7PM - Talissa

by Chris Heinicke

  I hadn’t been with another woman for a few months, and Beth cut a stunning figure in her body hugging little black dress. The long slit along the left side of the garment showed the full length of one of her toned legs, her weapon’s holster attached above a black lacy garter belt on her upper thigh. But this wasn’t the time and place for anything outside of the mission.

  “Come here, little girl,” I heard Bill call out and could only imagine what he would put Emily through. I had been with much older men for the sake of missions, and nothing felt as disgusting as the touch of a man forty years my senior.

  I hoped Emily could block it out as well as I had learned to do. He put his hand on the girl’s ass as she reached him and pointed for her to go in a particular direction. Then he proceeded to walk toward us with a briefcase in hand.

  “Payment as agreed. And a little bonus for letting me keep her for a week,” Bill said.

  I knew Emily would soon be leaving with us and not kept as a sex slave for a week like Bill expected. I hoped having her isolated with him might give her the opportunity to kill him before having to do anything unthinkable with him. She would have to do it quietly and slip away without alerting any security personnel.

  Diablo made small talk with a couple of the guards. I counted eight in the room, plus Charlie and Beth. We had zero weapons and zero communication with Helen. If things went pear-shaped, we would be done for.

  “So, what brings you here?” I leaned in close to Beth as we stood at the bar.

  “I was part of the guest list, a first-time attendee of a Big Bill party. They say anything you want, you can get here.” She touched my face.

  A few new arrivals entered the room, and the bar area became illuminated in a misty light, changing colours every few seconds. A blonde barmaid appeared behind the bar, entering from another room, dressed in only a black G-string and high heels. I guessed she was hired more for her silicon-enhanced assets than her cocktail making abilities.

  “Just a glass of champagne,” I requested, and unlike a pair of newly arrived males to the bar, I kept eye contact with her.

  “I suddenly feel overdressed,” Beth said to me and ordered a scotch on the rocks.

  Our drinks were served at the bar, and Beth pointed to a leather lounge. “Let’s go take a seat.” She grabbed my hand again and led me to the destination she’d pointed out.

  “So, do you really believe someone wants to kill your friend?” I asked while we walked.

  Upon reaching the lounge, Beth left me with no personal space as she sat right up against my side. “I think lots of people want to kill him, but he asked me to help out tonight with a little security. I think he’s paranoid, but with what he pays, I don’t let my personal judgements of people interfere.” When she spoke, her breath flowed onto me like a breeze of subtle sensuality.

  “How do I know that you don’t want to kill him?”

  She smiled at me. “Let’s quit playing games, life is very short, and you just need to live a little.” Her hand ran up my leg, slowing her caress as it reached my upper thigh. Maybe she could feel the goose bumps rising through the pores of my skin as her hand came to a stop a mere inch from the underwear I wore to match my dress.

  “What are you doing with my wife?” I heard Diablo’s voice boom from beside us.

  Beth released her hold on me and stood up near him. “You don’t have a wife. I see how you look at this woman here, and it isn’t jealousy I see. It’s more like an unrequited lust. I would guess you haven’t even been with her.”

  I moved to my feet quick. “Beth, you don’t understand.”

  She turned and visually stabbed me with the look in her eyes. “You better have a good reason for this deception.”

  “We pretend we’re married for business reasons. We believe people take us more seriously that way.”

  She pulled her pistol out again and poked me in the side with it. “What kind of bullshit is that? So let me guess—the two of you and that young girl are all in on this?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, forcing a tear to well in my eye. “Please, don’t shoot me.”

  She pushed me away and aimed at Diablo and fired, hitting him in the lower leg. “You obviously haven’t heard of me over at the Praying Mantassassin compound.”

  Oh crap, how the hell could she know that? Diablo grimaced at the pain in his leg but refused to go down. I had to scramble. “What the hell do you mean?”

