Fade the Heat Read Free Page A

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 timebeing. 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 hellout 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