Too Wylde by Marcus Wynne

looting failed banks -- hell, failed countries! -- and
moving it around to her benefit.
    She hurried off the library and its wi-fi so
she could enter a VPN she'd set up to work from a remote server she
leased in Romania, and do what she needed under proxy.
    She loved girl talk, and Double D Bodacious
would have advice for her. There was a dance coming up, and a boy
she wanted to ask her. Or at least he'd better ask her, or she'd
hack his Facebook and put fag pictures on it.
    She set up on a corner table, waved to some
of the girls she took math with (fellow math nerds) and set up her
cover screen, which was from top to bottom filled with programming
code, so it looked like an extra credit project for Computer
Science.
    Set.
    She opened a new window in Linux and went to
work, connected through her VPN and waited till the icons showed
she was secure, run through 7 proxies culminating in her Romanian
server, checked her private bulletin board/mail service, again run
through a proxy from both Hushmail and Cryptoheaven, and saw the
blinking icon that said: Double D Bodacious sends you
greetings...and an attachment.
    KiKi opened it up, let her eyes run down the
lines of code, the routing numbers, the bank names, and stamped her
feet in giddy excitement -- ooooooohh. This was *the* big leagues!
And most important -- major league fun!
    She typed out her reply....
    ***
    Dee Dee Kozak looked at her iPhone and saw an
encrypted message come through. Grinned, opened it.
    "Friend girl? We have contact," she said.
    Irina stared sullenly across the table at
her. "I want to go out."
    "Go ahead."
    "It is not safe alone."
    "I charge extra for that."
    "I have made you rich. And you have done
nothing."
    "Only saved your life, bitch," Dee Dee said
genially. "But hey, you wanna go out, we can go out. I could use a
rack of chicken tacos myself."
    "I want different clothes."
    "You need to lose the Eastern European hooker
look, honey. Just saying. You draw more attention than we need, not
that man-attention is generally a bad thing, I'm fond it myself,
but right now a little lower profile would be good."
    "What do you suggest?"
    "For you? Hmmmm...." Dee Dee said. "Maybe a
little urban hillbilly or wandering cowgirl might be good. You
could still wear the skin tight jeans, show off your ass and legs,
but we could break it up with a big shirt, just hint at those boobs
of yours."
    "I am not a cow herder. I will not dress like
one."
    "Hello Cowgirl in the sand...is this place at
your command..." Dee sang softly.
    "What?"
    "You wouldn't get it. We'll go shopping. I'm
thinking Kohls."
    She turned away from Irina's insulted look
and tapped out a brief response: Do it.
    And sent it.
     
    Jimmy John Wylde and Nina Capushek
    I took my time walking a lap around Lake
Heron. It wasn't the largest of the string of lakes in Lake City,
but it was my favorite. Not just because it was closest to my
house, but the symmetry of it was something I enjoyed; it was the
most nearly perfect circle of the three lakes. The southwestern
side of the lake was defined by hills; according to local history,
it had been the site of the Lakota Sioux Indian village that had
once been here, and the hillside was where the Lakota Medicine Men
had set up and had their visions, spoke to the spirits, and
communed with the sky and the trees and the lakes. I spent a fair
amount of time sitting there on that hill, when I felt like sorting
things out, and found it to be a peaceful place, a quiet place,
where the din in my head settled down to a barely perceptible
buzz.
    Sometimes I wondered if this was what had
drawn me back here to Lake City, after Afghanistan and the
hospital. I wanted to go somewhere, and while I could go anywhere,
I had to wonder: Where? My family was gone. I really had no roots
after I'd cut myself off from my military and OGA family. Here I'd
created a family for myself, cobbled out of the relationships
forged in the floating water world of the night life scene in Lake
City: