avón 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.”

Rip had seen what happened to someone Diaz went after, and he shuddered.

Diaz ignored him after that, putting Milla in the passenger seat of her SUV and then driving off without speaking again. Rip stared after them for a moment, then shuddered again. He got behind the wheel of his car and sat there for a minute, different scenarios running through his mind and none of them pleasant. He thought of Susanna. Then he bowed his head against the steering wheel and cried.

There was such a storm of emotions roiling through Milla that she couldn’t pin one down long enough to examine it. There were both relief and regret, triumph and sorrow, shame and grim satisfaction. She leaned her head back and watched the streetlights loom and then recede in a dizzying parade. The dash clock said the time was only eleven P.M.; she had thought surely it was almost dawn.

Tonight she had seen in action what she’d always sensed about Diaz, from the very first moment he’d knocked her down and threatened to snap her neck. The destruction he was capable of was truly frightening—and yet she wasn’t frightened. He had taken those aspects of his own character and molded them into a weapon to be used against the enemy, the dregs of society who ignored its laws and wreaked their own destruction. He won by being even more brutal, even more ruthless. What he didn’t do was turn that force against those he perceived as innocent. Ever. She felt safer with him than she’d have felt sitting in the middle of a police station.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“Helping me.” She didn’t know if she could have finished it without him. When Pavón started spewing his poison, Diaz had simply put his hand over Milla’s and together they’d pulled the trigger; his hand had steadied hers, his finger had added its strength to hers. She was ashamed that she hadn’t been able to do it herself, and yet so relieved that she hadn’t had to.

“You’d have done it,” he said with cool confidence. “I just didn’t want you to hear any more of what the bastard had to say.”

“Do you think he was lying?” She squeezed her eyes together, because his filthy words had spread cold horror through her heart.

“He didn’t know what happened to any of the babies; he just wanted to say something to hurt you.”

And he’d succeeded, all too well.

They reached her home and a touch of a button raised the garage door; he slotted the Toyota inside before the door had finished lifting, and had it lowered again almost before Milla could get out of her seat belt and open the door. She dug out her keys and unlocked the door from the garage into the kitchen, stepping inside and turning on the lights.

He whirled her against the refrigerator, his hands hard on her waist. Startled, she dropped her purse and keys to the floor and looked up at his set face and narrowed savage eyes. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said with clenched teeth.

She didn’t have to ask what he meant. Those moments when Pavón’s pistol had been trained directly at her head had been long and terrifying.

“I stayed in the—” she began, but he cut her off with a kiss that was wild and hungry and deep. He lifted her onto her toes and pressed in hard against her, grinding his erection into the softness of her mound. She yielded immediately to that outraged male aggression, wrapping her arms around him and transforming it into sheer lust. He moved one hand to the waistband of her jeans and unsnapped them, dragged down the zipper, then thrust his hand inside her panties and curled his fingers up into her while his palm rode her clitoris. She bucked under the lash of abrupt desire, growing wet around his fingers, hugging them with her body.

He took her there, shucking her out of her jeans and dropping his own, then bending her over the kitchen table. Milla clutched the edge of the table to brace herself against his hard thrusts, pushing back to take all of him. He reached around and under to fondle her, his talented fingers wringing a fast orgasm from her. Then he simply gripped her hips and pumped into her until he began coming, slumping over her as he jerked and thrust. He shuddered with completion, his mouth hot on the back of her neck. “God,” he muttered indistinctly, “when I saw him with that pistol in your face—”

“I had one in his, too.”

“Would that make you any less dead if he’d pulled the trigger?” He bit her shoulder, then gently pulled out of her and turned her around. He buried his fingers in her hair, holding her head as he sank into a kiss as hungry and devouring as if they hadn’t just made love. She gripped his wrists and let that steely strength wrap around her, soaking it up and using it to bolster her own. There was so much still to be done... tomorrow. She would spend the rest of the night just being with her lover.

Tomorrow she would go to New Mexico. Only part of her mission had been accomplished. She still had to find her son.