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 difficult 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.