Fade the Heat

by Colleen Thompson

  She grabbed her jacket before edging toward the door. “You always were too quick to judge, Montoya—or at least to judge those of us who check the wrong box on the census form.”

  It took a moment to sink in that this woman was accusing him—him—of prejudice. He’d heard such things before, from black addicts looking for their next fix and even from fellow Hispanics who’d told him he wasn’t Mexican enough. But hearing Reagan Hurley say it left him incapable of speech.

  Now he was convinced that, just as he did, she remembered every detail of that day near the bayou. Even those he wished he could forget.

  Before he could recover, she stepped out of the room. Glancing back over her shoulder, she said, “Keep the damned form. I’ve got others.”

  “A whole stack of them, I’ll bet,” Jack finally managed, but he had to say it to her back.

  She was already disappearing from his life.

  After a coughing jag triggered by the cold rain, Reagan looked up into the on-rushing steel grill of one damned big green car.

  “What the hell?” Whirling out of the way, she threw herself against the spoiler of her beat-up blue Trans Am. Heart thudding against her chest, she called after the fleeing sedan, “Watch where you’re going, jerk!”

  Its dented hulk squealed around the corner before it disappeared, giving her only a fleeting glimpse of a guy with a black stocking cap pulled down around his ears. She hadn’t thought to get the license plate until the car was gone.

  On shaking legs, she climbed into the Trans Am, brushed the rain from her face, and cranked the protesting engine until it finally caught. As much as she wanted to tear off to get the moron’s plates, her old car refused to cooperate, sputtering and dying no fewer than three times before she finally coaxed it out of the parking lot.

  Let him go, she told herself. Chasing him’s not worth the trouble anyway. The cops, she knew, would pay little heed to anything she told them, since the driver hadn’t struck her. Besides, she had too much at stake to spend whatever was left of the day filling out a report that would go nowhere.

  “Time to find another doctor,” she breathed, her words sounding strange and shaky, as if she’d flung them into a spinning fan. She pulled into an empty spot in front of a long-closed gas station. After glancing around to make sure no one was watching, she removed an inhaler from her pocket.

  It took three puffs to get her breath back, puffs she’d sworn to herself this morning she didn’t really need. As she waited for the elephant to climb off her chest, she recalled Captain Rozinski—the captain her dad had worked for—telling her, “I’ve known you for a lot of years now, kept an eye on you while you grew up. I’m saying this as your friend, not just your captain. Don’t keep fighting for a job you can’t do.”

  Her eyelids burned, and she swallowed past a lump of pain.

  “He’s right,” she said aloud, but the words faded to irrelevance against the images leaping through her brain. She saw herself scrambling onto the ladder truck, still pulling on her gear while lights flashed and the siren wound up; heard fire roaring, breaking above her head as flames flashed over. She soared with the high of hauling in a length of hose, blasting that inverted sea, and smothering the fatal orange waves. But it was so much more than an adrenaline addiction. It was the flood tide of relief she’d felt when an old woman she’d dragged clear of smoke coughed and breathed and lived to hear her grandchildren weeping their relief; the way it felt walking into the station at shift change and knowing she belonged. And it was the sense of connection to the father who had come before her, to Patrick Hurley, the man who had known things as she did. To sever that link, to allow it to ebb away with time, would be like losing him all over again.

  Reagan’s fingers clutched the wheel so hard they ached. It can’t be finished. I can’t.

  “You damned sure are if you give up,” she told herself, then flipped through the list of family doctors she’d left lying on the seat. Thirty seconds later, she found a listing for an office located off the next exit down the freeway.

  She asked herself why not? But a quick glance at the time gave the reason. It was already 5:06 on Friday. She’d never find a physician in the office now.

  Anger blasted past self-pity: anger at the doctors, with their banker’s hours and their surreptitious glances at expensive watches as they delivered diagnoses guaranteed to trash a patient’s life. And anger at Jack Montoya, who was supposed to be some sort of soft touch but had turned into one of their kind just the same, even if he wore a cheap digital instead.

