Too Wylde (8 page)

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.