by Linda Howard
Milla grabbed her radio and broadcast the good news, while Diaz went down on his belly and snaked under the truck. She got down on her knees, removed her sunglasses, and watched as he used his knife to cut the belt loop on the little denim shorts that held Max to the undercarriage of the truck. She thought of what would have happened if anyone had got into the truck and driven it away, and shuddered. Max would have been dragged to death, and if the truck’s radio was on very loud, the driver wouldn’t even have heard him scream.
“Gotcha,” Diaz said, taking a firm hold on the little boy with one hand while he slipped his knife back into his boot; then he slithered out from under the truck with Max in tow.
Max was soaking with sweat, his little face was pale, and dark circles lay under his eyes, but he stared up at them and announced, “I can’t talk to you. You’re strangers.”
“That’s exactly right,” Milla said, going down on one knee beside him and taking the bottle of water out of her pocket. “Are you thirsty? You don’t have to say a thing, just nod your head if you are.”
He nodded, his dark eyes round with apprehension as he stared at her. She twisted the cap off the bottle and handed it to him. “Here you go.”
He grabbed the bottle in both hands, which still bore some of the dimples of babyhood but were showing signs of becoming big-boy hands. He gulped the water, tilting the bottle so high that some of it spilled down the front of his shirt. When he’d emptied half the bottle, Diaz reached out and stopped him. “Slowly, chiquis. You’ll be sick if you drink too fast or too much.”
Max stared up at him. “What does that mean?”
“Chiquis?” Max nodded and Diaz said, “Squirt.”
Max giggled, then clapped his hand over his mouth. “I talked,” he said.
“Be sure and tell your mommy.” Diaz leaned down and scooped the little boy up in his arms. “Now, let’s go see her. She’s been looking for you.”
“I was trying to catch a kitty,” Max said, looping an arm around Diaz’s neck. “It went under the truck and I did, too, but then I got stuck.”
“It happens to the best of us.”
“You didn’t get stuck.”
“Almost.”
Milla listened to Max’s chatter, and Diaz’s relaxed answers. He was at ease with Max, and she realized he wasn’t as solitary as she had imagined. At some point he’d had contact with children, knew how to talk to them, and he’d picked Max up as if he had done so hundreds of times. Max certainly wasn’t afraid of him. This was a side of Diaz she would never have suspected, and it intrigued her.
Baxter and a couple of his men, plus a couple of medics, met them halfway, with Max’s mother running along with them. She shrieked when she saw her little boy, and Max yelled, “Mommy! I got stuck!”
The woman grabbed Max out of Diaz’s arms, hugging him close and kissing him all over his face and head, wherever she could reach. She was crying and laughing and scolding all at the same time, and Max was trying to tell her about the kitty, and the big knife the man had used to cut his shorts, and that he knew he wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers.
They took Max away to be checked out, but since he’d been under the shelter of the truck, he’d escaped sunburn and the worst of the heat. Milla herself was feeling the need for some water and air-conditioning, as were all of the searchers.
They trudged back to the staging area. Her people all reported in and dispersed in various cars and trucks, and she was on the verge of getting into her own SUV when a local TV reporter stopped her for a comment. Milla gave her standard best wishes to the family, praised the El Paso police, got in a plug for Finders, and briefly explained how Max had crawled under a pickup and his clothing got snagged. She noticed that Diaz had faded out of sight, and she didn’t mention him. The last thing he would want was for his face and name to be broadcast on television.
The reporter left, Milla got into her vehicle and started it, and waited to see if Diaz would reappear. He did, opening the door and sliding into the passenger seat. They buckled up, and she executed a U-turn.
It was several minutes before he spoke. “You didn’t get to have that moment.”
She knew the moment he was talking about, when Max’s mother had seen her child alive and unharmed, and incandescent joy had lit her face. “No,” she said, her throat suddenly tight. “The last time I saw my baby, he was crying. He’d been napping against my chest, and all of a sudden he was jerked away from me. He screamed his head off.” She saw that tiny outraged face as clearly now as she had at the time. She locked her jaw, fighting the burn of tears.
