Two Evils

by Christina Moore

  Once her still-damp jeans had been peeled away, Stan dropped to his knees at the foot of the bed. With a hand on each of her thighs, he rubbed them up and down. Billie could feel him beginning to tremble with desire, and realized that if she didn’t keep talking, he might forego the cunnilingus for immediate penetration.

  “Put my leg over your shoulder, Stan,” she told him in a sweet voice. “Nuzzle the inside of my knee and then kiss down the inside of my thigh toward that part of me that you really, really want.”

  Stan grinned foolishly—and then did as he’d been told. He lifted her left leg to place it over his shoulder, rubbing his nose lightly along the soft skin on the inside of her knee as she’d instructed him to before planting the first kiss over that spot. He then moved slowly downward, kissing and licking the inside of her thigh as he came closer to her panty-covered pubis.

  When he was positioned exactly as she wanted him—within inches of his goal—Billie achieved hers: in a flash of movement, she had her right leg up and slapped to the side of his head, crossing her ankles so her knees and calves locked together behind it, the pressure exerted by her thighs cutting off his air. Stan’s face grew red and his eyes bulged as one hand moved to try and pry her legs apart and the other reached for the gun at his waist.

  “What’s the matter, Stan? Am I too much woman for you now?” she taunted snidely, lifting her hips and pressing down with her shoulders to increase the pressure. When she had performed this maneuver on Wayne yesterday morning, her hold had been only tight enough to get him to let go of her throat—this time she was squeezing harder, fighting for her life and the life of another. While Wayne had suffered from little more than a headache as a result (which could also have been a result of his IQ-56 withdrawal), Stan would possibly be passed out for hours, and when he woke he would feel as though he had a monster hangover.

  Though he did get his hand on the pistol’s grip, his pull on it was sluggish, and by the time the muzzle was clear of his waistband, he was out like a light and the gun simply fell to the floor. Billie let the unconscious soldier drop face first onto the bed and drew her legs away from him. Sitting up, she crawled on her knees toward him and then stepped off the end of the bed to kneel next to him, looking for where he’d put the keys. Stan had used a key on the door of the double-bed cabin, and it had been on a ring with a few other keys—she remembered seeing him put them somewhere around his waist, or perhaps in his pocket. There, hooked on his belt loop with one of those hooks that resembled a climbing carabiner. Turning her back to him, she reached for it, the keys jingling as she tugged.

  At that moment she heard a gunshot, followed by a second, and then rapid firing broke out. Damn it, she had to hurry—the cavalry was here, and she wanted to greet them with open arms.

  “Damn it, Malone—where the fuck is Stan?!” she heard Wainright shout.

  “I told that dumbfuck not to mess with that bitch!” Malone replied. “Start the boat, sir—you need to stay out of the line of fire. I’ll go get him.”

  Shit! She had the keys free of Stan’s belt loop, now it was just a matter of finding the right one. Double shit—the engine was starting and the yacht was moving, and there were only seconds before Malone found her there with Stan knocked out. When he did, she wanted Stan’s gun in her hand.

  Keys jingled as heavy footsteps approached—Malone apparently had a set as well. Only one would have to do, she told herself, getting the handcuff key inserted and twisting it as she heard Malone opening the door to the other cabin. Once her left hand was free, she tossed the keys aside and grabbed the gun, a standard-issue M1911A1, then stood and reached for the door handle.

  She turned it quickly, hoping to surprise Malone as she popped into the tiny vestibule before both rooms. Instead, she felt dread pool in her gut when she stepped out to find him standing in the lounge with one arm around Rebecca’s throat, holding his gun to her head with the other hand. Billie drew on him in a flash, cursing herself for being too preoccupied with her own escape to have heard him grab the lieutenant, and spared only a glance for the pilot’s station over her head—she didn’t see Wainright at all.

  “Drop the gun, bitch,” Malone snarled, pressing the end of the muzzle into Rebecca’s temple.

