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The pilot opened the door and removed his headset. “Don’t take it personally. Mr. Benning does this sometimes.”
“Does what sometimes?”
He stared back at me, his expression unreadable. If he knew Pierce’s secrets, he certainly wasn’t going to tell.
Fine. I’ll figure it out on my own.
Pierce was walking north, and that was one of the directions he suggested to me, so I walked that way too. We went under a tunnel in the bleachers, which came to a gate that was watched by a guard inside of a little booth. The guard nodded at Pierce and pressed a button. The gate swung open.
On the other side of the gate was a busy street filled with pedestrians. Pierce looked both ways, then turned right. He immediately disappeared into the throng.
I jogged to get to the gate before it closed, giving a little wave to the guard. I barely caught a glimpse of Pierce twenty feet ahead; the crowd was so thick that he would’ve disappeared if I had waited another second.
I’m not following him, I told myself as I started walking. I wanted to go in this direction.
I considered myself well-traveled, but most of those travels were in Europe: France, Spain, Italy. I had never been to a city like San Jose. It wasn’t as clean as many of the European cities I had visited, but that wasn’t to say it was dirty. Just more rugged. The people all around me seemed friendly, smiling as they walked. There were wild dogs here and there, but they looked well-fed and harmless as they examined the passing pedestrians.
The buildings were a wild mix of quality. I passed a dilapidated house with open, glassless windows that showed a woman cooking dinner inside, surrounded by children that were hardly tall enough to reach the waistband of her jeans. The next house was modern, two stories built from brick and glass, surrounded by a fence that was covered with barbed wire. After that was a street vendor roasting some kind of meat on a flat top, followed by a nicer outdoor bar with picnic tables and umbrellas.
Everything was so lively even at this time of day. The culture of it all was overwhelming, but fascinating.
Pierce blended in surprisingly well with his choice of clothes. If he wasn’t tall, and wasn’t wearing that faded red baseball cap, I would have lost him in the crowd. It was still difficult to follow him, since I was staying about fifty feet back.
But my paranoia about being seen proved useful, because suddenly Pierce turned off the street and ducked into a little window shop that sold coffee and pastries. He looked both ways as if he suspected that he was being followed; I was able to avoid being seen by darting into the line for a street vendor, still thirty feet away from the incognito billionaire.
Pierce bought a coffee and continued walking. As I passed the shop, the smell of coffee wafted out and caught my nose. I was tempted to give up on following Pierce and get a coffee myself, but my curiosity was too great to stop.
I followed Pierce for at least ten minutes before he finally stopped at a small outdoor restaurant. It was tucked underneath a canopy of trees, with five concrete tables arranged in front of a bar, and two fire pits glowing yellow in the night, casting long shadows across the space. I slid into a souvenir shop across the street, grabbed a map of Costa Rica from the wall, and pretended to examine it while watching Pierce.
The billionaire was sitting at a table, alone. A waiter passed by; they exchanged some words, and then the waiter disappeared and returned with two beers and a plate of food. Pierce took a sip of beer and hunched over his phone, typing away. Was he meeting someone?
The owner of the souvenir shop tugged on my sleeve and spoke to me in Spanish. He was smiling, but there was an annoyed tension in his eyes, so I purchased the map and a cream colored Costa Rica hat. Then I returned to inconspicuously watching Pierce.
He was still texting on his phone, the food untouched. He took another sip of beer, but he wasn’t drinking fast enough to warrant two of them. I was certain he was meeting someone.
But who?
I got my answer in an unexpected way. My phone vibrated in my pocket with a text message. The number was unknown, but I knew who it was from the context:
UNKNOWN: Are you going to keep watching me from that souvenir shop, or join me for a beer?
13
Melinda
Pierce never looked in my direction. In fact, he had been sitting facing away from me this entire time. How did he know I was stalking him?
I considered playing dumb. Ignoring the text, or replying to tell him that I didn’t know what he was talking about. Of course, that would have been stupid—he obviously knew I was here. Swallowing my pride, I grudgingly left the shop and walked over to the outdoor restaurant.
“How do you have my number?” I demanded.
Pierce gave me a funny look. “That’s what you’re surprised about?”
I sat across from him and eyed the food. It was a bowl of thick white chunks mixed with diced peppers and spices, and a side of crackers still in the plastic wrapping. Were the white chunks fish? Instead, I took a long pull from the second beer. It was called Imperial, with a black, yellow, and red label. I didn’t recognize it, but it was cold and tasted good.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Pierce gestured with his beer. “What does it look like? I’m relaxing. I’ve had a busy couple of days.”
