Too Wylde (5 page)

"Jimmy's got past lives in this life."

Tinkling laughter from Lizzy. "Oh, Nina. If
you knew how true that is. I think you're becoming a Buddhist,
too!"

"Only if Buddha packs a .45."

Jimmy John Wylde

Jimmy John, Jimmy John, where do you
belong...

I didn't want to think about that. I wanted
to concentrate on the sound of someone working their piano scales
two houses down, the tinkling of keys carrying through my open
window, as I drank coffee after another restless night.

Got up and went into my backroom, where I
kept all the shit I didn't want anyone to see under lock and key.
Gun safes, lockers of gear, a computer locked down with every kind
of software to keep it as secure as anything on the net, a hard
wire interface to a cable network direct to a VPN firewall...

And The Box.

Every one who serves has A Box. A foot
locker, generally, from the Old School Days when one rested at the
foot of your bunk in the open bay barracks (when they still did
that, before the military got Politically Correct), a box in which
you saved the totems and the memorabilia you collected. Old
uniforms, medals, certificates and citations, pictures you didn't
want to hang, old weapons.

That was what I was looking for.

I opened The Box, pushed aside the boxed
flags, the challenge coins in their custom cases, reams of
photographs, banded files, and down at the bottom, a Glock 19 still
in a partially burned and melted Safariland thigh rig.

I took it out and cleared it. The muzzle and
metal slide were fine; the plastic frame touched by fire, blackened
and melted in places.

...resting the Glock on a rock, fire pouring
out of the chopper, couldn't crawl, shooting at the Muj bounding
towards him...

...Jimmy, help me, fuck, I'm burning....

I jacked the slide forward and snapped the
trigger.

Who was coming for me? On that day, the Task
Force QRF had come in heavy, lit up the mountainside, plucked me
away. No one else survived. They had to come back and bomb the
chopper wreckage, make sure the commo and the surveillance
equipment was completely destroyed, it was too hot to make a body
recovery. When they finally sent a team in to get boots on the
ground, all they found were body fragments and bone, enough to get
ID, but by then I was Outside, no longer in the loop, OPSEC and
Deniability at play, recuperating in Johns Hopkins and staring at
the wall, watching the hands go round the clock...

And there was someone out there that knew
what happened and what was said on that day. Or knew someone who
did.

Who?

I put the holster back, took the Glock to the
desk and cleaned it, studied the burns on the frame and grip. Maybe
Deon could fix this.

***

"Looks like the start to a grip reduction,"
Deon said. He ran his long bony fingers over the grip and frame.
"Best way will be to do just that. Whittle on it, clean the edges
up. Go through a house fire?"

"No," I said. "Downed bird."

Deon gave me one of his looks. Studied, calm,
his blue eyes seemingly wide and without guile; the way he studied
someone before he shot them, the way he looked over his sights.

"Foreign lands and long ago," he said.

"Yeah."

"I could get you a new one."

"I want that one."

"Numbers?"

"Leave them."

"Give it a few days, oke. I'll have it right
for you."

"Thanks, brah."

He inclined his head, tilted his jaw as
though slipping a punch.

"I think there's a storm coming," he
said.

"Yes."

"The other day?"

"Yes."

He held up the charred pistol. "And
this?"

"From that day."

"Friend or foe?"

"I don't know."

"Ah," Deon said. "And what one doesn't know,
might kill one, yes?"

I looked around the gun store, the cases
filled with handguns, the racks of rifles against the wall. All the
accouterments of violence, the world we'd both spent our lives
in.

"Just might."

"No, I don't think so, oke. Not today,
anyway. I'll have this sorted out for you. In the mean time, watch
how you go, and let me know what you need."

"Thanks, Deon. I'm good for now. But it's a
good idea to keep an eye on the sky."

Deon laughed. "All manner of things fall from
the sky, oke. Not just birdshit and fools. Later?"

"Yeah."

"Go see your lovely. That will clear your
head."

I left on that note. Fired up the FJ, pulled
away from the scarred brickwork where Deon's shop had been hastily
repaired after the gunfight we'd staged with certain baddies not so
long ago, and drove down to the Chain of Lakes to clear my
head.