  “Even you, asshole, have to know that there’s only one way a Marine surrenders her weapon,” Billie replied tartly.

  “You’re not a Marine anymore, remember?” he countered.

  “For some of us: once a Marine, always a Marine. For others—like three of the five people on this boat—never again.”

  Malone tightened his grip on Rebecca’s windpipe. Her hands were clasped around his forearm, trying to pull it away.

  “Let her go, Malone,” Billie demanded.

  “Not a chance. She’s seen too much. The both of you know too much. We can’t let either one of you go,” Malone replied.

  “Dude, you know there’s only two ways this could go down,” she told him matter-of-factly. “You shoot her, then I shoot you and the general. You lose. Or you could try to shoot me first, at which time I’ll shoot you and then the general. You still lose.”

  Malone laughed. “’Try’ to shoot you first? Don’t you think hanging out with criminals on the beach might’ve made your aim a little bit rusty? How many people have you killed recently, Miss Deadliest Woman?”

  “In the last three days alone? Five.”

  Malone blinked in evident surprise, and to her relief his arm relaxed enough to allow Rebecca to draw air. So the general hadn’t told his little lackey about how she’d taken out the entire hit squad sent to eliminate her? This was interesting news.

  “In the half second or so it would take you to turn your hand to shoot me I would drop you—make no mistake about that, Malone,” Billie continued. “No matter what decision you make next, you’re a dead man—so why not meet your maker with one less stain on your soul? Let the lieutenant go, and face me one-on-one.”

  Malone’s face darkened with anger. Billie knew that he was contemplating his chances of success against her, and found it somewhat sad that he even wasted the time doing so. With a distance of less than ten feet between them, however, there was simply no way he could either shoot Rebecca and then her, or attempt to shoot her first, without her killing him before he completed his objective.

  The choice of who was going to shoot first was taken out of their hands when Rebecca suddenly erupted, crying out in fury as she performed a series of classic self-defense moves on her captor: she twisted and elbowed him hard in the solar plexus, then stomped on his foot, brought her laced-together hands up to slam then into his nose, and then brought them back down again to grab hold of his groin. Malone was so stunned by her unexpected movement that he failed to react in time, and it was with a loud wail that her grip on his external genitalia sent him crashing to the carpet on his knees, his gun already having fallen from his loosened grip. Rebecca then brought her own knee up into his face, snapping his nasal cartilage. Once he was down she kicked him hard in the head, knocking him out cold.

  Billie was fascinated by the display—up until now, Rebecca had been almost meek. But that? That was the Marine she’d known was hidden under the file clerk.

  Rebecca dropped to sit on the low table, her face pinched as though in pain, and lifted her foot to cradle it. “I think I might have broken a toe,” she said wryly as she slowly pulled her shoe off. Her big toe was indeed in the process of swelling.

  “A well-deserved battle wound, sister,” Billie said, searching for Malone’s keys and finding them in his pocket. She finished removing her handcuffs, then removed Rebecca’s and handed her Stan’s gun. Next she put one pair of the cuffs on Malone, then dragged him into the cabin where she’d left Stan. He was still out of it, and so offered no resistance to her application of the second pair of handcuffs. She then picked up her pants and her boots, exited the stateroom, and locked them inside.

  “Captain, Stan didn’t—” Rebecca started to say, but Billie cut her
off with a shake of her head.

  “Made me sick to do it, but I let him think he was about to get what he wanted, then put him in a choke hold with my legs,” she said simply as she yanked her jeans back on. She then quickly shoved her feet back into her boots and stepped up into the lounge, picking up Malone’s weapon—another military-issue pistol—and looked toward the door that led out onto the deck.

  “Wow. I never knew a person could actually knock someone out that way,” Rebecca said.

  “Takes training and practice,” Billie replied. “I better go deal with the general before he takes us out to sea or something.”

