For ten years he had waited to make her pay for the loss of his eye.
He could have had her any number of times, the way she constantly came into his country with her silly questions, her prying. But Gallagher had said no, she was too visible, if she disappeared that would raise too many questions and would, at the least, cost them a great deal of money to ensure certain officials looked the other way; at worst, they would end their days in either an American or Mexican jail, depending on where they were caught. If it came to that, Pavón very much wished for an American jail, where they had air-conditioning, cigarettes, and color television.
Gallagher. Pavón didn’t trust him, but only because he trusted no one. Their association was a long and profitable one. Gallagher let nothing get between him and money. He’d been dirt poor when Pavón first met him, but full of fire and nerve and ideas, powered by an absolute lack of scruples. Gallagher knew how to make money; if he couldn’t make it, he would steal it, and he didn’t care how many people he trampled into the dust in the process. A man like that would go far.
Pavón had known it would be better to ally himself with such as Gallagher than to go his own way and perhaps become a rival that had to be eliminated, so he had made himself indispensable. If Gallagher needed someone to disappear, Pavón handled it. If he needed something stolen, Pavón stole it. If someone needed to be taught a lesson, Pavón took great pleasure in making certain this person never forgot it wasn’t wise to cross Señor Gallagher.
Things had gone well for Arturo, until ten years ago. The assignment was so simple: take the blond baby from the young gringa who visited a small village marketplace at least three mornings of the week. So he and Lorenzo had gone to the village, and waited, and they were lucky: the very first morning, she had been there.
It would be easy, they thought. The only problem was that she carried the baby in a sling across her chest, rather than in her arms or in a basket. But Lorenzo always had his knife, and the plan was that they would flank the gringa; Lorenzo would slice the strap of the sling, Pavón would grab the baby, and they would run. Some rich Americans had agreed to pay a lot of money for a blond baby to adopt, and this one was an easy target. The young gringa was distracted by her shopping, and she was a typical American, soft and unprepared for danger.
They had underestimated her. Instead of becoming hysterical and helplessly screaming, as they had expected, the woman had fought with unexpected fierceness. He still woke from nightmares, feeling her fingers clawing at his eye, reeling from the bursting pain and horror, his entire face feeling as if it were on fire. Lorenzo had stabbed the bitch in the back and they had escaped, but unfortunately she had lived. He himself had spent many days recovering, cursing her and swearing vengeance. Where his eye had once been was now a scarred pit; his cheek was permanently furrowed from her claws. When he had recovered enough to begin moving around again, he’d found that his depth perception was altered, that he could no longer shoot so well. And he could no longer blend into a crowd without being noticed; people stared at his ruined face.
She had caused him a great deal of trouble, and he would never forget.
But he had bigger trouble now, trouble that alarmed him. The matter of the woman, he would settle in his own good time. The matter of Diaz . . . he must be doubly cautious now, with Diaz on his trail, or he was a dead man.
Everyone knew Diaz hunted for money; Pavón, while proud of his justly deserved reputation, had still taken care not to come too much to the attention of the authorities. Under the radar, as Gallagher liked to say. So whose ire had Pavón drawn who also had the money to hire someone like Diaz? He had thought and thought, and there was only one answer.
It had disturbed him afterward when he heard that Milla Boone had been in Guadalupe the same night they had transferred the Sisk woman for her trip to heaven. She had been very close to him, in the same area at the same time, which for the past ten years, on Gallagher’s orders, he had taken care would not happen. Was it coincidence that she had announced then, to an entire crowded cantina, that she would pay ten thousand American dollars to anyone who could give her information leading her to Diaz? If she had ten thousand just for information, how many more thousands did she have? And why would she want Diaz, if not to hire him? Diaz was not a man one called simply to say you admired his work, and one certainly did not pay ten thousand dollars for that.
Pavón had put two and two together. It was obvious Milla Boone had hired Diaz to find him, because shortly thereafter he had received word that Diaz was looking for him. Pavón hadn’t lingered to find out why; Diaz didn’t hunt people just to chat with them. The people he hunted simply . . . disappeared. Except for the dead ones. They were always easy to find. The others were simply never seen or heard from again. What Diaz did with them was a matter of great speculation.
Pavón had immediately left Chihuahua, and his future was now uncertain. Diaz did not give up; time made no difference to him.
For the first time in his life, Pavón was frightened.
He had gone to the Mexican Gulf Coast, where a distant cousin kept a small fishing boat for him. The area, with the jungles and wetlands, the mosquitoes and the offshore oil fields, was not crowded with tourists, as the rest of Mexico seemed to be. He had supplied his boat and put out into the gulf, where no one could approach him unseen—unless Diaz had taken up scuba diving, which Pavón wished he had not thought of, because since then he had been uneasily watching the depths around his boat as well as the surface.