It didn't work.

Dee Dee Kozak

Dee Dee was on a roll. Working the Net was
like that. Just like jamming on an Old School pinball machine:
tilt, whirl, give it a bang and sooner or later it would give up
what she needed.

Just like men.

Any operator, no matter which side of the
fence you stood on, has a network of private sources to get things
done: provide weapons, cars, shelter, hide/wash money, run errands,
partner up.

Right now she was in her's, looking for
someone who could do the hacker thing, someone more controllable
than most of the hackers that the civvies thought about. Think
hacker, what do you see? An emotionally immature, generally fucked
up adolescent or post-adolescent case of retarded development,
whose entire life is focused on a keyboard and proving that he
(mostly he, though some shes, these days) is smarter than everyone
else...and probably so in coding and deceit of the keyboard kind,
but pitifully fucked up when it came to dealing with the rest of
the world.

So since the skill set went hand in hand with
the lack of social competence and maturity, she had to apply a
certain filter to her selection criteria. Most outlaw hackers want
to be caught -- it's no fun being a teenage genius if no one sees
your work and applauds you, and the need for attention generally
leads the dogged investigator to the well hidden and spoofed IP,
the place where the hacker entered into his electronic relations
with the world.

So they get picked up, put in jail, if
they're lucky they don't get butt fucked and turned out, but
sometimes they do, and then they are at least a bit more discreet,
because just like pedophiles, they've got a disease and they can't
stay away from the keyboards, which are the playgrounds for the
hacker-addict.

Dee Dee could ply her formidable sexual
charms on most any man, but most hackers would rather cyber-fuck
with someone else's computer (or brain) than have sex with a real
woman, so she had to engage her top shelf social engineering skills
to utilize a combination of flattery, cajolery, challenge and
straight up money, as well as facilitation to deliver various
services and goods (which ranged from blow jobs to custom pistols,
all in a day's work for her) to get a small stable of unstable
computer nerds, any one of which, on any given day, might be in
jail, locked in a sugar frenzy from overdosing on Ding Dongs and
Mountain Dew, or immersed in the one millionth level of some
massive Multi Level Player game.

But today, if she was lucky...

Ping.

On her monitor:
This is Neo Dark God. Who
dares to invoke me?

Loud laughter of pure dee-light from Dee Dee
Kozak, the cheeriest assassin in Lake City.

"Why, my goodness gracious, it's Neo Dark
God," she said. And then typed those words out.

Who dares to interrupt my rest?

Reach down and unbunch your panties, Dark
God. It's Double-D Bodacious, your favorite equal opportunity
employer, seeking an audience on the clock. You still interested in
what I've got to offer?

In Kansas City, MO, a 13 year old girl in a
severe Catholic school frock, sneaked a look up from her laptop in
the library, studied the room, and then typed:

Bet your sweet ass, Double-D Bodacious. Go to
this link and we'll run deep and secure.

Dee Dee laughed.

Oh, you bet, NDG. I got something to bust
your cherry wide open!

LOL. I hope so. I'm bored out of my mind.

Got any boyfriends yet?

Go secure first!

Nina Capushek

"Yo, Nina!" Detective LT "Oozy" Fabruzzi
shouted out his door. "Grace me with your presence, will ya?"

Nina shouted back without looking up from the
case files stacked ten deep on her desk. "Busy!"

"C'mon, at least
try
to act like a
subordinate, will ya, fer Christ's sake, Nina? C'mon, I ain't got
all damn day!"

Nina grinned, stood up, and walked into
Fabruzzi's office to the scattered applause from the other dicks in
the Detective pen:

"Oooooh, look...Nina's being
subordinate
!"

"Only till he shuts the door."

"Hey Loot! Leave it open this time, will
ya?"

Fabruzzi shook his head. "Shut up and get
back to work, alla you, be grateful you got a job this
economy!"

He slammed the door on loud laughter.

Nina leaned against the wall, arms crossed.
"So what now, boss? You got some more shit rolling downhill you
gonna dump on your favorite girl detective's desk? I think I'm
being discriminated against here...."

