Too Wylde Page 5

  "Keep it honest. Rounds."

  "Cool."

  Nico hit the timer with the edge of his mitt, moved in front of Lance, bobbed lightly on his toes. Lance worked his jab, taking his time, getting the sharp pop of a good hit and then crossing with that right hand, boom, that would take the lead out of some boy's pencil. Nico dropped one mitt and swooped it around in a looping hook, and Lance ducked under it, came up, jab cross.

  "Nice," Nico said. "Pick it up?"

  "Yeah."

  Pace and contact picked up. The two big men circled each other. Nico probing with different hands, varying the height and distance, a pro who'd been on both sides, and Lance tagging them good and solid, every once in awhile Nico's hook slipping him, just clipping his head to let him know he was out there --

  -- and it picked up some more, the steady pop pop pop of the mitts, Lance mixing it up now, combinations, and Nico going with the flow, moving around each other, amping it up just a bit --

  -- and the other fighters stopping to watch, two big combat athletes going at it, the intensity starting to amp even higher --

  -- Nico slapping Lance hard on the face with a mitt, straight up challenge --

  -- and the immediate response from Lance, blasting forward with a series of crosses, right left right left, driving the man back, Nico just a bit smaller than Lance, and feeling the wrestler's desire to close with and grapple, so he just stepped to one side...

  -- and tagged Lance lightly on the side, kidneys, back of his head, as the wrestler plowed past, and then Lance turned, fast, followed him...drove him back against the wall with a solid thump...

  -- and Nico's face shifted and he came forward onto his toes...

  -- and Rudy said, "Nico..."

  Nico grinned, raised his hands. "Good shot, Chief."

  Lance's chest heaved as he caught his breath. Found that he really did have some anger up -- the fighter's anger. And then he grinned and said, "I owe you a drink. Come by my place some time."

  "Where's that?"

  "The Trojan Horse. Down in E Block."

  "Sounds good."

  They broke off, appraised each other.

  Grinned.

  Fighters love fighters.

  Dee Dee Kozak and Neo Dark God, aka Kiki Warren

  St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception was the oldest Catholic church in Kansas City, Missouri, and the attached school was one of the oldest. Every day hundreds of neatly uniformed boys and girls, K-12, they had it all here including a pre-school that fed the kids well prepped into the education (and tuition) flow. Underneath the neat blue shirts and shorts of the boys, and the white shirts and plaid skirts of the girls, though, beat the same hormone inflamed fantasies of any other group of 21st century pre-pubescents and enraged adolescents.

  One of the girls hurried along, 13 or 14, with the angular up tilted shoulders of someone who might spend too much time on the computer, a book bag slung over her shoulder, blond kinky hair, the kind the nuns shook their head at, her figure just barely budding and hinted at beneath the bland uniform.

  Meet Kitten June Warren. No shit, her mom loved cats, probably more than she loved her only child, so she named her Kitten, but no kid who'd endured that name in the vicious arena of the schoolyard would stick with it (here Pussy, Pussy, Pussy, hey Kitten where's your litter box...) so when she could, she reinvented herself as KiKi Warren, aka Neo Dark God in hacker-dom, where a girl with a certain bent of mind, a deep pocketbook courtesy of her mother's carelessness with credit cards and bank accounts, and a deep and abiding desire to be somebody could make a name for herself.

  Her first gig was skimming debit and credit cards; she had to find a way to make ends meet while scooping ice cream for the spoiled bitches who came wandering into the upscale little gelato store; man, she'd skimmed a whole lot of account numbers, and had been careful with the attention to detail of a seriously committed criminal to not take too much, small purchases, advances, and transfers to a series of accounts from which she drew out enough cash to buy gift cards, no questions asked, and at this point she had probably close to $70K stashed underneath her bed, where mama never looked since KiKi did her own laundry, bless her heart, and then a significant amount drawn out of ATMs, enough to purchase several high quality custom boxes and the software and peripherals to go with them, and mama didn't care if she spent all that time on the computer, because she had great grades because of it, even though she did all her math on Wolfram Alpha and bought essays off the Net, she was too busy making bank to fuck around with school work, and it was pretty easy to stay on top of things when she hacked into the school network and downloaded all the tests, essays, homework assignments and reading...and over a week of vacation prepped everything into a neatly ordered file that she plucked the work from on a weekly basis.

