Two Evils (20 page)

“Yeah, if you can’t hack it, G-Man, I’ll be more than happy to take care of Billie’s needs,” Gabe said, a sly grin raising the corners of his mouth.

Billie now turned a discerning gaze at her friend. What the hell was he doing, baiting John? Daring him to see if he’d go through with playing doctor? Good grief, she did
not
need this to turn into a pissing contest between them. It was just a damn flesh wound for fuck’s sake.
Better head this shit off at the pass
, she thought sourly, as it looked like John was about to argue.

Reaching a hand down, she placed it on his shoulder and waited until he looked at her. “John, you guys agreed this wound needs stitches. Dental floss is a decent substitute in lieu of proper sutures, given we can’t go to a hospital without facing questions none of us want to answer. The floss is strong enough not to snap and flexible enough to allow me normal movement of my leg.”

“I’ve field-dressed gunshots and stab wounds before,” John said testily. “I’ve just never heard of anyone using fucking dental floss, okay? No need to make a damn federal case out of it.”

Yikes, they’d touched a nerve. She decided not to remark about how uptight he was being and simply said, “Then let’s get this done, shall we? While I’m sure the two of you are enjoying the sight of me in my underwear, I’d like to pull my pants up sometime before midnight.”

A
fter John had used an alcohol wipe to clean in and around the wound, after he’d sterilized the needle from the sewing kit with another, he threaded dental floss through the eye and put four stitches in her leg. It had hurt more than she thought it would, but Billie exercised as much control as she could muster and uttered hardly a sound through her gritted teeth. When he had tied off and cut the last one, she looked down at her leg and saw that he’d closed the edges of the gash neatly.

“Thank you,” she said, meaning it sincerely.

“We still have to put a bandage on it to keep it from getting infected,” John said.

“That, I think, I can manage on my own,” she told him with a smile. “Why don’t you go inside for a bit? Go take a piss if you need to. Buy yourself a drink—whatever. Better stretch your legs while you can before we get back on the road, because we’re gonna be there a while.”

After a moment, he nodded and stood. Handing her the bag with all the supplies in it, he turned and walked away toward the gas station. Billie watched him for a moment, then turned and set the bag on the back seat so she could get out a gauze pad, tape, and the antibiotic ointment from the first aid kit.

“You want any help with that?” Gabe asked her.

Turning again, she sat on the runner and held up the flashlight. “You can hold this while I work.”

He snorted. “What, the spook putting his hands on you is okay, but the thought of me doing so is repulsive?”

I really don’t need this right now
, she thought. “Thunderhead, it’s not like that and you know it.”

“I also know you could have stitched yourself up without any help,” he countered.

Billie loosed an exasperated sigh. “He insisted. And doing something productive probably made him feel better about me getting shot.”

Gabe stepped closer, invading her personal space. She was forced to look up at him and saw on his face an expression he’d shown her only a handful of times in the years they’d known each other. “What if I insist?” he asked, his voice dropping an octave. “What if touching you would make me feel better?”

She closed her eyes and lowered her head, drawing a breath she hoped would steady her fraying nerves. Why the hell was this happening now? Just because she was single again, suddenly there was not one but
two
men vying for her attention? Any other woman might be flattered, but she wasn’t. She didn’t need the headache or the distraction.

Looking up again, she schooled her features into a neutral expression. “Gabe, please. Don’t do this. Not now. Not when you know perfectly fucking well that I’ve got way too much shit on my mind to be even remotely capable of dealing with anything else.”

He sighed and inclined his head, then stepped back and held his hand out. “Give me the flashlight,” he said gruffly.

Handing it over, he held the light
in place while she made quick work of putting a dressing over the stitches. Billie sighed with relief when she finished and finally pulled her pants back up from around her knees. After putting the roll of tape and the ointment back into the first aid kit, she tossed them back into the bag and pulled out the two sodas, holding one out to Gabe.

“Figured you could use a refresher,” she said.

“Thanks,” he replied, unscrewing the cap and taking a long swallow.

He was going distant again, same as he always did after she rejected his advances. Billie wanted to scream, but all that would do was draw unwanted attention. She took a good pull of her own drink, then reached for Gabe’s free hand, holding it firmly and giving it a tug until he looked into her eyes.

