Inside Out (15 page)

“I’m being one hundred percent professional when I tell you there’s going to be a direct correlation between the doorman’s eagerness to examine you with his eyes and his failure to examine you with the metal detector.”

She looked at him for a long moment, as though trying to detect
some glint of humor or mockery in his eyes. When she saw none, she said, “All right, then,” and took the smaller halter into the changing room.

A few minutes later, she emerged, and despite himself, Ben’s mouth dropped open a little. He could tell before that she had a good body, but … damn.

“How’s this working for you?” she asked, smiling and stepping unusually close.

“It’s … you look good. For the role, I mean.”

She stepped closer. “You sure there’s nothing else I need to do, just to make sure I’m properly in character?”

He hadn’t noticed earlier that she’d been wearing perfume, but he could smell it now, and as much as the revealing clothes, maybe even more, it stirred his awareness of her as female. He’d contemplated her sexually from the moment they’d driven off from Kissimmee together, of course—she was an attractive woman, and some level of sexual contemplation of attractive women was a reflex for him. But it had been more of an intellectual thing initially, driven partly by curiosity, partly by antagonism. Seeing so much of her actual skin, her body revealed in the ridiculously tight halter and clinging sarong, smelling her perfume from how close she was standing … there was nothing intellectual about it.

She stepped so close he was sure he could feel the heat from her body. She put a palm on his chest, and he was acutely aware of its warmth and slight pressure. “What, nothing to say? That’s not like you.”

“What do you want me to say?” he said, horrified to feel himself getting hard and searching for some way to regain control.

She looked into his eyes. “Anything you like,” she whispered. “Whatever it is you want.”

He swallowed. “Come on, knock it off. We’ve got something to do.”

He took hold of her hand. She allowed him to remove it from his chest, but as soon as he’d done so, she replaced it, this time on his hip. Tilting her head back so that she was still looking into his
eyes, she stepped all the way in and pressed her breasts and pelvis against him. His lungs wanted to suck in a breath and he barely managed to refuse them.

She shifted slightly, and the feeling of her breasts moving against him, separated only by a pair of inconsequential pieces of fabric, the friction of her crotch against his hard-on …

“Oooh,” she cooed. “Feels like you have something nice down there.”

Within the severely curtailed drop-down menu of his mind, he recognized a possible option. Call and raise. See how far she would go with this before she blinked.

And was suddenly certain she wouldn’t blink. Not for anything.

She wet her lips with her tongue and moved her hand around to his ass. He grabbed her wrist and stepped away. “Okay, enough,” he said. “You’ve made your point.”

“My point? What’s my point?”

He blew out a long breath. “I don’t even know, but I’m sure you’ve made it.”

And suddenly the coquette was gone, vanished, and he was looking at Paula again. “The point,” she said, “is don’t assume I can’t work a cover.”

She was right. Just because she didn’t know the details of playing a role didn’t mean she didn’t have an instinct for it. She’d fooled him outside Marcy Wheeler’s house, and again now.

And damn, he was blushing, he could feel it. “Big mistake,” he said. “Clearly.”

“Now let’s go talk to Taibbi.”

They found a shadowy place under a palm in an empty lot. Paula put her gun in her purse and slung it over her shoulder so the bag rested against her ass and the strap pressed diagonally across her cleavage. The look concealed the bag and its unusual weight, and also further accentuated her breasts, something a moment earlier Ben would have sworn impossible. They waited until they saw another group of prostitutes approaching from down the sidewalk.
Paula fell in behind them as they passed and joined them at the entrance. The security guy waved them through with professional indifference, though he did take a long moment to look Paula up and down in a way that had nothing to do with his job description. All right, good to go.

Ben concealed his own Glock in the grass at the base of the palm. He judged the risk of someone breaking into the van greater than that of someone stumbling across the gun here, and besides, if things went hairy inside and one of them made it out, the quicker the access, the better. He also left behind the SureFire LX2 LumaMax flashlight he carried. It was a little longer than the width of a man’s hand and as thick as a thumb, with a length of duct tape wrapped around its middle to make it easier to hold in the teeth. Useful for a variety of tasks, not all of them involving illumination, and a little too recognizable as special ops everyday carry by anyone with an eye for such things. He took the souvenir shop bag they’d put her jacket and pants in and moved off.

