Authors: Linda Howard
“Never have. I’ve hunted, but with a rifle. Haven’t hit anything yet.” He gave her a concerned look. “You really think we’ll need guns?”
“I know I’d rather have them and not need them, than vice versa. I didn’t tell you, but the man who took Justin is supposed to be at this cantina tonight. If he is, you can bet he’ll be armed.”
Rip stopped in his tracks, an uneasy expression crossing his face. “Don’t you think you should call the cops? The PJF or the PJE, whichever would handle things like this.”
“And tell them what? I think he’s the man I saw very briefly ten years ago?” She didn’t want to deal with either the state or the federal judicial police. Both were highly unpopular in Mexico.
“You took out his eye. That makes him easy to identify.”
“Unless I think all one-eyed men could be the same man. I don’t even know that he’ll be here. I had an anonymous call that said he would be. Do you know how many other calls I’ve had over the years? Take a guess how many of them have actually been worth anything.”
“I’m guessing not any,” he said, relaxing.
“One, actually.”
“So this is more of a wait-and-see.”
“Probably. I won’t know unless I show up. But I definitely don’t want to hang around a rough cantina without some means of protection.”
Rip knew the score on cantinas, knew she couldn’t go inside—which meant she would be on the street. Even sitting in a car, as she intended to do, had its risks.
Her old friend Benito met them with a grin and a Ford Taurus in fairly good shape. He also knew where the Blue Pig was and gave her careful directions, along with a warning. The Blue Pig had a very bad reputation. Most cantinas were friendly places where men relaxed and got shit-faced drunk, but the Blue Pig was where the very rough element gathered.
Milla began to think Pavón might actually be there, if the place was that bad.
They met Chela, who silently handed over a shopping bag, took her money, and walked away. “Is it always that easy?” Rip asked in surprise.
“So far. If a policeman ever wants to look in the bag, though, I’m dropping it and running.”
“I’ll run with you,” he said, grinning.
They got back into the Taurus, with Milla behind the wheel. Without hope, before they went to the Blue Pig, Milla tried Diaz’s number one more time. To her absolute astonishment, he answered.
“Where have you been?” she all but shouted at him, then caught herself and felt her face getting hot. She’d said that as if she had a right to know. Then she thought briefly and decided she
did
have a right to know. They were lovers, and she’d been worried about him.
There were three beats of silence; then he said, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“My cell phone won’t receive calls. I can call out, but that’s it.”
“I’ve had my phone turned off most of the time.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want it to ring.”
This time she was the one who waited before she spoke, fighting the urge to beat her head against the car’s dashboard. She had the feeling that if she could see him, he’d be wearing that tiny smile of his. “Why not?”
“I didn’t want the noise to attract attention.”
He’d been on stakeout, then. “Did you find out anything?”
“Something very interesting. Where are you?”
“Juarez. That’s why I’ve been trying to reach you. I got a call this afternoon saying Pavón will be at the Blue Pig Cantina tonight.”
“I know the place. Stay where you are until I can get there. Don’t go there alone.”
“I’m not alone. Rip Kosper is with me.”
His voice was suddenly tense. “Kosper?”
“Remember my friends Susanna and Rip?”
“She’s involved, Milla. She’s part of it. Get away from him, go back to El Paso. Do it now.”
She actually took the phone away and stared at it in astonishment for a second before putting it back to her ear. “What did you say?”
“Susanna. She set up Justin’s kidnapping. She’s probably neck-deep in the organ smuggling, too. Someone with skill has been removing the organs, and a doctor is the most likely bet.”
She was so stunned she couldn’t think. Susanna? The idea was preposterous. Susanna was her friend, she had delivered Justin, she had made a point of staying in touch all these years and offering support and friendship.
She had kept track of Milla’s efforts to find the kidnappers
.
Milla was hyperventilating. She caught her breath and held it before she got dizzy, her eyes squeezed shut.
“Milla?” Rip asked, his voice worried. “Are you all right?”
“Get away from him,”
Diaz’s voice said in her ear, the tone deadly.
“How soon can you be here?” she asked with a calm that took every ounce of control she possessed.
“I’m seventy kilometers away. An hour, at least.”
“I won’t pass up a chance at Pavón. We know he probably won’t show, but maybe he will.”