  Life was good.

  But oh boy, did she like working with Double D Bodacious. A woman, for sure, and an alpha wolf in the underworld. She'd had some fun -- moved money around for her, introduced her to the gift card scam for portable cash, massaged some digital money through the back door banking operations run by the Muslims and the Hispanic gang members to get money off shore and back, even worked out a deal to get her some gold coins delivered. This was KiKi's career track -- finance. Wave of the future, looting failed banks -- hell, failed countries! -- and moving it around to her benefit.

  She hurried off the library and its wi-fi so she could enter a VPN she'd set up to work from a remote server she leased in Romania, and do what she needed under proxy.

  She loved girl talk, and Double D Bodacious would have advice for her. There was a dance coming up, and a boy she wanted to ask her. Or at least he'd better ask her, or she'd hack his Facebook and put fag pictures on it.

  She set up on a corner table, waved to some of the girls she took math with (fellow math nerds) and set up her cover screen, which was from top to bottom filled with programming code, so it looked like an extra credit project for Computer Science.

  Set.

  She opened a new window in Linux and went to work, connected through her VPN and waited till the icons showed she was secure, run through 7 proxies culminating in her Romanian server, checked her private bulletin board/mail service, again run through a proxy from both Hushmail and Cryptoheaven, and saw the blinking icon that said: Double D Bodacious sends you greetings...and an attachment.

  KiKi opened it up, let her eyes run down the lines of code, the routing numbers, the bank names, and stamped her feet in giddy excitement -- ooooooohh. This was *the* big leagues! And most important -- major league fun!

  She typed out her reply....

  ***

  Dee Dee Kozak looked at her iPhone and saw an encrypted message come through. Grinned, opened it.

  "Friend girl? We have contact," she said.

  Irina stared sullenly across the table at her. "I want to go out."

  "Go ahead."

  "It is not safe alone."

  "I charge extra for that."

  "I have made you rich. And you have done nothing."

  "Only saved your life, bitch," Dee Dee said genially. "But hey, you wanna go out, we can go out. I could use a rack of chicken tacos myself."

  "I want different clothes."

  "You need to lose the Eastern European hooker look, honey. Just saying. You draw more attention than we need, not that man-attention is generally a bad thing, I'm fond it myself, but right now a little lower profile would be good."

  "What do you suggest?"

  "For you? Hmmmm...." Dee Dee said. "Maybe a little urban hillbilly or wandering cowgirl might be good. You could still wear the skin tight jeans, show off your ass and legs, but we could break it up with a big shirt, just hint at those boobs of yours."

  "I am not a cow herder. I will not dress like one."

  "Hello Cowgirl in the sand...is this place at your command..." Dee sang softly.

  "What?"

  "You wouldn't get it. We'll go shopping. I'm thinking Kohls."

 
She turned away from Irina's insulted look and tapped out a brief response: Do it.

  And sent it.

  Jimmy John Wylde and Nina Capushek

  I took my time walking a lap around Lake Heron. It wasn't the largest of the string of lakes in Lake City, but it was my favorite. Not just because it was closest to my house, but the symmetry of it was something I enjoyed; it was the most nearly perfect circle of the three lakes. The southwestern side of the lake was defined by hills; according to local history, it had been the site of the Lakota Sioux Indian village that had once been here, and the hillside was where the Lakota Medicine Men had set up and had their visions, spoke to the spirits, and communed with the sky and the trees and the lakes. I spent a fair amount of time sitting there on that hill, when I felt like sorting things out, and found it to be a peaceful place, a quiet place, where the din in my head settled down to a barely perceptible buzz.

  Sometimes I wondered if this was what had drawn me back here to Lake City, after Afghanistan and the hospital. I wanted to go somewhere, and while I could go anywhere, I had to wonder: Where? My family was gone. I really had no roots after I'd cut myself off from my military and OGA family. Here I'd created a family for myself, cobbled out of the relationships forged in the floating water world of the night life scene in Lake City: Lizzy, Deon, Big Dick, Theiu, my loose knit network, they were the only family I had. Where had I read that, that friends are the family we choose?

