Inside Out (17 page)

Paula said, “So you never saw him again.”

“No. And I sure as hell haven’t been looking.”

She said, “You don’t know what he was doing here?”

“I don’t know if he was on holiday, or he had a mistress, or if he wanted to go hiking in the fucking rain forest. I don’t know how long he was here or whether he’s ever been back. I don’t know anything more than what I just told you. And I don’t really want to, either.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Ben said, “I want to know something.”

“What?”

“Why’d you tell us all this?”

Taibbi glanced at Paula. “Because your partner asked so nicely, remember?”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Taibbi took a swallow of whiskey. “I told you, I don’t want to cross paths with Larison again. But that doesn’t mean I want him to live happily ever after, either. So whatever you’re planning to do with him, I figure now it’s your risk, and maybe my reward. That’s a division of labor I can live with.”

Paula frowned. “What do you mean, ‘whatever we’re planning to do with him’?”

Taibbi laughed. “What I mean is, if you’re FBI, I’m Doris Day.” He nodded at Paula. “You, maybe.” Then he looked at Ben. “But you? No way.”

“Yeah?” Ben said. “What am I?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But I’ll tell you what you look like. You look like him.”

In the van on the way to San Jose, Paula was fuming in the passenger seat. “I told you I was going to take the lead. Why can’t you listen?”

“We got what we wanted, didn’t we?”

“Despite you, not because. Every time you open your damned mouth, you antagonize people.”

“Yeah, and then you got to do your sweet southern girl routine. Isn’t that what you guys call ‘good cop, bad cop’?”

“That’s right, ‘you guys.’ That was an FBI ID you showed Taibbi, wasn’t it?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I want to know who the hell you’re with.”

“That doesn’t make any difference, either.”

“Then why won’t you tell me?”

“Because it doesn’t make any difference.”

“It’s all personal for you, isn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You say it’s the job, but it’s not. You’d already gotten past that bouncer, but no, you had to make fun of him afterward, also. And Drew—you’d already disarmed and disabled him, why’d you have to sass him, too? Does the sass help you get the job done?”

He frowned. It was like Hort again, asking him why he went to that Burgos bar.

“Look, a Zen monk can’t do what I do, okay? Not that you would know.”

“Oh, those are the only two possibilities? Zen monk, and you?”

He didn’t answer. He’d never longed to be working alone as much as he did right then.

They drove for a while in silence. Ben said, “Did you catch what Taibbi said about the wallet?”

“Of course I caught it.”

“I mean, what did you make of it?”

“Just what Taibbi said. Larison was trying to make the second killing look like a robbery.”

“Wrong. Larison didn’t give a shit what the second killing looked like. He’d already vanished like a ghost and no one was going to connect him to the body whether the guy died of blunt trauma or a heart attack or was abducted by aliens.”

“Why, then?”

“Because once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

“Will you please stop talking in riddles?”

“Put yourself in Larison’s shoes. You arrive at the airport. You’re good—you’re the best, in fact—so you remember faces, especially ones that belong to anyone who puts out any kind of operational vibe, no matter how slight. At the airport, you log dozens of faces, knowing most of them, probably all, will turn out to be false positives. The ones you see now are happenstance. Then, a
half hour, a bus change, and five miles later, one of those faces pops up again behind you. The guy definitely has the vibe. Okay, that’s twice—coincidence, maybe. Now you get to Barrio Dent—long way from the airport, small part of the city—and you see the guy
again
. That’s enemy action.”

“Tell me again how you’ve never been in the military.”

“So now Larison knows for sure he’s been followed. But he’s got no reason to think there’s any way he could have been followed from the States. In other words, he’s not being followed because he’s Larison. He’s being followed because he’s something generic.”

“You mean, like a tourist.”

“Exactly. He figures that he drew the attention of a gang whose MO is to follow a tourist from the airport, hit him over the head when he’s alone or somewhere dark, and make off with his bag, his wallet, his passport, his watch. It happens. And the pattern fits what Larison realizes is in his wake. So he decides to disrupt the pattern.”

“All right, that’s Carlos. Then what?”

“Then what, I think, could be our break.”

“How?”

“Larison was in town for a few days, maybe longer. Say he was shacking up with his mistress. They’re going out a lot, enjoying the local nightlife, the restaurants and bars. Carlos’s brother Juan knows Larison had business in Barrio Dent or nearby because that’s where they tracked him to. He knows it’s a long shot, but he’s obsessed and he’s got nothing else to go on anyway. So one night, he cases every watering hole in Barrio Dent, Los Yoses, and San Pedro. They’re all right next to each other and none is particularly big. I read it in the guidebook. Systematically, one by one, starting in Barrio Dent, go back to the beginning, repeat. If he doesn’t get bingo the first night, he does it again the next.”

“Okay, one night, like Taibbi said, he gets lucky.”

“Yeah, although again, lucky might not be quite the right word. He spots Larison and his lady, say, having dinner. Now, he
thinks he’s being a cool customer and that no way Larison’s going to make him. Even after what happened to his brother, he doesn’t get what he’s up against. Like Taibbi said, he’s young and hotheaded.”

“And Larison made him.”

