Free Too Wylde by Marcus Wynne

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