  Wherever, it was true. You didn't get to pick your family, but you got to pick your friends.

  So what happens when they die? Do you owe allegiance to the dead? Do you need to speak to their ghosts? The old religions had rituals to propitiate the dead and put the spirits to rest. But that seemed out of place here. If I put it out of my mind, it was dead.

  Or so I wanted to think.

  ...a mountain top in the 'Stan, the CH-47 chopped apart by heavy machine gunfire, heavy lumps, some ablaze, my crew scattered around the crash site, and the muj probing with fire, darting from rock to rock, closing in, QRF out there somewhere, no guidance other than from the Predator circling above, maybe a Hellfire would help out but not against this...

  ...Jimmy John, help me, brah, fuck, I'm on fire...

  ...the Glock running dry, fumbling through a one-handed reload, the whip of rounds over my head, forcing myself to slow down, get it right, Jimmy, this is all you've got, and then back over the rock, bap bap bap...

  ...JIMMY! FUCK YOU! HELP ME! FUCK....

  A crow cawed from a tree ahead of me, rose into the sky, and then two others followed it across the still lake. I hated getting lost in my head. But wondering if someone had returned from the dead, and he'd been dead, I'd seen it myself before the QRF plucked me off that mountain top, that was enough to get me lost and keep me lost, wasn't it?

  I lapped the band shell and headed up the hill to get a coffee. Lots of people out enjoying the day, the water, the turning leaves. And me, wandering, with the dead in my head.

  "Jimmy?"

  I spun, hand dropping to the hem of my shirt where my Glock 30 was tucked away.

  Nina, coffee and a white bag in her hand, jocked up for the street in snug fitting Arc'Teryx pants and a black Smartwool t-shirt under a battered leather jacket to hide that cut down Glock 21 she sported, hair pulled back tight in a business-like ponytail and eyes hidden behind VR-28 Oakleys.

  "Nina."

  "Look like you've seen a fucking ghost."

  I just stared at her.

  ***

  With coffee, by the water.

  One of the things I prized about Nina was her ability to just hold the space, just sit and be still. I remember my dad, long ago, when I was a boy, and the two of us just sitting and content with that, happy to be in each other's presence and "keeping company" as he liked to say. There were days when I missed him, but I never went down to his grave.

  "I was just talking about you," Nina said, after a long sip on her brew, the refill I'd brought her back from the Coffee Bean.

  "Yeah?"

  "Lizzy and I."

  "Um."

  She laughed. "Makes you nervous, doesn't it? It should."

  "Why is that?"

  "What the fuck is up with you, Jimmy? You're off your feed."

  With Nina it was always walking the razor's edge. We'd fought together, killed together, and that was a bond more intimate than marriage in a warrior's mind. She was a cop, and a righteous one, and always conscious of where she stood in the world. Me, I was a ragged edger, and I lived in the world of the grey; there was no black and white for me and hadn't been since that mountain in Afghanistan. Talking with her was fraught with risk, not only because with a cop's unerring instincts she'd go to the jugular of the story, but as a woman, and easily one of the most desirable women he'd ever met, she'd be guided ever deeper into who I am, and I wasn't ready for that.

  I think.

  Lizzy was in there, deeper than anyone else, but in her serene fashion she was just as fierce about my privacy as I was. Or was it privacy? Was it just the vestige of someone I wasn't anymore?

  I had to laugh. Nina grinned at that.

  I had to be careful not to confess to murder so she'd arrest my ass, which she would, unless it was someone she didn't like.

  "You ever think about the people you've killed?"

  She snorted. "That's a wannabe question. You're in The Club, you don't ask shit like that. You know better."

  "They ever talk to you?"

  Now it was full on laughter. "They've got meds for that, Jimmy. Why, you getting the guilts late in life? Come the fuck on, Jimmy."

  She studied my non-response.

  "So..." she said.

  So I told her.

