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  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