Helsinki Blood (10 page)

The gangsters around the table laugh. The ambassador says, “It takes a hundred thousand to get in the game.”

“I’m good for it. An IOU OK for now?” A frank admission that we’re crooked cops.

The ambassador waxes indulgent. “Sure.”

This is bizarre. I give up my seat for Sweetness. The other bodyguard, not the drink flunky, brings him a hundred thousand in chips. “Whites are a thousand. Blue five thousand, red ten thousand. Max bet is twenty-five thousand, unless upped by mutual agreement.”

“Gosh,” Sweetness says, “and we’re playing for keeps?”

Saukko says, “The money is only a metaphor, now rendered meaningless. We played for blood. Who won and lost the real game is already decided, only the debts remain unpaid.”

“It might interest you to know that Inspector Vaara didn’t kill your son. I did. I dumped two clips of .45 caliber hollow points in his face and chest. Shit, what a mess. But I guess you saw it at the morgue.”

“Good to know,” Saukko says, “you son of a bitch. You can join Vaara on The List.”

“The List?” I say.

“The Shit List. That’s where my worst enemies go. Bad things, horrific things, happen to people on The List. I plan them with care. You, for instance, have some kind of preoccupation with saving women. I’m going to take your child, maybe tomorrow, maybe in ten years, and have her tortured to death. Waiting appeals to me. The older your daughter gets, the more you’ll love her. Maybe after I bust her prepubescent cherry, I’ll sell her for an Asian snuff film. What do you think, Vaara?”

He wanted to scare the mortal hell out of me, and he succeeded so well that I don’t even feel anger, just terror. I unscrew the handle from the shaft of my cane and pull out the thin twenty-inch sword contained within it. I reach across the table and press it against his chest, over his heart. “I think I should just end your miserable, bitter life right now.”

On his shirt, a bloodstain flowers around the blade. He pays no attention to it. Instead, he proffers a grin worthy of Satan. “I wouldn’t, if I were you. You don’t know how The Shit List works. The hits are prepaid, like a debit card for death. It’s called the ‘button down’ method. My death takes the finger off the button, the punishments are carried out, and my enemies join me in hell.”

I return the sword to the cane. I’m speechless.

Sweetness, however, isn’t. “Are we gonna play or not?”

Saukko laughs out loud. “Boy, you have style. If I wasn’t going to kill you, I’d offer you a job. It was Palo’s deal. Since you have his seat, I guess it falls to you.”

“Give me a new deck,” Sweetness says. “I don’t trust you criminal fuckers.”

The bodyguard who gave him his chips hands him a pack of Bicycle cards. Sweetness breaks the seal, tosses out the jokers and shuffles with speed and thoroughness. Everyone antes. He passes the deck to the right and the Arab cuts the cards.

“Seven-card stud,” Sweetness says, and deals with confidence. As dealer, he runs the hand fast, calls out the cards as he flips them faceup. He bets high, but not high enough to drive anyone out of the hand. When he deals the last card facedown, they’ve already bet seventy thousand per player. No one folded. He tosses in a red chip. Ten thousand more. Everyone sees and calls. Around the table, the players throw their cards down by turn. All have good hands. Saukko has aces and eights, the hand the Wild Bill Hickok legend says he held when he was shot dead. Sweetness flops down three kings, says, “Thanks, guys. I’ll cash out now. You know how it is, places to go and people to see.”

I give the ambassador his phone. Sweetness takes all the electronica from the table, to make sure we have time to get away. Whether we live through the night is still up in the air. He dumps all the junk into a gym bag one of the players must have brought to carry cash. He takes his half million euros and tosses it in the bag, too.

The ambassador makes a quick call and rings off. He gives me an address and tells me to be there in half an hour. I take his phone from him. Whoever he called knows where the abducted girls are kept. I can track that person through his dialed numbers.

Sweetness says, “Thanks, guys. We’ll have to do this again sometime.”

The painkillers are kicking in, I push myself to my feet and gimp out the door. Sweetness covers me until I’m out of the room and then follows. “Plug your ears,” he says, and tosses in two more flash-bangs behind him as a parting gesture. Even with my ears protected and eyes shut, it’s like a nuke went off in the room. We step over the two cuffed guards in the hall and walk away.

We get to the delivery entrance. The guards there remain as we left them. I point at Saukko’s personal bodyguard and ask Sweetness, “Would you cut the zip-lock cuffs off his legs and pull the tape off his mouth? I want to take him with us. Men with their mouths taped shut tend to draw attention on the street.”

“Why take him with us?”

I want to puke from anxiety. “This Shit List thing. He knows Saukko’s business. We have to interrogate him and find out if it’s true, and if so, how to nullify it.”

Sweetness cuts him loose. This guy is a trained killer. I’m a crip with guns I barely know how to use. I cock the hammers of the shotgun and keep him at arm’s length. “Don’t say a word. Don’t make sudden movements. Or you get both barrels. Walk in front of us out to the street.”

He nods.

When we get to the Wrangler, I order him to get in the rear of the vehicle, rebind his ankles, retape his mouth, and throw a tarp over him.