“I see why you do this,” Diaz said after another long pause. “It was a good feeling.”
She cleared her throat. “The best.”
He said in a casual voice, “I don’t think you’ll ever find your boy, but I’ll kill Pavón for you.”
10
“No!” she yelled, so startled that the steering wheel jerked in her hands. “Not yet!” Then, appalled at herself, she said, “Oh, God,” and pulled to the curb because she was suddenly shaking so hard she was afraid to drive.
“Don’t you want him dead?” Diaz asked in the same tone he might have used to ask if she wanted fries with her order—disinterested, flat, eerily remote.
“Yes!” Her tone wasn’t flat, it was fierce. “I want him dead; I want to kill him myself; I want to scratch out his other eye and cut out his kidney; I want to hurt him so much he’s screaming for me to end it before he dies. But I can’t. I have to find out what he knows about my baby. After that, I don’t care what happens to him.”
He waited those few unnerving beats before he asked, “’Kidney’?”
She stared at him, eyes wide, her attention totally derailed by that one word. Out of her entire tirade he had picked up on the one detail that didn’t fit in with the rest. From the moment she’d awakened from surgery in that little clinic, her entire life, her very being, had been concentrated on finding Justin. She hadn’t let her focus waver, had gritted her teeth and charged through her physical rehabilitation, had almost literally set her life aside because nothing else was as important to her as her son. She hadn’t dwelt on what the attack had done to her body. Until those enraged words, she hadn’t realized how furious she was at what had been done to her, the pain she’d endured, the physical cost.
She turned away, staring woodenly out the windshield. “I told you I was stabbed,” she said. “I lost a kidney.”
“Good thing you had two.”
“I liked having both of them,” she snapped. She remembered the searing agony, remembered convulsing in the dirt as the pain hurled her body out of control. She functioned perfectly well with just one kidney, of course. But what if something went wrong with it?
She drew a deep breath and forced her attention back to the original subject. “Don’t kill him,” she said. “Please. I have to talk to him.”
He shrugged. “Your choice. As long as he doesn’t fuck with me, I’ll leave him alone.”
Milla wasn’t a prude, but his use of the word “fuck” made her uncomfortable. For her it was primarily a sex word, regardless of how it was used as an adjective, adverb, interjection, and exclamation these days. Her dealings with Diaz were already dicey enough; she didn’t want anything sexual, even language, to make matters more tense. Odd how Olivia could use the word and be funny; hearing it from Diaz made Milla want to squirm.
She pulled back into traffic, concentrating on her driving so she wouldn’t have to think about anything else right now. Silence reigned, and she let it lengthen, let the minutes add up. There were times when even an uncomfortable silence was better than words.
“Don’t go after him yourself,” he said as he checked the traffic around them. “No matter what, don’t go by yourself. Not even if you hear he’s sitting outside your office, and you haven’t seen me in a week. Don’t go yourself.”
“I never go by myself,” she said, startled. “There’s always someone with me when I go
on assignment. But if Pavón is outside my office, I’m not making any promises.”
“You were alone in Guadalupe.”
“Brian was there and you know it.”
“He was on the other side of the cemetery. He had no idea I was anywhere around. I could have snapped your neck, and there was nothing he could have done about it.”
That was inarguable. She hadn’t known he was there until he was on her. Besides, he wasn’t telling her to do anything she didn’t already practice. “I’m as careful as possible,” she told him. “I know my limitations.”
“Another missing woman turned up in Juarez last night. Her body did, anyway. This one was an American college student named Paige Sisk. She and her boyfriend were in Chihuahua; she went to the bathroom one night and never came back.”
There was a serial killer in Juarez, she knew; numerous articles had been in the newspaper. The FBI had worked with the Mexican authorities—the first time they had ever been asked to help with a Mexican investigation—and concluded that all the murders were single homicides. If so, a lot of young women had gone missing and turned up dead since 1993. A couple of criminologists agreed: it wasn’t a serial killer, it was two serial killers, possibly more. The pickings were rich in Juarez.
