Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) by Carolyn Crane Page A

bed; that would give him a few hours of peace. He drained his beer and began on his churrasco . The boy and Liza had pollo asado . The boy finally got service. He began surfing the Web, scrolling his phone with one hand and eating with the other.
    “You can make this, right?” He nodded at his churrasco . “This would be acceptable.”
    “Let’s find a recipe.” She inclined her head toward the boy’s phone.
    “It’s only a grilled steak,” he said. “This is rice. An avocado. You can find out the recipe from looking at it, can you not?”
    She gazed at him straight on. “I like a recipe. I like to do things right.”
    “The ingredients are there to see.”
    “To make it the best as possible,” she said, “with the right seasonings, I need a recipe.”
    “The seasoning is chimichurri sauce,” he said.
    She asked the boy to look up three recipes for chimichurri .
    “Three?” Hugo pressed. “You need three?”
    “Yes,” she said, still with that blank face. “I want it to be right.”
    Americans. They needed help with everything. Everything was Mickey Mouse. Shiny. It disgusted him. “Get her three recipes. And three for llapingachos stuffed with cheese as well.”
    They named off more meals. Hugo decided she would make lomo saltado for dinner.
    The boy furrowed his little brow, punching away at the tiny screen, which shone with the liquid colors of his game, Hugo noticed.
    “Now!”
    The boy complied, and then passed the phone to her. The boy retrieved a pencil from the Jeep. She copied the recipe onto the back of the wax-paper wrapper. When enough time had passed, Hugo snatched away the phone. “No Internet unless I’m present.”
    He couldn’t have her communicating with the outside world. His eyes fell to the bandage on her wrist. He needed to get a look under there. She was his to care for now.
    She dashed a drip of sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I might want to contact a friend to say I’m all right. Could I do that?”
    “We’ll see,” he said as he emailed her name and everything else he had on her—Miami, Mikos, all of it—to his private investigator in Bogotá.
    His beautiful mother had been a wonderful cook, and she’d never needed recipes. “Do you know how to make anything without the aid of a recipe?”
    “No.” She looked him in the eye as she said it, unashamed.
    “Not even a peanut butter sandwich?”
    Her blank expression lit briefly with a flare of emotion—incredulousness, annoyance. Whatever it was, he liked it. “You want peanut butter sandwiches?” she asked.
    “ Ni loco .” He turned to the traffic speeding by on the dusty street, watching out the corner of his eye as the boy looked up recipes. “No.”
    Okay, then.
    She insisted that they examine three recipes for each dish and create a shopping list. Was she hoping to contact somebody?
    They sent the boy down the street to a small market with the list.
    “He’s not yours, then?”
    “No,” Hugo said simply.
    “A relative?”
    He shook his head.
    “Orphan?”
    “Probably.”
    “What do you do for his birthday? Do you celebrate the day you brought him home?”
    “I see no reason to celebrate that day,” Hugo said, picturing the boy weeping among the bloody bodies. “Do not teach him that word, señorita .”
    “You don’t want him to know the word for birthday .”
    “No.”
    “I’ve never heard of a child without a birthday.”
    “I’ve never heard of a woman who needs three recipes for one sauce.”
    She kept her face perfectly blank, but she wasn’t fooling him. He could feel her flare hard and hot, like a flame upon a match head, and it made his heart speed. “I did not take you on to teach him Mickey Mouse and birthdays.”
    “Fine,” she said. “No birthdays.”
    Was that a taunt? “Perhaps you could celebrate that you are alive and not a corpse being torn apart by jaguars or El Gorrion’s men. It can still be arranged. I can still bring you back there. Is