'Well, that's handy,' Paula said. 'I don't suppose you'd like to share.'
'Check under your seat.'
Paula did. There was a Glock waiting for her, too.
'Now that's the kind of interagency cooperation I'm talking about,' she said, smiling and checking the load.
'I don't want you walking around unarmed. But don't point it at me, okay? Once was enough.'
'Well, that would be ungrateful of me, wouldn't it?' she said, and Ben noted that she hadn't actually agreed. Not that it would have mattered anyway. They weren't exactly on their way to a lifelong friendship, but he was pretty sure they were past the point where they'd be throwing down on each other.
They headed north up the coast, the sun setting to their left, the road shifting from one lane to two and then back again as it twisted past jungle and plantation and rickety roadside town. Occasionally they would crest a hill and catch a glimpse of the ocean, its surface scored with gold and pink as the sun slipped away beyond it, but mostly the route felt more tunnel than road, a passage sealed off in all directions but forward and back by the indifferent, impenetrable green of the rain forest all around.
When they passed a sign telling them they were ten kilometers from Jaco, Paula said, 'Now listen. I know you like to be the driver, I know you like to be in charge. But let's not go into Taibbi's place bristling with attitude, okay? If we have to ratchet things up, we'll ratchet things up. But let's start sweet. Which means I'll do the talking, okay?'
Ben chuckled. 'Was that sweet when you told McGlade you were going to climb up his ass and chew your way out?'
'It's what was called for at the moment. But I started 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 Jaco, 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, Jaco 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 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.
