The Wild One

by Nick Petrie

  As he felt his tires begin to slip, he saw a car off the road on the right, a snow-covered sedan with a lightbar and police markings. But the windshield was clear. Was that a shadow in the driver’s seat?

  He upshifted and found traction to power through the curve. The dark police car didn’t move. In his rearview, both pairs of headlights had vanished. Either his pursuers had lost the road, or they’d killed their lights so he couldn’t see them coming.

  The police car vanished behind him. He looked over his shoulder but the night remained black in his wake.

  When he faced front again, he saw three big vehicles blocking the road a half kilometer ahead, showing faint amber on their fenders.

  Then, as if on cue, three bright sets of headlights came to life and three lightbars flashed red and blue in the cold winter night.

  * * *

  —

  A sedan, a station wagon, and a big SUV were parked in an aggressive wedge, blocking the narrow road. The land fell away on both sides so Peter couldn’t simply drive around them. Snow blew in white ropes across the bare asphalt as the wind scraped the raised road clean.

  The heavy Defender was more than a match for the smaller Volvo wagon and sedan. He could hit the gas and crash through their weak spot, but they’d only come after him harder. He thought about turning around to run back the way he came, but the lighter, nimbler vehicles would have no trouble keeping up. Either way, they’d know his vehicle and have his plate number. They’d call for reinforcements and chase until he ran out of gas.

  Peter knew how this worked. He’d done his share of chasing.

  As he slowed, four figures got out of the vehicles, bulky in their cold-weather gear. The reflective tape on their sleeves and pant legs shone in Peter’s headlights. They adjusted their equipment belts and Peter was glad not to see the familiar shapes of holsters and pistol grips. This meant he probably wasn’t facing the Víkingasveitin, the armed Icelandic SWAT team known as the Viking Squad, called out for major incidents. These four were likely just local police, well trained and capable, but equipped only with batons and pepper spray.

  They waved their arms, as if he somehow might not have noticed them in the road, then held out their palms for him to stop.

  The static began to crackle again. Peter checked his rearview. The headlights were gone, but he knew Brunelli’s people were still back there. He thought of Óskar, running across the grass. Maybe carrying something in his head, something worth killing for.

  Peter wanted to crash through and keep driving. He wanted to find Óskar and keep him safe.

  But he didn’t have a choice.

  It was possible he might still talk his way out of this.

  47

  One of the officers detached himself from the group and walked toward Peter. With the swirl of snow and headlights in his eyes, Peter couldn’t make out the man’s face, only that he wore a fur-lined hat with a six-pointed star on the front and earflaps snapped under his chin. Taking care to stay well to the side of the heavy Land Rover, the officer made a throat-cutting motion with the blade of his hand, indicating that Peter should kill his engine.

  Peter did as directed, but left his headlights on and his keys in the ignition. He stuffed his phones into the top pouch of his day pack.

  Next, the officer held his hand out, palm up, and gestured to the side, a polite invitation for Peter to leave his vehicle. It wouldn’t be an invitation for long. Peter opened his door and stepped out. The wind slammed it shut behind him, and almost blew him off his feet. He hadn’t put his coat on, thinking he might need an excuse to get back to the truck. Now he zipped up the neck of his fleece.

  The officer beckoned Peter forward with a curl of his gloved fingers. Peter walked toward him. He still couldn’t make out the man’s face.

  The officer plucked a radio off his chest and held it to his mouth. He spoke briefly, refastened the radio, then moved forward with the other officers in his wake.

  As he stepped into the glow of Peter’s headlights, Peter saw his face clearly. It was Hjálmar.

  Peter had underestimated him again.

  * * *

  —

  The three officers began to close the gap behind Hjálmar. Peter saw batons and pepper spray on their belts. No pistols yet.

  Peter’s head was killing him. He should have put on his coat.

  Hjálmar raised his voice over the wind. “Your eye is not looking well, Peter. Have you seen a doctor?”