Evidently realizing the futility of telling her to go home, Diaz took a deep breath. “Are you armed?”
“Yes.”
“Is he?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Keep it that way. What kind of car are you driving?”
She described the Taurus to him.
“Stay in the car. Keep the doors locked. Park on the street where I can find you. I’ll be there as fast as possible. And if Kosper does anything the least bit suspicious, shoot his ass.”
“Yes. Okay,” she said to the staccato list of commands.
He disconnected the call, and she did the same. She felt shell-shocked, and she didn’t dare look at Rip. He couldn’t be involved. Not Rip. He had a gentle heart, that of a true gentleman. The only time she had ever seen him be less than friendly was the night Susanna had tried to set her up with True; he’d made it obvious that he didn’t like the man.
Neither did Diaz. How odd that both of them would so intensely dislike the same man, and knowing that Rip disliked True, how odd that Susanna would try to throw Milla at him anyway. Why would she do such a thing?
True and Susanna talked. Nothing incriminating about that. He was wealthy now, but he’d dragged himself out of poverty. She had heard that he’d come from El Paso’s meanest, toughest section. She knew that he still had contacts in that world, that he knew all sorts of unsavory characters such as smugglers.
Susanna . . . and
True
?
It made sense. She was going solely on instinct now, without a shred of corroborating evidence, but it made sense.
She took one of the pistols out of the shopping bag, then put the shopping bag in the floorboard on the other side of her legs.
“What’s wrong?” Rip asked. “Who was that?”
“A man named Diaz.”
He heaved a weary sigh. “I’ve heard about him.”
“How?”
“I overheard Susanna and True talking.” Rip stared out the window. “I’m guessing he knows about Susanna.”
Startled, Milla stared at him, and kept her hand on the pistol. He rubbed his eyes. “She’s careless sometimes. She says things she shouldn’t, forgets how sound carries. Her home office, for example, seems to amplify sound. I’ve overheard conversations for years, but only in the past few months have things started to come together for me. She was talking to him on the phone one day, and—I don’t remember exactly what she said, but the meaning was pretty clear. Something about how much money they’d earned with the babies, though the hullabaloo about Justin had nearly gotten them caught.
Earned
. She actually said they
earned
the money.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” Milla asked. “Go to the cops?”
“Lack of evidence. Hell,
no
evidence. Just some phone calls that I heard only her side of. She asked True if he was sure this Diaz guy was coming up empty and they didn’t have to worry. I don’t know what True said, but it was obvious he took Diaz seriously. So I did some investigating on my own, did more eavesdropping, and found out there was going to be a transfer of some kind of cargo behind the church in Guadalupe. I know a few hard-asses in Mexico myself. I contacted one of them, told him Diaz would appreciate knowing about this, hoped it worked. Then I called you, used a fake accent and told you Diaz would be there. I didn’t know for sure, but there was a possibility. Guess I was right, huh?”
Rip was the anonymous caller. He had to be; otherwise he couldn’t have known about that night. “He was there,” she said, her throat tight.
Rip bowed his head. “When I found out what she’d done . . . I’ve loved that woman for twenty years, and I never knew her. It was the money, I guess. We were almost bankrupted paying back our student loans, credit card bills, you name it. She isn’t good with a budget. I’m not either, truth be told. That’s why we went to Mexico, to get away from the bill collectors for a year. The money situation got much better that year, and now I know why. She was selling babies. Hell, she delivered them, she knew their sex, age, general health.”
And the poor Mexican women had traveled considerable distances to reach the clinic so they could have a real doctor in attendance during birth. The kidnappings would have been spread out over a sizable area, and who would ever think to ask who had delivered the babies? Since Susanna had had no contact with them once they left the clinic, she had never even blipped on the radar of suspicion.
“She sold Justin,” Rip continued. “They got a lot of money for him. I’m sorry, Milla, I don’t know where they sent him. I’ve gone through all of her paperwork, but there’s nothing about what happened to the babies. I don’t think she cared.” Tears gathered in his eyes. “She said they’d kept you busy chasing your own tail for ten years. They’ve been hindering you every way they could.”
“What are
you
going to do?” Milla asked, her voice thin. This hurt. She was shocked and hurt and angry. Susanna was lucky she wasn’t within reach at that moment, or Milla would have done physical damage to her.
