by Plum, AB
But not smarter than me. I met and held his stare. Unlike everyone else I knew, he refused to look away. My eyes burned. Blindingly bright, the sun blazed through the windows behind him. Despite the bruises around his puffy eyes, their sharpness bored into my brain like hypodermic needles.
“I don’t like you treating me like an inferior,” he said, his gaze steady. “I am not your hound. I have always considered you a brother. A real brother. Not an asshole like Alexei. So long as you treat me as if you respect me, I will protect your back.”
Quite a speech for a bastard Russian.
Muscles around my eyes and mouth tightened. The bones and skin in my face melded into the contours of the mask I presented to the world. I extended my hand. “I think we understand each other.”
Chapter 41
Going Separate Paths
We cut the remaining cake in half and put Dimitri’s portion in a paper bag we found in the stocked pantry. He selected the only jar of sausages for the trip and both of the keyed tins of sardines. Without a can opener, none of the six tins of braised reindeer did either of us any good.
Next, we raided the fridge. Most of the cheeses, we’d never heard of. Dimitri simply grabbed three packets along with a package of gravlax sealed in clear plastic. Expiration date: March, 1977.
Did it occur to him to wonder where we’d be on that date? So much could happen in nine months. What if we became enemies?
He laid his loot on the nearest counter, opened a drawer and removed a long cutting knife, a package of rye bread and a cloth bag.
“I’ll need water,” he announced.
“You’ll need a trailer,” I said drily. “Make that a truck. How can you carry all this?”
He looked up from stuffing his cloth bag. “I’m a good bike rider. I’ll manage.” He swiveled his gaze around the room. “If I can find a damn container for water.”
Sensing his patience was raveling, I checked all the other drawers which turned up empty except for one important find.
“Here’s what you really need.” I held a flashlight over my head.
“Absolutely.” He stretched and grabbed at the flashlight.
“Hold on. If you take this, I’ll be stuck in the dark.” Since the sun would never fully set, this was a bit of a stretch, but I dragged the flashlight’s beam across the ceiling from kitchen to sitting area. “Not a single light bulb in the place.”
“It won’t be that dark inside.” He pushed my back against the counter, leaped, and tore the flashlight from my hand.
Heat shot into my brain. I reacted instinctively. I slammed my hands into his chest. Pushed him against the counter, knocking the breath out of him.
In that split second, the rest of me slipped out of my trembling body, and I became hyper-aware of how close I was to bringing my knee up to his groin.
He lunged and grabbed my wrist, twisting my arm behind my back. “Maybe,” he panted, “I should get on the bike, keep riding, and forget about coming back.”
“Fine.” I exhaled in his face. “Don’t think I’m begging.”
Without warning, he released my arm with such force I went sprawling across the counter. My ribs cracked against the tiled edge. I grunted and lay there, fighting the ache. Inches from my fingers, the knife’s blade glinted.
“Pick it up,” Dimitri said, his voice low, with no emotion. “Then, you will have to kill me. Then … you will be totally alone in the world.”
Chapter 42
Thinking Rationally
The sound of a car door slamming interrupted our confrontation.
Instantly, our bickering died. We dropped to the floor and crabbed to the windows overlooking the front garden. Kari leaped out of the black Mercedes, his mouth running as he stomped toward the house. When he reached the first step, the car pulled away.
He stood there, hand raised to the sky, and shouted, “I don’t know why I have to stay here with the little bastards! Don’t think I’m staying all night. I didn’t sign up for babysitting.”
A cloud of dust engulfed the departing sedan. Impossible to see the driver.
Mumbling obscenities, Kari climbed the steep stairs, weaving, teetering on the edge. He stopped twice—hands thrown out—to regain his balance.
“Drunk,” Dimitri whispered the obvious.
“More dangerous drunk than sober.” A touch of acid. My pal’s statements of the evident burned my skin like a wasp’s sting.
“We’ve got to knock him out.”
