Inside Out Read Online Free

and kept his gaze on nothing in particular, nodding his head slightly as though he was enjoying the pulsing house music. He knew the smart thing was to ignore them, but part of him couldn’t help hoping they’d take their wordless interview just a little further. It had been a hell of a day and he could feel that old, crazy urge to unload on someone. If these guys wanted to give him a reason, it was up to them.
    The three of them were in civilian clothes, but he’d heard the accents and seen the swagger and took them for sailors on shore leave. Manila’s Burgos Street, an eternally crumbling matrix of neon and girly bars and massage parlors, had ingested them as it had ingested generations of sailors and marines and sex touristsbefore them. It would appropriate their money, alleviate their lust, and expel them afterward like pale effluent into the dank Manila night.
    The burliest of the three missed his shot at the spotlit pool table, and as he stepped away to make room for his buddy, he squinted and waved a hand up and down in Ben’s line of sight, palm forward, as though wiping a window. The gesture read,
Hello? Anybody there?
    Ben kept his expression blank.
Oh yeah, pal, somebody’s here. And believe me, you don’t want to meet him
.
    A petite Filipina waitress in heels and a microscopic skirt sauntered over to the pool table, balancing a tray of San Miguels one-handed. Ben hadn’t seen her earlier—she must have just started her shift. She took the Australians’ pesos, distributed their beers, and studiously failed to respond to their leering smiles. Then she turned and headed in Ben’s direction, the Australians’ eyes following her ass.
    “You need another drink, sweetie?” she asked Ben, smiling, her eyes dark, her teeth white against the smooth brown skin of her face.
    He was standing with his back to the bar and she would have known he could have just ordered from the bartender. He didn’t know whether her interest was personal or professional. He wondered whether it would irritate the Australians.
    He shook his head and offered only a polite smile. “Thanks, I’m good.”
    She leaned a little closer. “Are your eyes … green?”
    “That’s what people tell me.”
    She smiled again. “It’s my favorite color. If you need anything, just tell me, okay?”
    “I will. Thanks.”
    He told himself that as long as he didn’t do anything to provoke them, it wasn’t his fault. But he also recognized that he was ignoring them almost ostentatiously now, that a more effective way to avoid a problem would have been to raise his Bombay Sapphireand give them a cold smile:
I’m aware of you, I’m not afraid of you, I’m being friendly so you can now look for trouble elsewhere without having to acknowledge you’ve backed down to the guy you were initially assessing
.
    He took a swallow of the gin and set the glass down on the bar. Yeah, that would have been the better way. But that afternoon his ex-wife had told him she never wanted to see him again, that their daughter, Ami, believed the man now raising her was her real father, that he shouldn’t have tracked them down in the first place, and what could he have been thinking after they hadn’t heard from him in nearly three years? She hadn’t even seemed angry when he’d approached her in the rain in front of Ami’s suburban Manila school, just uncomfortable, as though he was no more than an old acquaintance she would have preferred not to run into. She’d countered his protests, ignored his entreaties, and dismissed him with obvious relief. And instead of doing the minimally dignified thing and just leaving, he had lurked around the corner, getting wetter and angrier, until he heard the school bell, and then he had watched pathetically from behind a tree as his ex-wife collected their small daughter, kissing her and taking her by the hand and leading her away before Ben even had time to get a good look at her face. And now he was on his third