Saint Death - John Milton #3 Read Online Free PDF

turned back to his three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Juárez. His pregnant wife, Emelia was at the door, with their youngest––Jesus Jr––in her arms. She was calling him.
    “What is it?”
    “Come here,” she said.
    He tossed his shoulder holster, the Glock safely clipped within it, onto the passenger seat, and went back to the house. “What did I forget?”
    “Nothing,” his wife said, “I did.” She stood on tip-toes and he bent a little so that she could plant a long kiss on his lips. “Be careful, Jesus. I don’t want to hear about you taking any risks, not this week. Lord knows you’ve done enough of that.”
    “I know. I won’t––no risks.”
    “You got a different life from next Monday. You got me and this one to think about, the girls, and the one on the way. If you get into trouble on your last week it’s going to be much worse as soon as you get back, alright? And look at that lawn––that’s your first job, right there, first thing, you hear me?”
    “Yes, chica ,” he said with an indulgent grin. The baby, just a year old, gurgled happily as Plato reached down and tickled him under the chin. He looked like his mother, lucky kid, those same big dark eyes that you could get lost in, the slender nose and the perfect buttery skin. He leant down again to kiss Emelia on the lips. “I’ll be late back tonight, remember––Alameda and Sanchez are taking me out for dinner.”
    “They’re just making sure you’re definitely leaving. Don’t go getting so drunk you wake the baby.”
    He grinned again. “No, chica .”
    He made his way back down the driveway, stopping where the boat he was restoring sat on its trailer. It was a standing joke between them: there he was, fixing up a boat, eight hundred miles from the coast. But it had been his father’s, and he wanted to honour the old man’s memory by doing a good job. One day, when he was retired, maybe he’d get to use it. Jesus had been brought up on the coast and he had always hoped he might be able to return there one day. There would be a persuasion job to do with his wife but when his job was finished there would be little to hold them to Juárez. It was possible. He ran the tips of his fingers along the smooth wooden hull and thought of all the hours that he had spent replacing the panels, smoothing them, varnishing them. It had been his project for the last six months and he was looking forward to being able to spend a little more time on it. Another week or two of good, hard work––time he could dedicate to it without having to worry about his job––that ought to be enough to get it finished.
    He returned to the cruiser and got inside. He pulled down the visor and looked at his reflection in the vanity mirror. He was the wrong side of fifty now, and it showed. His skin was old and weathered, a collection of wrinkles gathered around the corners of his eyes, his hair was salt-and-pepper where it had once been jet black and his moustache was almost entirely grey. Age, he thought, and doing the job he had been doing for thirty years. He could have made it easier on himself, taken the shortcuts that had been offered, made the struggle of paying the mortgage a little easier with the backhanders and bribes he could easily have taken. He could have avoided getting shot, avoided the dull throbbing ache that he felt in his shoulder whenever the temperature dipped. But Jesus Plato wasn’t made that way, never had been and never would. Honour and dignity were watchwords that had been driven into him by his father, a good man who had also worked for the police, shot dead by a sicario around the time that it all started to go to hell, the time that dentist was shot to death. The rise of El Patrón and La Frontera. Plato had been a young cadet then, and, while he had been green he had not been blind. He could see that plenty of his colleagues had already been bought and sold by the narcos, but he vowed that he would never be the