Too Wylde Read online

  Love that giggle..."My name is Mia..."

  "...and I'm glad to meetya," Nico said.

  More giggle. "...and I'm supposed to take care of you till Lance gets back."

  "Well, I'll let you take care of me, and we'll let Lance take care of himself, 'kay, Bama?"

  She led him into the club, and Nico was at home. This was no titty bar, this was raw naked orgy blow jobs on demand with premium Scotch and Dutch Chocolate upscale GENTLEMAN'S CLUB. Just his kind of place.

  The girl up on the runway working a pole was a ripped athlete of the Scandinavian blonde kind, but her routine set her out -- serious acrobatics, not just the lazy stand and twitch, but someone who had a routine, worked the music and the thin afternoon crowd hard, and obviously worked just as hard on her physique.

  "You like?" Mia said.

  "I like. Very much."

  "What's your pleasure, Nico?"

  He pressed his arm hard against his side, pinning her small hands against his pecs. Grinned at her. "I'm partial to steel magnolias..."

  She was completely relaxed, leaned into him with the ease of a woman who handled men all the time. The swell of her breast was real, no enhancement there. "Well, Nico, let's get you started with a drink. Let me guess, you're a bourbon kind of guy?"

  "How astute of you."

  "Oooh. I like guys who use big words."

  ***

  Happily slouched down in a leather booth, feet kicked up on a leather davenport, Mia tucked in beside him and signaling to the on-duty cocktail waitress to keep his Kentucky reserve fresh, a bevy of dancers stopping by the table to say hi --

  -- life was good in Nico world.

  "So what's Lance's story?" he said.

  Mia sipped on her iced Coke Lite. "I thought you were friends."

  "We just met."

  "Oh. Well, I don't get into Lance's business. I'm *part* of Lance's business."

  "I mean what did he do before he established this mighty fine establishment?"

  "He's got what he calls his 'I Love Me Wall' over there," Mia said, pointing one long nailed, elegantly painted finger.

  Nico took his time untangling, got up.

  "Where you going?"

  "Check the man out. I'll be right back. Hold my seat."

  He wandered over to the wall, a full length stretch of mahogany with multiple framed pictures and several cases mounted, with championship wrestling belts, trophies, and beaucoup pictures of Lance T with wrestler types he recognized and more than a few mainstream movie celebrities. Some with folks he didn't recognize till he leaned in and checked the fine print; apparently wrestler-dude collected author celebrities, too. David Morrell, the Rambo guy, Janet Evanovich, mystery gal, some others, hey, Marcus Wynne, thriller guy -- Nico liked his books, F. Paul Wilson, the Repairman Jack guy...

  Interesting. Who'd a thunk it?

  He wandered down the hall to the palatial men's room, done in shades of white marble, pulled out his JoyStick and drained it into a gleaming urinal, washed his hands, and winked at himself in the mirror.

  This whole Federale gunfighter thing was under rated, if you asked him.

  He went out, just in time to get brushed past by one of the hottest asses he'd seen, in a snugged up tailored Arc'Teryx black pant, with a leather jacket over that...Lawdy, lawdy.

  "Nice ass," he said. "How much for a dance with you, honey?"

  Nice Ass spun on her heel, faced him.

  Damn.

  Broken nose dominated a face with fine bone features, sharp high cheekbones, brilliant hard eyes, black hair pulled back tight in a bun, Smartwool T-shirt taut over breasts and some seriously hard midriff. Yum.

  "What the fuck did you say?" Nice Ass said.

  "I said, nice ass, Nice Ass. And..."

  Never saw it coming. One second he was relaxed and grinning, the next minute she had the web of her hand jammed up in his throat and he was back-pedaling and then on his back, arms coming up in the guard and he just froze when he saw the big black bore of a Glock .45 resting on the bridge of his nose.

  "Hey, bitch," Nice Ass said. "My name's not Nice Ass. It's Sergeant fucking Kapushek to you. Bitch. And if you want to get froggy, I'm in the mood to dirty up Lance's fucking floor with your brain matter. So...how you doing? Wanna get froggy?"

