Too Wylde (9 page)

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 --

There. With a keystroke, she'd siphoned off
money from an account in Dubai through a server she'd entered in
Belarus and then spread it across five different accounts in five
different banks, disguised as a recurrent payment and below the
radar for the IRS software (out of date as it was) to pick up, so
the funds were then set up for a wire transfer from each bank to
arrive at staggered intervals at an account set up for face to face
access in --

-- Lake City, Minnesota.

Hmm.

She opened a new screen, checked out the
distance and the flights. She could get a direct flight from here
to there, and be on the ground in a few hours. She'd have to get a
driver to take her around. Maybe a cute bodyguard-driver?

Kiki grinned into her knee, her leg pulled up
like a crane's as she looked up driver and escort-services in Lake
City.

Never know. A girl could get lucky on a
little visit.

Nina Capushek

"What the fuck?" Nina said to Fabruzzi.

The detective's bull pen overflowed with
plain clothes and uniformed cops; radios turned up were filled with
traffic sending ambulances and fire trucks and the National Guard
over to St. Paul. She recognized a couple of the Feebs from the
JTTF over in a corner, and a bunch of other obvious Federale types
not known by face.

Fabruzzi shook his head. "Still getting the
picture, Nina. We've sent over all the off-duty who came in to help
out. We've cranked the whole city up to full terrorist alert
status. We got our hands full covering what we got."

"They blew the fucking Capital up?"

"No," Fabruzzi said. He lowered his voice.
"The non-suits over there?" He inclined his head at a much older
man with a full white beard and head of hair sitting with two very
fit guys dressed in the tactical dirt-bag combo of Arc-Teryx and
Levis that meant some kind of military or para-military operator.
"OGA."

"Like somebody's not supposed to know
CIA?"

"Whatever. The word is that what got fucking
blown apart in the first explosion was an off-the books CIA
facility. The Feebs claim they were never informed that facility
was there, and it's not affiliated with the one they've got over
here. The second blast took out the first tier of first-responders
in St. Paul; they lost something like three trucks, all the
firefighters, two ambulances and EMS, the fucking Command and
Control Van and about a dozen cops and squads. Whoever did this was
not fucking around."

"Damn."

"Yeah."

"So who you want me to kill?"

"Did you ever meet up with that ATF guy?"

"Not yet. Was busy."

"Well, he's over here somewhere." Oozy
scanned the room, then yelled: "Le Fronte? Come over here!"

Nina turned and stopped dead in her
tracks.

"Oh, you've *got* to be fucking kidding me,"
she said.

"What?" Fabruzzi said. "You two know each
other?"

Le Fronte walked up, extended his hand, and
said, "Nice to meet you in person, Detective Capushek."

Nina ignored the hand. "Oozy, I have a
problem with this."

"Deal with it. I got marching orders for you
two. Wait here."

He slid off the desk, shouldered through the
crowd and spoke to the old white haired man surrounded by his
war-dogs.

Nico was the first to speak. "Look,
we..."

"Shut up. Seriously. You're a fucking asshole
and incompetent to boot. I won't work with you. Don't say another
fucking word."

"You don't have a choice. You fucking deal
with it."

Nina rose up on her toes, settled back when
she saw Oozy gesturing at her. Le Fronte crossed his arms and
stared off into space.

Oozy walked up to them and said, "You like
movies?"

"What?" Nina said.

"You two remind me of Casablanca. 'This looks
like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'"

Jimmy John Wylde

The big screen TV showed the same footage
over and over again. A couple of Japanese tourists had been
shooting video of their family on a visit to St. Paul when the
building went up, and they kept filming and then got that footage
right over to the first arriving TV truck. In between the footage
of the building going up, the constant update of casualties from
the two blasts, and the arrival of every kind of heavy duty
counter-terror organization, the news was pretty much non-stop St.
Paul, St. Paul.

I had a stale beer in front of me. Thieu kept
shaking her head.

"No good, Jimmy. Things very crazy right now.
War, terrorism, now this here. I'm happy my family was not
hurt."

"That's good."

She shook her head. "This is like what my
father say last days in Viet Nam were like."

"It's the last days of something, Thieu."

My cell phone rang. A local number, one I
didn't recognize.

"Hello?"

Slight asthmatic wheeze of someone with
difficulty breathing. A voice I didn't want to recognize.

"Jimmy John, Jimmy John, where do you
belong?"

"Who is this?"

"You know, brother. You know. Busy? Thought
we might take a walk in the park, like the old timey time
days."

"Hank?"

"The Artist Previously Known As. Maybe."

"Where?"

"Remember how you used to tell me the story
about Lake Harriet and the Lakota holy lands? That little hill
there, the one where you ran off that rapist a long time ago."

Those words filled me with a dread so deep
and cold I couldn't speak. Only Hank would know that.

"Yes. I remember."

"Start there and walk down to the Lake, turn
counter-clockwise and walk against the flow. I'll find you along
there."

"Why you running SDR on me, Hank?"

"Even paranoids have real enemies, bro. You
and me got that class on the same day at the same time. Courtesy of
Uncle Sugar. Say, a quarter past two? We can have a nice walk in
public, won't attract a lot of attention that way, you figure?
Looking forward to catching up, Jimmy John. Maybe we can figure out
where we both belong."

