The Wild One

by Nick Petrie

  “Most of my work is on the computer,” Holm said. “Background checks, security interviews. I work for big companies, like Equinor and Orkla. Before Catherine Price, I didn’t leave my desk very often. After what happened in Iceland, I’m not leaving my desk again.”

  “The pay is good,” Peter said. “Double your normal fee.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Okay, triple your fee. Quadruple it, if you want.” The thought of an actual trained investigator with knowledge of the family was appealing. He should have called Holm before he even got on the plane. “Don’t you want to get back at these guys? Or have you forgotten about the boy?”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything.” Holm’s thin voice was flat. Peter heard the mechanical sound again. “The auto crash damaged my spinal cord. I’m paralyzed.”

  That explained the sound. Holm’s wheelchair. “I’m so sorry. That must be difficult.”

  He heard another match flare. “I should feel lucky. I can still use my arms. I can empty my own shit bag. That’s what my wife said when she left. Anyway, I can’t help you.”

  Peter thought again about Holm’s written report and how much information he’d found on the Icelanders. Peter was definitely not a computer person. And he couldn’t very well ask June for help with research.

  “I have another idea,” he said. “Would it be okay if I sent you something? You won’t have to go anywhere, just some computer work. Charge me whatever you like.”

  Holm sucked in another lungful of smoke. “Do what you wish, but you won’t hear from me. I’m done with that family.”

  Then he hung up.

  Peter had already sent himself the picture he’d taken with Bjarni’s phone, the facial close-up of Staple lying on the sidewalk outside the embassy. Now he took pictures of Staple’s passport and U.S. driver’s license and the now-expired plane ticket home. He texted all of them to the Norwegian investigator, with a note.

  This is the man from the U.S. State Department who convinced the customs police to remove me from Iceland. What can you tell me about him?

  Then he sent one last text. If you don’t want to help with this, I understand. I’m sorry for what happened to you. I’ll make them pay.

  27

  The long-haul trucks had vanished and Peter had the highway entirely to himself. The road clung to the contours of the landscape, steep winding river valleys alternating with long stone fingers that reached far into the sea. Rock walls on the left, a precipitous drop on the right, a riot of angry ocean far below.

  In the occasional flat spots, he saw houses and barns abandoned to the weather. The Norwegian was right, he thought. The police could spend years searching these old buildings and never find Erik and Óskar.

  Every hour or so, he turned the Defender into the wind, stopped in the middle of the road, and stepped out, engine running, to stretch his legs and gather a handful of clean, cold snow to put on his eye. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the swelling had started to go down. His face felt less tight, and he was getting a glimmer of light on that side.

  He left the main highway at Egilsstadir, turned east, and arrived at the harbor village of Seydisfjordur just after eight in the morning. The sky was still dark, but the snow shone with ambient light. His mouth tasted like a goat’s armpit and his body ached from the tension of driving through the gusting wind and snow. Still, the roads had remained passable. The worst of the storm had not yet arrived.

  Seydisfjordur sat at the innermost point of the fjord, where an empty parking lot waited at the ferry terminal for the weekly boat to Denmark and the Faroe Islands. The streets followed the contours of the water, and the houses were painted in bright, cheerful colors. The sheer stone walls of the valley rose like ramparts around the village and channelled the wind into a steady southeast gale.

  Peter found the uncles’ address at the edge of the village, between a fish processing facility and the fuel storage depot with its squat tanks like snow-frosted cupcakes. A boxy red building crouched midway between the road and the shore, the corrugated metal siding loose and humming in the wind. Behind the unlit building, parallel to the shore and partly hidden from view, a fishing boat lay against a plain concrete pier. The boat was festooned with lights and the pier was edged with yellow paint. Safety first.

  Peter drove the Defender down a narrow gravel access road to a grubby oceanfront storage yard beside the pier, and parked in partial concealment between two faded shipping containers, but where he could still get a good look at the boat.

