Helsinki Blood

22

The sound of the door opening wakes me. I hear the trundle of suitcase wheels. Kate is home. I pull on sweatpants and go out to greet her. Her eyes are flat, lifeless. She looks like she’s aged ten years in a week. Milo is behind her, as if to cut off her escape. I hug her. She allows it, but doesn’t return it.

“I missed you,” I say.

She slurs, “Where is Anu?”

“In her crib, sleeping.”

“Would you get her for me?”

“Of course.”

I knock on the door, wondering what kind of scene I’ll find after Jenna’s anger and her TKO of Sweetness last night. “Come in,” she says.

I find them in bed, her head on Sweetness’s chest. It seems all is forgiven.

“Kate is home,” I say. “And Jenna, I think you have an impression otherwise, but I didn’t have sex with Mirjami. She just wanted to sleep in the same bed with me. Nothing happened.”

“Not my business,” she says. “Why tell me?”

“Because I don’t want some innuendo about me cheating on Kate slipping out unintended. I’ve never cheated on her.”

And then it comes to me. I intended to change the bedding. It will be redolent of Mirjami. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

I bring Anu to Kate. She takes Anu in her arms, squeezes her so hard I’m afraid she might hurt her, and Kate starts to cry. Not just crying, but wailing from grief. The kind of crying one would expect if her baby was dead, not reunited with her.

Milo whispers in my ear. “She didn’t sleep for the whole trip, so she’s been up for almost two whole days. Plus, she’s been drinking the whole time.”

Anu starts to cry, too. “She hates me,” Kate says.

“Of course she doesn’t hate you,” I say. “She loves you. She’s just upset because you are.”

“I abandoned her and she hates me for it. And she should, I deserve her hatred. And I don’t deserve her. A woman like me doesn’t deserve a baby.”

She sits on the footrest of my chair, holds Anu, rocks back and forth, and just cries and cries. I don’t know what to do, so I sit on the couch and wait.

Milo whispers, “Got any tranquilizers?”

I nod, get them and hand him a sleeve of Oxamin.

He goes to the kitchen, and I see him crush some of them to powder with the back of a spoon, make a stiff drink with kossu and Jaffa, and stir them into it. He takes it to her. “Here, Kate,” he says, “this will help.”

She wipes away tears and snot. “My kidnapper and bartender,” she says, and sucks down half the drink in one go.

Her crying stops as she finishes the drink, and her eyes start to close. “I have to go to bed,” she says, hands Anu back to me, and wobbles to the bedroom.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I say.

Milo sits beside me on the couch. “Yeah,” he says. “She’s confused and she stays drunk. Not much of what she says makes sense.”

“Have you had any sleep?” I ask.

“I didn’t have much time to sleep in Miami, so I caught a few Z’s on the plane, where she couldn’t get in any trouble. I’m in OK shape.”

“Thank you for this. I owe you.”

“You’re welcome, and no you don’t. You would have done the same.”

“A lot has happened,” I say, “and none of it good. We need to trade stories. Who goes first?”

I sit in my chair. He lies back and stretches out on the couch, legs out straight and feet crossed, hands on his stomach and fingers laced. He closes his eyes while he talks. “I guess I can. Like I told you when I got there, John was speedballing and Kate was drunk. I spent time listening to their conversations through the open window. Kate going on about how killers can’t be mothers, talking about a man who fell burning from the sky. Crazy shit.”

“She has post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say.

“That was apparent, and it was also apparent to me that it was only a matter of time before she picked up his bad habits. She was curious, asked him what speedballing was like. He said, ‘Like falling down an elevator shaft.’ I saw that the idea appealed to her. He’s a ‘one more day’ junkie. ‘Another day and I’ll go to rehab.’ Which, of course, she believed. So I went to a place called Walmart. Ever heard of it?”

“They talk about it on American TV.”