“Really?” Glad Dimitri didn’t suggest stabbing since we‘d never used knives for anything but cutting food, I locked my jaw but couldn’t stop myself from snapping, “That never occurred to me.”
“What does occur to you that we can hit him with?”
“I’ll find something in the pantry.” Too bad if I’d stepped on Dimitri’s pride, but I didn’t have time to soothe his hurt feelings. “If we each hit him with a can of reindeer meat—”
“Go! Go!” Somehow, Dimitri managed not to point out that Kari was two steps from the porch. He hissed, “Six—seven seconds. Maybe less. Then he’s inside.”
Panic raised the intensity of each hoarse whisper. Jogging across the kitchen, I saw in my mind’s eye, the exact shelf with the six cans of braised reindeer. I snatched four of the heavy containers. I pivoted around. Without missing a step, I returned to the window flanking the door, tossed two cans to Dimitri, and tensed for attack.
Our ESP was operating at peak efficiency.
The instant Kari opened the door we fell on him—crashing the cans down on his head and shoulders. We yelled like gypsies.
“Whaaa—?” Caught off guard, he toppled backward against the open door.
Dimitri slammed a can between our kidnapper’s eyes. I went for his groin.
Arms flailing, blood streaming down his face, Kari screamed. His legs gave way, and he whacked his right temple on the door handle.
“Jesus,” he moaned from the floor. “Jesus.” He lay motionless. “Help me.”
“Dimwit must have cottage cheese for brains.” Dimitri huffed, his face red, his pupils dilated.
“We need to tie him up.” Dammit, now I was stating the obvious.
“I’m bigger. I’ll stay. You go. A sheet …”
My ears rang, and the rest of his comment faded. Where the hell did he get off telling me what to do? Wasn’t Kari lying semi-conscious because I remembered the damn reindeer meat?
Not now. Kari could wake up. I bit my tongue and crossed to the staircase.
At the top of the stairs, two doors at either end of a short hall stood closed. I froze. The cake on the kitchen table had made our mouths water, our hearts race, our brains lock on the lure of the cake’s butter and sugar. Except for that one, out-of-place oddity, we’d assumed the house was unoccupied.
Satisfying our hunger had overridden all thoughts of searching the upstairs. A fleeting question of poison did pass through my mind, but the primitive need to eat prevailed. Now, with my belly soothed, caution returned.
What if the owner had heard Dimitri and me come inside, and had hidden in one of the bedrooms? What if he was waiting for me to stick a foot across one of those thresholds? What if Baseball Cap had sneaked inside while Dimitri and I signaled the boat?
“Hurry up!” Dimitri’s voice rose from the living room.
“Hold on.” Slick with sweat, my fingers slipped off the doorknob. Shiiit. I’d left my cans of reindeer meat downstairs.
Too bad. Hyper-aware I was stalling, I slammed open the door.
The frame shook. I jumped to one side without entering. Anyone hidden behind the door would have a headache to match Kari’s.
A glance at the double bed gave me all the information I needed. I ran down the hall and wasted no time worrying about anyone hiding in the second bedroom. I whipped open the door.
Sunshine poured into the room. A large, red gardening wagon sat next to a child-sized bed. Like the double bed down the hall, no bed linens covered the mattress,
no curtains flapped at the window. Baseball Cap and Company must’ve left a few days’ food—just enough to keep Dimitri and me from starving. Were sheets and pillows unnecessary because our kidnappers never planned on keeping us here long enough to sleep?
The hairs on my neck prickled.
The slap of feet on the stairs brought me back to the bedroom. Instinctively, I flinched, then stepped into the hallway.
Dimitri stared at me from the top of the stairs. “Forget tying up our guy. He’s dead.”
III
Chapter 43
Facing the Unexpected
Heart pounding, I charged down the stairs, imagining Kari jumping to his feet as soon as my feet touched the bottom step. Breath scalding. Face contorted in rage. Eyes ready to bulge out of his head. How could he be dead?