Finally, two bus drivers had been arrested, and supposedly the killings had stopped. Now Diaz was telling her they hadn’t.
“Is it the same M.O.?”
“No.” He checked the traffic again. “She was eviscerated.”
Nausea roiled in Milla’s stomach. “My God.”
“Yeah. So do what I tell you, and stay out of Mexico right now. Let me handle this.”
“If I can,” she murmured, and he had to be content with that, because she wasn’t going to promise him she would play it safe, not when getting some information about Justin was at stake. She wouldn’t be foolish, she wouldn’t lie, but neither would she let an opportunity pass by.
“It’s going to rain,” Diaz said in a complete change of subject, staring at the purple edge of clouds just showing on the western horizon.
“Good. Maybe it’ll break the heat.” The heat wave was killing old people and driving everyone else insane with misery. Granted, El Paso was usually hot during the summer, but not this hot.
“Yes, maybe,” he murmured. “Let me out here.”
“Here?” They were in the middle of a busy intersection.
“Here.”
She put on her brakes and turned on her right signal at the same time, wedged her way into the right-hand lane, then pulled to the side. A horn blared at her, but she didn’t blame the offended driver, so she didn’t bother looking. Diaz unhooked his seat belt, got out, and walked away without a word of good-bye or a hint of when he would turn up next. Milla watched to see where he went, noticing the catlike way he walked, as if his legs were spring-loaded. He disappeared behind a utility truck, and didn’t reappear. Still she waited, but somehow he used the utility truck, traffic signs, and other vehicles for cover, because she didn’t see him again. Either that or he went down a manhole. Or had slithered under the utility truck and was clinging to the undercarriage. Or—
She had no idea where he’d gone, and she wished he’d stop doing that.
Diaz made his way back to where he’d parked his dusty blue pickup. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the vehicle, except perhaps that it was in perfect working condition. It wasn’t pretty, but it could run. He could afford a newer model but he didn’t see any reason to get rid of this one. It suited him, and didn’t attract attention.
He’d spent most of his life not attracting attention. He instinctively knew the best camouflage, and whenever anyone noticed him, it was because he wanted them to. Even as a child he had been silent and solitary, prompting his mother to have him tested for autism, mental retardation, anything that would explain the way he just sat and stared at the people around him but seldom joined in any conversation or activity. Even knowing that his mother had worried about him at first and later was simply uneasy around him hadn’t stirred any emotion or response in him.
He watched people. He watched how their faces, their bodies, would tell a different story from their words. And contrary to his mother’s belief, he wasn’t an inactive child. When she wasn’t there to see, or when she was asleep, he roamed the house, or—depending on where they were at the time—the neighborhood or the countryside. He was as at home in the night as the other predators. From the time he was so small he had to stand on tiptoe to reach the doorknob, he had slipped outside at night and explored. He liked animals better than he did people. Animals were honest; no animal, not even a snake, knew what it was to lie. Their body language expressed exactly what they were thinking and feeling, and he respected that.
Eventually, when he was about ten, his mother got tired of dealing with him and sent him to his father in Mexico. His old man was less concerned about socialization than he was about how much Diaz could help with the chores, so the boy fit right in. But it was with his grandfather, his father’s father, that Diaz had found a like soul. His abuelo was as remote as a mountain snowcap, content to watch rather than participate, his sense of privacy like an iron fence around him. Mexicans in general were a friendly, highly social bunch, but not his grandfather. He was proud and remote, and fierce when crossed. It was said that he was of Aztec lineage. Thousands of people were, of course, or said they were. Diaz’s abuelo never said any such thing, but other people did. It was their way of explaining him. And it was how, in turn, they explained Diaz.
Diaz had tried not to be any trouble. He made good grades in school, both in the United States and Mexico. He didn’t act out. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, not out of any sense of social responsibility but because he saw both as weaknesses and distractions, and he couldn’t afford to have any.