  “Look at you in that red dress. Your reputation precedes you, Talissa. The voluptuous temptress who kills her victims with anything she can find. Well, you are as beautiful and tempting as your reputation, but are you as deadly?”

  She swung the pistol back in my direction, and before her finger squeezed the trigger, I spread my legs and did the splits in time to dodge the bullet. Sailing above my head, the bullet travelled past its intended target over to the bar area, hitting a party guest who groaned in pain. I lay on my back and propelled my feet at Beth, hitting her in the stomach.

  The gun fell from Beth’s grip. I rolled in its direction, only to receive an elbow to my stomach from the recovered attacker. I took a split second to look at the other guards in the room, who appeared to withhold from firing any weapons so as not to hit any of the innocent party guests. They all took measured steps towards us, pointing their weapons in the direction of Diablo and me.

  “Stop right there,” a female voice screamed.

  I turned and saw Emily using a young girl as a human shield, holding a large blade near the girl’s throat. The little girl couldn’t have been any older than five or six at a guess.

  Beth looked at me. “You teach your recruits young, don’t you?” She turned her focus to Emily. “You think you can use my girl as leverage against me?”

  Lying beside me on the floor, Diablo pulled his keys from his pocket. “Take them, Talissa.”

  “No, we leave together.” I pulled them to me. I knew what his plan was, and I opened the dangling charm on the keyring and grabbed the communication device.

  “I will slash her throat, you watch me,” Emily said. I looked at her face and couldn’t see any signs of nervousness.

  “Just tell me where Bill is, and we can all go home,” Beth said.

  I could tell where this was headed and brought my foot to my hand. The guards were closer, and all they needed was the word, and they would open fire on us. I slid my high-heeled shoe from my foot, the stiletto heel was steel tipped, and a hit to the head could render a person unconscious.

  At this stage, I noticed the blood-soaked towel in Emily’s other hand, and as she unravelled it, a head rolled out and hit the floor. “This is part of him. Do you still want him?” she asked.

  I heard a scream behind me and assumed it was the barmaid or a female party guest. I doubted they would be expecting to see the decapitated head of their party host.

  “You would have had to get past six guards between his bedroom and here. How are you still alive?” Beth asked.

  “They weren’t expecting me to be a killer. Anyway, I’m about to kill your little girl since I’m guessing those guards are going to shoot us anyway,” Emily said.

  Beth stared straight back at her, and I saw my moment to make my move. I stood and swung the shoe through the air, aiming directly at Beth’s temple.

  They say some people are blessed with incredible peripheral vision, making them great for serving in the armed services or spy agencies. Beth must have been similarly gifted. She lifted a foot and swivelled on the spot, blocking my arm before I could make contact with her. She thrust her other arm against my blocked one, clasped her hands together, and swung downward.

  My elbow almost became dislodged. I barely managed to move my body parallel with my injured arm and jut my leg out to kick her before we both crashed into the polished wooden floor. Several pairs of footsteps hurried our way, but I was unable to see much due to my tussle with Beth. A punch connected with my jaw, my head hitting the floor once again from th
e impact.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Diablo hobble over to the bar and Emily cowering low and dragging the young girl in the same direction. I rolled away from Beth only to see a guard standing over me and aiming his long weapon at me.

  “Shoot the bitch,” Beth yelled.

  The guard smiled at me, his finger pulling back on the trigger. I tensed. No human had the speed to dodge a bullet from three feet away. I closed my eyes ready for my life’s light to end with a bang.

  The sound of glass breaking made me jerk my eyes open. The guard hovering above me began to fall forward, the expression on his face seeming to go slack as his gun dipped downward. I managed to roll away before the man, who I guessed to be twice my weight, smashed onto the floor, a bullet hole in the back of his head. Without a whisker of hesitation, I snatched the gun from the dead man’s hands and did a quick visual hunt for Beth. I caught sight of her jumping up and placing her hands on the top of the bar, pushing herself into a somersault and landing somewhere behind the bar.