  Peter called back, “You know I didn’t kill David Staple.”

  Hjálmar’s smile was gentle. “You did knock him to the ground, however, not long after we last spoke. You took his wallet and passport.”

  “True,” Peter admitted. “But if I planned to kill him, would I have asked you to help me find him?”

  “Perhaps you became angry,” Hjálmar said. “He fought back and you lost control. It was an accident. Crimes of passion are quite common in Iceland.”

  “I sent you a text not long after Staple was killed. The cell tower records will show that I was in Seydisfjordur.”

  “We will check those records,” Hjálmar said. “I am sure you are correct. Although I must mention that you would not be the first person to lend your phone to a friend. Also, I am curious. How do you know when Staple died?”

  Peter didn’t like how this was going. The static crackled high. Despite the cold and the wind, beads of sweat ran down his temples. He kept talking.

  “I think Staple was killed by an Irish national named Seamus Heaney. He drives a Mitsubishi Pajero with front-end damage. Its original color was silver. He ran Kristjan Holm off the road.” Peter hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “He was right behind me on that last curve. He’s after Óskar.”

  Hjálmar didn’t say anything. Peter pressed on.

  “The FBI investigated David Staple for laundering money for the IRA. Before that, he worked with Jerry Brunelli, Catherine’s husband. Brunelli works with all kinds of bad guys. Erik didn’t kill Sarah Price, someone else did, maybe Brunelli or one of his people. You need to call the FBI.”

  “An excellent idea,” Hjálmar said. “I will call your FBI.” The three bulky cops flowed around him, closing in. “Come with me, we will sit in my office and talk to them together.”

  Peter held up a warning hand. His head pounded. He was running on fumes. “Goddamn it, Hjálmar, you know why I’m here. To save Óskar.”

  “Yes, I know.” Hjálmar’s face was calm and kind. “But who will save you, Peter? You want to do the right thing. Let me help. We will make this easy. We will find out what happened. Nobody wants to hurt you.”

  Peter remembered that he had several Valium left. They’d go a long way toward easing the pressure in his head, along with a long swallow of vodka. Although he knew they wouldn’t help, not really. They’d just put off the problem until later.

  The officers edged closer. Peter’s neck and shoulders were clenched tight. His head felt ready to explode. They would put him in a car. They would put him in a cell.

  He thought of Óskar again, running through the grass. His purity and innocence.

  His mother’s face as she climbed up to save him.

  What the boy had seen since that moment. What he’d been through.

  No, Peter could not rest. Not yet.

  He shook his head. “I can’t, Hjálmar. I just can’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Peter. You must.”

  Hjálmar raised a hand and the night grew suddenly brighter. A vehicle had come up behind the Defender, unseen and unheard in the snow and the wind, and only now had turned on its headlights. Peter threw a quick glance over his shoulder, fighting the blind spot of his swollen eye, and saw the snowy police sedan from the curve, the spotter now blocking his escape.

  He whipped abruptly back to face Hjálmar and a wave of dizziness hit him. Pain spiked through
his head and the world faded to gray. It only lasted a few seconds, but when he could focus again, the two biggest officers were already on him.

  With strong hands, they’d moved him off balance, face-first against the side of his truck. “Sir, you are under arrest. Do not resist.” One man held Peter’s bent left wrist behind his back in a compliance hold, preparing him for the cuffs. The other man stood to Peter’s right, reaching for his free hand. The third man stood back, ready to jump in.

  The static flared high, like an electric arc.

  The burly officers leaned in, using their body weight and the pain of his bent wrist as leverage. Police were usually very good at the basics of physical control, and these two weren’t rookies.

  But they’d never tried this with a man like Peter, and they’d made a mistake. They should have put him on the ground. It was easier to control someone on the ground.

  He felt the hands on him shift. As the man on his left reached for his cuffs, the pressure on Peter’s wrist decreased slightly. Adrenaline burned like rocket fuel. Now was the time.