“I don’t know. Divorce, obviously. I haven’t left her because I wanted to be in a position to snoop. Can I testify against her? I don’t know if I can make myself do it.”
“Diaz thinks she’s involved with black market organ transplants, that they’re killing people and selling their organs.”
Rip stared at her, his mouth working soundlessly. Finally he managed to say, “She—she couldn’t do that. That’s beyond—”
“The ‘cargo’ that was transferred in Guadalupe that night was a person.”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” All color washed out of Rip’s face and he closed his eyes. He looked as if he was going to vomit.
Milla felt as if she might be sick, too. She checked the time and a spurt of adrenaline had her starting the car with quick, jerky movements. “We have to get to the cantina. Pavón might already be there.”
“I thought you said he probably wouldn’t—”
“There’s always a chance.”
23
Pavón reached the Blue Pig early; he wanted to be here when the bitch arrived, he wanted to watch her wait for him. Talking to her on the telephone had made his heart beat faster, and the excitement had given him an ache in the crotch that he wanted to rub. He had waited and waited, hiding out in that foul boat, every day that he spent cowering like a little girl eating at his soul. He needed to find out where Diaz was before he made a move on the woman, and that was not easy.
But fortune had at last smiled on him. One of the fishermen mentioned to his cousin that the tracker Diaz had been to Matamoros looking for Enrique Guerrero. The news was both frightening and reassuring: it was good because this fisherman also said that Enrique had fled south, from which Pavón could assume that Diaz had followed; it was bad because he had no doubt Diaz would find Enrique, who could not be trusted to keep his mouth shut about anything. He would sell his mother to the devil to keep himself safe, though with Lola as a mother, one couldn’t truly blame him. Still, Pavón had to assume that what Lorenzo had known, Enrique knew. And what Enrique knew, Diaz would shortly know.
There could not be a better time to sever the relationship with Gallagher, and disappear for good. There was a chance that Diaz would be content to go after the bigger fish, and leave the minnows alone. But he had a reputation for being both ruthless and relentless, letting no one escape, and Pavón couldn’t take the chance of looking up one day and coming face-to-face with that devil. His original plan was better, to take the woman and use her as bait to catch and kill Diaz. Only then would he truly be safe.
So he sat in the cantina and waited—and waited, consoling himself with several bottles of Victoria beer. Where was she? Was he so unimportant to her that she wouldn’t bother to walk across the border to see him? He’d made it as easy for her as possible, short of presenting himself at her front door.
He was on his fourth bottle of beer before he realized that perhaps she would not come into the cantina. Only whores did, or women looking for trouble. A good woman did not, and the bitch was a good woman.
Swearing to himself, he got to his feet and was halfway across the floor to the front door when he suddenly reversed himself and went to the back. Fool! What if she was parked directly outside? That would be foolish of her, but it was possible. He definitely wanted to see her before she saw him, so he would go out the back door.
He worked his way around, which was not easy, because here the buildings had been built flush against one another and he had to walk through the narrow, smelly back alley to the end of the street, then double back. He stayed in the shadows against the buildings and near other people as well; she would be looking for a lone man, not a group. Luckily this street teemed with people, especially at night, and most of them were men of the type a good woman would not like to meet.
He moved carefully. She might be parked on the other side of the street, or facing him. He had to examine each vehicle—there! And so conveniently parked, on this side of the street, with her back to him.
It had to be her. It was a woman with light-colored curly hair, so light a brown that it was almost blond. And the curls; he especially remembered the curls. Even at night and in silhouette they seemed to float around her head with a life of their own; they looked as soft and feathery as a baby chick. He wondered if her lower hair was as curly, and chuckled to himself because he would soon find out.
For ten years he had not fucked a woman who was not a whore—not a willing woman, anyway—because this curly-haired bitch had ruined his face. She would pay for that. He would use her until she screamed for mercy.
Perhaps he would keep her for a while, even after he killed Diaz. He could charge others to use her. He did, after all, need to make a living.
There was someone else in the car with her. A man.
He stopped, his blood turning to ice. Diaz—how could he have returned so fast?
Idiota!
He mentally slapped himself. Just because he himself would not go in an airplane—too much security and checking of papers—didn’t mean others had the same need for secrecy. Diaz could return from anywhere in the country in a matter of hours.