“What a freaky place. As big as a shopping mall and they sell everything imaginable. If a nuke went off, you could survive for years in there without ever leaving the building. They have like a hundred different kinds of potato chips. The place is so big that they have electric carts to ride around in. You would think mostly geriatrics use them, but almost all the people riding around in them are just too fat to walk. It’s the fattest fucking place I’ve ever seen.”

Milo and his stories of biblical length. I wish, just this once, he would cut to the chase.

“So anyway, I bought a hunting knife in there. My disguise was a baseball cap and sunglasses I got at a gas station. The gas stations are weird, too. Huge. They stock like a hundred different kinds of energy drink. Why the fuck would you need a hundred different kinds of energy drink?”

I’m resisting the urge to yell at him.

“John’s daily routine consists of going out early, buying eight balls of heroin and cocaine, flogging most of it, and using the rest to support his habit. I followed his dealer, B amp;Eed his house, and stole an ounce of each. The next morning, I met John on his way out to buy dope. I told him Kate was leaving with me. He got all indignant and threatening until I put the knife to his throat and showed him the dope. I told him I would trade him the dope for Kate. The price: he could never, ever, have contact with her again. And I lectured him, told him he could either put the shit up his nose, or sell it and pay for rehab. He snatched the drugs out of my hands and told me to come pick up Kate later in the day. He sold me his sister.”

“No surprise there,” I say.

“So I showed up in the afternoon, she was half in the bag, and I told her to start packing, that she was going home now. She got haughty and told me to make her. I showed her the knife and said if she didn’t, I would kill John on the spot. He played his role, backed me up, told her she belonged with her husband and child and he was kicking her out.”

“How did she take it?”

“Badly. But, as you can see, she did it.”

“What do you think will happen to him?” I ask.

“He has a laptop on a table facing his couch. It has a webcam in it. I infected the computer, so we can watch him with his webcam and find out.”

I didn’t take Milo’s voyeuristic obsessions into account. Of course he has to know what happens to John. His life wouldn’t feel complete without it. In giving John the drugs, he played a game. Sell them and detox and live. Put them up his nose and die. Speeedball freaks have short life spans. Play for blood. Milo spun the roulette wheel and played for John’s life.

“I have hard things to tell you,” I say.

I start with Mirjami and work through the murder of the Russian diplomat to the poker game and The Shit List to the harassment and discovering Captain Jan Pitkanen was behind it.

He doesn’t say a word while I talk. I watch fury course through him, see veins in his neck and forehead pumping harder and harder as his heart races from adrenaline. When I’m finished, he says, “People will die for this.”

“Who? We’ve made so many enemies that we can’t kill them all.”

“You realize,” Milo says, “that they burned up Kate’s car. Your wife was the target and my cousin, Mirjami, was just collateral damage.”

I’m pretty sure he’s right, but think we should make sure before we let our emotions run high and go on some half-cocked revenge spree. In the end, we could wind up behind bars, and prisons aren’t the nicest places for anyone to live, but especially not for cops. “We should find out the cause of the fire before doing anything,” I say.

“Fine. Let’s go look at it.”

“I can’t. I want to be here when Kate wakes up.”

I also want to find Loviise Tamm again and parade her in front of Kate to prove the sanctity of my mission. I hear the trumpets sounding again.

Milo snickers and talks to me like a child. “Kate hasn’t slept in two days, she’s got more alcohol than blood coursing through her system, and I just doped her with enough tranquilizers to knock down a horse. She’s not waking up today. Maybe tomorrow.”

I call her therapist. Torsten asks how I got her home. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, “but now that I have, I need to know how to best take care of her.”

He asks me to bring her to his office tomorrow at eleven a.m. And he would like to talk to both of us, not just Kate. I agree.

Sweetness and Jenna are still in bed. I ask Jenna if she minds looking after Anu for a while. She says she will, and asks if I’m pissed off at her. I say no. I ask Sweetness if he can clean up any blood left over from last night, because it might upset Kate to see it. He promises.

I go to the bedroom to get dressed. Kate snores like a chain saw. Milo is right, she’s dead to the world. As he said, “Maybe tomorrow.”