  Jimmy John Wylde

  I thought about what Nina said. It made sense. In a way. It was strange, that after all these years in the life that I'd chosen to live, that a woman who might be the only female peer I'd ever had would be the one to tell me that the key to living with my past was to put it right where it belonged -- behind me. Absorb the lessons, integrate them, and move the hell on.

  Straight ahead.

  Great in theory. Not so easy in practice.

  Introversion is a poor character trait in the world of violence. You don't want to be lost in navel-gazing when you got incoming, whether its gunfire or a fist, and afterwards, when you've debriefed, it's time for decompression and moving on. Sifting out the emotional content after the fact enables you to keep the hardest lessons handy without the crippling recall of the terror or the adrenaline cocktail -- or, as most of us wouldn't admit, the sheer glee of the fight.

  There was no glee in this for me.

  She understood survivor guilt, in the way that only someone who'd been down that road could. No specifics, but she didn't need to be specific. If you were in The Club, you'd know. If you weren't, you weren't going to get it anyway.

  You learn to live with it. Or it kills you. Or keeps you up till you go crazy.

  But what about when the past comes back?

  That was the part I couldn't get my head around. Was it real? Was it comeback from one of the other deals I'd run, one of the pack of enemies I'd created along the way?

  Who was out there?

  Mr. Smith

  It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood, won't you be mine, won't you be mine...

  Mr. Smith hummed, floating on the custom cocktail his pet chemist had brewed for him, riding the razor's edge between pain and narco-dullness, hands as steady as they could be, as he steered the white Plain Jane Honda Civic through the mid-morning rush of traffic in downtown Lake City and then onto the ramp near Hennepin and 94, through the construction and onto the highway.

  It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...

  He took the Capitol exit, made his way through the snarl of one-way streets that defined St. Paul, and turned down University towards the capital building. This was Hmong town, the largest concentration of expatriate Hmong in the States. What most people didn't know was why the Hmong were all sitting here in the coldest fucking state in the Union. A couple of good Lutherans from Minnesota who happened to be Old School Oh So Social boys (OSS) from WW-2 and the generation who rallied round Lucien Conein when the flag and the White Star went up in Laos, held to these Old School virtues: You Take Care Of Your Own. Even if it means burning down the fucking headquarters and the flag with it, a field man took care of his own. And those Hmong warlords, the ones who married their daughters to the white men who choppered in and lived with them, ate their food, carried their wounded, led their warriors -- the Hmong swore fealty to them. And the good ones among the whites returned it, when everything fell apart -- they sent stolen choppers or planes in, led their Hmong and their families out overseas, or bought their way out with gold paid for out of opium proceeds, or bought them out of a camp and loaded them onto a boat or a plane and put them into the Lutheran run resettlement shelters in friendly Minnesota, where guys like Tony Poe could drop in and check on them, and then disappear, leaving the silent scarred elders, the Buddhas of War, nodding and looking out over their flock.

  Mr. Smith wasn't of that generation, but he, as they say, was read-in on some of those assets from someone of that generation, so he had a number to call, an electronic drop box which consisted of a USB drive buried in the mortar of an old pho house in downtown Lake City, where he could pick up data and names and
pass some instructions...

  ...and you had to give these Hmong this, they were good at following orders down to the fucking T.

  Because there he was, in the parking lot of the McDonalds, a sturdy quiet looking fellow in his twenties, hands on the wheels of an equally non-descript Ford Focus, beige in color, just as anonymous as can be. Mr. Smith pulled up beside him and nodded. The younger man's face was flat and brown and hard, and there wasn't even a smidgen of reaction to Mr. Smith's quite remarkable face.

  They got out and exchanged cars without a word, Mr. Smith toting a Patagonia Messenger Bag. The Hmong man drove away. Smith opened up his MacBook Air, powered it up, opened the wireless and connected to the Internet through the McDonald's interface, which in this case linked to a server in Lake City instead of St. Paul. The proxy program he ran spoofed his IP and computer ID, instead of making him invisible. Best to hide in plain sight, no easy task for someone as fucked up as he was.

