Once Craved. Blake Pierce

than just her body – even teenage whores had stretch marks from childbirth. And it wasn’t the lines in her face. Whores aged faster than any kind of women he knew.

      He couldn’t put his finger on it. But there was plenty about her that perplexed him. She displayed a certain kind of faux-girlish enthusiasm that wasn’t the mark of a true professional – not even a novice.

      She giggled too much, like a child playing a game. She was too eager. And most oddly, he suspected that she actually liked her job.

      A whore who really enjoys sex, he thought, watching her come nearer. Who ever heard of such a thing?

      Frankly, it turned him off.

      Well, at least he was sure that she wasn’t an undercover cop. He would have picked up on that in a split second.

      When she got close enough to see him, he honked his car horn. She stopped talking on the phone for a moment and looked his way, shielding her eyes from the morning sunlight. When she saw who it was she waved and smiled – a smile that looked, for all the world, completely sincere.

      Then she walked around back of the gym toward the “service” entrance. He realized that she probably had an appointment to keep inside the brothel. No matter, he would hire her some other day when he was in the mood for a specific kind of pleasure. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other hookers around.

      He remembered how they’d left things last time. She’d been cheerful and good-natured and apologetic.

      “Come back anytime,” she’d told him. “It will go better next time. We’ll hit it off together. Things will get really exciting.”

      “Oh, Chiffon,” he murmured aloud to himself. “You’ve got no idea.”

      Chapter Four

      Gunfire rang out around Riley. To her left, she heard the noisy cracks of pistols. To her right, she heard heavier weaponry – blasts from assault rifles and staccato sprays from submachine guns.

      In the midst of the clamor, she drew her Glock handgun from her hip holster, dropped to a prone position, and fired off six rounds. She rose into a kneeling position and fired three rounds. She deftly and quickly reloaded, then stood and fired six rounds, and finally knelt and fired three more rounds with her left hand.

      She stood up and holstered her weapon, then stepped back from the firing line and pulled off her earmuffs and eye protectors. The target with the bottle-shaped outline was twenty-five yards away. Even from this distance, she could see that she had clustered all her shots nicely together. In neighboring lanes, the FBI Academy trainees kept up their practice under the guidance of their instructor.

      It had been a while since Riley had fired a weapon, even though she was always armed on the job. She’d reserved this lane at the FBI Academy firing range for a little target practice and, as always, there was something satisfying about the gun’s powerful recoil, the raw force of it.

      She heard a voice behind her.

      “Kind of old-school, aren’t you?”

      She turned and saw Special Agent Bill Jeffreys standing nearby, grinning. She smiled back. Riley knew exactly what he meant by “old-school.” A few years ago, the FBI had changed the live-fire rules for pistol qualification. Firing from a prone position had been part of the old drill, but it was no longer required. Now more emphasis was put on firing at targets from up close, between three and seven yards. That was supplemented by the virtual reality installation where agents were immersed in scenarios involving armed confrontations in close quarters. And trainees also went through the notorious Hogan’s Alley, a ten-acre mocked-up town where they fought off imitation terrorists with paintball guns.

      “Sometimes I like to go old-school,” she said. “I figure that someday I might actually have to use deadly force at a distance.”

      From her own experience, Riley knew that the real thing was almost always up close and personal, and often unexpected. In fact, she’d actually had to fight hand to hand in two recent cases. She’d killed one attacker with his own knife and another with a random rock.

      “Do you think anything prepares these kids for the real thing?” Bill asked, nodding toward the trainees who were now finished and leaving the firing range.

      “Not really,” Riley said. “In VR your brain does accept the scenario as real, but there’s no imminent danger, no pain, no rage to control. Something inside always knows there’s no chance of being killed.”

      “Right,” Bill said. “They’ll have to find out what it’s really like just like we did a lot of years ago.”

      Riley glanced sideways at him as they moved farther away from the firing line.

      Like her, he was forty years old with touches of gray in his dark hair. She wondered what it meant that she found herself mentally comparing him to her leaner, slighter male neighbor.

      What was his name? she asked herself. Oh, yeah – Blaine.

      Blaine was good-looking, but she wasn’t sure whether he gave Bill a run for his money. Bill was big, solid, and quite attractive.

      “What brings you here?” she asked.

      “I heard you’d be here,” he said.

      Riley squinted at him uneasily. This probably wasn’t just a friendly visit. From his expression, she detected that he wasn’t ready to tell her what he wanted just yet.

      Bill said, “If you want to do the whole drill, I’ll keep time for you.”

      “I’d appreciate that,” Riley said.

      They moved off to a separate section of the shooting range, where she wouldn’t be at risk of being hit by stray bullets from the trainees.

      While Bill operated a timer, Riley breezed through all the stages of the FBI pistol qualification course, firing at the target from three yards, then five, then seven, then fifteen. The fifth and last stage was the only part that she found the least bit challenging – firing from behind a barricade at twenty-five yards.

      When she was through, Riley took off her headgear. She and Bill walked up to the target and checked her work. All the impact marks were clustered nicely together.

      “A hundred percent – a perfect score,” Bill said.

      “It had better be,” Riley said. She’d hate it if she were getting rusty.

      Bill pointed toward the earthen backstop beyond the target.

      “Kind of surreal, huh?” he said.

      Several white-tailed deer were contentedly grazing on top of the hill. They’d actually gathered there while she’d been shooting. They were within easy range, even with her pistol. But they weren’t the least bit bothered by all the thousands of bullets slamming into targets just below the high ridge they walked on.

      “Yes,” she said, “and beautiful.”

      Around this time of year, the deer were a common sight here at the range. It was hunting season, and somehow they knew that they would be safe here. In fact, the grounds of the FBI Academy had become a sort of wildlife haven for lots of animals, including foxes, wild turkeys, and groundhogs.

      “A couple of days ago, one of my students saw a bear in the parking lot,” Riley said.

      Riley took a few steps toward the backstop. The deer raised their heads, stared at her, and trotted away. They weren’t afraid of gunfire, but they didn’t want people getting too close.

      “How do you suppose they know?” Bill asked. “That it’s safe here, I mean. Don’t all gunshots sound alike?”

      Riley simply shook her head. It was a mystery to her. Her father had taken her hunting when she was little. To him, deer were simply resources – food and hide. It hadn’t bothered her to kill them all those years ago. But that had changed.

      It seemed odd, now that she thought about it. She had no trouble using deadly force against a human being when it was necessary. She could kill a man in a heartbeat.