Fade the Heat Read Free

leading pulmonologists in Hou—”
    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 oldcar 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. Itwas 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