But this could be to his advantage. Both of them together, and oblivious of his presence behind them. He could kill Diaz right now. A bullet through the window into his head; that would do the job. The woman . . . he would probably have to kill her now, too, and he sighed with regret. Ah, well. Shooting Diaz first, as he had to do, would give her time to react. He didn’t dare approach from the front, which would give him two quick shots at both of them; he would have to move in from behind and to the side, out of the view of the side mirror, until he had an angle on Diaz’s head. After shooting Diaz, he would have to move forward even more to be able to see the woman and have a decent shot at her. She would be screaming, moving around, perhaps even trying to drive away. He would have to be fast, and accurate, which was not so easy now with only one eye. To make things worse, it was his left eye that was missing, and they were on his left.
The man got out of the car. Pavón froze in place. This was not Diaz! This man had light-colored hair. He was older, shorter, stockier. Shocked, he recognized him. It was Dr. Kosper’s husband, the other Dr. Kosper.
Son of the great whore! What was he doing here?
Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. This Dr. Kosper was going into the Blue Pig, presumably to look for him, Pavón. This could not be better. The woman was watching Dr. Kosper; she wasn’t paying attention to—she looked into the rearview mirror, checked her side mirror, and Pavón froze. She couldn’t see him in the mirrors, but she was more alert, more cautious, than he’d believed. He needed to come at her from her left, his right, so he would be best able to see her. But if he did, she would be able to see him.
He had underestimated her once, to his cost. He would not do so again.
She would have the car doors locked; she wasn’t stupid. The windows were up. But had she relocked the passenger door after Dr. Kosper got out?
The four beers he’d had to drink said there was only one way to find out.
He strode forward at an angle, staying away from the mirrors until he was right at the car. He pulled on the door handle, the door opened—miracle!—and he leaned in with his pistol pointing right at her head.
“Hola!”
he said, grinning as he slid into the passenger seat and closed the door. “Remember me?”
He saw her eyes grow huge, a most satisfying response—then quick as a snake her hand snapped up and he found himself also staring down the barrel of a pistol that was pointed at his good eye.
“
Hijo de la chingada,
do you remember
me
?” she said in slow, careful Spanish.
Son of a bitch, do you remember me?
Her hand wasn’t shaking. Her eyes were cold with hate. Pavón looked at her and saw his death, unless he could pull the trigger faster—
The door beside him opened again and another pistol jammed under his right ear. “Pavón, you pig,” said a soft voice so laden with menace that he nearly pissed himself with terror, because he knew whom the voice belonged to and he also knew beyond a doubt that he had fucked up beyond all chance of recovery. “You threaten my woman? That makes me very angry.”
Rip stood off to the side, shaking uncontrollably. When he’d returned to the car, he’d almost passed out at the sight of Milla holding one of the pistols to a man’s head, that man also holding a pistol pointed at
her
, and a second, dark, lethal-looking man standing in the open door also with a pistol to the man’s head. By Rip’s panicked count, that was three pistols and two threatened heads. Someone was going to die.
Things had then happened fast. The man in the front seat with Milla was disarmed, and Rip found himself in the backseat sitting beside that living, breathing weapon who simultaneously held one pistol to the back of Pavón’s head and another trained on Rip himself. He’d figured out that this was the infamous Diaz, and after seeing the man, he understood completely the rather gory reputation that followed him. He was absolutely the scariest person Rip had ever seen, and it wasn’t anything he said or did; it was just that aura of lethal competence. He himself had been speechless with fear at having that pistol pointed at him, but Milla had talked fast as she drove out of Juarez, following the stranger’s directions, telling him everything that Rip and Milla had discussed. At hearing that Rip was the anonymous informant who had brought them together, and everything he had to say about True Gallagher, Diaz shoved the pistol he’d been holding on Rip into a holster strapped to his leg like an honest-to-God gunslinger.
Now they were in the desert, far from the lights of Juarez and El Paso, and he was shaking not from the cold or from any lethal aura. He was shaking because he had watched Diaz at work with Pavón, and now he knew Diaz’s reputation was well-deserved, even understated.