  But the fury that burned hottest was directed at herself, for allowing weakness to snatch away her future…and her last connection to a job that had become her life.

  Using the back of her leather jacket’s sleeve, she wiped away the single tear that had betrayed her. Defeated, she decided to drive home, at least for the time being. But as if it sensed the opportunity to make a bad day worse, the Trans Am stalled again.

  She swore anew, hating the thought of taking it back to the shop, where her mechanic would joke that she was sending his three kids through college with the Blue Beast, as he called it. He’d advised her several times to put the old Pontiac out of its misery—or, more precisely, out of hers. But she’d had the car since high school, and Reagan got attached to things.

  Besides, she didn’t have the money to splurge on a new car—not after she’d used every penny she could scrape together for a down payment on her house, a bungalow in Houston’s Heights neighborhood around the corner from a place her grandparents once owned. At the thought of her bank-account balances, she popped the dashboard hard enough to get the wipers slapping. The blow also started up the radio. Unfortunately, the tuner was stuck on the AM station carrying Darren Winter’s drive-time show. Though she ought to know better—he usually said something infuriating every eight seconds or so—she turned it up to hear him over the defroster, which was blowing cold air against the steamed-up windshield.

  “If we want our borders to mean anything and our economy preserved,” an overconfident male voice urged listeners in major-market cities nationwide, “we have to derail the border runners’ gravy train. No access to employment. No education for their kids. And for God’s sake, no free healthcare when they come down with the sniffles.”

  She rubbed at her still-clouded windshield and wished she could funnel Winter’s hot air through her defroster. Even though he wasn’t an official candidate—apparently, political commentators weren’t allowed to keep their jobs if they ran for office—it scared the hell out of Reagan to imagine his listeners succeeding in getting him elected mayor. She only prayed that once he got control of the city’s multi-billion-dollar budget, he wouldn’t do anything alarming with the fire department’s share.

  “Like with this Dr. Jack Montoya I’ve been telling you about,” he began, just as Reagan had been about to cut him off. “Or I should say Joaquín Montoya, the son of a man drowned trying to illegally cross the Rio Grande. No need to guess in which direction this doc’s sympathies are skewed.”

  “Leave his father out of this, you idiot,” Reagan growled. “Or at least get your facts straight.”

  She’d heard around the old neighborhood that Antonio Montoya had been murdered by coyotes on his way to visit his widowed mother in Mexico. For years, Reagan had carried an image of a man savaged by a pack of animals, but as she grew older, she’d learned coyote was a name given to criminals who smuggled illegals across the borders. Vicious sons of bitches, they often led their charges to the desert, where they killed them for whatever money and valuables they carried.

  “But the fact is,” Winter continued, his outrage mounting with each word, “Dr. Montoya of the East End Clinic doesn’t have the luxury of setting policy—or ignoring state law, for that matter. Not when he’s working for us, the taxpayers.”

  Reagan had heard all this before, including the accusation that Jack had falsified a diagnosis so he could legally treat the child of undocumented workers. For a
sthma, of all things.

  Not that it had made him one bit more sympathetic to Reagan’s cause. Sympathetic, nothing—he’d been rude as hell. And to think she’d remembered the guy as a nice kid, the kind of boy who could inspire a younger girl to go squirmy in the stomach and imagine all sorts of stupid things. It just went to show that it didn’t take a radio-show platform or political ambition to make a jerk of someone; apparently, having a handsome face and an M.D. tacked onto your name could effect the same result.

  The loudmouth’s voice grew in volume, as if the mix of ego and indignation had pumped up the wattage on her speakers. “And I think it’s high time this sort of bleeding-heart liberal got the message. Since he won’t respond to me, I’d like to put you, my Winter Warriors, into action. I’m not telling anyone what to do, of course, but if several concerned citizens were to, say, visit www-dot-America-for-Americans-dot-com on the Internet, they might find personal contact information for a certain physician who has been—shall we say—‘outed’ by the fine webmaster, Ernest Rankin, whom many of you know from his frequent guest appearances. To remind Dr. Montoya he is working for you, the taxpayer, and not just any José who can swim a river, why not send him a personal message that we’re onto him? Again, that web address is…”

  What was that reckless idiot suggesting? Reagan sucked in a startled breath, then exploded in another fit of coughing so hard her eyes teared.