“I love you. I’m always going to love you,” she began. “But you are my brother. Same as Wayne and Darren and Eddie are my brothers. Given some of the shit I’ve been through—which you know about—you know damn well what a big deal it is for me to tell a man that I love him, to choose him as my brother and consider him as much a part of my family as the brothers I have by blood. I’m sorry if that isn’t enough for you, Gabe; you know I don’t want to hurt you. If you want to stop being my friend—”

He silenced her by putting a finger to her lips. “I could never give you up, She-Devil,” he said. “I love you, too. I just need to get it through my thick head that you’re never going to love me the way I’ve wanted you to for the last ten years.”

He laughed without humor, shaking his head as he turned and leaned against the side of the car. “You’d think after a decade of rejection, I’d get it. You’d think after seeing you deliriously happy with another man, I’d have
really
gotten it. But I could never quite let it go.”

Gabe looked at her then. “Sometimes I don’t think you realize just what kind of effect you have on us men. One look at that beautiful face and we’re goners. Travis fell for you with just a look. So has John. And you fell for both of them—what is it about government spooks that you like so much?”

“I haven’t fallen for John,” Billie said. “I’ve only known him two days.”

“I told you, all it takes is a look, Billie. There’s definitely something going on between the two of you,” Gabe said.

She shook her head. “You’re delusional, because it’s one-sided. Yes, I know that John’s developed some feelings for me, but I don’t return them. I can’t.”

“Why not? Don’t tell me you feel like you’re cheating on Travis?” her friend asked incredulously.

“No, of course not. But I still love Travis. I still miss him, Gabe, so much that I cannot even begin to tell you how much it hurt to realize where Wayne and Darren had gone. You saw what happened to me today.”

Gabe sighed. Setting his drink down on the floorboard of the back seat, he turned and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Billie, I hate to sucker-punch you like this, but Travis is dead. It was senseless and tragic and I kn
ow his death all but killed you too. But you have
got
to let him go. You have
got
to move on with your life—he’d want you to. Travis would not want you to spend the rest of your life mourning him, and you are too young and beautiful and smart to just let yourself waste away pining for someone who’s never coming back.”

Billie began to tremble, her eyes losing focus. She didn’t want to listen to Gabe talking about Travis, didn’t want to hear him say things that she knew deep down were true, like how much Travis would have wanted her to go on
living. She also knew that he would have wanted her to find love again, but she just wasn’t ready. She might never be ready—some things were just too hard to let go of.

The sound of a clearing throat startled her so much that she jumped. Turning, she saw an indecipherable cloud cover John’s eyes as he took in the scene before him.

“I’d have been back sooner, but I got a phone call from Rex,” he said. “He told me how Andre and his crew knew to follow us in the Charger.”

“Just how did they find out where Billie’s dad lived?” Gabe asked.

John looked at him. “That I can’t tell you, though obviously someone passed them the information.”

“Then how do you know how Andre knew to follow your car?” Billie asked.

His gazed returned to hers, changing into one of sorrowful anger. “Because someone broke into a neighbor’s house, forced her to lie down in the bathtub, and put a bullet through her brain.”

“Oh my God,” Billie said breathlessly, falling back against the open back door.

“Not that I don’t believe there’s a connection, but how does your guy know that the home invasion is connected to the Sardetskys?” Gabe asked.

“Rex has been monitoring anything having to do with Billie or her family; he has your team’s names as well, just in case,” John explained. “A call came in on the local police band not too long after we left—a man had returned home to find his wife dead in the bathtub. There were no signs of forced entry and nothing was taken. Police are suspecting she either opened the door for them or they picked the lock and surprised her. The fingerprints found on scene, other than those of the woman and her husband, aren’t in AFIS—but the
y do match two dead men and two other individual sets of prints found in a crashed SUV on the outskirts of Langley. He also, on a hunch, had a team inspect my car. The found a tracking device inside one of the rear wheel wells.”

“What was her name?”

The two men turned to her, and Billie looked at them both before holding John’s gaze. “I want to know who that bastard killed.”

“Her name was Lydia Ellis,” John said quietl
y. “She and her husband Rob bought the house next to your father’s about six months ago because they were hoping to start a family.”

