wildlife and tropical beauty, the southern tip of Texas had recently gained notoriety for its obscenely high numbers of birth defects and cases of cervical cancer and malnutrition.

“We’re looking to make a difference by educating the community,” Mailer had told him, “and to do that we need a bilingual doctor who cares about the people—not the politics.”

“What’s not to be sure of?” Luz Maria asked. “They’re even going to pay off your student loans if you stay at least three years. And think of all the good you could do there, totally unfettered by the strings attached to government funding. This job sounds like it’s tailor-made for you.”

“As if somebody knew exactly what it would take to get me out of town—or earn my gratitude.” Jack hadn’t yet mentioned that there was a social worker’s position for Luz Maria there, too. He didn’t want to get her hopes up until he met this evening with Sabrina McMillan, who had clearly orchestrated the offer, and determined exactly what Sabrina expected in return.

But that wasn’t the only reason he was ambivalent about moving. Somehow his sister seemed to tune in on his thoughts.

“It’s that firefighter, isn’t it? Tell me you aren’t waiting for a woman who won’t return your calls. Tell me you haven’t gone and picked up Rubia Fever.” This was LuzMaria’s expression for the “disease” of Hispanic men who chased Anglo blondes. “God, Jack. I would expect more sense from you.”