Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (4 page)

El Gorrion’s people.

He’d always regretted not killing El Gorrion before he’d left the killing game.

He looked over at the boy, who was still viewing his phone. A furrow in his little brow told Hugo that the consciousness of what he was smelling had gotten at least as far as his instinct.

How long it would take? Would the boy know to feel fear? The boy had been around five when Hugo had lifted him from the bloody, burning battlefield. A child of a child soldier, crying. It had disgusted and moved Hugo, this helpless sobbing boy, surrounded by dead. Utterly unlike him to rescue a child; but that day, he had. Hugo was not a man to question himself. It led nowhere good.

Hugo drove on, feeling eyes peer out from brightly painted cinder block hovels. He knew precisely what they’d find in the village center, but he went on now, needing to see the particulars.

Finally, the boy honed in on the world outside his phone. He looked around, confused, then pointed at the padlock on the door to the school he’d been kicked out of. He’d lasted a mere day.

“
Qué
?” Hugo asked, as if he didn’t understand. It was preferable for the boy to feel smart and observant, because feeling smart and observant had the effect of actually making the boy smarter and more observant. The boy was no good to him stupid.

“
La escuela esta cerrada
,” the boy said.

Hugo nodded. “
Sí
.”

“
Debería estar abierta hoy
.”

“
Sí
.” The school was locked, when it should be open. Hugo pulled the vehicle to the side of the dirt street in the village center, waiting for him to spot the burnt-out hulk of a car. He suspected that the boy’s body would spot it before his mind would. You learned to trust your instincts when you were a killer, a hunter. He waited, and indeed, the boy stiffened. Hugo watched the fear come over the boy’s conscious mind, then the horror. Expressions Hugo knew well, although they were most often directed at him.

The boy’s heart would be beating hard now. Hugo sometimes wondered how specific the boy’s memories were.

“
Combate
,” the boy said, turning his brown eyes to Hugo for confirmation.

Hugo remained impassive. The boy needed to be able to determine such things for himself.

“
Combate
?”

It was now a question. Hugo scowled. “Don’t look at my face for the answer. What do you see?”

Hugo turned off the Jeep and climbed out.

The boy looked surprised that Hugo would treat this as a lesson, but there was no better time for a lesson. The boy cast his gaze around. Movement behind the iron gate of a shop.

“
Miedo
,” the boy whispered, scrambling out from behind Hugo.

“
En
inglés,
” Hugo said, strolling into the rubble. “Complete sentence.”

The boy’s adrenaline was kicking in. Hugo’s old Moro teacher had always instructed him to train at the points of high adrenaline in order to best simulate battlefield conditions. Hugo had lived his life under battlefield conditions. He supposed he should be thankful for having been cast into the pits of rabid dogs that went for schools in Germany and America and other foreign lands, a rough-looking brown boy knowing only Spanish.

As rough as the schools had been, they had always been safer than home.

“Fear. The people are frightened.”

Hugo nodded. “Why?”

They turned the corner and found the worst of it—
la plaza de mercado
burnt.
La farmacia
. El Café Moderno. Hugo’s heart sank.

The boy looked up at him, gauging his reaction.

Hugo kept walking.

The boy followed him to the gate of a shop farther down the way. The shopkeeper came to the gate. Ramona or Renata. She had several children and a husband who was away on the oil rigs. “Get out! Go back! Pack your belongings! El Gorrion. They killed Pedro, Victor…”

Hugo nodded grimly as she related the tale in her rough hills dialect. Hugo had been born in the south, near Valencia’s capital city, but his family had been yanked away before his first birthday, so his Spanish sounded foreign to them. The villagers thought he was American. He was content to let them think it.

Some of the eligible women had tried for him when he’d first taken over the crumbling mountaintop villa, but he’d made it clear he was not interested. When he wanted to enjoy a woman, he went into the city and enjoyed one. He liked women, but only in small doses. And he never brought them to the house.

“They’ve given us twenty-four hours to get out,” she continued. “They’ll kill anybody who stays—unless they’re prepared to cooperate. Like they did in Lapas. They want fields…”

Hugo squinted down the street.

“They’re desperate,” she said. “Looking for cropland this far up the mountainside…”

He could feel the woman’s eyes on him as he followed the direction of her pointing finger. He always knew when people were watching him with any kind of intensity. It was a tickle. Waiting for him to react.

She expected fear. Alarm.

They rarely interacted, he and the villagers, but social order always broke down at a time like this.

“
Ve por ti mismo
.” She pointed across the way.

Another gated storefront. The little repair shop. He knew what he’d find there—he could hear the flies. She bade the boy to stay and help her with something, thinking she was sparing the boy some hell. She had no idea where they came from, Hugo and the boy.

The boy turned his big brown eyes to Hugo.

Hugo nodded, telling the boy to obey. The boy understood Hugo’s every gesture and expression.

Hugo walked across the street and peered inside. Pedro had crawled a ways, judging from the marks upon the dusty slab floor. They had shot him far more than they’d needed to for a kill. Bullets were expensive these days, but this was an efficient use of them nevertheless. Death had never been the goal here. Terror had been the goal.

Humans were animals, and it didn’t take much to spark terror in them. Terror was something between a taste and a feeling in the blood—when you were on the giving end of it, anyway. When you were on the receiving end, it was a form of madness.

He stood there for an acceptable amount of time staring at the old man on the ground, but really he was testing the contours of his own darkness. Trying to see if the violence touched him in the way that it touched regular people. He looked at the blood path and imagined Pedro crawling—doomed, but still fighting to get away, trying to work up some sadness or empathy, but it didn’t work. The sight of the man’s body made him feel like killing somebody. Nothing more.

