There was a hesitation; then a timid voice with a Spanish accent said, “Señor Gallagher?”
“Yeah, what is it?”
“You said you wished to know if anyone saw the man Diaz.”
True straightened, all his irritation gone, his attention totally focused. “Yes, that’s right.”
“The reward, you are still offering it?”
“In cash. American.” He never welshed on promises to pay. Money kept the information pipeline flowing.
“He was in Ciudad Juarez today.”
Juarez. The son of a bitch was close, too close.
“He was not alone,” the timid voice continued.
“Who was he with?”
“A woman. They came to our fonda. I served them myself. I am sure it was Diaz.”
“Did you recognize the woman?”
“No, señor. But she was a gringa. She had a bandage on her neck.”
True didn’t see how a bandage on her neck meant the woman was American. “What else?”
“She had curly brown hair with a white streak on top.”
True went cold. Automatically he got the information for where he should send the money and made arrangements for payment to be made that very night. With one sentence, Diaz’s presence in Juarez had gone from annoying to catastrophic.
Milla was with him. Milla and Diaz, together.
Son of a bitch.
He had to start tying up loose ends immediately. He had to locate Pavón and make certain the stupid bastard didn’t talk.
17
True was very good at analyzing his options. he knew whom he was up against, and Diaz was nobody’s fool; on the contrary, the bastard was one of the most cunning people True had ever met or heard about. Just his name was enough to send a certain element scurrying for cover, because Diaz always found his quarry, but he didn’t always bring it back alive.
The word was that Diaz was government-sanctioned—both governments, United States and Mexico. Since Mexico didn’t extradite criminals who might receive the death penalty, the country inadvertently became the safe haven of some very unsavory characters. The United States wanted these people either caught or dealt with by other methods. Mexico just wanted them to disappear and stop being a problem. So it was possible Diaz was being paid by both governments. Maybe. Maybe he was just a very good bounty hunter who was also very good at projecting an image. But he definitely had contacts and resources, and the nose of a bloodhound.
True had been able to keep Milla stonewalled all these years, but Diaz was different. For one thing, people were afraid of him. If it came down to a question of who they feared most, him or Diaz, True wasn’t certain what the answer would be.
The key, he thought, was misdirection. Keep Diaz occupied chasing down bogus rumors while he himself found and eliminated Pavón, which was something he probably should have done years ago. Pavón was the one person, other than himself, who knew everything—and True had certainly never intended that to happen. People underestimated Pavón; True had been guilty of the same misjudgment. Pavón was a vicious thug, but he had an instinct for survival and for handling things just right.
That had made him a valuable asset. Pavón could get things done. Tell him what you wanted, and it happened. But valuable asset or not, with Diaz on his trail Pavón’s personal scale had tipped over to the liability side.
The good news was that Pavón had heard Diaz was after him and had gone to ground. The bad news was that Diaz never gave up and would eventually find Pavón. Which meant True himself had to find Pavón first. No one would care enough about Pavón to do more than a cursory investigation into his death.
True’s other option—his only other option—was to have Diaz eliminated. Problem was, that was easier said than done. And if Diaz truly was government-sanctioned, that would bring down more heat than True was prepared to handle. You could hide only so much, and that was as long as no one was looking very closely. The Feds tended to look closely. He had to be very, very careful in how he arranged things.
So—buy some time by leaking bogus rumors and names, and keep Diaz occupied. Find Pavón and get rid of that problem, which would buy him even more time and allow him to finish covering his tracks. This was probably the end of a very lucrative business, which was a shame, because he had only about half as much as he’d wanted to accumulate before he got out.
But he would find some other moneymaking deal. He always did. And if the price was right, he could always do some special collections.
He smiled, thinking of all the people whose names he could drop into the rumor mill and get Diaz pointed in their direction. He could have some fun with this. Payback was always hell, wasn’t it?
August slipped into September, bringing a slight lessening of the heat, noticeably shorter days, and a tantalizing hint of crispness in the air. School had started, and it seemed as if kids were swarming everywhere. Though it was painful, she had always compulsively watched the kids in Justin’s age group, from kindergarten on up. He would be in fifth grade this year, she thought. Somewhere, he was starting school just like all these youngsters, yelling and running, full of energy and devilment. Were his eyes still blue, or had they darkened to the brown of her eyes? She thought they would be blue, because they had been the exact shade of David’s eyes.
Diaz seemed to have disappeared—again. That day they’d gone to Juarez she’d felt such a connection with him, but she hadn’t heard from him since. Of course, just because she’d felt a connection didn’t mean he had, and no matter what she felt the truth remained that she knew very little about him. She wasn’t even certain what his first name was, if he’d pulled “James” out of thin air that day or if it really was his name. She’d never thought to ask him, because in her mind he was “Diaz,” not “James.”
She didn’t know where he lived, how old he was, if he’d ever been married—my God, what if he was married now? The thought of Diaz being married made her sick to her stomach. What if he had children? He’d been at ease with little Max that day, so it was possible he had a child somewhere. Perhaps that was where he was, at home with his family.