  By the time the sound subsided, her speakers bleated the cheesy theme music that let her know the Darren Winter show had just returned from its commercial break. Hammering the dashboard to turn off the radio, she shifted the car through its gears and headed toward her house, where Frank Lee, at least, would wag his tail to see her. Her warm, dry, brick kitchen would be waiting, and even in this weather, her windowsill herb garden would provide enough basil and oregano to throw together a kick-ass pasta dish.

  If she could force herself to swallow it. Though she’d had nothing but a chalky-tasting energy bar since breakfast, the thought of cooking—and worse yet, eating—left her nauseated.

  She tried to convince herself that things could be worse. Since her friend, rookie firefighter Beau LaRouche, was working, she could at least enjoy an evening free of his nonstop boasting about his paintball prowess or his ruminations about people at the high school both of them had attended years before. Besides, come Monday, she still had a couple hundred other doctors she could hit up for a signature. And unlike Jack Montoya, at least she wasn’t going home to an answering machine that would be shorting out under the strain of irate messages from half the country, thanks to Winter and America-for-Americans-dot-com.

  But when she ran inside from her detached garage and scooped up the ringing phone, the voice on the other end blew away whatever smugness she’d managed to scrape together.

  “Hurley, hoped I’d catch you home.” Captain Joe Rozinski’s voice hadn’t lost that stiff, official manner he’d adopted since she’d transferred to his station. If anything, he sounded more distant than ever.

  As Reagan fended off her white greyhound’s slobbery kisses, she wished, not for the first time, that she could have back the old captain, the one who had never forgotten her at Christmas or her birthdays, who had become a father to her since the horrible day he’d watched her dad die. But hearing the captain call her “Hurley” reminded Reagan that those days were gone forever—banished by far more than fear that the rest of the crew would accuse him of favoritism.

  “I just had to pick up a few groceries,” she said quickly. Technically, while off sick, a firefighter was required to call the captain for permission to leave home. She’d often enough heard Rozinski complain that he had better things to do than play hall monitor to sick firefighters, but Reagan wondered if, in light of their recent disagreement, he would crack down on her today.

  “So you weren’t at the doctor’s, hunting up a signature?”

  “Uh, no. I already got that taken care of,” she lied, reasoning that by Thursday, when her crew returned for its next twenty-four-hour shift, she would have the issue covered.

  “Really? Then you won’t mind dropping by the station with it this evening,” he suggested.

  Cursing herself, Reagan wracked her brain for a suitable excuse. “I would,” she told him, her heart doing a quickstep in her chest, “but I had to take my car in to the shop. I accidentally left the form inside. And besides, I don’t have a ride right now.”

  “So how’d you get your groceries?”

  Suddenly sweating, she slipped off her jacket. He knew damned well she was lying. The question was, which of them would blink first?

  “Peaches took me after we dropped off the car,” Reagan said, hoping the mention of her neighbor’s name would convince Rozinski to drop the subject. Though the captain had witnessed scores of gory accidents and gruesome deaths during his thirty-two years in the department, he lost all power of speech when it came to Reagan’s fun-loving neighbor.

  Reagan supposed she should have warned the guys on her shift that despite her traffic-stopping curves, strawberry-blond bouffant, and world-class flirting skills, Peaches had been born James Paul Tarleton of Amarillo. But only days before Peaches stopped by the station, Reagan’s co-workers had amused themselves on a frigid February night by encasing her Trans Am in ice, a mission they’d accomplished by repeatedly sneaking outdoors and misting it with a fire hose. They’d had a good laugh over the gag, but watching them make fools of themselves with Peaches had been worth every minute Reagan spent chipping and thawing her way into the car.