"That's what you get for being my best
detective, Detective Capushek," Fabruzzi said, plopping down in his
chair with a groan of satisfaction. "Man, my fucking ass
hurts."

"There's this thing, it's called a gym? You
get to go there free if you're a cop, you know, have that badge and
gun thing going on? You go to this gym thing, you can exercise,
ogle hot chicks in spandex, or guys, if that's your speed, no
offense, I don't care, don't know, don't ask, don't tell, you know,
Oozy?"

"Fuck you, Nina. Why you always got to bust
my balls for?"

"It's my job to remind you that you've got
some. It's on the duty roster. Go look."

Fabruzzi laughed. "Crazy bitch. You got some
balls on you."

"Yep."

"No shit." He picked up a file. "You know the
Fed-ulas love you, Nina. Alla the time. You got DEA wants to kiss
your ass, the Feeble Bureaucratic and Incompetent, and now
ATF..."

"Those guys should open a retail outlet.
Alcohol, tobacco, firearms...they'd make a killing."

"Good one. Now. Back to this shit."

"I've got enough shit on my desk, Oozy."

"You'll like this! Explosives and shit."

Nina sat down. "Okay, so what you got?"

"See, I told you."

Nina sighed. "What *we* got, Oozy?"

"Here's a little something I didn't know. Did
you know that except for Kentucky and West Virginia, there are more
industrial explosives stolen in Wisconsin than in any other state
in the Union?"

"No, I did not."

"Fucking surprised the shit out of me.
Cheeseheads lose more heavy duty ordnance than anybody else in the
Upper Midwest. Anyway. There's some military grade shit gone
missing, and an ATF snitch claims he sold it to some guy here in
the City."

"So why the fuck am I sitting here?"

"ATF needs a street animal."

"They've got a couple of their own."

"Yeah, they do, and they're all tied up with
the bikers and the gun dealers. You'd think they'd have time to do
their own work..."

"That's probably where that shit is right
now."

"You'd think. But apparently this stuff went
to some nice white guy. No bad guy connections. Nothing on the
books except Clean White Citizen."

"So go talk to Clean White Citizen."

"He passed it on. And they don't quite know
to who or how."

"And..."

"They're throwing that Lone Wolf thing around
again."

"Oh, fuck me. DHS too?"

"They got their finger in that pie, along
with the Feebs. You got a good rep for finding that kind of shit,
when you're not killing suspects and shooting up city blocks like
Ramba, Return of the Eternal Fucking Warrior or some shit."

"Gimme the file."

Fabruzzi slid it across the desk. "And Nina?
I know it goes against your Lone Wolf nature, but this file got an
ATF body attached to it."

Nina slid it back. "Then they don't need
me."

"Actually they do. Check it out."

Nina opened the file. An ATF business card
and a one-page briefing note: Special Agent Nicholas Le Fronte.
Ex-Special Forces, multiple combat tours in the Big Sandy, 5 years
with ATF mostly undercover in the Deep South doing that long
standing tradition of dealing in guns, reassigned to the Lake City
Joint Terrorism Task Force. There was a picture.

Long thick black hair combed straight back
with a streak of white on either temple. Mustache hiding part of a
scar that started at the upper right of his mouth and stretched
across both lips into his left cheek. Hard brown eyes that stared
right at the camera and the hint of a tat in the faded neck of the
black t-shirt. Muscles underneath that, not the gym kind.

Not bad.

"His cell phone's on the back of the card,"
Oozy said.

"I'll call him."

"Nina?" Oozy said as she got up to go.

"Yeah?"

"Please don't kill him."

She laughed all the way back to her desk.

Lance T

Lance T handed a thick envelope to the squat
elderly Laotian man who stood before his desk.

"Thank you, my friend," Lance said.

The older man inclined his head, smiled
slightly. "Thank you, my friend. It is always good to see you."

"I appreciate your...patronage."

The older man took that in. "Yes. I know this
word. 'The regular business given to a store, restaurant, or public
service by a person or group.' Yes?

"Yes. Exactly."

"So please, Lance...help me with my poor
English? Are you a store, a restaurant, or a public service?"