He imagined himself as just another horndog tourist, liberated from the strictures of work and church and family and on the cusp of a night of memorable Jacó debauchery. With the scent of Paula’s perfume lingering in his nostrils and the feel of her breasts still vaguely electric against his torso, getting the vibe right wasn’t too much of a stretch.

The doorman wanded his waist, shoulders, and the souvenir shop bag he was carrying, patted the cellphone in his back pocket, and waved him in. Ben pushed open the door and a pretty woman pointed to a sign in English and Spanish—cover charge for men two thousand colones, or four dollars U.S. Ben gave her the money in colones and she taped a fluorescent paper bracelet to his wrist, a pass to show he’d paid if he came back later and wanted to pick another girl.

The place was a long rectangle, with an island bar up front and a second bar against the left side farther back. The lighting was low—just a collection of small blue and red bulbs dangling from a black ceiling, plus the glow of a half dozen wall-mounted flat-screen
monitors all displaying the same soccer game, all inaudible over the thumping house music. Ben estimated the crowd at about thirty, but the place looked like it could accommodate ten times that, assuming local fire codes were interpreted with the appropriate leeway. Well, it was early still, and places like Bottle Bar didn’t really get going until a bit later in the evening. He noted an alarmed emergency exit on the right, and had a feeling there would be another in back.

He moved inside, keeping the island bar to his left, avoiding the bold eyes of the hookers. He spotted Paula at the end of the bar and walked over.

“You come here often?” he asked, raising his voice over the music, his eyes sweeping the area behind her.

“Yes, it’s my favorite place. Give me my clothes now, okay? I think we’re more likely to get some cooperation from Taibbi if I look like the Bureau than if I look like a Jacó streetwalker.”

“No problem. Just step in close first and slide the barrel of the Glock into the back of my pants, okay?”

“I’ll hang on to the gun, thanks.”

“I don’t want to argue about this,” he said, suppressing a little surge of irritation. “I’m sure you’re a good shot, but you probably expend as much ammunition in a year on the range as I do on an average day. And I won’t even ask how many gunfights you’ve been in. You’re trained for law enforcement, Paula, not combat shooting. So do me a favor. For both our sakes. Give me the gun. And I’ll give you your clothes.”

She glared at him, and he was suddenly unsure whether having her stick a gun in his pants was such a hot idea. But then she was stepping in close, standing on her toes, her breath warm against his ear, one hand under his shirt on his abdomen, the cold gun metal on the skin of his back, and she slid her front hand around and eased his pants back and he felt the barrel of the gun slide into his waistband.

“You’re lucky I don’t shoot your ass off,” she said. She took the bag with her clothes and moved off to find the bathroom.

Ben watched her go. He adjusted the Glock, then did another circuit of the bar. He counted a total of six security guys, including the one with the portable metal detector out front, all in Bottle Bar T-shirts. Three of them were behind the island bar, working alongside an equal number of petite Ticas, and didn’t look like much, though probably they could be mobilized if there were a problem that required a show of force. And probably the number of security personnel, like the number of bartenders, would increase as the hour grew later and the bar more raucous.

He walked. Rear emergency exit—check. Next to it, a black curtain with a sign next to it that said
Privado
. Presumably Taibbi’s office. And if there had been any doubt, the muscleman in dreadlocks and the black Bottle Bar T-shirt sitting on a stool next to the curtain would be an important clue. Okay. He stood a little ways off and watched the scene in the bar and waited. He thought of the last bar he’d been in, the one in Manila. But it was different now. He was operational. If violence was called for, he’d use it purposefully.

Or at least for the right purpose.

After a few minutes, Paula appeared. She was back in her regular clothes.

“I think I’m going to miss that outfit,” Ben said.

“I’m sure you will.”

“I should have taken a picture.”

“Yeah, you should have. Because that’s the last you’ll be seeing of it.”

“You ready?”

“Let’s go.”

They strolled over to Dreadlocks. The guy watched their approach and didn’t get up. Ben wasn’t impressed. If he’d been Dreadlocks and seen himself walking over, he’d damn sure be on his feet before the threat had closed the distance.

Paula said, “Hello there. Do you speak English?
¿Habla mejor Español?”

Dreadlocks looked at her and said in American-accented English, “What do you want?”