  She was bigger than Peter had expected. Maybe twenty meters long, she had a high, ocean-going bow, followed by a pair of tall crane masts for hauling nets and offloading fish, then the long working deck with the cargo hold beneath, and a rounded two-story superstructure at the stern. On the overhang shielding the curved windows of the wheelhouse, someone had hung a varnished wood plank with Freyja painted in bold blue letters.

  The Freyja was definitely not a new vessel. Her graceful curves spoke of an earlier era, when the vast, capricious power of the ocean was something to be negotiated with, rather than overcome by sheer mechanical might. Cascading streaks of rust on her hull made it hard to see the vessel’s true colors beneath. The wind rocked the Freyja up against the ancient tractor tires used as dock bumpers, so at least she was still afloat.

  A slender gangplank with rope rails angled down from the high gunwale to the pier, where a heavy four-door flatbed truck with disintegrating door panels waited beside a newer black Dacia station wagon with an elevated suspension. Neither vehicle’s engine was running, but the snow had been scraped from their windows the night before.

  The vehicles and their license plates matched what the Norwegian had found registered to Eiríkur’s uncles, Ingo and Axel Magnusson.

  * * *

  —

  Peter sat and watched the Freyja while his brain cried out for coffee. He ate some bread and cheese and tried not to think about a hot breakfast. The back of his head still throbbed where the vodka bottle had hit him. He touched it with his fingers. Did the skin around the cut seem warm, even a little puffy? He tried not to think about that, either. Instead, he thought about where Erik and Óskar might be.

  If the boy had truly witnessed his mother’s death, he would be traumatized. Bjarni had told Peter that family was everything. If that was true, they’d want what was best for the boy. Which would probably mean getting back to some kind of regular life. The comfort of family, and the familiar routine of school. It was another argument, as if Peter needed one, for bringing Óskar back to Catherine.

  The red building certainly didn’t look like any kind of home. The wind would blow right through that rattling siding. The boat must have crew cabins and some kind of heat, but it looked ready to sink at any moment. Either way, this fishing pier was no place for a traumatized child.

  Maybe that was the problem with Peter and June.

  Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell him.

  Why she was trying to get him to change.

  His life was no place for a child, either.

  With the engine off, the Defender was cold, and the sky remained impossibly dark. He shivered and thought about getting himself to the desert after all, someplace warm and dry where the sun kept shining. Maybe June would come with him, if she could get away from her work. They could hike the canyons during the day and make a campfire feast at night. Dance naked and make love under the stars. Although June had a limited tolerance for sleeping outside. He wondered again if they could actually make a life together. If they were just too different. If he was ruined for all that.

  He took out his Icelandic phone and brought up the video of Óskar running in the park. Climbing the tree. His mother climbing after him, vanishing into the leaves. Peter had been up for almost twenty-four hours. He didn’t have time to sleep. He didn’t want to dream. He glanced again at the clock. It was 8:47 in t
he morning.

  In a few minutes he’d dig out his camp stove and make some coffee in the back.

  He closed his eyes, just for a moment.

  He stood in a hot dusty street with a radio in his hand, watching the old sedan roll toward his checkpoint, a small, sad-eyed man behind the wheel. The car came closer and closer. Big Jimmy stepped out from behind the Humvee with his M4 and a friendly smile, patting the air with his palm to indicate that the driver should slow. The sad-eyed man made frantic gestures. The car kept coming. Light it up, Peter said. The squad emptied their magazines. When Peter walked to the ruined car, he saw the woman and two children huddled in the back seat, covered in blood, an entire family dead because their brakes didn’t work. They stared at him through open eyes.

  He jerked awake.

  It was still dark. He glanced at the clock. It was only 8:49.

  He still held his phone in his lap. It buzzed again and he realized it had woken him.

  The number began with +47, the country code for Norway.