  “Fuck. I’d almost forgotten about him,” Rebecca said. “I’m kinda surprised he hasn’t come down here already—but then I guess someone has to steer the boat.”

  Billie looked down at her. “Hold your gun on that door,” she said, gesturing behind her. “If either one of them comes through it before I come back, don’t hesitate to shoot.”

  Rebecca adjusted her grip on the gun and nodded. Billie then put a hand on her shoulder and headed for the exit, chambering a round in her own weapon as she went. With the safety off and a finger by the trigger, she mounted the steps and took hold of the sliding door’s handle, then pushed it slowly to the side. She saw nothing immediately in front of her save for the deck table.

  And the dock as it was slowly receding from view.

  She made a quick note of the firefight going on between men positioned on boats tied at the dock—obviously in the employ of the general—and at least five others on the shore. All but one of those were familiar to her, and her heart skipped a beat as she prayed that John and the team (and whoever they’d brought along to help) stayed safe and emerged victorious.

  “Tell me, Miss Ryan,” came Wainright’s voice from above and to her right. “What was my first mistake—choosing your team for the experiment?”

  At the right of the cabin door were four steps topped in gleaming wood. Billie walked cautiously over to them, turning quickly with her gun at the ready, pointing it up to the open bridge above. The pilot’s seat was directly in front of her; Wainright sat there with his back to the steps, his hands steady on the wheel save for a movement to adjust a control off to the side.

  “Don’t feel so surprised I knew it was you,” he said. “Stan and Malone are smart boys, up to a point. But there’s really no one that quite compares to you, is there? I should have told them to shoot you if you survived going off the bridge. Bringing you onto the boat was a mistake.”

  “One of many,” she replied. “And no, choosing my team wasn’t the first—choosing them was the second. Not drugging all of them was the third, as I said before, and giving me up to Grigori Sardetsky was the fourth.”

  He kept his back to her still, though he laughed a little at her words. “So you found out that little secret too, I see.”

  The yacht was picking up speed steadily as it moved down Boundary Channel. Ahead was the wider stretch of Pentagon Lagoon, and before long Wainright would be able to turn the wheel left toward the underpass that would take them to the river proper.

  “I made a logical assumption based on the facts at hand,” she said in reply. “I mean, you deal in sex slaves, far too many of which are lured out of Russia.”

  Wainright shook his head. “Please, Miss Ryan—let us not soil the conclusion of our acquaintance with lies.”

  Billie scoffed. “You’re kidding me, right?” she asked incredulously. “You have been lying to me from the moment I met you, and you have the audacity to lecture me about honesty?”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “However, if you insist on the truth in your final moments as a free man, so be it… Rebecca took a listen to one of the conversations between yourself and Vasily Krupin that you kept on file, though I honestly can’t imagine what you hoped to gain by recording even a single phone call. Your rank and his name were the only two words she understood, but when she told me about what she’d heard it was enough to tell me what I wanted to know—at least in part. Only thing I can’t figure out is why you even bothered with the pretense of wanting my help when you were planning to send the Sardetskys after me all along.”

  He spared a brief glance over his shoulder. “That’s just the thing, Miss Ryan,” he said slowly. “I did want your help—or rather I needed it. By all accounts, given the close-knit relationship between the five of you, you truly were the person deemed most qualified to find the remaining three men on your team. And so you did.”

  “But then why try to kill me?” she asked. “Either before I’d even had the chance to look for them or after I’d started?”

  “Because by those same accounts, once dedicated to a task you’ve a determination that borders on rabid tenacity. In reading your dossier I got the feeling—accurate, given our present circumstances—that should you discover the truth of what IQ-56 was capable of, you would not rest until justice had been served.”

  Pressing yet another control, Wainright at last stood and faced her. “So what, pray tell, was my first mistake?”

  Billie allowed a scowl to cover her face as she said, “Breaking your oath as a United States Marine. Now sit your ass back down and turn this boat around.”

  “I’m afraid I just can’t do that.”

