Barry Eisler - Inside out

In the shop, amid!Pura Vida! T-shirts and Imperial Beer baseball caps and postcards of beach sunsets and surfers carving waves, they selected a black sarong and a red halter top. Ben looked at the halter Paula was holding, checked the sizes, and grabbed another one, one size down. He held it out. Paula looked at him as though he was offering her a turd.

"I won't even be able to breathe," she said.

"And no bra."

"Are you trying to be funny?"

He wasn't. Maybe, on another occasion, he would have been enjoying the whole thing, but he wasn't in that mode now. He didn't know what was inside that bar and whatever it was, he wanted to be carrying when he found it.

"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 Jaco 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 Jaco streetwalker."

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