  28

  Staple is a staff attorney for the American State Department. Not at the embassy in Reykjavík, but in Washington. So he does not work for the ambassador.”

  No hello, no good morning. “You’ve been up all night.”

  The Norwegian’s voice was flat. “I no longer sleep well.”

  “Me neither,” Peter said. “How did you find out about Staple?”

  “I have access to six databases of current American government employees. It’s public information. I know Staple’s salary. I thought it would be higher.”

  “So maybe it’s not the ambassador trying to kick me out of Iceland.”

  The scrape of a match, the start of a fresh cigarette. Breakfast of champions. “Staple should not be able to do so, either. He is a low-level functionary.”

  “He didn’t act like one,” Peter said. “He acted like somebody important.”

  “Perhaps that is an old habit. I found his employment history. When he was twenty-eight, he was an attorney in your White House. After that he was a partner in a multinational law firm. Then he worked for a United States senator. Then back to the law firm.”

  “And now he’s a low-level lawyer at the State Department?” This wasn’t the typical D.C. revolving door, where a career alternated between power and wealth, adding to both along the way. Something had happened to Staple. “What about the plane ticket?”

  “I found payment for a ticket on Icelandair, Reykjavík to Washington, D.C., on his personal credit card account, along with a second round-trip ticket, which must be his own. Purchased at the last minute, so they were quite expensive.”

  “If he paid for the tickets himself, he definitely wasn’t on State Department business.”

  “Yes. I will keep looking for other affiliations.”

  “Thank you.” Peter looked out the window at the red shed and the two parked vehicles and the rusting boat tied to the pier. He wasn’t sure how to ask his next question. “Listen, I was thinking about the people that drove you off the road. Did the police ever find them?”

  “No. And I couldn’t help. I didn’t see the driver’s face. I couldn’t even be certain of the car’s manufacturer, only the type and the color. They could only search for a large silver SUV. Nobody in Eiríkur’s family owned such a car. The police were certain it would be damaged. They went to the local repair shops where that kind of damage might be repaired. They spoke with tow drivers. They reviewed insurance claims. Eventually they reviewed every silver or gray SUV registered in Iceland. All such cars were accounted for. They found nothing. As if it didn’t exist.”

  “You didn’t imagine the car, right?”

  A deep inhalation of tar and nicotine, the crackle of burning paper. “Icelanders love their automobiles, and they have many amateur mechanics. It would be possible to get the SUV repaired without reporting the accident. Or it could have been blue, painted silver the year before, and the car registry never updated. Or it could be entirely unregistered and now sits inside a barn, waiting for the police to stop looking.”

  Peter scratched at his growing beard. “Do you think the police have stopped looking?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps not. Iceland is mostly a peaceful place. The police take their work seriously.”

  “They’re not the only ones,” Peter said. “I thought you were done with this.”

  “I told you, I no longer sleep well.” The clink of a mug on a countertop, the faint rattle of the wheelchair. “Also, I need the money. But let me ask you a question. When I took the job, I did not know how dangerous Erik’s family was. But you do. You are alone in a wild and empty place. You risk your life for this boy. Why?”

  “Somebody should,” Peter said. “And I like to be useful.”

  He didn’t mention the dead he saw in his dreams.

  On the boat, two men stepped through a door in the lower superstructure.

  “I have to go,” Peter said. “I’ll call you in a few hours.”

  29

  On the Freyja, the men walked to the waist-high rail and down the gangplank, which sagged beneath their weight. They wore dirty orange coats unzipped and flapping in the growing wind. No gloves or hats, the white stubs of cigarettes poking from their bunched fists. Faces hidden beneath unruly gray beards.

  The men in the photo on Bjarni’s phone, standing with Eiríkur on a snowy slope somewhere. Ingo and Axel Magnusson. Erik’s uncles. Neither one looked much like him.

  They looked like NFL linemen. Only bigger.