  He knew the men behind him intimately, how they stood, their centers of gravity. He felt the flaw in the control grip. Both were right-handed. They wore their batons in front-draw holsters just ahead of their left hips. All Peter needed was a baton and one good eye and he could crack their skulls like eggs. The static soared, lightning in a thunderhead, just waiting for release.

  Hjálmar must have seen it. “I can help you,” he called. “If you let me. Please.”

  Peter struggled to contain himself. He could break free, he knew, but he had no friends here. No contacts beyond Hjálmar himself. He didn’t speak the language. He’d be a wanted man in a foreign land in midwinter on an inhospitable island in the middle of the North Atlantic.

  He needed to learn why Sarah Price had died.

  He needed to save Óskar.

  He needed Hjálmar’s help.

  These cops were just doing their jobs. He didn’t want to hurt them. He wasn’t an animal. Take a breath. Hang on to your shit, brother.

  The static raged. The wind roared. Peter took a breath, then another. The officers adjusted their holds. He allowed them to capture his free hand behind his back, and the moment was gone.

  He felt cold steel on his skin and heard the click of the pawl as the cuffs closed, first on one wrist, then the other.

  Three steps away, Hjálmar took his hand off his holstered baton and called out in Icelandic. The burly officers took Peter by the biceps and pulled him away from his truck. The third officer retrieved Peter’s coat and day pack from the Defender. The spotter got out of his snowy sedan.

  “Hjálmar,” Peter called. “We need to talk.”

  The wind rose higher still. It smelled like a frozen sea. The commissioner shook his head. His face was hard, all kindness gone. His voice carried over the sound of the storm. “We are done here.”

  Then he turned and walked away.

  The two burly officers grabbed him tighter and muscled Peter toward the roadblock vehicles.

  48

  The cold steel cuffs bit into Peter’s wrists as the officers ushered him down the snowswept road. With every step away from the Defender, the static crackled higher, stronger. He’d never felt it like this, not while he was outside.

  Before, the static had always come when he went into an enclosed space. It climbed his spine and filled his head with noise. If he got stuck indoors for too long, the static would spread farther, into his entire body. Eventually it would drown out everything, including Peter.

  It would howl and rage, the way it threatened to now.

  Because he was in handcuffs. And Hjálmar wasn’t talking to him.

  Peter had made a mistake. He’d hoped to have enough to convince the man, but he didn’t.

  Peter wasn’t Hjálmar’s friend. He was a murder suspect.

  As the cops moved him toward the sedan, Peter looked inside. Like any American police cruiser, the white Volvo had a steel grate between the back seat and the front, making a man-cage.

  After the car, they’d move him to a holding cell.

  His chest was tight. He had to work to breathe. Despite the cold, sweat soaked his clothes.

  Before the dreams had ruined his sleep, when his main problem was his claustrophobia, a therapist had suggested he get used to the static. To notice and become comfortable with it, to treat it like an old friend. In the years before the dreams, Peter’d had a fair amount of practice at it.

  Walking now across the windblown pavement, he forced himself to take deep breaths, to keep the oxygen flowing. He closed his eyes and pictured a place where he’d been happy, at the top of the thousand-foot waterfall overlooking the pocket valley where June lived. He stood there in his mind, with the green meadow behind him and the summer valley spread out below and hawks soaring on warm thermals.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. Hello, old friend. We can make this work, right?

  He had no choice. He would do this.

  His muscles were taut as bridge cables. Another breath, then another. Eyes closed, trying to feel the warmth on his face as the police moved him along. Not better, but not worse, either.

  Until he stumbled on a chunk of frozen snow and they caught him hard, lifting his arms behind him at a painful angle. He growled and felt the thunder in his bones.

  Not their fault, he told himself, not their fault. But the handcuffs ratcheted tighter.

