Read Too Wylde for Free Online

And he
loves us both. In different ways. You're a warrior, you're his peer
in that world. He's the presence of the Divine Masculine in my
world, and I am the Feminine in his. The three of us, there's karma
and past lives --"
    "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