Milla knew she was being ridiculous. She’d never seen anyone less likely to be a family man than Diaz. He was so clamped down and solitary that she couldn’t imagine him living with anyone, which in turn told her how foolish she was to be attracted to him in the first place. But chemistry was what it was, and it seemed she could no more stop thinking about him than she could flap her arms and fly.
Diaz wasn’t the only one who seemed to have disappeared. To her relief, she hadn’t seen True at all. Not that she’d seen him all that regularly before, but after the last time, she’d been afraid he would become even more persistent. He’d said he would back off, but she doubted he knew how. But relieved as she was, she’d still expected to run into him at some of the city’s society functions she had to attend. He was either out of town, or he’d found a Miss September who was unusually engrossing. She hoped it was the latter, to deflect his attention elsewhere.
The second week of September, her mother called and asked her to come for a visit. Milla hadn’t seen her parents since spring break, when both Ross and Julia had gone on vacation with their respective families and there hadn’t been any chance of running into them at her parents’ house. Right now, with school just starting and all the extracurricular activities, they would be busy and weren’t likely to pop over to their parents’ house. In addition, her mom would call and warn them that Milla was visiting.
Glad for the chance to get away and have something besides Diaz to think about, she took a few days off and flew to Louisville, Kentucky. There she rented a car and drove across the Ohio River to the small town in southern Indiana where they lived.
Her dad was sixty-five and newly retired from an accounting firm; her mother, at sixty-three, had retired from teaching grade school the year before. Already her dad was making grumbling noises about moving to Florida, where he wouldn’t have to dea
l with shoveling snow ever again, but her mother was firmly planted in the house where she had lived for over forty years and where she had raised her three children.
The house was synonymous with “home” in Milla’s mind. It wasn’t fancy, just a fifty-year-old two-story frame house, with a deep porch, steep roof, and memories in every room. There were three bedrooms upstairs, and during a remodeling in the seventies, a large downstairs parlor had been turned into a master bedroom with connecting bath. The eat-in kitchen was large enough that they’d all been able to sit at the table, and they’d had many wonderful, exciting Christmases tearing into a mountain of wrapped gifts under the decorated tree in the living room. In the future they might hire someone to shovel the snow from their driveway, but Milla couldn’t imagine her parents ever moving from this spot.
Milla had once thought her life would be a lot like her mother’s: teaching and raising a family. Now she couldn’t even imagine so peaceful a life. Hers had been torn apart so completely that the After bore no resemblance to the Before. She hated that there was a rift between her and her siblings, but they couldn’t seem to grasp how deeply she had been changed. They wanted her to go with the flow, and it simply wasn’t possible. She couldn’t imagine giving up on Justin, and she couldn’t forgive them for thinking she should.
Still, when she and her mother were gossiping in the kitchen and Mrs. Edge caught herself for the third time mentioning either Ross or Julia and then lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, Milla sighed. “Mom, I don’t expect you to never mention them. Talk about them if you want; I’d like to hear what the kids are up to, keep up to date on what’s happening.”
Mrs. Edge sighed, too. “I just wish you three would settle things between you. I hate not having you here for the holidays.”
“Maybe someday, after I find Justin. Though I doubt I’ll ever completely forgive them for saying I should just forget about him.”
Her mother’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, honey . . . Do you still really think you’ll ever find him? I don’t see how it’s possible.”
“I’ll find him,” she said fiercely. It hurt that her mother had given up, too. Was Milla the only one who still hoped? “I have leads now that I didn’t have before. I know he was flown out of Mexico, probably to New Mexico. I know a woman falsified a birth certificate for him. I know the name of the men who stole him from me. One of them is dead, but the other one—” She stopped. Without Diaz, her chances of finding Pavón had dwindled alarmingly. But maybe that’s what Diaz was doing: tracking. It was what he did best.
Mrs. Edge looked stunned. “You—you’ve actually found out all that? Just recently? I know you haven’t said anything when you called.”
“Within the last month.” She felt ashamed that she hadn’t called her parents in over a month, at least. There was no excuse, no matter how busy she was. “Things have been”—she searched for a word that was accurate but unalarming—“hectic.”
“I imagine so.” Mrs. Edge glanced at the thin red scar on her daughter’s throat. “How did you get that scar?”
Self-consciously Milla touched the scar. It wasn’t a bad scar at all, and in time would probably fade completely. She doubted her mother would appreciate that little detail. “From a cut,” she finally said.
“I see. You were shaving?”
Milla smiled appreciatively, then gave up. “No. A woman did it. She was part of the smuggling ring; she took care of the babies who’d been kidnapped, until they could be flown out of the country.”
Mrs. Edge sat down hard in the nearest chair. Her cheeks were pale at the thought of her youngest being attacked, yet at the same time she was almost beside herself at the other news. “She—she saw Justin? She actually saw him? She remembered him?”
“She remembered. He was alive. He was okay.”
“She—but why did she cut you?”
“Because I did something stupid.” Trying to attack Lola had been very stupid, but she’d been blinded by emotion, the same way she had been in the cemetery when she’d first crossed paths with Diaz. Scolding herself hadn’t worked; she’d done exactly the same thing again, and this last time she hadn’t come out of it unscathed. She was good at several things, but evidently fighting wasn’t one of them.