  The tracking program from the cellular GPS mounted in the package built into the trunk and back seat of the Civic came up, and showed the location of the car in real time. The vehicle pulled into the parking spaces in front of the designated building and stopped. From his recce, Smith knew the parking spots were designated for drop off and delivery only, and the security people gave them only a few moments to stay there. He split his screen and looked at the moving dot that represented the active cell phone used by the Hmong driver. The driver had dismounted and would be now walking into the building. To his immediate left was a hallway with a T-intersection; down that hall and to the right was an exit door; from the exit door to the MTD bus-stop was 25 meters. He split the screen again and saw, as usual, the MTD bus on time, that good Midwestern efficiency at work.

  He tapped his fingers lightly against the keyboard, looked up, saw one of the local street scum going car to car, asking for spare change. The crack-head, an acne scarred white boy with bleach blond dreadlocks, cued on the car, tapped on the glass. Mr. Smith turned and gave him the full face blast, grinned his frightening grin, and mouthed, "Get the fuck away from me."

  The white boy ran.

  Mr. Smith laughed, turned his attention back to his monitor. The cell phone signal merged with the bus GPS signal, and away they went. He tracked them to the corner, mentally counting off the distance, 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, 400 meters...

  He slid his cursor down to a custom interface, clicked on the little red switch that said BOOM.

  Far off in the distance, the concussion, blast and then, finally, the smoke, of a carefully constructed car bomb, VBIED or Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device, to use the cool guy vernacular, going off outside a government building that hid the offices of a very particular OGA operation and, no doubt at all, inflicting 100% casualties or at least seriously pissing off anyone left standing.

  Smith clicked over to another program and turned the volume up and listened to the dispatch calls rolling in. He tapped his fingers, and waited.

  Eight minutes before the first and nearest fire department got there, and then the cops, and then the Emergency Command van -- all of them in the pre-designated rally point, well rehearsed for many years, a parking lot just off the Capital building, at this point with a few cars yet.

  Smith grinned. Slid his cursor over to the custom interface, clicked down on BOOM TWO, and watched a pre-positioned VBIED take out most of the first wave of First Responders and their Command van.

  They never saw it coming.

  But then, they never did. That was Smith's calling card. Even the local network didn't know about this one. Backups within backups within backups. That's the singleton's tradecraft.

  Oh, it was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

  Nico La Fronte, meet Nina Capushek

  "You best put that gun up," Nico whispered. He kept a tight leash on his rage.

  Nina grinned down at him. "I've killed seven men with this gun, sweetmeat. You want to be number eight?"

  Her radio toned. Officer down, officer in trouble. She twisted her face. "Go to jail or let you go, lemme see. I don't think you're worth the trouble."

  Nico's phone buzzed.

  "Somebody calling you?" Nina said.

  "You're a cop?"

  She snorted, stepped back, dropped her pistol to low ready. "Get the fuck out of here, Gomer. Go on, your party's over and you get a "Get Out Of Jail Free Card" today."

  Nico inched back, stood up, glowered.

  "Keep a leash, baby. Or I'll let my friends take care of what's needing to be taken care of while I light your ass up."

  Nico said, "I'm going to show you something. I'm using my left hand to lift up the right side of my shirt."

  He pulled up his shirt and showed her the ATF shield pinned next to his holster. "You miss that?"

  Nina stepped back, gun at the ready. "You won't be the first Fed I've fucked up. Stay away from me. I got shit to do." She turned and walked away.

  Nico stood there and watched her go. "What the fuck just happened?"

  The phone buzzed again. He read the text message: CALL IN NOW.

  He sighed. "What the fuck now?"

  Deon Oosthuizen

  Deon bent over Jimmy's burn-scarred Glock 19 on his work bench. He filled the partially melted grip spacer in the heel of the butt with fast hardening plastic epoxy. When it had fully set, he took out his Dremel tool and began to shape the handle, cutting the butt swell on the backstrap off, and then switching to a small power sander to shape the rest of it. The burn scars came off in a cloud of plastic dust, and the grip shrank. Deon loved shaping guns, even plastic ones -- transitioning from the smell of oil and metal and wood to the generation of plastic and metal and oil wasn't so hard, different smells, same skills. He loved it all. In his heart he was a craftsman of the highest order with weapons, a long standing and almost archetypal function within the warrior tribe, and he was warrior and warrior-smith, and today he was able to turn his hand to that craft in the service of his brother.