He liked living in Mexico. Whenever he visited his mother in the States, he felt hemmed in. Not that he visited all that often; she was too busy with her social life, with finding another husband. Diaz’s father had been her third, he thought. He wasn’t certain they had ever actually been married. If they had married at all, it hadn’t been in the Church, because by the time Diaz went to live with him, his father had another wife and four children. His father regularly went to confession and mass, too, so he was in good standing with the Church.
When Diaz was fourteen, she took him back. She wanted him to finish school in America, she said. He did. She moved so often he spent his last four years in six different schools, but he graduated. He didn’t date; teenage girls had great bodies, but their personalities left him cold. He thought he was probably the only virgin in his class. He was twenty before he lost his virginity, and he’d been with only a handful of women since. Sex was great, but it required a voluntary vulnerability on his part that he had a difficult time accepting. Not only that, women tended to be afraid of him. He tried never to be rough, but nevertheless there was a fierceness to his lovemaking that seemed to intimidate them.
Maybe if he tried it more often, he thought with black humor, he wouldn’t seem so hungry. But taking care of the matter himself was easiest, so he did. It had been a couple of years since he’d seen a woman he was attracted to enough to consider having sex with—until he saw Milla Edge.
He liked the way she moved, so smooth and fluid. She wasn’t pretty, not that bright American prettiness that made him think of cheerleaders. Her face was strongly molded, with high cheekbones, a firm jawline, dramatic dark brows and lashes. Her hair, worn not quite shoulder length, was a froth of light brown curls, with that startling streak of white in front. Her mouth was completely feminine, soft and full and pink. And her eyes . . . her brown eyes were the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.
Those eyes made him want to put himself between her and the world, and kill anyone who caused her one more iota of pain. Many women would have been broken by what had happened to her. Instead she fought, and she wouldn’t let herself stop fighting, no matter how hopeless the cause or how diff
icult it was for her to keep going. Such gallantry humbled him in a way he’d never before felt. Here, he thought, was a woman he truly wanted to know. For a while, at least.
If he could keep her alive, that is. Arturo Pavón might be a chingadera, a fuckup, but he was a vicious fuckup. She would break her heart and her spirit trying to find her kid, and that was the best-case scenario. He couldn’t let her track Pavón on her own, even though the odds were she’d learn nothing of value from him. That was if Pavón didn’t kill her; it was well known he harbored a deep hatred for the gringa who had torn out his eye. He would love to sell her body on the black market.
Pavón was now involved in something much worse than baby snatching, and the stakes were proportionally higher. Before, getting caught would have meant a prison sentence; now it would be the death penalty. Mexico didn’t have the death penalty, but Texas sure as hell did, and from what he’d been able to find out so far, the gang was headquartered in El Paso. Pavón might not be executed, but the higher-ups would be. Diaz didn’t know exactly how international law shook out on that one. If Pavón was caught on American soil, though, he thought American laws would prevail. That was what happened in Mexico whenever a stupid tourist believed the old tales about what a free and open country Mexico was when it came to drugs. If you got caught in Mexico, then you went to a Mexican prison.
The matter of law might be a moot point, though. When he was certain who was running the operation, if he couldn’t get enough evidence to turn it over to law enforcement and be sure of a conviction, then he would take care of the matter in other ways.
He’d told Milla he didn’t kill for money, and he’d told the truth, as far as it went. He’d killed, and he’d been paid for it, but money was never the reason he did it. There were some people whose crimes were sickening, yet if they were ever brought to trial, they would be given either light prison sentences or probation—and that was assuming they’d even been found guilty. Maybe killing them wasn’t his decision to make, and maybe he’d answer for it in the hereafter, but he’d never felt bad about it afterward. A child molester, a serial rapist, a murderer—those people didn’t deserve to live. To some people that would make him a murderer, too, but he didn’t feel like one. He was the executioner. He could live with that.