Time of Death

PROLOGUE

El Paso, Texas

Erubiel Diaz lay curled on the wet floor of the soiled gas station restroom. He had been violently ill. But to a man with damaged senses, a weakened stomach and voided bowels could never be anything more than a physical condition. It could never be the bad omen that he had been foolish to ignore. As a result, his instinct that morning had not been to turn back, but to hook a fingernail into a small bag of white powder and take in a pure cocaine rush. Outside, a car radio crackled with a thunderstorm warning. Within hours, the searing heat was set to be broken by quarter-sized hail.

Erubiel Diaz now stood in the cobbled courtyard of a million-dollar home on the west side of the Franklin Mountains. Diaz was squat and muscular, short-limbed and heavy-browed. He was wearing a yellow sleeveless T-shirt and black shorts to his calves. His body, his clothes, hadn’t been washed in days. He was a dark blot in a space that was filled with light, with flowers, plants and trees that he would have recognized if he was the landscape gardener on his van’s fake sign. Only the plant by the living-room window looked familiar to him. Something to do with a bird.

Diaz had a round, lined face, sallow skin, and bloodshot eyes. He squinted against the bright sunshine that bounced off the white walls of the Spanish-style house. He had done what he came here to do. As he made his move to leave, he heard a car pull up outside. The security gates to his left slid slowly open. He pressed himself against the cool stone of the perimeter wall.

The woman who stepped out of the car was nothing like the women he paid for, or took for free, nothing like the worn-out mother of his children. This woman was tall and delicate, with fine blonde hair to her shoulders and a light, freckled tan. She wore a long, flowing skirt, and a white cotton blouse. Three gold bangles shone on her slender wrist. Her polished toenails were the color of the flowers beneath the window. Diaz looked down at his feet. They were wedged into Tevas that were a size too small — their criss-crossed straps digging into his flesh. His toes were short, covered with black hair, their nails caked in dirt.

Diaz checked his watch. It was an absent glance; no matter where the hands pointed, he knew what time it was. What he could not have known as he lurched forward and slammed the woman face-down onto the trunk of her car, was that he had just sent those hands spiraling wildly toward his time of death.

The sound of the woman’s breath as it was forced from her lungs died in the rumble of the forecast thunder. The charcoal sky exploded with light. And the woman watched as the quarter-sized hail came crashing down, severing the fiery blossoms of the Red Bird of Paradise.