Inside Outt

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 is,” she said, “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 cell phone 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 florescent 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