"I...."

"Don't say a word, Jimmy Jay. Nothing to be
said right now. See you quarter past. And don't get your friends
involved. You still got friends, right?"

"Hank..."

"The Artist Previously Known As. Later,
gator."

Click. Nothing.

I shut the phone.

"Jimmy?" Thieu said. "Who that? You okay? You
look sick, you sick?"

Lizzy Caprica

Lizzy sat crossed legged in an elegant lotus
position on the worn leather couch in the dancer's lounge in the
backroom warrens of The Trojan Horse. The other dancers were all
gathered around, draped over chairs, perched on chair arms, or on
the floor leaning against one another's knees watching the big
screen TV Lance T had installed in the lounge for them.

"This is awful," one of the girls said. "How
many killed?"

"They don't know yet," one of the others
said. "Couple of hundred for sure."

"Anyone we know?" Lizzy said.

"No," Gina, one of the senior dancers with
Lizzy, said. "Not that we've heard. Everyone's okay."

"I think Marie's boyfriend is a St. Paul
firefighter," Lizzy said. "Has anyone heard from him?"

"He's okay. They were in bed when it
happened; he got called in."

"Thank Goddess," Lizzy said. "I think we
should all pray and offer thanks."

Several girls muttered under their breath and
moved away; most of them, and all the senior girls, gathered closer
to Lizzy.

"Say it, girl," said a tall black girl
muscled like a gymnast. "Say those words you say."

They all held hands, and Lizzy opened the
prayer with the words she intoned daily: "Father, Mother, Creator
God, Holy Spirit, Great Spirit, Goddess...hear our prayers...."

Lance T

Lance watched the girls pray on his wall
mounted camera monitor. He had one monitor set on the girls and
another monitor on the news.

It was a hard day in Lake City. This was
going to cut into the good, and he needed the good to keep coming.
It cost a lot to keep things up, keep people happy, the doors open,
the green flowing.

He had opportunities to branch out, but he
steered clear of those entanglements. There were more than enough
entanglements for a business owner in the Twin Cities, especially
one in the business he's in, and there were more than enough people
sniffing around him already. Naked women and booze brought in the
bad with the good, and men drunk on liquor and/or sex tended to
talk. Secrets had a high price to the right people.

Something Lance T knew too well.

Costs a lot to keep a secret.

He tapped on a key on his desktop computer,
pulled up the real-time accrual in the cash registers. He could
keep a second by second accounting of what came in through the
electronic registers (and change it himself, if he so needed to,
with a custom designed program provided to him by some
investors....) and graph it all out. He knew the peak hours for
booze, the peak hours for certain dancers, the lows and the highs,
he had it all.

As did a certain investor.

That was life in Lake City.

But today, he had to think about other
things.

Dee Dee Kozak

Dee Dee swung her 10kg kilogram kettlebell
through her 199th hinge swing. Sweat poured down her neck down the
deep V of her breasts in her new Athleta top, darkening the fabric
down her back and all the way to the flat hard expanse of her
belly, flexing with each careful swing all the way up to 250 a day,
just like clockwork. She checked her form: eyes straight, chin up,
gut in, and thrusting from the hips and lower core, elbows pinned
to her side and letting only the deep core work, honing those
muscles so useful in a fight or fuck situation. Lord knows she
enjoyed both, sometimes at the same time.

She grinned. It's good to be Dee Dee.

She paused, took a deep breath and gutted out
the last 47, grunting deeply, nothing sexy about that except to the
right man, of which there were damn few left, at least one in this
lovely little burb, but when she saw him last, he was debating
whether to kill her or to fuck her, and that was how she preferred
to leave it -- leave 'em laughing when you go, if they were still
breathing. Which was a rarity among her work-related sexual
encounters.

Deon, Deon. Her exotic South African. She'd
never had one of those before. And know that she had, she
considered taking a long vacation down there. Sun and fun and
hard-bodied killers who didn't wake up apologizing for being born
with a penis, like most American metrosexuals these days.

Too bad she'd have to kill him if she saw him
again, and she'd better be sure she saw him first because that boy
was definitely Top Shelf when it came to the world of dealing out
death and destruction up close and personal.

She set the kettlebell down, wiped her face
down with a Dior exercise towel, dropped down to do push-ups. Four
sets of 25 regular ones, and then four sets of 25 each Hindu
push-ups. Her boy-toys liked those.

She was glad for the work-out, and glad for
the privacy. Irina had settled down once she'd seen what Dee Dee
had done with the money online; settled down enough to send her out
on her own to spend a little cash. Major operational faux pas, but
at this point, it was just as useful to see what she was going to
do as it was to keep her under wraps.

Hell, as long as Dee Dee had her money, she
could do whatever she wanted.

Dee Dee flexed through the final
Hindu-pushups, flopped on her back and caught her breath. Her body
burned in the pleasant way it did after a serious workout, and Lord
knows she needed to keep that up; getting old is not for the weak,
even though as far as she was concerned, she was in her prime. As a
shooter, hell yeah, and as a woman well into her best years. As an
earner? Hell, boys, she was on top of the heap. And might have to
raise her prices after this one.