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 T-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 after wanding it, probably to confirm that what had set off the detector was just a cellphone.
“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 you can’t just march in there in your FBI pantsuit. You look all wrong. You’ll draw attention and at a minimum 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 and otherwise 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! 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.”