Cry No More (Page 54)
Very little scared him; he was stoic about pain and death, figuring very few people escaped the first and no one escaped the second. But when Lola had held the knife to Milla’s throat and he’d seen the blood trickling down her neck, for the first time in a very long while he’d been scared. He could have killed Lola right there, had been within a hairsbreadth of pulling the trigger, but the thought of Milla’s reaction if he blew Lola’s brains all over her had stopped him. He’d reined in the impulse, though Lola had been able to see in his eyes how close he was to doing it.
He’d known going in that Lola Guerrero was a stone-cold bitch, with a reputation for meanness and a taste for drugs. But she had information Milla wanted, and he’d known he could get it. Taking Milla, though, had been a mistake, which was why he was going back alone.
He’d had to think very fast, before. If he didn’t kill Lola at that point, he was in a quandary. He couldn’t just walk away, not after she’d cut his woman. He’d called Milla his friend, but no one would believe that. Everyone who had seen them, everyone who would hear about the incident, would think she was his; he couldn’t let anyone cut her and go unpunished. If he did, people would think he was going soft. They would think they could get away with crossing him, get away with the flood of killings and drugs that he was trying to help stem. And because they would think they could get away with it, innocents would die. Then he would have to kill even more people to convince them that they still didn’t want to cross him.
All of that, and more, and had flashed through his mind in a split second. What should he do about Lola, if not kill her? Beat the hell out of her? That would have taken too long, Milla would have been in hysterics, and he had a distaste for such brutality against women, even scum like Lola. Shoot her? With a nine millimeter, there was no such thing as a minor wound. The big slug tore out flesh, ripped nerves and blood vessels. Cut her? Unless he sliced her to pieces, cuts were easily healed, and he hadn’t wanted to remove any body parts, minor or otherwise.
The only option that had been left was breaking a bone, which would cause her trouble for a good length of time. He’d chosen the thumb because of the knife, because he was so enraged that she’d cut Milla. With a broken thumb, she wouldn’t be holding that knife for quite a while. And there was something cold about the chosen punishment that fit the crime, and that let people know he hadn’t gone soft. As soon as he’d thought it, the deed was done.
He realized the absurdity of trying to choose a punishment that was bad enough to make a statement on the street but wouldn’t permanently cripple the woman. He didn’t want to hit her, so he’d just break her thumb. Having been beaten himself on more than one occasion, he knew how long the pain lasted, how utterly debilitating it was. Lola’s thumb would pain her, but she wouldn’t be seriously handicapped—except for knife handling, of course. He wanted her mobile, able to get around; she couldn’t find out anything for him if she was half dead from a beating.
He could have killed her without the faintest twinge of remorse; breaking her thumb had made his stomach knot with nausea, even though he hadn’t shown a flicker of hesitation. If he had, Milla might now be dead, or at least seriously hurt.
Milla had been upset, but she had understood immediately why he’d had to do something.
He needed to get his hands on Pavón. Wasn’t it interesting that the same person was connected to smuggling babies ten years ago and smuggling involuntary organ donors now? Maybe Pavón was just a man who got around, but maybe he was still working for the same boss.
Diaz got a nice warm feeling in the pit of his stomach at the thought of tying up both problems with the same bow.
Milla’s son was gone. Only fools would keep a paper trail, and since adoption files were, for the most part, private, he didn’t see how she would ever be able to track him down even if they did crack the ring and discover the fake birth certificate that had been issued for him. But it had meant a lot to her to find out that at least he hadn’t been in that plane crash, or smothered in a car trunk. He’d seen the look in her eyes, the joy that had temporarily banished the sadness.
The plane crash was another avenue he could investigate. The FAA would have a record of things like that. He didn’t remember anything in the news about a plane crash killing six babies, and he was certain a story like that would have stuck with him. So either the crash site had been sanitized and the little bodies removed before rescuers and investigators arrived, leaving only the pilot, or the site had never been discovered by authorities. New Mexico was a big, mostly empty state. There were thousands of square miles in which a small plane could go down without being seen.
The owner of the plane would have known it was missing, though, and mounted a search for it. If he’d found it, what then? Completely disposing of a plane, even a small one, would take quite a bit of effort. The best bet would have been to remove the bodies, strip the plane, remove all markings and serial numbers, and set fire to it. There were a number of accelerants that would produce a very hot fire.
That’s how he would have done it, anyway.
He had a pretty good instinct for how the bad guys worked. All he had to do was figure out how he would do something, and most of the time he was right on the money. That didn’t say much for his personality, but it said a lot for his effectiveness.
He had to be more careful now, because Milla softened him. He didn’t know why, but he knew it happened. He found himself doing things he shouldn’t be wasting his time with, because of her. Conversation didn’t come easily to him, but he could talk to her, tell her things about himself. It amazed him that she told him about herself in return. At first she had been afraid of him, but he was used to that. Now she wasn’t, and he was pleased.