“Oh, thank you. My Spanish is so rusty. We’re here to see Mr. Taibbi.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“I don’t believe so, no. But I’m sure he’ll want to talk to us anyway. We have some information about Harry McGlade.”

Dreadlocks looked at her for a moment longer, shifted his eyes to Ben, then shrugged. He got up, parted the curtain, and disappeared behind it. Ben heard a door open and close.

A minute later, Dreadlocks appeared from behind the curtain. He stood closer to Ben and Paula than he needed to, crossed his massive arms across his chest, and said, “He’s not here.”

Ben looked at him. “You had to go back there to figure that out?”

“Guess I did.”

“When’s he coming back?”

“Don’t know. Maybe never. Main thing is, he’s not here. Now you need to not be here, too. You understand?”

“Of course we do,” Paula started to say. “It’s just—”

Ben cut her off. “Actually, I don’t. I can be a little slow about that kind of thing. Maybe you can explain it to me.”

Ben could tell by a dozen tiny signals the guy wasn’t a fighter, just someone who’d gotten used to intimidating people with his size and demeanor. Some guys like that, when they realized they’d treed a bad one, would find a lame way to back off and save face. But Ben didn’t see any of that kind of recognition in Dreadlocks’s eyes. Well, every would-be hard-ass fucks with the wrong guy eventually. Looked like Ben was going to be this one’s first.

Dreadlocks looked at Ben and frowned. Ben thought of something one of his instructors had once taught him, something he’d already known from innumerable street fights as a kid. But he liked his instructor’s formulation anyway:

When faced with violence, make sure you hit first, soon, early, and often
.

Didn’t look like Dreadlocks had received that particular memo. Well, it was never too late to learn.

Dreadlocks uncrossed his arms and stepped in closer. Ben knew the stance was supposed to look confident, and he supposed it did. But it was also extremely stupid. It left the guy’s whole body open to attack.

“I’m gonna ask you—”

Ben didn’t wait for the rest of the question. He threw a hand forward like a guy pitching a softball. There was a nice, satisfying impact as his palm connected with Dreadlocks’s package. Dreadlocks made an
oomph
sound and doubled forward, his eyes bulging. Ben spread his fingers, raked in everything in the neighborhood, and squeezed extremely hard. The sound Dreadlocks was making changed to
huuunnnnhh
, and his face turned as scarlet and stricken as that of a man having a coronary. He wrapped his hands around Ben’s wrist but Ben didn’t let up for a second.

Ben looked around to make sure Dreadlocks didn’t have plain-clothes backup and that they hadn’t drawn the attention of any of the uniformed security up front. He didn’t see anyone. They were lucky the bar was relatively quiet at this hour, the security posture accordingly relaxed.

“I’m sorry, what did you want to ask me?”

“Hnnnnuuuunnnnnhhhhh,”
Dreadlocks said, grimacing.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak
hnuh
. But let me ask you something. Answer in English, okay? Is Taibbi here?”

“He’s … here … ,” Dreadlocks said, sounding like a human steam kettle.

“Good, I thought so. Now, in a second, I’m going to let you go. You try asking me any more questions after that, I’m not going to be so easy on you. Okay?”

“Okay,” Dreadlocks wheezed.

Ben let go and Dreadlocks dropped to his knees, clutching himself and making retching noises. Ben stepped past him through the curtain. Paula caught up and said, “What the hell was that?”

Ben glanced at her. “Just trying to break the cycle of violence.”

“You call that breaking the cycle of violence?”

“Well, there’s no more violence, is there?”

“How are we going to get any cooperation after that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t usually think that far ahead.”

Ben swung open the door and stepped into a small, rectangular room, only slightly better lit than the bar outside, Paula just behind him. A man was sitting in an enormous leather chair facing the door, leaning back, his legs up on a wooden desk, tooled-up cowboy boots crossed at the ankles. He had a head of shaggy gray hair and small, strikingly blue eyes set back deeply under a craggy, protruding brow. He didn’t flinch when Ben and Paula walked in. Instead, he pulled a few leaves off a plug of chewing tobacco in a pouch and casually eased them up between his gums and cheek. He closed the pouch and tossed it onto the desk. Then he slowly worked the wad into place with his tongue, watching them silently.