  Like trolls or some other oversized creatures out of myth or history. From the Norwegian’s file, Peter knew the uncles were on the far side of middle age, but they were no less powerful for that. Thick-shouldered and barrel-chested, these were men who had done hard physical labor for decades, who thought of getting drenched and frozen and hurt as a normal part of the workday.

  Peter had known men just like Ingo and Axel. He’d served with them, had worked beside them. He was one of them, in a way. But he was a lot smaller than these two.

  Just watching them, Peter found himself shrinking into his seat, as if trying to make himself invisible. It was an atavistic reaction—ancient, gene-deep instincts hijacking his rational mind. A monkey hiding in a tree as apex predators prowled below.

  Ingo and Axel were going to be a problem.

  He had never minded facing a big man before. It was a matter of skill, leverage, and desire, and Peter had all those in spades. But there were two of them. They were enormous. And Peter had just one good eye. Why make it harder than it needed to be? An elephant gun, that was the thing. Maybe a squad of Marines.

  The enormous uncles somehow managed to shoehorn themselves into the little black Dacia wagon, which settled deep on its springs. Peter watched as it lurched around the corner of the red warehouse and strained up the hill to the road.

  Hjálmar had thought the uncles were living on the boat. Aside from the red building, the Norwegian investigator had found no other apartment or house in their name. They definitely had another vehicle, somewhere, or they used to. The silver SUV that had forced the Norwegian off the road and into a wheelchair. Maybe they had another apartment in town, too, someplace more suitable for a child.

  Only one way to find out.

  When the little station wagon turned onto the road into town, Peter cranked up the Defender and followed.

  Maybe he’d find an elephant gun on the way.

  * * *

  —

  Ingo and Axel drove a half mile and parked in front of the Bistró Skaftfell, a three-story building with a restaurant on the first floor and an art gallery upstairs. The snow began to fall in earnest as Peter left the Defender behind a brightly painted rental camper and walked back, his coat unzipped, his hat jammed in his pocket, freezing in the wind. Any self-respecting Icelandic bistro would have coffee, right?


  To keep him awake on the long drive from Reykjavík, Peter had put an app on his new phone to teach him basic Icelandic. He was up to a few dozen words, including “farm” and “boat.” So he knew that LOKAD, the sign on the bistro door, meant the place was closed.

  But he could see customers through the low front windows, and a young man in a white apron moved behind the counter, so Peter stuck his head inside. The ceiling was low. The static flared, and not just because of the space. Ingo and Axel sat at a long table by the window with six other men in similar work clothes. None were Erik. Jesus, the uncles were huge even in that small space. Coffee cups and plates with pastries were spread out in front of the group, a feast of fat, carbohydrates, and caffeine. On the back wall, a television showed the ever-present footage of the crisis in Venezuela. This time the footage was of the giant rust-colored U.S. Embassy in Caracas, damaged in an RPG attack.

  “Opid?” Peter asked. Open? In an effort to avoid notice, he was still trying to pass for an Icelander. His safety-yellow coat and uncombed hair and scruffy beard did most of the heavy lifting.

  “Já, já.” The young man waved him in. He wasn’t Erik, either.

  If Ingo and Axel noticed Peter, they didn’t seem to care. They were talking with the others.

  Peter stepped to the counter. “Góden dag. Kaffi?” He was nearing the limit of his vocabulary, but the man in the apron had the usual Icelandic reserve. If he took note of Peter’s sudden sweating from the static, he was polite enough not to mention it. He just nodded at the trio of different sized cups and raised his eyebrows.

  Peter raised one palm above the other to indicate the largest size, then raised two fingers. “Bakarí?”

  The counterman pointed around the corner, where a glass-fronted case held a dozen varieties of sugary deliciousness. Suddenly, Peter was starving. He loaded a paper bag, glanced at the menu, figured the total in his head, rounded up, and handed over a few bills from Bjarni’s wad of krónur. “Takk fyrir.” Thanks.