Free Too Wylde by Marcus Wynne Page A

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.
    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