“Right. And I’ll give you good odds, too, that Juan was liquored up when he found Larison the second time, so he’d be sloppy and radiating all his inner badassedness. So Larison spots the problem and says to his girlfriend, excuse me, I need to step outside—a smoke, a little air, whatever. Wait here, babe, I’ll be right back. He walks outside, and dumb young Juan follows him. Larison leads him along a little, then doubles back on him, just like he did to Carlos. He doesn’t have time or the opportunity to interrogate him, but he wants to know who are these guys who’ve been following him. So he does him, takes his wallet, puts him in the nearest sewer so he won’t be found until later, and is back inside without even breaking a sweat.”

“Taibbi said Juan’s skull was caved in. How did Larison do that? With some table linen he borrowed from the restaurant?”

Ben reached into his pocket and pulled out the SureFire flashlight. He handed it to Paula. “Feel the bezel, around the glass. That’s Mil-Spec hard-anodized aluminum. Now hold it in your hand like a hammer, with the bezel protruding at the bottom of your fist. Now imagine smashing it into the back of someone’s head with an overhand blow. What do you weigh, a hundred twenty, a hundred twenty-five pounds? You could put a hole in someone’s skull that way. A guy like Larison could do an entire lobotomy.”

She handed the SureFire back to him. “Larison would carry something like this?”

“Like this, or an ASP tactical baton. Or he picked up a rock. It doesn’t matter.”

“How would you know what a guy like Larison carries?”

Ben ignored the probe. “The point is, he does it, takes the wallet, and sees the guy he just killed is named Juan Cole. He would
have checked the papers after he did Carlos, so now he knows he’s dealing with brothers. Taibbi suggested these guys were petty criminals, they probably have records, and the papers would have said as much. So Larison’s working hypothesis becomes, two brothers, or maybe a gang of which two brothers were a part, followed him from the airport hoping to mug him. He killed one brother, the other decided he wanted revenge, Larison killed him, too.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, Taibbi was smart to steer clear—guy’s a survivor type, you can tell. Anyway, after he did Juan, Larison would watch his back even more carefully than usual just to make sure the rest of the gang, if there was a rest of the gang, wasn’t on his ass. Nothing happens, though, and anyway he’s only in San Jose sporadically. And all this was three years ago. So at some point, he figures these were the only two guys he had to worry about. And he doesn’t have to worry about them anymore.”

“What did Taibbi mean when he said ‘whatever you’re planning to do’ with Larison?”

Ben glanced at her, then back to the road. “He meant, what do you think happens to someone who tries to read the angel of death his rights?”

“What are you going to do if we find him, then?”

“I’m not going to wind up like Carlos and Juan, I’ll tell you that.”

“What are you supposed to do?”

“All I’m supposed to do is find Larison. So if we tree him, I hope you’re not going to try to arrest him, okay? You bring that mind-set to the job, you’ll be at a lethal disadvantage. And I don’t want to fill out the paperwork.”

“I’m touched that you care, really.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes.

Paula said, “Where’d you get that ID?”

Ben glanced at her, then back to the road. “You knew there
were other alphabet soup agencies involved in this. You said so yourself.”

“I want to know which one you’re with.”

“I told you, forget about it.”

“You’re some kind of assassin, aren’t you?”

“I’m just here to find Larison,” he said again. The weird thing was, it was the truth. So why did it feel like a lie?

“Taibbi said you looked like Larison. What did he mean by that?”

Ben looked at his watch. “Why don’t you tell me what our next move is. You know, don’t you?”

“Are you talking down to me?”

“Not that I was aware of. But I can if you’d like.”

“Our next move is, we canvass restaurants and bars around the sewer where Juan’s body was found. Larison couldn’t have moved him far—the body would be heavy, for one thing. He wouldn’t have time, or concealment, for another. So wherever Juan was found, Larison was nearby that night. If we show his picture in a few places, and if Larison’s been back or if he was a regular, we might just catch a break.”

Ben nodded. “How’s your Spanish?”

“I can get by. You?”

Ben’s Farsi was fluent, his Arabic decent, and his Spanish high school rusty. “I think we’ll need to rely on you in that department,” he said. “And by the way, it’s not just that Larison must have been close by to where he did Juan. It’s also that, when he killed Carlos, it wasn’t in a place that mattered to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d already spotted the surveillance. He wasn’t going to lead them all the way to his correct address. He’d either get off the bus early, or ride it well past his actual destination. Barrio Dent comes up before Los Yoses on the way from the airport. My guess is, Larison’s real destination that night was Los Yoses, or maybe the next stop, San Pedro, or maybe somewhere farther east. He got off in
Barrio Dent to make sure the killing wouldn’t be too close to a place he was connected with. The second time, he wouldn’t have that luxury. He wasn’t being followed, he’d been discovered. It’s a whole different dynamic.”

“So you think the fact that both killings happened near a restaurant is a coincidence.”

“I think the first one was a coincidence. The second one, maybe not. Anyway, most of the streets in San Jose don’t have names. People use restaurants and other landmarks to describe locations. That’s all Taibbi was doing.”

“How do you know that?”

“Read it in a guidebook on the plane.”

“Well, that was a good idea.”

Ben nodded. He didn’t mention that reading extensively about a place before going operational was ordinarily only the beginning of area familiarization, and that not having had time to do more than read this time made him feel like he was groping and stumbling in the dark.

“So you think his girlfriend lives in Los Yoses?” Paula said.

“Or farther east. But not Barrio Dent. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten off the bus there. Now, tell me this. You think he’d still be dining out a hundred yards away from where he put Juan in a sewer?”

“From what Taibbi told us, I don’t think we’re dealing with someone who gets indigestion from murder.”

“What about tactically? He’d practically be returning 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 at all.

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.