At the bottom step, I stared at the red halo on the entry floor around his battered head. Was he dead? Some people—like me—could hold their breath for a long time. And they didn’t have to be under water.
Despite giving my brother his fatal push off the railway platform, I’d slipped away from the scene at Hovedbanegård and so never saw his body. A part of me had doubted he was dead. When the police came for my father and we went to the morgue, I began to hope. Father refused to allow me to see my brother’s corpse and so short-circuited my sense of accomplishment.
Like her older son, my mother was cremated. No viewing of her body either. Which made Kari my first look at a dead body. Curious, but disbelieving, I hesitated, filled with a sense of power. Dimitri plowed into me from behind.
Somehow, I managed not to pitch forward onto Kari. He lay flat on his back. No rise and fall of his chest. A lump bulged from his forehead. Blood had trickled from one corner of his mouth. Vacant blue eyes stared at the ceiling. His fingers curled toward his palms facing the ceiling. Fresh air drifted through the open door, but the nose-twitching stink of shit filled the entryway.
“I told you,” Dimitri whispered. “He’s dead.”
“What the hell happened?”
“I think he was already dead when you went upstairs.”
“No—” I stared at the body and tried to recall our attack around his head. What happened refused to fall into place. My mind blanked.
Damn, if only I’d known at the time he was dying so I could savor the moment, that instant I’d been forced to miss when I pushed my brother in front of the train, the split second my mother had put the gun to her head without me at her side. “He must’ve had a stroke. We hit him hard enough.”
“He has a gun.” Dimitri’s abrupt subject change erased the images of Kari shielding his head from our blows. “There. Tucked in his belt.”
“I suppose he had orders to shoot us if we got out of control.”
“I bet he hoped one of us would give him an excuse.” Dimitri bent, pulled out the gun, held it at arm’s length, and then laid it at our feet.
Neither of us knew anything about handguns. But I knew they were inherently just as deadly in the hands of novices as in the hands of skilled marksmen. “Baseball Cap has a gun too.”
“He’d shoot us in a flash.” Dimitri glanced outside at the road. “If they come back and find this one dead …”
“They’ll come back and find him dead, but we won’t be here.”
Five minutes later, we set the red wagon at the foot of the stairs. We were both breathing hard. Sweat plastered our shirts to our backs, strained from carrying the wagon down the steep stairs. The large rubber wheels had made it especially unwieldy, and the sheer weight tested Dimitri’s balance on every tentative step he took backward, trusting me to be his eyes as I guided him down step by step.
“I’ll remove his belt.” I knelt at Kari’s body, unbuckled the clasp, and pulled the leather off his waist.
“Looks about a hundred centimeters,” Dimitri guessed as I stretched the belt to its full length.
“Belly fat from all that beer—or his genes.” I cracked the belt on the floor, then looped the silver buckle through the wagon’s handle. “Let’s go. They could come back any minute.”
“Are we taking the gun?” Dimitri called on his way to the kitchen.
“Whatta you think?” I shut the front door and followed him with the wagon in tow and the gun lying in the bottom, pointed away from me. We had one more set of stairs to maneuver before hooking the belt to the bicycle.
Chapter 44
Accepting a Little Humiliation
Riding a bicycle had never appealed to me.
Dimitri, on the other hand, had often trekked off alone when we lived at Hellerup. I preferred staying inside studying biology and chemistry. Once we moved into the city with its traffic congestion, he rode less. He told me he preferred stalking prey over all other activities.
His stronger legs and more experience made him the logical bicycle rider, so I made the call to ride in the wagon like a child. In my eyes, my job as lookout mattered every bit as much as keeping the bike on the graveled road. Brains over brawn.
I laid my undershirt over the gun without informing Mr. Brawny—too busy pedaling to start another power struggle. In another surprise show of cooperation, we decided—mutually—to go in the same direction Olavi had driven. We hoped to find the hotel.
If it existed.
