Fade the Heat (26 page)

Within twenty minutes of Reagan Hurley’s disappearance, fire apparatus lined the streets around Las Casitas Village, and every man within range of the “firefighter assist” call had joined the search. After one of her coworkers found Reagan’s personal items and ID in the weeds, HPD was called in to question every tenant that could be rounded up.

Based on Magoo Flores’s description of the incident with the catcalls and the hurled beer bottle, the working theory was that several young males had snatched her for the purpose of sexual assault. Both the firefighters and the cops moved fast, their urgency prompted by the thought that if their sister-in-uniform wasn’t dead already, she sure as hell would be if they didn’t find her soon.

Fortunately, they caught a break, in the person of one Emilia Ochoa. After being assured that no one had any interest in contacting Immigration, she was quick to tell them how she’d been standing at her window folding laundry when she’d seen the landlord toss the
woman into the trunk of his big green car. Senora Ochoa didn’t know his name, but it was obvious she feared him. He was a big man who once threatened her when she complained that conditions in her apartment had made her husband sick.

She didn’t know the license-plate number of the old car, either. But her account quickly brought investigators to an important—and demoralizing—realization.

They were searching in the wrong place. By this time, the landlord and his victim could be miles away.

Had she thought about the taillights earlier, things might have turned out differently for Reagan. Had she been a little faster to pull away the disintegrating trunk liner and bash through one of the lights with the tire iron she’d found beneath the spare tire, she might have been able to shove her hand through the opening to flag down help in time.

But at the very moment the taillight finally shattered, the car was coming to a stop. Though the engine continued idling, she heard a door open and felt the car wobble as if her attacker had climbed out.

Reagan shifted her grip on the tire iron, her heart leaping like a wild thing in her chest.
This is it,
she told herself.
He heard me break the light, and he’s coming back to kill me.

She braced herself, waiting for the trunk lid to fly open, as well as for the ridiculously slim chance that she could somehow jump up and hit him with the iron. Sweat rolled off her in hot sheets, stinging her eyes and making her body feel as if it would spontaneously combust.

But he didn’t come back to the trunk at all. Instead, she heard him slam first one door, then another—as if
he’d either put something inside the car or invited another person to join him. Did he need help killing her—or disposing of her body?

As the car started moving again, she wormed around and started beating at the trunk’s lock with the round end of the tire iron. From the front, she heard muffled but unmistakably angry shouts before the old Ford accelerated rapidly, its engine roaring.

The driver slammed the brakes, and Reagan’s body rolled backward, her head slamming hard against the jack. She groaned and lay still until the urgent need to vomit passed and the car once more began to move.

Gritting her teeth against the pain, she turned the iron around and slipped the angled handle up underneath the lock. It was clear that she couldn’t get away with pounding, but maybe, just maybe, she could pry the trunk lid free. During her time in the department, she’d helped to open vehicles at the scenes of wrecks or car fires. Although she’d never had the occasion to escape from a trunk, she at least had a basic understanding of what sort of force and mechanism might do the trick. With the tire iron, she’d get out of here—if given enough time.

In spite of her best efforts to focus on her plan of action, this last thought echoed darkly.

If given enough time…

Jack drove with exaggerated care, praying he could get to the FBI field office without a Houston cop arresting him for the way he’d left Sabrina.

Naked as a jaybird and handcuffed to the bed, she had screamed the full gamut of threats and insults—until he returned to her bedroom doorway with a stack of files in his arms.

“No. My God, you…you can’t take those.” Her eyes went wide and her face drained of color as terror replaced raw rage. “They’re my…they’re my ticket out…the only way I’ll ever break free. Please, Jack. I’ll give you anything, do anything you want. You don’t know what it’s like, being passed around like a damned whore, having to pretend I’m enjoying the sickest…oh, please. You can’t do this to me. I have to find a way out. I’m getting too…I can’t keep it up much longer, not even with the surgeries and Botox.”

Tears streamed down her face, but he reminded himself that this was the same woman who had threatened to emasculate him with a dull spoon when she’d realized that his interest in her handcuffs had nothing to do with sex. If he made the mistake of feeling sorry for her, she would destroy him in a second.

Patting the files, he assured her, “I have everything I need here—namely, good insurance. If anything happens to me, my family, or Ms. Hurley, I’ll make arrangements for the contents to be made public.” He hesitated long enough for his words to sink in. He’d found not only damning records of financial shenanigans involving at least a half-dozen well-known politicians, but photos of a few as well, involved in the kinkiest of sex acts with Sabrina. Obviously, she’d been keeping this blackmail evidence as a part of her retirement plan, but if those photos got out, she’d be ruined, too—and none the richer for her humiliation.

He’d left a glass of water and a blanket within her reach, but he shoved her handgun into the pocket of his sports coat, then took all of her phones and threw them into the trunk of the junker Paulo had loaned him.

The same Paulo who, according to the file he’d unearthed on Sabrina’s desk, owned Las Casitas Village.
The same Paulo, Jack realized, who must have run down his own Mustang and injured Luz Maria.