“Stupid, how?”
“I jumped her.” Milla made a helpless gesture. “I was just so angry at her, I couldn’t help it. She had a knife.”
“You could have been killed!”
She could have been killed numerous times in the past ten years. Thank heavens, her mother had no idea of the type of places she had gone into, the people she had talked to, the things she’d done. She supposed she was lucky she hadn’t been shot, beaten, or raped, but her personal safety had somehow never mattered. Her guardian angels must have been working overtime—that was the only reason she could come up with for none of those things having happened.
And if Diaz hadn’t been there in Juarez, Milla had no doubt Lola would have sliced her throat from ear to ear, just because she could. Diaz was the most unlikely guardian angel she could imagine, but he’d served the purpose.
She’d come to Indiana so she could stop thinking about him for a while, but every subject seemed to bring her right back to him. It was almost like having a painful adolescent crush, she decided, though she’d escaped her teenager years largely unscathed. Maybe if she’d gone through the usual emotional upheaval then, she wouldn’t be so hung up on Diaz now. He was the ultimate bad boy, she was in lust, and she needed to forget about him and concentrate on more important things.
“What are you thinking about?” her mother asked suspiciously. “You got the most peculiar expression on your face. Has something like that happened before, and you didn’t tell me about it?”
“What? Oh, no—no. Nothing like that. I was actually thinking how lucky I’d been that nothing had happened before.”
“Lucky? You mean you’ve done things that—”
“I mean I’ve been in some really rough places, trying to find someone who knew anything about the baby smugglers. I never go alone, though,” she hastened to add. “Never.”
“That’s something, at least.” Mrs. Edge blew out a shaky breath. “But how I’ll sleep at night now knowing you make a habit of doing things like that, I don’t know.”
“I guess that’s why I haven’t told you before,” Milla said, feeling guilty. There was nothing like a visit with your parents to make you feel twelve years old again.
A car pulled into the driveway, and Mrs. Edge got to her feet, peering out the kitchen window to see who it was. She gave a small gasp of dismay. “It’s Julia. What on earth? I told her you were here.”
“It’s okay,” Milla said to reassure her mom. She thought of going up to her room to avoid her older sister, but that seemed so cowardly she remained where she was. Their relationship was strained, not violent; she didn’t care to be around either her brother or sister now, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be polite.
Listening, they heard Mr. Edge open the front door, heard Julia say, “Hi, Dad. Where are Mom and Milla?”
“In the kitchen.” His tone was that of a man who planned to absent himself from a likely unpleasant scene as soon as possible.
Then there were Julia’s crisp footsteps on the hardwood floor in the hallway. Milla just stood and waited, leaning against the cabinets, declining to do anything that would make her look busy and casual.
Julia was three years older than Milla and two years younger than Ross. Instead of being the stereotypical middle child who got lost when the family’s attention was doled out, Julia had always claimed attention as her due. She paused in the kitchen doorway, looking as stylish, collected, and determined as always. She had always been the pretty one of the family, with their mother’s delicate features. Her hair was the same color as Milla’s, but had great body and a hint of wave instead of Milla’s crop of curls. Whenever she had time, Milla actually had a perm to tone down her curls and make them more man
ageable; Julia had never had to resort to a perm for anything.
They were both around the same height, five-seven, with the same general build. No one looking at them could ever mistake them for anything other than sisters, despite the stronger, more severe structure of Milla’s face. Their styles were completely different: Milla moved with a floaty grace that was completely in tune with her love for rich fabrics and feminine clothes, while Julia strode through life, preferred tailored suits for work, and at home was often in sweatpants and a T-shirt.
Julia would have been much more suited for the life Milla had been living. She would never have lost control of her emotions and charged into danger.
“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Edge asked, a trifle nervously.
“Wrong? Nothing. You said Milla would be here, so I came by.” Julia was staring hard at Milla, as if daring her to say something to start a fight.
“You’re looking good,” Milla said with perfect civility, and truth. She wouldn’t say she was glad to see her sister, because she wasn’t.
As usual, Julia charged right to the point. “Don’t you think this has gone on long enough? It’s silly that we can’t come over when you’re here, and you’re doing nothing but hurting Mom and Dad by staying away during the holidays.”
There were a lot of things that Milla wanted to say, but she took a page from Diaz’s book and remained silent, letting Julia have her say. This was distressing enough for their mother, without descending into a hurtful argument.
“It’s been three years,” Julia continued. “Don’t you think that’s long enough to pout?”
Had she been pouting? Milla wondered. Funny, she had considered her anger to be far more serious than that. The word “enraged” came to mind.
Evidently their mother took issue with Julia’s word choice, too, because she said, “Julia!” in a sharp tone as she got to her feet.
Julia said, “You know it’s true, Mom. We told her the truth, and she got in a snit about it. Milla, honey, I’m so sorry your baby was stolen, I would do anything in the world to undo it, but it’s been ten years. He’s gone. You’re never going to find him. At some point, you have to start living again. It’s better to do it now while you’re still young. Get remarried, have a family. No one will ever replace your baby, but this isn’t about replacing him, it’s about living.”