  Another guard running my way hit the floor and slid a few feet, dead before his body stopped moving. Helen had obviously made it to her sniping point and had now saved me twice in less than a minute.

  “Fucking sniper,” one of the heavily armed men yelled. He motioned to his men to form two groups, one to take us out while the other group hunted the sniper. I picked a target and put him down as I quickly made my way to where Diablo, Emily, and Beth had gone.

  Shots continued to be fired inside the room, all of them seeming to hit walls and furniture but little else as the people managed to dodge the incoming shots. A quick glance at the other side of the bar, I saw Beth and Diablo pointing guns at each other from just a few feet away.

  “Stand down, Beth,” I yelled, pointing my own gun at her.

  “We’re in a quandary. Your girl has mine at knifepoint, and your man and I are about to shoot each other dead. And if I let you three walk away, there’s a mini army here ready to take me down. So this is what happens. Your girl lets mine go, I just shoot your man, and then I get shot in return. Or we stand and argue, and we all die.”

  I heard a bullet whistle past my ear and crash into the wall of hanging glasses nearby. If I stayed in the open, I would soon be dead so I leapfrogged the bar, leaving my newly acquired weapon behind. Diablo smiled and fired a gun he must have picked up from someone, hitting Beth between the eyes.

  The girl held hostage by Emily wailed, and her captor let her free to go and embrace her dead mother. I looked at Diablo again, this time noticing his hand barely covering the red mark on his shirt.

  “Oh fuck no, Diablo. Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I got her, Talissa. I killed the legend,” he said, slumping against the wall of the bar

  “What do you mean? She was just a hired head of security.” I knelt beside him, trying to ignore the way my heart twisted at the beads of sweat blooming on his forehead and the way he already gasped for breath.

  “Long have I heard of the legend of the masterful assassin Bethonius. Word is she was the one who took down and killed the Jackal several years ago, but no one could ever verify the fact that either the Jackal or Bethonius actually existed. But I got her.”

  It was the last time I saw Diablo smile. His breathing soon stopped, and his eyes stared back at Emily and me, like windows to a house void, of its owner’s soul.

  “Oh shit, Emily. We need to get out of here.” I nearly choked on a tear I couldn’t let escape as the emptiness of his eyes left me feeling full of regrets.

  “What about the girl? We can’t leave a witness behind.”

  “She’s just a little girl. We need to clear this room and get Helen and go.” I went over to the counter and lifted my head just high enough to see into the room.

  Another bullet sailed by and found more glass, shards falling on top of us. “There’s still a lot of heat out there.”

  “I didn’t sign up for any of this shit,” the barmaid said. Looking at her red-rimmed eyes, I could tell she’d been crying. But it was the faded, fist-size bruise on her cheek that gave me pause.

  She didn’t appear to be much older than Emily was, even though the legal age to serve alcohol was twenty-one. But being employed by Big Bill, age legalities probably didn’t come into the employment equation.

  “I’ll try and get you out. Stay close, okay?”

  She nodded. A movement to my left revealed Beth’s daughter trying to snake past me, cheeks wet with tears. One look at her innocent, frightened expression, and I knew I couldn’t just leave her with the wolves.

  “Hang on to the girl,” I instructed the barmaid with a nod at the child. “I’m going to use both of you as hostages.” There were a few reasons that Big Bill might have a child in his home, but I was betting Beth, and he had been more than acquaintances. This meant, with her parents dead, the child’s life could be worth more than their own.

  The barmaid’s eyes widened, but she nodded again and clutched the crying girl to her.

  “We have to wait for Helen,” Emily said. “If it weren’t for her, you would have been killed.”

  “I know, and I’m not in the habit of leaving people behind. I just hope they haven’t got to her.” I sat and considered my options. We were safe behind the bar, the steel counter surrounding us deflecting the potency of the bullets flying across the room. It would do for a while, but we couldn’t hold out forever.

  I peeled off Diablo’s jacket and passed it to the near naked barmaid as I nodded at the entrance of the bar’s counter. “Where does it lead?”

