Inside Outt

nicely and evaluated him first.”
    “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great line. I’m going to use it myself first chance I get.”
    “Do we understand each other? You’re too much of a hard-ass all the time, and I don’t want you getting in people’s faces and antagonizing them unnecessarily. We won’t get any cooperation that way. You have to know when to use sugar and when to use spice. You’re all spice.”
    “All right, whatever. If you want to take the lead, it’s fine with me. All I care about is the results.”
    “I don’t think that’s true, but okay.”
    “What do you mean, it’s not true?”
    “I mean, when someone uses a hammer for every job he’s presented with, he’s not just trying to do the job.”
    He glanced over. “What’s he doing, then?”
    She looked at him. “He’s enjoying the hammer.”
    Ben didn’t answer. Like a few of her earlier observations, like what Hort had told him in the Manila city jail, the latest comment chafed, and he knew that must mean there was something to it. But not something he was inclined to consider at the moment.
    By the time they pulled into Jacó, the last light had leached from the sky. They rolled along the main drag, two potholed lanes hemmed in on either side by low-slung buildings, some new, others ramshackle. There were open-air restaurants and dim nightclubs, souvenir shops and cheap hotels, construction sites and vacant lots and everywhere palm trees, swaying as though to silent music in the murky dark.
    “There it is,” Paula said, pointing to an enormous illuminated sign for Bottle Bar, the name they’d gotten from McGlade.
    “I know,” Ben said, watching three curvaceous Latina prostitutes going inside. “Just want to get a feel for the street before we go in.”
    He continued down the strip. Small knots of tourists, some Tico, others foreign, wandered the sidewalks and zigzagged back and forth across the street, not aimlessly, exactly, but more with the air of people who would know what they were looking for only when they found it. The contours of the town changed somewhat as they drove, but overall, Jacó was a fractal, each part possessing and revealing the character of the whole. Which was, obviously, the bartering of pleasure—surf and sun by day; booze and sex at night. Burgos Street in Manila, Pattaya in Thailand, Orchard Tower in Singapore… they all looked different, and they all felt depressingly the same.
    They drove back toward Bottle Bar and parked a little way down the street. Paula started to get out. “Wait,” Ben said. “Let’s just watch for a minute.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you never know what you might learn.”
    A group of five pudgy white guys approached the entrance. A security guy in a black Bottle Bar tee shirt stood up and waved a wand over them, but perfunctorily, just their waists and shoulders. The guy reached out and patted a pocket here and there, probably to confirm that what had set off the detector was just a cell phone.
    “See that?” Ben said. “We can’t just go in there with shoulder-holstered Glocks.”
    “All right, fine, we’ll leave the guns in the van.”
    Ben shook his head. Even on his own time, he didn’t like to go unarmed. When he was operational, there was just no way. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s just keep watching for a minute.
    They did. “Look,” he said. “They’re not wanding the girls.”
    It was true. Another collection of prostitutes, black, Latina, and mulatto, went right past the security guy, who nodded and didn’t even stand up.
    “He probably knows those girls,” Paula said. “They’re probably there every night.”
    “Maybe.” He looked at her.
    She frowned. “What?”
    “We need to get you a costume change.”
    She looked at him, not understanding. Then her eyes narrowed as his meaning became clear. “No. No, that’s ridiculous.”
    “It makes perfect sense. Have you seen even one nonprofessional woman go in there in the last ten minutes? Civilian women don’t go to places like Bottle Bar—it’s not that kind of joint. The system is, the hookers get in free and the bar charges the men a cover for the privilege of paying for overpriced beer while they take their time deciding which girl they want to take home that night.”
    “I see you know a lot about places like this.”
    “I know enough to tell you that you can’t just march in there in your FBI pantsuit. You look all wrong. You’ll draw attention and at a minimum