The terrain was pancake-flat, but Dimitri’s strong leg muscles jumped as he struggled to propel us away from the house. All the trees looked identical so we rode with no landmarks, stopping every fifteen minutes for Dimitri to go to the water’s edge and lap water. The sun projected less heat than when our kidnappers had dropped us off at the house, but a slight breeze did little to reduce our core body temperatures.
We had no real way of tracking how long we traveled. Baseball Cap had confiscated our watches on the ferry from Stockholm. Probably because they were Rolexes, bought by Dimitri and me with our Copenhagen porn and drug proceeds.
What would happen to our carefully constructed business if we never returned? Would my father take over the enterprise if he found out how successful we’d become?
Of course, our success was due mainly to my strategies.
In the wagon, I had to bite my tongue more than once. I didn’t need a watch. We were going too slowly. Making too many water stops. At this rate, we’d never find the hotel. We’d end up dead like Kari.
Despite the heat, a shiver raised goose bumps on my arms. I pushed all thoughts of Kari to the back of my mind. His stupidity got him killed. Brains guaranteed my survival.
Face brick red, Dimitri signaled another stop.
“Dammit,” I yelled, “you drink more than an elephant.”
He stopped, dismounted, flipped the kickstand down, and stomped to the edge of the lake. “You’re too heavy. You have to get out of the wagon and walk for a while.”
“I’m not walking.” My legs ached from the lack of space.
“Well, I’m not pulling you any farther.” He splashed water on his face and scooped water into his mouth.
My fingers closed around the gun’s handle. God, it would be so easy—
He rose up from kneeling and faced me. “If I ride alone, I can go twice as fast.”
His words made sense, but I didn’t like him taking charge. “Don’t think it’s fun for me rid—” Hearing the whine in my voice, I stopped.
“You want to take the bike?” He shrugged. “Okay with me. I’ll wait in the trees.”
His sudden reversal caught me off guard. In that instant, I realized he was right. The humiliation I’d been feeling had spread through me like a mutant virus. Infecting my logic. Wrecking our chances to outsmart Baseball Cap.
And since I wanted to smash that bastard’s plans, I said, “Keep in mind how much time you’ll need to get off the road if you see a car coming toward you.”
Chapter 45
Cultivating Hope
The second I unhooked the wagon from the bike, Dimitri took off in a burst of speed. I suspected he’d slow down as soon as he was out of sight. Maintaining su
ch momentum would prove impossible with the sun pounding his whole body.
Did he realize that of the two of us, I was less likely to suffer heatstroke?
Although by the time I reached the copse of trees, dragging the wagon behind me, I was reconsidering the answer. Black spots danced in front of my eyes, and the sweat down my back ran cold. God, I should’ve drunk more water too.
I stumbled onward a few more feet before I dropped the tongue of the wagon and collapsed in a small circle of birches. I exhaled, leaned against a tree trunk, and closed my eyes. The bruises from the nights on the ferries throbbed more after a couple of days’ ripening.
Someday, I’ll probably look back on this adventure and swell up with pride at my resilience.
At that moment, I felt hot, exhausted, and more exposed than tough. Embers of pure hatred toward Baseball Cap smoldered in my gut, and my neck muscles twitched incessantly. What were the chances Dimitri would see or hear the Mercedes before Baseball Cap and Olavi saw him and recaptured him?
No doubt existed in my mind that they would recapture him. They’d torture him. Force him to reveal the general area where we’d gone our separate ways. After they finished with him, they’d kill him and come looking for me.
My gut convulsed. How much could they hurt me and still hope to get ransom from my father?
The ocean’s rush filled my ears. I tilted my head back and tried to see blue through the trees’ green foliage. I searched for a sign my father would pay a krone for my release.
Money didn’t matter, did it? My father was wealthy. Wasn’t I worth any price?
Hadn’t he always cared for me but never showed it because of Alexei?
Wasn’t I more valuable to him now that my brother was dead?
My eyes burned. I squinted and faced the truth.
Wouldn’t my father be delirious if he never saw me again?