Pavón was, quite literally, scared shitless. He was naked and staked out, spread-eagled, on the ground. At first he had cursed long and loud; then he had tried to bargain, and now he was simply begging. Diaz kept asking questions in that soft voice, and what Rip heard made him turn away and vomit. Pavón told it all, starting with the babies who were sold like so many cattle, how the smuggling ring had worked, Susanna’s role in it, the name of the woman in New Mexico who worked at the rural county courthouse and who had stolen blank birth certificates and falsified them. With birth certificates bearing new names, the babies had immediately become different people.
Pavón had told everything he knew about True Gallagher, and Rip shook with rage. Diaz, if anything, became even colder and his work with the knife more diabolical. The people who had been murdered for their internal organs that were sold for millions on the black market—Susanna was doing the organ removal, and Gallagher was getting rich. That was when Rip turned aside and vomited, shaken to the core by the knowledge that his wife was as cold a murderer as this disgusting thug staked to the ground and spewing out his filth.
When Diaz had asked all his questions, he stopped and wiped off his knife and slipped it into a sheath inside his boot. He stood looking down at the sniveling, sobbing mess at his feet, then pulled the pistol from his thigh holster.
Pavón began begging again.
Diaz reversed the pistol in his hand and extended it to Milla butt first. “Do you want to do it?” he asked with grave courtesy. “It’s your right.”
Milla stared at the pistol for a long moment, then slowly stretched out her hand to take it.
“Milla!” Rip said in shock. “This is murder!”
“No,” Diaz corrected, his tone going hard and giving Rip a searing look that told him to keep out of it. “What they do is murder. This is an execution.”
Milla looked down at Pavón, the weight of the pistol heavy in her hand. This was a larger caliber weapon than the ones she’d bought from Chela, guaranteed to do the job, which was probably why Diaz had given it to her. She had wanted Pavón dead for the past ten years, dreamed about killing him. She had dreamed about choking him to death with her bare hands. But she had always seen herself killing him in a rage, not in cool deliberation.
Pavón was going to die here tonight. It was a given. If she didn’t kill him, Diaz would. Because of what Pavón had done to her, Diaz was offering her retribution.
Slowly she lifted the pistol and aimed it. Pavón closed his eyes and flinched, waiting for a sound that he wouldn’t be alive to hear.
She didn’t pull the trigger, and her hand began to tremble from the weight.
Pavón opened his eyes and began to laugh. One way or another he would die here tonight, and he knew it. It made no difference to him who pulled the trigger, but if he had one last chance to torment her, he would take it. “You stupid whore,” he jeered, then coughed on his own blood. “You are too soft, too useless. Your stupid little boy was soft and useless, too, but the buyer wanted a pretty baby boy. He loved little boys. Do you understand, slut? Your baby was sold to a boy lover who wanted to raise his own little love slave. Your baby boy probably likes it by now; he likes getting it in his—”
Those last disgusting words were never said.
Diaz handled everything. He left Pavón’s body there to be found, his clothes and identification neatly folded and placed on the ground beside him, with a large rock on top to hold everything in place.
There were the pistols to be taken care of—he didn’t destroy them, as Milla and Brian always did; instead they were put away for future use. His own vehicle was there; he had flown into Chihuahua and taken care of some detail he didn’t explain, then driven to Juarez. It wasn’t one of the pickups Milla had seen before; he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. He arranged for it to be picked up at the border crossing as before; he called Benito and told him where he could pick up the car Milla and Rip had used; then he got them back across the border.
Rip and Milla were totally silent, in shock at the events of the night. It was only when Rip was unlocking his car that he looked up with agony in his eyes. “I can’t go home,” he said. “I can’t look at her again. What happens now? Will she be arrested?”
“We have no proof,” Diaz said. “If we were in Mexico—” He broke off and shrugged. If they were in Mexico, True and Susanna would already be in jail, and charges didn’t have to be filed for seventy-two hours . . . or as long as was necessary. But this was the States, and what a dead Mexican thug had supposedly told them wouldn’t get them the time of day in a police station. “But we know where to look now, and there are people here who are much better at this than I am; I’ll turn it over to them.”
Rip looked startled. “Whaddaya mean? You’re some kind of—I mean, you’re
official
?”
Diaz ignored that. “Stay in a hotel. Don’t speak to your wife; you’re too emotional. Don’t spook her into running. If she runs, I’ll have to go after her.”