  Behind him, Hjálmar spoke, his words torn to fragments by the wind.

  The two burly police pushed him chest-first against the police Volvo and kicked out his feet, which banged his swollen face against the hard metal roof. He watched from the corner of his good eye as the third man patted him down and emptied his pockets. He put Peter’s wallet, keys, and the orange knife into a clear plastic bag and handed it to Hjálmar with Peter’s passport. The spotter came up with Peter’s coat and day pack from the Defender.

  Hjálmar tucked the passport into his breast pocket and the plastic bag into the top pocket of Peter’s pack. The wind whipped at Peter’s face. Thunder rumbled. Breathe in, breathe out. One of the burly officers opened the car door, then put a rough tactical glove on the back of Peter’s head, directly on the tender skin split by Dónaldur’s bottle.

  The infected wound tore open. The cop bent him down and put him in the back seat. It took everything Peter had not to fight.

  The door closed beside him with a solid thump.

  Breathe in, breathe out. His hands were cuffed behind him. The doors wouldn’t open from the inside. The steel grate was bolted to the seatback, the roof, and the side pillars. The officers stood outside and talked. Inside, the static raged.

  He had windows on four sides, but he couldn’t see past the storm. The wind moaned its dismay. Where would he be next? A cinder-block cell with a steel door, a steel bunk, a single flickering light in a cage on the ceiling. The chemical stink of industrial cleaner. Shit.

  He tried to take a breath but his lungs wouldn’t expand. His chest was wrapped in steel bands that tightened by the second. His skull pounded, his face throbbed with blood. He was so tired of being broken.

  Outside, the police kept talking like they had all the time in the world. Peter put his hot face against the cool window. How long would he would be in that cell? Days, at least. Maybe weeks, until they decided what to do with him. If there was a trial, it would be months. He’d never walk toward the horizon again. He was going to die inside. He might die right here.

  His mouth tasted like a thousand pennies. The adrenaline spiked and his vision narrowed. His heart hammered but he couldn’t catch his breath. The static crackled and sparked high, then higher still, until something gave way.

  The static burst out until it filled his mind. Lost to himself, his thoughts disappeared into forks of lightning that set the world ablaze. All he knew was an interior
scream and the desperate need to be free.

  He kicked heedlessly at the metal mesh of his cage. His wrists strained behind his back. Cut by the cuffs, he began to bleed. The mesh clattered and flexed but did not give way. Like a wolf in a trap, he knew that he didn’t have the muscle or leverage to break it. His instincts gave orders. He turned sideways in the seat, hyperextended his long arms, and forced his tearing wrists down around the narrow curve of his ass. He pulled his knees to his chin and pushed the cuffs past his ankles and around his toes. Hands now in front, he set his upper back to the steel cage and kicked at the rear windshield.

  His heels hit hard. Years with the heavy pack had made him strong. He heard shouting. A fragment of stone from the Reykjavík alley was stuck in the lugs of his boot, and it hit with a crack. The laminated glass starred, then bowed outward.

  The shouting got louder. Wind came at him from the side. He kicked the windshield from its frame. Salt air swirled and hands grabbed at him. Unthinking, he scrambled toward the hole and the hands lost their grip. His legs tensed and flexed and launched him headfirst through the opening and across the trunk to roll onto the cold hard pavement.

  He gathered his feet beneath him.

  The burly police ran at him in a rush.

  The werewolf bared its teeth and sprang forward to meet them.

  49

  The two closest men came with hands open and ready. Wearing tactical gloves and equipment belts, they were trained to contain large, belligerent drunks and put them in handcuffs. The cuffs were supposed to neutralize the threat. They’d never seen a wild man kick his way out of a patrol car before.

  He wore the cuffs in front now, but he still wore them. He was just one man, and they were four. They hadn’t laid him facedown in the road before, and that was a mistake, but they would do it now. Two of them against a single man in handcuffs, they figured it would be easy.