Had the bastard meant to kill him, then decided to make a point when he realized that Jack’s sister was behind the wheel instead? Or had he purposely gone after Luz Maria, then used the bizarre tableau and scrawled slurs at Reagan’s house to put the media on the scent of Darren Winter?

Beginning with the fire and the phoned-in racial epithets, the whole plot must have hinged on rousing the sleeping giant of the city’s Hispanic vote. Why else would Sabrina go to such extremes to court Jack’s endorsement?

From the years that he had known the man, Jack seriously doubted Paulo had the slightest interest in politics. Had he gotten involved not only to raise money to pay for his son’s needs but to increase his status in the community? God only knew the high-school dropout loved lording his success over those around him.

Jack tried not to think about the child—Paulo’s supposedly autistic son—who would be left without a parent if his father went to jail. Jack tried, too, to put out of his mind the way the combination of love, pride, and ruinous expenses must have pushed his former friend over the line.

Jack punched the on button of the car’s tinny little radio and turned up the volume on his favorite call-in sports show in the hope that it would drown out the turmoil in his mind.

But the top-of-the-hour news he heard was so upsetting that Jack found himself pulling off the road to listen—then taking Sabrina’s gun out of his pocket and placing it beside him on the seat.

From inside the trunk, Reagan heard the crunch of leaves and snap of sticks as the old sedan rolled over them. The big sedan rocked over uneven ground before nosing sharply downhill.

The hole she had smashed through the taillight had made a gift of fresher air. But now it brought her something different—a heavy, marshy scent that told her they were coming close to water.

Did he mean to save himself the trouble—and the risk—of killing her directly by driving the car into some pond or bayou? A panicked cry caught in her throat as images played through her mind of the old Ford sinking, its trunk filling with water and no way to escape.

With a fresh surge of adrenaline blasting through her system, Reagan gritted her teeth and bore down on the tire iron’s handle. Her back was screaming from her contortions in the cramped space, but it hardly mattered. Unless she broke free within the next few minutes, she knew she would be dead.

Once the car came to a stop, doors opened—first one and then the other. But the breaking glass she heard next was not the splash that she’d expected.

And the fumes that reached her moments later made her gasp with the realization that he didn’t mean to drown her. Instead, he had settled on the fate that fueled her nightmares…

The death she could not bear to name—not even in her thoughts.

Instinct had warned Jack that even with his 911 call, the police would never locate Reagan in time. The dispatcher had patched him through to an officer who’d advised him to come in and make a statement, but Jack couldn’t bring himself to do it—not when there was some chance that he could think of where Paulo might have gone.

Not his house, Jack had figured. No way would Paulo go there with his mama and his kid at home. His Cheap Wheelz outlets didn’t seem like such a good bet, either, as all of them were located on highly visible street fronts.

Jack could think of only one other place to try—the garage where he’d picked up the kumquat, the same one Paulo used to keep his rentals on the road. Unlike the storefront locations, the shop was tucked between a warehouse and a high-fenced lot where out-of-service taxis parked. This time of night it was unlikely that anyone would be about—except the black-and-brown-striped pit bulls Paulo kept to guard the place in his mechanics’ absence.

Remembering their maniacal barking, Jack had figured only a fool would set foot on Paulo’s property alone. Or one seriously desperate man.

Though thoughts of Reagan in that bastard’s hands had left Jack plenty desperate, he didn’t end up braving the dogs’ teeth. Namely because he listened once more to his instinct—the instinct that told him to follow the single taillight that he’d spotted near the garage—the same one that had led him here to this deserted stretch of bayou.

“First, you gotta find the perfect bottle,”
the Firebug rasped inside Paulo’s mind.
“Too hard, and it won’t bust when it hits the floor. Too thin, and it explodes on impact with the window, splashing you with fuel mix and burning you to hell.”

Paulo had chosen wisely, proving that he wasn’t going to end up like the scarred horror who was his father. Proving that for him, the fire was just another tool, not an addiction that would eventually destroy him.

Yet something had gone wrong—the impact must have killed the wick’s flame. So, pulling out his lighter, he moved closer to the car.

Close enough to hear Reagan Hurley’s screams from the locked trunk.

“Let me out,” she pleaded. “You son of…son of a bitch…let me…out now.
Please.
”

He thought about the way he’d last seen her, how snotty she had been to him…and how goddamned beautiful. Still nearly as blond as she had been when they were children.

It occurred to him that out here, in the dark isolation near the bayou, he could find out if the bitch had wheat-gold hair on both ends.

But it was the thought of how her hair would burn that made him harden—and the thought of how her pleas would turn to shrill screams that made him toss the flaming lighter into the backseat of his car.

Even before she felt the heat, Reagan knew the car was burning. Before the first fumes swamped her lungs, she heard the tremendous, deep-voiced
whoosh.

Dropping the tire iron, she drew her knees toward her chest and felt her soul pull itself into the same fetal position—not so much with the knowledge she was dying, but with the bone-deep understanding that she had squandered the short time she had been given.

