Fade the Heat Read Online Free Page B

cruelty. Jack could still smell the lighter fluid, could still see the big bastard setting fire to his little brother’s GI Joe and hear him hooting with laughter and squealing gleefully, “ I’m melting, Reagan. Save me! ” as if it were hilarious that the girl’s dad had died fighting a warehouse blaze a few days before Christmas. Jack remembered, too, how he’d come home, beaten bloody by Paulo after stopping his furious friend from doing God-knows-what to pay her back for the purple knot she’d left on his forehead.
    After that day, Jack had never gone back to that wooded bend of the brown bayou, no matter how many times Paulo told him he was over Jack’s “betrayal” there. Oh, they’d hung together now and then—in their neighborhood, having Paulo as an ally definitely increased a teenager’s chances of survival—but things had never really been the same between them.
    And Jack had never again felt quite the same way about the skinny blond pain-in-the-butt who’d followed him—much to his thirteen-year-old horror—to the bayou that windy January day. Even now, he didn’t want to hurt Reagan, didn’t want trouble over his damaged Explorer to force her out of the job she obviously loved.
    Besides, he told himself, if the media whipped up some scandal linking him to a feud with a beautiful blond firefighter, it would heap more fuel on the blaze Winter’s accusations had ignited. Fuel enough to see him fired and this desperately needed clinic closed.
    So instead of calling the police, he let himself back inside the locked clinic and rummaged through the day’s charts until he found Reagan Hurley’s. Opening it on a clerk’s desk, he found a piece of scratch paper and copied the address and phone number.
    As he wrote, the telephone beside his elbow began ringing. Figuring it was probably another reporter, Jack ignored it—until he heard the gruff voice on the answering machine.
    “This is Paul Rodriguez calling for Jack Montoya.”
    Jack stared at the machine, shaken to hear the same Paulo he had thought of only moments earlier. Not that the towering adult, who these days favored sharp suits and expensive haircuts, bore much resemblance to the troublemaking teen…
    “Jack—you gotta put a stop to this,” the speaker barked. “They’re trashing the neighborhood’s reputation with all this talk about illegals, acting like we’re nothing but a bunch of goddamn wetbacks. You call back that fucking Winter and set him straight before he—”
    Unable to find the right button to disconnect the call, Jack snatched up the receiver.
    “Hey, ’ mano ,” Jack said, though it had been a lot of years—and a lot of water under the bridge—since the two of them had run the streets together. Even then, Paulo had pounded Jack at least as often as he’d seen fit to help, punishing him for everything from helpinghis landlord’s little girl to suddenly choosing school over la vida , the street life.
    Fumbling with the answering machine, Jack managed to stop its recording. “What can I do for you?”
    “It’s what you can do for this neighborhood, not me,” Paulo shot back. “That Darren Winter Show—the man is tearing down our people. You gotta stop it now, before we lose all our investors.”
    Investors. Of course. Jack should have known his old friend’s motives weren’t completely altruistic. Though Paulo—or Paul, as he now called himself—had turned his rough energies from tormenting little girls and stripping stolen cars to expanding Cheap Wheelz, the small, cut-rate auto rental chain he’d inherited from his grandfather, he was always on the lookout for the next big score.
    Rumor had it he was hungrier than ever, thanks to some sort of family medical situation. Jack had never seen Paulo’s son, but word was that not long after Paulo’s common-law wife ran off, the three-year-old was diagnosed with some serious disorder—Jack thought it might be autism or mental retardation. But sorry as