  “To a storeroom, with a little vanity room where most of my clothes are,” she said.

  A no-exit. “I don’t think it will be safe there.”

  I took Diablo’s gun from his slack grip and checked his pockets for more clips. Sliding a fresh one into place with a sharp click, I took another quick peek over the counter and fired my new weapon blindly. It started another thunderstorm of lead hitting the sanctuary, and it hit me that our only hope for a clean escape was for Helen to pick them off one by one.

  The firing continued as relentless as rain on a tropical coastal town in spring. “Someone needs to do something,” Emily said, her face twisting into a determined sneer. She wrenched the weapon from me, leaned against the bar, and took a quick look before she ducked her head back down and began shooting blindly.

  It would do us no good if she got herself killed. I fished around near Beth’s dead body and grabbed her pistol, giving me a weapon for each hand. I followed the crazy girl in her endeavour, taking in quick glances and shooting blind from both hands. I couldn’t risk peeking long enough to count the number of armed men shooting at us, but I made my first round of rapid firing count, noting that I dropped three targets the next time I stole a quick glance at my damage.

  Emily’s training had served her well. Between the two of us, we were lowering the odds against us. We hadn’t claimed victory yet, and just as we thought we might clear the room, I caught sight of two familiar faces just as I looked over the bar counter.

  “Is this woman with you?” Charlie asked, holding Helen in a headlock with a gun pressed against her temple.

  “Don’t you dare fucking hurt her,” Emily yelled and aimed directly at him.

  “Well, you better put the gun down then, little darling. You ladies have caused me a little more trouble than I had anticipated. You were supposed to just come in and kill that useless old fucker and leave, but no, you had to take a little girl hostage,” he pointed at Emily.

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked.

  “I’m the real Big Bill, and I’m not happy with the mess you’ve made here. I should make you pay for the damage out of what you made from this mission.”

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked.

  “I paid your organisation big money to kill one of my rivals, King Kansas. With the promise of getting sex with a tender young thing, he happily pretended to be Big Bill. So thanks, Emily, for that fantastic blow
job. The things sixteen-year-olds know these days are astounding. Any chance I can keep you here and get me some of that oral perfection every day?”

  “Why didn’t you just kill him yourself?” I asked, ignoring his perverted leer directed at our youngest squad member.

  “And start a war? The King didn’t know he was a rival. He thought I was his friend. But I need his territory, and by making it look like a disgruntled young whore murdered him, I’ve ensured the blame will be deflected away from me. You are free to leave now, Talissa.”

  Something bugged me about the situation. His explanation was too easy. And he hadn’t moved to let Helen go.

  “You know our names and who we would send in.” The organization usually didn’t disclose those details to a client. “Tell me who the mole is.”

  He laughed. “Why should I tell you that? I suggest you leave while you still can. Or we can shoot you both where you stand and this lovely sniper, as well.”

  A sudden sob behind me from the little girl in the barmaid’s arms reminded me of Beth and the other part of this whole plan that didn’t quite make sense.

  I kept my gun trained on Big Bill. “Why was Beth here with her little girl if you knew we were here to do the job? Diablo is dead and so is she, and despite her reputation, we never had a beef with her before tonight.”

  “Insurance,” was all he said, but his gaze flicked to the barmaid and the little girl standing behind me against the wall.

  Helen was able to turn her head and look at me, and then it all came together. Stepping back quickly, I pulled the barmaid and the little girl to me but kept my gun trained on Big Bill. “Put your gun down, Emily. Let’s cut our losses and go.”

  Emily glared at me but obeyed. Big Bill or Charlie, or whatever his name was, smiled and released his hostage. I took a step sideways and kept an eye on the men remaining in the room, aware they had lowered their weapons but had not discarded them.

  “We’re taking the girl and the barmaid with us,” I said, keeping them close to me as I switched my target from Bill to them, hoping their status as hostage would keep us safe