Wasted her life in the futile attempt to live out her father’s dreams. For years, she had blown off her supervisors’ suggestions to enroll in paramedic classes, her obsession with fighting fires blinding her to the fact that she truly enjoyed the medical aspects of her job. She’d shunted aside her own tastes—clinging to a rattletrap heap because Pat Hurley had once admired that year’s model, struggling to best more talented opponents in the ring—even buying an old house because it reminded her of the one where her father had been raised. She had pushed away her mother…

And turned her back on the only man who had ever seen through her defenses and loved her for herself.

As the temperature surged upward, Reagan’s body began its final struggle, her breaths coming noisily in tight, constricted gulps. But though her lungs refused, her mind filled, not with air but with Jack’s presence, and she imagined she could speak to him if she tried hard enough.

“You—you were right,” she whispered, her vocal cords impossibly tight against the vapors.

She needed him to know it, that he’d been right to tell her what no one else would dare, and right to recognize the secrets she’d been hiding, even from herself. Right to understand that she was more than the tough scrapper she let on.

“I know you’re more than just a fighter,”
he said as she felt his strong arms wrap around her,
“but you can’t afford to be less—especially right now.”

The mirage lifted like a flight of doves, and she found herself alone in the suffocating darkness, save for the crackling of the flame and the deep groan of warping metal and—

Was that Jack—the real Jack—she was hearing?

“Reagan!”

Real or not, the sound of her name sent a jolt of pure energy shooting up her spine. What the hell was she doing, waiting for the fire to eat its way into the trunk?

Coughing too hard to call out, she fumbled desperately to find the tire iron she had dropped. Maybe she’d been hallucinating in her terror, but the Jack who’d hugged her to him had been dead right. So she had a softer side? It didn’t have to make her any less of a competitor—a warrior when it counted.

If she was going to die here, she was damned well going to go down swinging.

Jack should have known the driver had not simply disappeared so quickly. He should have known that Paulo must be nearby, watching from the trees.

But the sight of flames burned everything from Jack’s mind except Reagan. It was all he could do to fumble through the dialing of three digits, then shout the location to the emergency operator as he pulled his rental as close as he dared to the burning vehicle.

Leaping out of his car, he saw that the initial flare had died back. Though a column of black smoke rose, the fire had settled back to feasting on the car’s interior. But the heat was still intense enough to drive him back, forcing him to raise his arm to shield his face as he cried out Reagan’s name.

Every fiber of his being, every atom, blazed the message that Reagan was still in there—maybe burned to death already.

Get back from it
, his better judgment warned him.
Get back or you’ll be killed, too, when it blows.

Yet when the trunk lid suddenly sprang open, he raced toward the inferno, tossing aside self-preservation for that one chance in ten thousand that the woman who owned his heart was still alive.

In the end, it was Reagan’s lungs that failed her. Not her courage, not her grit, but the simple lack of oxygen that left her powerless to climb free of the trunk she had forced open.

Her awareness constricted, shrinking to the primal struggle to draw another breath. Her world turned to
swirling grayness, maybe from the thick smoke, or perhaps her eyes were going. And mercifully, she felt nothing at all.

Her brain was shutting down now—failing. Resorting to hallucinations of a rescue, of Jack rushing in, his head ducked, of powerful arms lifting her free, strong legs pumping, running. The scene played out like a movie, as if she were looking through a camera from the treetops.

She watched Jack lay her body flat before a pair of shining headlights, watched him tilt her head back and pour his breath into her body.

Stared down as his head pressed to her chest—and traced the progress of a tear trail cutting through the soot that covered his face. And as her vantage spiraled skyward, she saw the figure, too, coming up behind Jack, clutching a branch as thick and solid as a major leaguer’s bat.

No!

At the sight of it, her lungs seized, and Reagan felt herself falling. Plunging like a hawk out of the treetops, then tumbling back into herself.

Where she lay coughing. Hurting. Weeping. And fighting to get out the words, as Paulo’s arms drew back in preparation for what would surely be a crushing blow to Jack’s skull.

“Ja-Jack,” she moaned.

“Reagan,” Jack cried, pulling her to his chest in an embrace so tight it threatened to choke off her air again. “Oh, God—Reagan, you’re alive.”

“Behind you!” she barely managed to choke out.

Later, Jack would be called upon a score of times to tell what happened. But he would never find the right
words to describe the way knowledge passed between him and Reagan in that instant.

However it happened—whether it was the panic in her voice or a more mysterious force at work—Reagan’s warning arced straight to his muscles, so that he let go of her and spun around, his hand already darting for the pocket of his jacket.

His eyes already seeing Paulo’s silhouetted form as the branch swung toward his head.

The crack echoed in the clearing, louder than the flames, louder than the approaching sirens and the sounds of Reagan’s weeping. But loudest of all, to Jack’s ears, came the sound of Paulo Rodriguez crashing to the ground.

And the sound of his death rattle only moments later.