Which was not a comforting thought at all.
17. His Friend Nico
The drive from Jacó took three hours. The road zigzagged up through the jungle and then down again, the diffused glow of the moon behind the clouds from time to time silhouetting mountains in the distance. Here and there they passed the odd roadside soda selling tacos or a bodega advertising fresh mangoes and avocados, and the light from these tiny and invariably empty establishments would shine in the distance like a promise of permanence and then fade away behind them, leaving nothing but the headlights pushing feebly against the dark again, the jungle close on either side, the van feeling small, enclosed, improbable, a bathysphere exploring an accidental canal along some ocean’s lightless floor.
They passed the time talking about pistols, loads, and their favored carries. For someone who took a dim view of violence, Ben had to admit, Paula knew her hardware. Paula used the iPhone to find a hotel in San Jose -the InterContinental, in Escazú-and to confirm there were vacancies. Ben told her not to make a reservation. The hotel wasn’t going to sell out its remaining rooms this late, and he saw no advantage to possibly alerting someone to where he would be spending the night. Not that anyone was looking, but… he just had this weird feeling, like there were forces moving around and beneath him, forces he could sense but not understand, and the feeling was keeping his usual low-grade combat paranoia at a healthy simmer.
They arrived in Barrio Dent at close to eleven. The iPhone’s GPS function took them straight to La Trattoria, where Taibbi said Carlos had been killed.
Ben parked the van and they stepped out into the sultry night air. There was an audible whoosh of traffic from the central avenue a block away, but other than that the neighborhood was quiet, its colonial houses decaying in stoic dignity beneath the swaying palm trees.
A streetlight across from the restaurant cast a sickly yellow cone of light on the crumbling sidewalk beneath it. Outside the illuminated pall, the street was cloaked in shadow. Ben stood at the edge of the light and glanced around.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “He got off the bus on the central avenue, took a couple turns, walked past this light… yeah, he could have come at Carlos from anywhere in the dark, and disappeared as easily. Okay.”
They walked back to the van. “What does that tell us?” Paula said.
“Maybe not much. I just need to get in his head.”
“Is it working?”
Ben nodded, imagining what Carlos would have looked like spotlighted under that streetlight. “Plug in the coordinates for that restaurant Spoon, will you? Let’s see if we can figure out what happened there.”
Paula did. It wasn’t much more than a kilometer. They drove the short distance, parked just down the street from the restaurant, and walked over. Spoon was on the corner of two reasonably busy streets, cars parked on both sides, an auto body repair place across from it, the neighborhood a weird mixture of small restaurants and light industry, overgrown lots behind rusting chain-link fences, high-tension wires clinging to low buildings, plaster façades giving over to creeping mold feasting nonstop in the incessant tropical moisture.
Ben looked inside the restaurant. A neighborhood joint, brightly lit, cacti in the windows, plastic chairs and vinyl booths, locals talking and laughing over what looked like desserts and coffee. He could hear eighties American pop playing incongruously from inside. Windows ran the length of the place on both streets it was facing, and Ben was on the verge of deciding this wasn’t where Juan Cole had seen Larison-he wouldn’t have needed to go inside-when he saw there was a back room that wasn’t visible from the windows. So he would have gone inside to check. Okay, Spoon was a possible.
He turned and watched the street for a moment, imagining Larison inside with his girlfriend. Juan Cole pops his head in, you spot him, but he doesn’t spot you spotting him. What do you do? You make the decision. You come up with an excuse and get up. You go outside, and…
He looked around. Not the street facing the entrance. Too busy. You’d make a right, instead, toward what looked like a more residential part of the neighborhood. Yeah, that felt right. And according to Taibbi, it was where they’d found Juan Cole.
He walked down the cracked sidewalk, Paula just behind him. As soon as he was beyond the light cast through the restaurant window, he was enveloped in darkness. It felt right. So right he was nearly convinced this was exactly how it had gone down.
The block was short. He passed a rust-colored, two-story apartment building on the right, its windows, like all the others he’d seen in San Jose, barred. Then a windowless wall. The sidewalk curved right onto the cross street, and on instinct, Ben followed it rather than crossing the street, and bam, there it was, he saw exactly what Larison had done. There was a staircase and an entranceway immediately to his right. Larison had ducked into it the second he’d turned the corner. If he had any street sense at all, Juan Cole would have realized what had happened just an instant after turning the corner and seeing that Larison was gone, but in that instant Larison had already stepped out from the shadows and broken open the back of Cole’s head. An instant could be a hell of a long time against a guy like Larison.
He looked around. Taibbi had said southeast corner, right? That meant across the street. Ben waited for a car to pass, its headlights momentarily cutting through the darkness, then crossed over.
Yeah, there it was. A corner sewer, the cement lip eaten away by time and humidity and lack of repair. It would have taken Larison all of five seconds to drag Cole across the street and shove him inside. If Cole hadn’t been a big man, he would have fit easily enough. If he had been big… Ben knelt, took hold of the metal grate, and lifted it. It came free easily.
Yeah, brain him, take his wallet, wait for any cars to pass, drag him, dump him… he wouldn’t have been gone longer than three minutes. People left for longer than that when they got up to take a leak.
“I think it was in Spoon,” Ben said, standing up.
“Where Cole saw Larison?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?”
Ben shook his head. “Just a feeling. Let’s go see if anyone in that restaurant recognizes Larison.”
They walked back to Spoon and went inside. It was lively with laughter and conversation and the sounds of Billy Idol playing through speakers in the ceiling. Yeah, a neighborhood place. The crowd-about twenty men and women, ages ranging from mid-twenties up to maybe fifty-felt like they belonged there, like they were regulars. Just a neighborhood dessert place, good when you’re tired after a night out, but not quite ready for the night to be over.
The host, a smiling man with a belly and a handlebar mustache, walked over with a couple of menus.
“¿Cuantas personas?” he asked. How many?
Paula smiled and responded in Spanish while she showed her credentials. Ben was able to make out most of it: We’re looking for a regular customer of yours, we’d be grateful if you could help us find him. He’s not in trouble, we just need to ask him a few questions.
“Your Spanish is very good,” the host said in English, returning her smile and wiping his hands on his apron. “But if you like, maybe English is better?”
Paula laughed. “Oh, my goodness, thank you for saving me from embarrassing myself. Yes, please, English, if that’s okay.”
The host’s smile broadened. “All right. How can I help?”
Ben had to admit this was the right time for Paula to take the lead. When she wasn’t busting balls, there was something so… soft about her. It was disarming. Maybe that’s what she’d meant about people not seeing her coming.