Helsinki Blood

37

I step off the dock into Milo’s boat at five thirty a.m. He’s already up, slurping coffee and dictating into a microphone. Judging by his eyes, he’s had a wake and bake. I pick up the hashish pipe next to his computer. It’s pungent, freshly used. Its warmth and smell confirm it.

“So where are we off to?” I ask.

“Let me show you something first. Sweetness and I didn’t really go out drinking last night.”

He leads me to the other cabin and pulls a tarp away to reveal a gun safe lying on its back. The lock is gone, drilled out. I comment on it. Milo sighs. “Like everything, lock picking is hard for me just using my left hand. This belonged to the good major. Sweetness and I B amp;Eed him and boosted it. It’s made of cheap metal and not that heavy, so we just hoisted it up and carried it out to the Jeep on our shoulders.”

He flips open the door. “A.50 cal Barrett, two assault rifles, and a small assortment of handguns. Another step in the plan accomplished.”

We go to the kitchenette and he pours me a cup of coffee. He takes some gun parts out from the cabinet he keeps cups in.

“Have you learned how to fieldstrip your Colt?” he asks.

I had so little to do when I was sitting home alone, and had promised myself that I would learn to shoot, so I practiced until I could do it with my eyes closed. “Yeah, I learned.”

He hands me a barrel and firing pin. “After you kill Pitkanen, the first thing you do is replace the ones in your Colt with these and fire it a couple times. That way, the rifling and pin mark on the brass will clear you if you’re caught. Just tell the truth and explain that you’ve been practicing marksmanship, and it will explain the powder residue on the gun and your hands.”

He seems to have thought of everything. “How are you going to get Roope Malinen out to his summer cottage where you can kill him after his frame-up rampage?”

“What happened to the less you know, the less you have to do theory? The more you know, the more culpable you are.”

“I’m already culpable.”

“We’re not sure yet. Either entice him out there with a phony meeting he believes has to be held in private, or just abduct his sorry ass and force him there. That doesn’t concern me as much as making certain his family isn’t there. He has to go there alone in order to commit suicide after his atrocities. Sweetness will attend to that part of things.”

“Have you got a Go Day yet?”

“Not yet. Soon.”

“I’ve got another aspect to it that might deflect some media attention. All those girls in the apartments owned or rented by Russian diplomats. Raiding them and freeing them on or around the same day seems like a good idea. Every day that goes by, those girls suffer, so if you’re bent on doing this, do it soon. We release the info on the girls forced into the slave trade, it has to be dealt with immediately. It will create havoc in the police department, among the media, everywhere, just overload them all with more than they’re able to deal with efficiently.”

“A good idea,” Milo says. “I’ll get this together as fast as I can.”

I ask nothing more for now. Lying to myself about not taking part in an event that will change history is the ultimate in self-deception.

Milo pilots, I fish. By the time we’ve reached his uninhabited island destination, I’ve got a pretty good catch: some nice salmon, perch and pike.

There are actually two islands, a little less than a kilometer apart. Milo chose this spot so he can practice with his sniper rig, shooting from one to the next. Vegetation is sparse on both of them, but there are a few trees he can shoot at long distance.

He says we’re going to learn to shoot pistols the way Adrien Moreau taught us. No using the back sight. Just using the front sight, as if pointing with our index fingers. We shoot at smaller things and from farther away as we get the hang of it. We practice only with silencers, because we’re not training to be cops at the moment, we’re studying to be assassins.

We start with a garbage can lid at fifteen paces. I have to hold a cane in my left hand, so we decide I should turn sideways, like an old-fashioned dueler, to make a thinner target. He tries facing forward, with his damaged right hand supporting his left, but he says it hurts like hell when the pistol goes off. He has to stop that method and tries standing sideways, like me, and shooting one-handed.

This goes better. At first, we’re just sort of waving our pistols around, and if we hit the trash can lid at all, it’s near the outside perimeter. But after we burn up about a thousand rounds, we start to get the hang of it and at least hit the lid with consistency.

Milo lies down and tries out the Barrett. He picks a tree on the other island. The correct method is to apply equal pressure across the trigger with the index finger, slowly, so not even the shooter knows when the rifle will discharge. His index finger won’t do this, so he puts the tip of his finger on the trigger and fires by slowly pulling his whole arm backward. Not only does he miss the tree entirely, but the recoil, akin to that of a cannon, jars his damaged wrist so badly that he screams.

He rolls over and tries the process as if he were left-handed, which means he peers through the scope with his left eye. Since he’s right-eyed, this proves difficult. At first, he misses the tree again, but after a few rounds his eye adjusts, and he can’t shoot any kind of group, but can at least hit the tree.

When we’re done, I tell him that we’re a couple of buffoons with these weapons and there’s no way we can pull this off. I ask him where he intends to shoot from when he assassinates Veikko Saukko. “From the boat,” he says.

I start to laugh.

He gets furious. “And what is so fucking funny about that?”

“You can’t even hit a fucking tree lying down, and you think you’re going to hit a moving target from a rocking boat. It’s fucking ludicrous.”

His face twists into something like hatred, and it makes me laugh all the more.

He forces himself to stay calm, to maintain his dignity. “I have to go to Helsinki to pick up something I mail-ordered. And tomorrow, you insignificant fuck, I will show you how I’m going to blow his brains out, from a boat, and from several hundred meters away.”

“Cool,” I say, “I’ll look forward to it.”

We start back to my place. I catch a couple more fish while he sulks.