Fade the Heat Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been ogling her body during his examination, so he snapped a mental padlock on its cage.
    Luz Maria’s good humor shifted into reverse with jarring speed. After thrusting the paper back at him, she threw up her hands, flashing long nails painted a blistering red-orange. “Handle it however you want. There’s no need to get snotty.”
    Once more, Jack was struck by the thought that something serious was bothering her. “What is it, Luz Maria? What’s the problem? Don’t dare tell me it’s nothing, or I’ll put Mama on the scent.”
    “It’s this job.” Luz Maria’s hands darted about like startled birds as she explained. “Not just the job, the system—all of it. You know how we’ve been talking about all those kids who keep coming in with trouble breathing…?”
    Jack shifted uncomfortably at the reminder, wondering for the thousandth time which clinic worker had leaked the copy of little Elena Suarez’s charts to Winter, and why someone who saw this suffering every day would do such a thing.
    “No one from the health department wants to look into the spike in respiratory ailments or listen to what I have to say about those addresses,” Luz Maria said. “And someone there must have complained to my supervisor that I keep calling. Now she’s all over my pompis , telling me to worry about my own cases and stay off everybody else’s.”
    That didn’t much surprise Jack. Since she’d been a tiny child, when Luz Maria zeroed in on something she wanted, she could grind like a belt sander. Besides, she had butted heads with her supervisor almost from day one, when the woman continually mispronounced her name, rhyming it with buzz instead of cruise.
    “I’ve called, too,” he told her. “But with all the budget battles, their manpower’s been cut to the bone. They said they’ll get to it.”
    “ Eventually , right? But when’s eventually?” she shot back. “How many more kids from that block have to die?”
    She’d been the caseworker for the family of Agustín Romero, an eight-year-old whose father had carried him into the clinic, blue as death, when he’d stopped breathing. With paramedics en route, Jack had done everything he could to open the boy’s airway, but Agustín had been down too long. By the time they reached the hospital, his oxygen-deprived organs were failing one by one.
    It had been one of the longest nights of Jack’s life, waiting helplessly for that beautiful child to die. Especially after trying to explain to the weeping family why, only days before, another doctor from the clinic had turned them away, saying that the boy’s asthmawas a chronic and not a communicable or life-threatening condition.
    Not life-threatening, my ass. Tell that to the Romero family.
    Since then, Jack had treated twelve more kids with breathing troubles at the clinic—and falsified the charts of every one, diagnosing contagious diseases instead of asthma, then slipping their parents drug-company samples for their treatment. And if Agustín’s death had hit him hard enough to push him to what might amount to professional suicide, what had it done to Luz Maria, who’d seen only a small fraction of the suffering he had witnessed?
    “Maybe we both need to get out of this cesspool,” he said bitterly. “We can find some nice, clean jobs in the suburbs, help nice, clean yuppie kids learn to deal with their own sense of entitlement.”
    Luz Maria’s eyes flashed. “Maybe that M.D. after your name cancels out who you are. Maybe it erases what happened to our papa, what’s happening to so many of our people still. But it will never, ever be that way with me.”
    He doubted she remembered their father at all; she’d been only a toddler when he disappeared. And yet she claimed his memory, held it to her like a merit badge of unremembered suffering. Ten years older, Jack bit his tongue to keep himself from reminding her that he still bore scars from those days.
    Changing the subject, he said,