He turned, watching Ramona guide the boy to some task involving cans. He looked around at the destruction. The villagers had imagined that the remoteness of the village would protect them—that the coca gangs wouldn’t bother reaching up the mountain. But the coca gangs were desperate these days—they were being driven out of places like Colombia and Ecuador in favor of tourism, mining, and legitimate farming. Driven into Valencia.

El Gorrion. Expanding up the mountain.

He came back. “
Lo siento
,” he said.

She nodded, stroked the boy’s hair. The boy frowned, barely tolerating it.

“Fernando?” he asked. Fernando owned Café Moderno.

“Drove out an hour ago. They can take what they want. They’ll want your farm, and they’ll take it. Julian is trying to save some of the bushes, but…”

He nodded. This was the only place in the world that the savinca thrived. The farmers would be saving plants.

Again he squinted down the street. He should feel more than a killing anger, but that was what he felt. He felt it strongly. Because this was his goddamn village.

Nobody fucked with his village.

“
No creo que vayan a volver
,” he said simply.
I don’t think they’ll come back.

He could feel the excitement shoot through the boy like a fucking arrow. The boy knew not to show it.

“They will come back,” Ramona or Renata said. “They’ll want your land. You have good land for coca.” Cocaine land. Because that was what this was about. Not quite up to the frost line.

“
Ellos no volverán
,” he said. “Tell the others—twenty-four hours will pass, and they will not return.” He shouldn’t feel happy about returning to the killing.

Hugo started up the Jeep. Fighting and killing was going to be hell on his burns.

The boy got in, face glowing. He spoke in Spanish. “You’ll save them. You’ll make them sorry for what they did to the old man. El Gorrion has hit the nest of a hornet.”

Hugo kept his eyes on the road. The boy was still idealistic. He wanted him to be something more than a cold-blooded killer.

“You think this is about justice?” Hugo growled.

The boy’s silence told him yes, he thought it was about justice. At least he hoped it was.

“This isn’t about justice.” Hugo said icily. “It’s about
llapingachos
.”

F
ootsteps in the
hall. She sucked in a breath. It was night—maybe eleven. She’d wondered when he’d come.

A key in her door.

She spun around. A slim man with a goatee strolled in—Brujos himself—followed by a woman and then two guards.

The woman came up to her with fire in her eyes and slapped her.

Zelda forced herself to cry, to look bewildered. Brujos’s girlfriend—it had to be.

Brujos came up to Zelda, now. She braced herself. It was going to be something bad with the two of them, or nothing at all.

But Brujos didn’t touch her. “La puta de Mikos,” he said—
Mikos’s whore
—and he spat in her face.

She wiped it off because Liza would wipe it off.
Just last.

It was easy to guess what had happened. The girlfriend had learned about Brujos winning her in a card game and had come to stake out her territory. She wanted Brujos all to herself.

She could have him.

“
Ahora. Antes de que se vayan
.” The woman pointed sideways.
Now
.
Before they leave.

They?
Who?

But she and Brujos were already walking away.

“What about the deal?” she asked.

The two guards came up and took her arms, one on either side.

“Wait!” She twisted away and grabbed the small suitcase. She couldn’t leave that equipment behind, dammit. She couldn’t leave at all—she hadn’t gotten the files.

She was hustled out of the mansion and put in the back of a Jeep. She wanted to scream, thinking about the standoff, about the pirates holding that tanker off Costa Amarrilla. People would die if they blew that thing up. The ecosystem up and down the coast would be destroyed. She had to get back into that mansion.

Two guards with fully automatic weaponry sat up front. There were Jeeps in front and behind her, also full of guards. A convoy of five. The seat covering was rough and warm on her bare ass, which the thong did nothing to cover. At least she had the apron to cover her in front. And the top.

Her blood raced. Why the heavy guard? “Where are we going?” she asked.

Nobody answered, not that she expected it. She really just wanted to remind them that she spoke only English, so that they’d feel free to speak in front of her.

One thing was clear: they weren’t guarding her. Something larger was going on.

Headlights were flipped on and the small motorcade rumbled to life in a cloud of diesel. She strained to listen to the chat in the front seat, but got nothing of importance. Deep down, she knew they weren’t going back to that mansion, or at least she wasn’t.

She eyed the suitcase. Wherever they were going, the stuff in there could give her away. Put Liza in danger. She eased open the lid and pretended to be searching for something, but really she pulled out the vibrator, unscrewing the top and dumping the drive. She quickly crushed it under her heel and shoved it out a rust hole in the bottom of the vehicle, and then she ripped that remaining parabolic mic out of the lining.

“No!” the man in the passenger seat said, tension in his voice.

She held up a shirt. “I’m getting a shirt to wear.” She pressed it to her front.

He grabbed it and threw it out onto the shadowy wayside.

“Hey!”

He shook his head, pointing to her barely covered breasts. “No more.” He clapped his hands together and pointed to the suitcase. A sign to shut it.

She complied, and once he turned, she got rid of the parabolic mic. Clean now. But where were they going?

She’d done enough time in hot spots around the world to know when soldiers were tense. These men were on high alert. Beyond high alert. It wasn’t so evident in their banter with each other, quips and jeers in Spanish over the screaming muffler, putting on brave, macho faces, but you could tell it in the way they held themselves in the silent moments. They expected trouble.

Damn.

She looked down at her feet. She wanted to take the shoes off—she could run and move better in bare feet, yet she still felt protective of them. She always had, ever since Friar Hovde.