Inside Outt

to the scene of the crime.”
    “Yes, but like you said, he’s only in San Jose sporadically. A month, or six months after the murder, he knows the case is closed. Juan was some sort of street criminal. I can pretty much guarantee that if they didn’t have a suspect within seventy-two hours of the crime, they dropped the file into a cold cases basement drawer. Which would be like dropping it into the Bermuda Triangle. And Larison would know that.”
    Ben nodded, glad she wasn’t asking any more assassin questions.
    He ran it all through his mind again, and felt pretty sure they were looking at it the right way. And although canvassing restaurants was going to be a long shot, it wouldn’t be any longer than what Juan Cole was up against when he’d gone looking for Larison.
    Which was not a comforting thought.

CHAPTER 17
His Friend Nico
    T he 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 mangos 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 Escazu—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 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