  One of the things the warrior-brotherhood is good at is the NOT asking of questions; some things you know to be personal, some things you know not to be discussed, and some things just don't need to be said. He'd never pried into Jimmy's history; that history was as plain as day to any gunfighter or warrior who'd ever been out on the two-way gun range. He didn't need to know the specifics and he knew not to ask; in the same way Jimmy knew, and trusted, what he saw in Deon without having to ask the specifics of what happened in Africa, or Iraq, or anywhere else.

  He just knew, and trusted.

  Funny how that is, because to the outsider watching the warrior brotherhood, lack of trust is one of the first things they notice. What they miss most often is that it's a lack of trust of THEM -- not of the warriors around them. Though there's often ample opportunity for betrayal within the brotherhood, there's a bond that men who have been under fire share, the same bond that makes immediate friends out of servicemen when they meet, an understanding and respect of each other without a word being exchanged.

  He switched to a finer grade of sander and began polishing the handle. The grip reduction wasn't just removing and reshaping the backstrap swell, though that did the bulk of it; to Deon's artist's eye it called for a reshaping and thinning of the overall grip, including the removal of the annoying finger grooves. Deon preferred the Old School simplicity of a plain grip. He didn't like a designer telling him where his fingers needed to rest.

  Jimmy was Old School, so he'd enjoy this.

  At least the new gun part of it. There was a metaphor in this somewhere; reshaping a personal weapon, grinding off that which was old and burnt and belonged in the past and transforming it in a way that gave it new use and new life with the old burnt and ground away.

  Deon laughed at himself. Getting philosophical in your old age, oke.

  He took a sheet of paper and did the final touching up by hand, smoothing it out just so.

  Perfect.

  He set the receiver to one side, after
checking the condition of the metal insert rails to make sure they were aligned and all the bits and pieces still in good order. They were, thanks to the good work of Gaston Glock, who intended his weapons to function despite being burnt, abused, rusted and full of dirt.

  The slide was next. The front sight, plastic from the factory as a bone stock Glock would be, was dinged and partially seared. So off came the sights, and then a refinish with Tenifer. He plucked out the sights he'd chosen for Jimmy: a Dawson Precision tritium front sight and a plain Warren Tactical rear sight. Those would go on once the slide was refinished. A Vicker's magazine and slide release for the receiver/frame, and then a polish of the internals -- that's all that was needed.

  He'd have it done by this evening, when the finish had set.

  Deon pushed back and looked at the pieces of the Glock set out carefully on his work bench. Just like the scattered pieces of a life. Taken apart, transformed, and ready to be reassembled into something completely new.

  He wished he could do the same for Jimmy. But maybe, just maybe, this would be the start of that.

  Kitten June Warren, aka Kiki aka Neo Death God

  Kiki, dressed in pink jammies with Miley Cyrus pictures on it, hunched on her bed. She would of course kill anyone who saw her dressed like that, since Miley Cyrus is so not-cool, but secretly she loved the TV show. The jammies were something she'd had for years; she always felt safe and secure in them -- as long as no one else knew.

  Her fingers danced on her keyboard; her custom Linux box cost more than some people's cars did, but she'd already earned about that much on this job. This was way interesting. Double D Bodacious (what a cool handle!) had sent her a number of IPs and ports to enter with a backdoor protocol, and what a world she entered: offshore servers in the Ukraine and Belarus; banks in Dubai and Aruba, electronic transfer points in Thailand and Taiwan -- cool!

  This was a whole new level of play. She felt like she'd just smashed the record and cracked open the hacks on Warcraft (back when she used to waste her time on those games, well, truth be known, every once in awhile she'd go on just to impress the boys, not that she'd ever met anyone really cool in Warcraft). This was the real deal, the Real Deal all caps REAL DEAL, big time cyber-crime (she liked the way that sounded) and she was a player, not just another kid with intimacy issues and low self-esteem, but a player running with real players --