Lucifer's Tears

12

The four of us go home. Both John and Mary remove their shoes in the foyer without being asked. That they know we don’t wear shoes in our houses speaks well of them. They made it a point to learn something about Finnish culture before coming here.

We make up the spare bed for Mary and the couch for John. His pick-me-up has worn off, and he and Mary are both exhausted from the long journey across the Atlantic. I’m dead in my tracks, too. I brush my teeth. John is waiting for me outside the bathroom.

“Hey, Kari,” he says. “Got a joint?”

“Excuse me?”

“A little pot would help me sleep.”

John just doesn’t know when to quit. “No, I don’t have a joint.”

“Oh, come on, everybody knows cops have the best dope.”

“Good night, John,” I say, and push past him.

Kate is waiting for me in bed. I turn out the lights. She lays her head on my shoulder. “I don’t know what to think about John and Mary,” she says.

I stroke her round belly. “Me, neither. I guess so much time has passed that all three of you have changed. Maybe you have to get to know them again.”

“You don’t like them, do you?” she asks.

There’s no point in lying. “I’m trying to like them, for your sake.”

“Mary never laughs,” she says. “And for John, everything is one big joke. When we were kids, it was the opposite. I don’t know what happened.”

She doesn’t mention how much John drank. I don’t mention his drug use.

“You were a little tough on them,” she says.

“I had a hard day.”

I tell Kate about Vesa Legion Korhonen, that I was a jerk to Torsten, that Filippov seems thrilled his wife was murdered. “My tolerance level for people is zero right now,” I say, “and I’m overreacting to things.”

She snuggles her face deeper into the crook of my neck. “I’m worried about you. Being short-tempered with people is something that happens, but making a boy drink a bottle of vodka is mean.”

“I know.”

“It’s not like you. Is it because of the headaches?”

“That’s part of it anyway. My nerves are bad.”

“You’re moodier than you used to be. You’re always sweet to me, but with other people, you can be short-tempered. You’re more unpredictable than before.”

She pauses. I wait.

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t have the scar on your face fixed. Police department insurance would have paid for plastic surgery. It’s not that it bothers me as far as your appearance goes, I just can’t help but feel that all these things are related.”

“It’s just the headaches. I’ll see Jari. Everything will be fine.”

I wait for her to say more, but within a minute or two, her breathing goes deep and regular. She’s asleep. My mind turns circles. I think about the skin sliding off Rauha Anttila’s corpse. Baby wasps swarming out of her mouth. Blood spray from Iisa Filippov’s riding-crop beating. But mostly about Ukki. About eating ice cream and sitting in his lap. He tickled me and made me laugh. He taught me children’s rhymes. He taught me to dum-dum bullets. The last time I look at the clock, it’s five thirty. It occurs to me that my behavior is unpredictable because I haven’t really slept in months now.