Max stared up at him. “What does that mean?”
“Chiquis?” Max nodded and Diaz said, “Squirt.”
Max giggled, then clapped his hand over his mouth. “I talked,” he said.
“Be sure and tell your mommy.” Diaz leaned down and scooped the little boy up in his arms. “Now, let’s go see her. She’s been looking for you.”
“I was trying to catch a kitty,” Max said, looping an arm around Diaz’s neck. “It went under the truck and I did, too, but then I got stuck.”
“It happens to the best of us.”
“You didn’t get stuck.”
“Almost.”
Milla listened to Max’s chatter, and Diaz’s relaxed answers. He was at ease with Max, and she realized he wasn’t as solitary as she had imagined. At some point he’d had contact with children, knew how to talk to them, and he’d picked Max up as if he had done so hundreds of times. Max certainly wasn’t afraid of him. This was a side of Diaz she would never have suspected, and it intrigued her.
Baxter and a couple of his men, plus a couple of medics, met them halfway, with Max’s mother running along with them. She shrieked when she saw her little boy, and Max yelled, “Mommy! I got stuck!”
The woman grabbed Max out of Diaz’s arms, hugging him close and kissing him all over his face and head, wherever she could reach. She was crying and laughing and scolding all at the same time, and Max was trying to tell her about the kitty, and the big knife the man had used to cut his shorts, and that he knew he wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers.
They took Max away to be checked out, but since he’d been under the shelter of the truck, he’d escaped sunburn and the worst of the heat. Milla herself was feeling the need for some water and air-conditioning, as were all of the searchers.
They trudged back to the staging area. Her people all reported in and dispersed in various cars and trucks, and she was on the verge of getting into her own SUV when a local TV reporter stopped her for a comment. Milla gave her standard best wishes to the family, praised the El Paso police, got in a plug for Finders, and briefly explained how Max had crawled under a pickup and his clothing got snagged. She noticed that Diaz had faded out of sight, and she didn’t mention him. The last thing he would want was for his face and name to be broadcast on television.
The reporter left, Milla got into her vehicle and started it, and waited to see if Diaz would reappear. He did, opening the door and sliding into the passenger seat. They buckled up, and she executed a U-turn.
It was several minutes before he spoke. “You didn’t get to have that moment.”
She knew the moment he was talking about, when Max’s mother had seen her child alive and unharmed, and incandescent joy had lit her face. “No,” she said, her throat suddenly tight. “The last time I saw my baby, he was crying. He’d been napping against my chest, and all of a sudden he was jerked away from me. He screamed his head off.” She saw that tiny outraged face as clearly now as she had at the time. She locked her jaw, fighting the burn of tears.
“I see why you do this,” Diaz said after another long pause. “It was a good feeling.”
She cleared her throat. “The best.”
He said in a casual voice, “I don’t think you’ll ever find your boy, but I’ll kill Pavón for you.”
10
“No!” she yelled, so startled that the steering wheel jerked in her hands. “Not yet!” Then, appalled at herself, she said, “Oh, God,” and pulled to the curb because she was suddenly shaking so hard she was afraid to drive.
“Don’t you want him dead?” Diaz asked in the same tone he might have used to ask if she wanted fries with her order—disinterested, flat, eerily remote.
“Yes!” Her tone wasn’t flat, it was fierce. “I want him dead; I want to kill him myself; I want to scratch out his other eye and cut out his kidney; I want to hurt him so much he’s screaming for me to end it before he dies. But I can’t. I have to find out what he knows about my baby. After that, I don’t care what happens to him.”
He waited those few unnerving beats before he asked, “’Kidney’?”
She stared at him, eyes wide, her attention totally derailed by that one word. Out of her entire tirade he had picked up on the one detail that didn’t fit in with the rest. From the moment she’d awakened from surgery in that little clinic, her entire life, her very being, had been concentrated on finding Justin. She hadn’t let her focus waver, had gritted her teeth and charged through her physical rehabilitation, had almost literally set her life aside because nothing else was as important to her as her son. She hadn’t dwelt on what the attack had done to her body. Until those enraged words, she hadn’t realized how furious she was at what had been done to her, the pain she’d endured, the physical cost.
She turned away, staring woodenly out the windshield. “I told you I was stabbed,” she said. “I lost a kidney.”
“Good thing you had two.”
“I liked having both of them,” she snapped. She remembered the searing agony, remembered convulsing in the dirt as the pain hurled her body out of control. She functioned perfectly well with just one kidney, of course. But what if something went wrong with it?
She drew a deep breath and forced her attention back to the original subject. “Don’t kill him,” she said. “Please. I have to talk to him.”
He shrugged. “Your choice. As long as he doesn’t fuck with me, I’ll leave him alone.”