Rage over the senseless murder of a young woman whom she had never even had the chance to meet coursed through her. Billie wanted nothing more right then but to put her gun to Andre’s head as he had done to poor Lydia Ellis. And she was sure he’d pulled the trigger himself—her gut told her it was him.

Picking up Gabe’s drink, she handed it to him, and then climbed in the back seat. “We need to get moving. I want to go get Wayne and Darren and get them to the safe house. Then I want to hunt that son of a bitch down.”

Neither John nor Gabe argued with her. They simply got in their seats—John behind the wheel again—and within a minute they were back on the road. For a long time silence permeated the air. Billie sat and stewed in her anger u
ntil weariness claimed her, and she decided to lay down across the bench seat. She laid on her right side with her legs partially drawn up and her hands clasped together under her head, sighed, and closed her eyes. Sleep wasn’t immediately forthcoming, however, and after several minutes she sensed Gabe looking over his shoulder at her from the passenger seat.

“Thank God,” he said as he turned forward again.

“Is she asleep?” John asked.

“Looks like it. About time all this shit caught up to her, I suppose,” Gabe replied.

John took a deep breath and released it. “I honestly never meant to cause her any trouble. Hell, I’d never even heard of her until my supervisor gave me the assignment to track her down and bring her back. Yet somehow I feel like this is all my fault.”

“Billie’s the one that ran away from her pain, G-Man. She’s got no one to blame but herself for not facing the fact that Travis is gone,” Gabe mused. “Not that I’m in any way demeaning her loss or her pain, because I know as well as anyone that losing someone you love deeply hurts like hell, and that we all deal with it in different ways. But if she’d stayed and fought through it, it wouldn’t have nearly the power it has to fuck her up like it did today.”

“I have to say it was kinda scary to see her completely zone out like that,” John said then.

Gabe scoffed. “Who you tellin’? I have seen that woman take down multiple targets without batting an eyelash in the midst of a war zone, but one fucking reminder of where she spent her engagement weekend and she’s inside her own personal hell. I’m telling you, if she doesn’t kick Wayne’s ass for this, I will.”

“She must’ve really loved Travis for his death to still affect her like it did,” John observed.

“She did,” Gabe replied with a sigh. “Still does, and that’s part of the problem. I’m not saying she should stop loving the guy—he was a decent fellow for a spook, and he made her happier than I’d ever seen her—but Christ, it’s been a year already. She needs t
o let him go and move on.”

A moment of silence passed, and then John said, “You love her, don’t you?”

“I do,” Gabe replied. “Far too much for my own good, and for far too long than is healthy. Guess I need to take my own advice and move on. Billie’s never seen me as anything more than a friend and brother.”

Another moment of silence went by before Gabe asked, “What about you, John? Do you love her?”

“I’ve only known her for two days, Gabe,” John replied. “Hardly long enough to know whether or not you love somebody.”

“I don’t buy it. You’ve got feelings for her, man. I’ve seen it on your face every time you look at her. She means something to you.”

John sighed. “Maybe she does. I don’t know. I just… Christ, I’ve never met a woman with more fire than she’s got. She is strong and willful and stubborn and beautiful and a pain in the fucking ass. She frustrates me to the point that I don’t know if I want to smack her or kiss her senseless.”

Gabe laughed. “On that we most definitely agree, though smacking her would probably get you killed. But despite those apparent shortcomings, she’s also one of the best damn Marines I’ve ever served with. She knows how to stay cool under p
ressure, has a sure, steady finger on the trigger, and never once complained about being surrounded by a bunch of cock-swinging commandos… She’s saved my life a time or two. I owe her a lot.”

“Her dossier at the agency indicates she w
as also an exceptional operations officer,” John said. “Everything I read told me she’s exactly the kind of agent I would like to work with. And she saved my life twice, too.”

He released a breath. “But there’s also a vulnerability about her, Gabe. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but I’ve caught a couple flash
es. She wears snark, sass, and guns like a shield because she is so deathly afraid of getting hurt. I’ve only ever seen her relax around her family. She’s such a tough person that I think we take it for granted, and we forget that there’s also a woman in there who needs love and protection and tenderness just like the rest of us.”