Inside Outt

they’ll wand you. It won’t work.”
    “So you want me to dress up like a sex worker, is that it?”
    “Well, you’ve got the body for it, from what I can tell.”
    She looked at him. “You’re repulsive.”
    He sighed, realizing something. “You’ve never worked undercover before, have you?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It means you’re used to people taking you seriously because you’re the FBI. You’re used to relying on the badge to get what you want. But you’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. You don’t have automatic authority out here. You need to learn to blend, to use stealth.”
    “Stealth? All I’ve seen you use since the moment I met you is force.”
    “The point is, if your sweet-talk routine falls flat, and if no one here gives a shit that you’re with the big bad Bureau, force might be all we have to fall back on. We’re going to be on unfamiliar ground, with a guy who I gather from McGlade is no cupcake, in a place that deals with enough troublemakers to justify a metal detector at the door and probably more security inside. I don’t want to go into an environment like that without a gun if I don’t have to, and if all we have to do to slip one inside is dress you like a streetwalker, it seems like a pretty small price to me.”
    She glared at him for a long moment, then said, “Fine.”
    They got out and walked to an open-air souvenir shop down the street. Along the way they were approached twice by scrawny locals offering weed and ecstasy. Each time Ben shook his head and the dealers peeled off.
    In the shop, amid
¡Pura Vida!
tee 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 out.
    “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 more, it stirred his awareness of her sexuality. Of course, he’d contemplated her sexually from the moment they’d driven off from Kissimmee together—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, 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