  Nicholas La Fronte, aka Nico

  Nico sported a 2001 Tacoma, TRD Off Road, with an Old Man Emu lift, Nitro tires, and ARB bumpers front and rear. The truck was dinged and striped with off road use, but the real reason was that one time, when he was working in Miami, he'd gotten into a car fight with some of the Zetas who were on a working vacation and sporting a customized Hummer that put his Cherokee into a ditch and smashed it to shit. So the car fight turned into a gun fight, long story short, three dead Zetas, including one who was a multiple graduate of certain high speed training courses offered at Ft. Benning and Bragg, so Lil Nico was sent off to the frozen fucking north (though, he had to admit, there was a serious overage of single beauties of Nordic descent that made him glad those bumpers were there, to avoid more road damage when his head snapped to cover a local beauty).

  Tooling down Lake, then turning to follow H-Street down to the E-block, check out this place that muscle head wrestler (he had to give the old guy points, he could probably open up a can of whip-ass yet on most guys have his age) owned, because free drinks in a House of Pussy was never a bad thing, was it?

  He hitched his Comp-Tac 2 o'clock over to one side, Glock 19 rubbing his inside thigh a bit, shifted around, his old Ares Gear Ranger belt battered and worn but perfect under his faded denim shirt that hid his rig. He was an investigator, but in his heart of hearts he was a manhunter and a gunfighter -- always had been, always would be. These days it wasn't the muj but the domestic variety of bad guy, though he hoped to get in on one of the Federal slots that supported the Task Force over the water in the Big Sandy, one of these days, if they'd ever get him the fuck out of here. But his was not to reason why, his was just to do or die, and so it was off and running on tracking down some military grade boom boom.

  Interesting case, though. Not your run of the mill parking lot swap of cash for explosives. At least one layer of cut-out, and that meant someone who'd thought about it, done it, or at least read the right thriller novels. So a higher grade of felon, which made things interesting. And the possibility (oh, joy) of working with the fucking locals, in a town that had layers upon layers of bad guys on the streets.

  Ah well. At least he'd found a good gym, and and a titty bar with free beer. Things could be worse.

  He wov
e in and out of traffic, hands positioned properly on the wheel, just like The Gryphon Group taught, enjoying the feel of his truck flowing in and out of the traffic. A light vehicle, but man with them bumpers and dropping it into 4 wheel, he could climb over or through just about anything someone tossed his way, including a fucking Hummer this time around, though he'd make up for light weight with his fucking superior driving skills. Hell yeah.

  Hard to miss The Trojan Horse; big gleaming brass, gold and mahogany entrance with a huge mural of a wooden horse being drawn, not by Athenian warriors, but nude women right out of a Frank Frazetta panel. Big parking lot, well lit, staffed by two Hispanics in red coats, who were studiously bland when he pulled the beat up Tacoma into a space, and tossed them the keys.

  "Here you go, hermano. Don't let me catch you sitting in there listening to my stereo, you sabe?"

  "No worries, man," the younger one said. "We'll take care of your ride."

  "Cool."

  Inside, a seriously hot Scandinavian blonde with breasts that defied gravity's bobble and perked straight out at him greeted him with a smile.

  "Hey there! Welcome to the Trojan Horse!"

  "Hey there back! Is Lance in? He asked me to stop by..."

  "And your name is?"

  "Nico."

  "Oh, Mr. Nico! Yes, Lance is expecting you, but he's going to be busy for few minutes, so we have someone to look after you...just minute, 'kay?"

  She picked up a phone and whispered into it.

  After a moment, Nico turned as he felt someone coming up on his gun side. And what a someone...short, maybe 5'2", but perfectly formed with breasts, waist and hips in accord, black mini-skirt, white blouse opened nearly to her navel, spike heels, net hose, long black hair down her back, brilliant blue eyes...

  Oh, my goodness.

  "Are you Nico?" she said, a faint hint of the South in her soft voice.

  "I most certainly am, miss," Nico said. "Do I detect an origin somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line?"

  She dimpled. "Well, I *am* a Bama girl..."

  He extended his arm, waited till she tucked her hands into it. "Take me, Bama. I'm yours."