  Despite her situation, the memory of their horrified reactions when they learned the truth about Peaches made Reagan grin.

  “If you want,” she added, “I’ll give you Peaches’s number. She’ll be happy to confirm it, if she’s not out shooting pictures.” She waited, praying he would not want to risk the razzing he’d get if it got out that he had asked for Peaches’s number.

  “I’m working a debit day on Monday,” Rozinski growled, referring to the extra shift each firefighter worked every three-and-a-half weeks. “Meet me here at the station at 0630—with the form and no excuses. Either that or I’ll assume you’re at the transfer office putting in for an ambulance position.”

  He wanted her to return to her old station, where she would spend the better part of her career ferrying headaches, head colds, and head cases to emergency rooms because the patients lacked the insurance—or the good sense—to visit their own doctors. He’d been after her for months about it, since it became apparent that her “colds” were more than that. And last week, when she had coughed so hard she’d been unable to climb a smoke-charged stairwell with her usual seventy pounds of gear, he had finally shouted at her, “Go home, Hurley. Go home ’til you can do the job, or damn it, don’t come back.”

  Stung by the demand that she transfer, Reagan lashed out like a wounded animal. “I joined this department to fight fires, like my dad. I’ve worked for years to get into suppression. I can handle it.”

  He struck back with the most devastating weapon imaginable. “Your father would never try to hold on like this, wouldn’t respect it either. You’re not just dragging down yourself here. You’re dragging down the crew. You have to stop this, Reagan, for your own good. You have to understand it’s over. You’re useless to us this way.”

  She wanted to shout that she would damned well show him who could do the job. Who was it who’d been known from the start for matching male rookies ax-stroke for ax-stroke—despite her slender, five-six frame—and fighting interior fires with a will? And who was it who’d represented the station in the women’s boxing division of the annual clash with the cops the past two years? She wasn’t finished, not by a long shot.

  “If you don’t get this problem of yours under control and you refuse to transfer, I’m going to report you as unfit for duty,” Rozinski told her. “You and I both know you’ll lose your job entirely if it comes to that.”

  Before she could protest, she heard an alar
m go off at the station. She recognized the series of tones even before Rozinski said, “That’s for us. I’ve gotta run.”

  He hung up, leaving her to imagine the crew—her crew—rushing to pull their gear on, climbing on the apparatus…and driving off to do the job without her.

  Had she even left a hole when she’d gone? Or had they already filled it, with someone whole and strong?

  As she set down the receiver, Frank Lee bounded over to the closet where she kept his leash and barked to let her know he’d had enough of waiting. Though she hated going back out into the weather, Reagan responded on autopilot, grabbing an old Astros cap, then leashing up the dog and exiting the front door to take him on his evening walk. She’d better cut it short, she realized as the rain rolled off the cap’s brim. Though she’d just used her inhaler, she could feel her damned lungs twitching with the insult of the cold, damp air. But her feet weighed her down like anchors as the captain’s words replayed in her head a dozen times.

  As she fought the asthma’s anaconda grip, she thought of her battle against Rozinski, her illness, and the medical community in general. And how, at 0630 Monday morning, the whole damned mess would come to a head.

  She could cave in now or go down swinging, but Reagan Hurley was looking for an Option C…some passage through this firestorm that would help her fade the heat.

  Chapter Two

  Reagan was gone, Jack realized, off to find a quack—and he didn’t delude himself into thinking they weren’t plentiful—who would sign her damned release. So why, two hours later, was he still remembering her face?

  Shivering in a denim jacket that had seemed adequate before this front blew in, he trotted through the rain to his chili-red Explorer, then gaped at what he saw.

  Ahuge dent had caved in the driver’s-side door, and the trim was lying mangled on the broken asphalt. Besides that, someone had made angry gouges on the three-year-old SUV’s hood, maybe with a screwdriver…or a nail file.