  “Where the hell are you going to go, General? What could you possibly hope to gain by resisting now?” she asked him.

  The general’s expression darkened. “I won’t go to prison, Miss Ryan. I’m a brigadier general of the United States Marine Corps—my end is either a quiet retirement or death on the battlefield. No other option is acceptable.”

  It dawned on her then what he was planning to do: he’d either kill himself, or force her to do it for him via the old “suicide by cop” routine. Coward, she mused darkly. Billie did not want to let him take the easy way out—Wainright deserved to go to prison for his crimes. He needed to answer for all the young women who had been stolen from their loved ones and sold for the sick pleasure of others like himself. Their families were owed answers as to what had become of their daughters, sisters, and nieces.

  “Take us back to the dock, General,” Billie said firmly.

  Wainright stepped around the double seat. In but three or four more steps he would be in front of her—she needed to make a move, or he was going to make his. Billie could see in his eyes that he’d made up his mind:

  Death before dishonor.

  Moving up the remaining three steps slowly, on the deck she was only about two arm-lengths away from him, her gun pointed squarely at his chest. She was not remiss to the irony of having been in nearly the exact same scenario just 24 hours ago with Andre Sardetsky. Unlike that standoff, however, she didn’t want to have to kill Wainright—being fairly certain that while he could give up plenty of information on the wider spread of the trafficking network, his high-profile job meant there was probably little chance of his getting a deal. There would be no new name, no new life, no second chance to turn criminal mastermind all over again. For him, it was prison or hell.

  Wainright, it seemed, had chosen hell. At that moment he advanced toward her, and she calculated all the possible moves she could make to avoid having to shoot. What she hadn’t thought to factor in was his pulling a gun, one he had concealed beneath his uniform jacket—and which she had simply hadn’t noticed when he’d gotten to his feet. He had clasped his hands behind his back when he turned to face her but she’d thought he was merely posturing.

  She’d been wrong to assume.

  The moment she saw the waning sunlight glinting on the barrel, her desire to see him behind bars was overridden by her strong sense of self-preservation. Billie depressed the trigger of Malone’s pistol on instinct, and following the loud crack of its report, Wainright staggered. He dropped his gun and it fell to the deck; he stepped backward, both hands rising to the wound in the middle of his chest, his fingers proving of little use against the flow of blood pouring in a bright red fountain down the front of his olive green
uniform coat. He gave a little cough and more blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth, the vein in his neck throbbing madly as his damaged heart fought to maintain its rhythm.

  And then it began to slow as his blood pressure started to bottom out. Wainright staggered backward again, his legs bumping the bench seat along the side of the bridge, his eyes as he fell down onto it suddenly lifeless. Billie maintained her aim for another thirty seconds, assuring herself that he would never move of his own accord again, before she bent to retrieve his gun and slipped both weapons into the pockets of her jacket. She then moved around the pilot’s seat and sat down, taking the wheel in hand and turning it to the left, making an easy u-turn.

  “Cap… Billie?” Rebecca queried cautiously from the lower deck behind her.

  Locating the throttle, she dialed it down a few notches. “I’m here,” she replied simply.

  She heard the younger woman climb the steps, heard her gasp of surprise as she took in the sight of the general slumped over just a few feet away. She then came over and sat beside her, staring ahead for a moment before asking, “Are you okay?” in a soft voice.

  Billie sighed. “I’m quite fine. But thank you for asking.”

  Rebecca looked at her. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

  A laugh escaped her. “Not a damn clue. But it can’t be too hard—just like driving a car, wouldn’t you say?”

  For a moment Rebecca only stared, and then they both laughed.

  It was a few minutes before they reached the dock again, where Billie carefully maneuvered the yacht back into its slip with a little direction from John—though even with his traffic signaling, she still bumped the dock with the boat’s nose. But it was over, and they were seconds away from being engulfed by the strong arms of five handsome men who waited for them…along with a few dozen police officers.