W
e drive away. The dashboard clock reads ten after three. We drive a short distance to the address supplied to us. I ring the buzzer. No answer. I smash the apartment building’s front-door window with my sap, an extendable steel baton, reach inside and let us in. We take the elevator to the fourth floor. I ring. Again, no answer. Burning up a clip from my silenced Colt works as a key on the bottom lock. The door swings open a fraction. The Gemtech silencer I’m using, courtesy of Milo, really is a gem. I hear little more than the slide cycling and the used casings pattering on the floor as I’m firing. No waking the neighbors. Sweetness picks up the spent brass for me. The top, heavy-duty lock is usually meant for extra security when leaving. It’s unlocked, which suggests someone is inside.

We enter, and I push the door closed behind us. The reason we weren’t buzzed in becomes apparent. A man has his knees on the floor, his head and torso on a couch, as if trying to push himself to his feet. The butcher knife in his back, planted deep between his shoulder blades, prevented it. He’s dead.

Sweetness looks at me. “Fuck,” he says.

I agree. “Yeah, fuck. We need to take our shoes off, and for God’s sake, don’t touch anything.”

We don’t have any latex gloves to keep us from contaminating the crime scene with our own fingerprints. It’s a big apartment, with the doors to all the rooms shut. We both pull jacket sleeves down over one hand and use the cloth to turn door handles, hold pistols in the other, not easy with my cane. We split up and go through the place. It has three bedrooms, I suppose necessary for multiple girls turning tricks at the same time.

I hear Sweetness scream, “Jesus Fucking Christ!”

I would have come running if I could, but can only call out and ask if he’s hurt.

“No,” he answers, his voice calm now. “Come here.”

I follow his voice and enter a bedroom. He’s staring up into the shelf space over a closet. I look and see a waif of a girl. She’s folded herself into the tight space. Her eyes radiate terror. Loviise Tamm.

I doubt if she speaks anything but Russian. “Talk to her,” I say. “Tell her we’re police, here to help her, and ask her if she can get down from there.”

She seems to take our stated good intentions at face value. She pushes her hands against one wall, feet against the other, faceup, and shimmies down, spiderlike. It reminds me of a circus trick. “Can you make her feel comfortable and try to find out what happened here? Ask her to please not sit or touch anything, and tell her we’ll take her away from here very soon.”

They go back and forth for a few minutes. Some of it I understand, some of it I don’t.

When they’re done, Sweetness explains. “It’s like her mom said, she was promised a job in Helsinki. Then, when she got here, the men who brought her talked about her owing them money for arranging her work and the cost of the trip over, and took her passport. They locked her in this apartment. Other people, including some girls, came and went. They kept her fed, but wouldn’t talk to her. Just told her to wait and all would become clear. She was frightened the whole time. Then a man came just a little while ago. He was angry because she was going to leave, and he said he was going to get something from her first. He sat on the couch and told her to take out his ‘thingy.’ She said it was big and hard, she didn’t know what to do, and he told her to get on her knees and put it in her mouth. She froze, it seemed icky and wrong. He started to yell and he slapped her, but the doorbell rang. He answered it and a woman was at the door. She saw Loviise and looked furious. He told Loviise to get up, go to a bedroom and shut the door. She heard him talk to the woman, but their voices were low and she didn’t understand what they said. Then she heard him shout and everything went quiet. She was afraid of him and his anger and his ‘thingy,’ and crawled up into that space to hide. When I came in, she had a blanket pulled over her and I couldn’t see her, but I saw the blanket move from her breathing, I jerked it away and found her. That’s when I yelled. She scared the shit out of me.”

“Ask her what the woman looked like.”

He asks and translates. “She looked like a magazine.”

“What does that mean?”

She clarifies. “She was very beautiful, like a woman in a magazine.”

Her case of Down syndrome appears to be as mild as her mother claimed. She seems largely functional, but her naïveté likely saved her from a worse fate than she suffered. If she didn’t even know how a penis functions, she needed to be broken in, accomplished by raping her on a regular basis until she gave up hope and just succumbed to it. No one had gotten around to that yet. “Thank her and ask her to wait right here.”

I go over the rest of the house quickly. There’s little to see. Cheap furniture. More IKEA stuff. Some microwavable food in the fridge. A case of Stolichnaya vodka and a crate of beer, I suppose for the clientele. I find some yellow latex cleaning gloves in a closet along with cleaning supplies, and a roll of masking tape in a kitchen drawer. I use it to hide the bullet holes in the front door.

I put on the gloves and rifle through the corpse’s pockets. I find two passports, Loviise’s and his own. If he had her passport, but no others besides his own, it indicates that he meant to turn her over to me. Something went wrong first, and he was murdered. I also take the corpse’s credit card. He was one of those dummies who keeps his bank codes on him with the user number sequence written on it. I take it, too. If he were alive, I couldn’t ask him for anything more.

He’s a Russian named Sasha Mikoyan and his passport is diplomatic. So he’s a spy or an attaché or both, and the Harper brothers didn’t lie. People from the Russian embassy are taking part in the slave trade.

The Russian diplomatic mission, given the circumstances of his death, whorehouse, kidnapping et al., will probably exercise their right to keep Finnish law enforcement out of this. I put his passport back in his pocket but take his wallet and iPhone, so I can carry out an investigation of my own. I’ve developed quite a collection of gadgets tonight.

“Let’s go,” I say. I check the time, now three fifty-five.

Loviise has a traveling bag. Sweetness carries it for her as we walk to the car. I want to discuss this situation with Sweetness, but don’t know if our abductee in the back can understand Finnish. I jam cigarette butts deep in his ears, cover them with duct tape, and put shooting-protection earphones on top of that. He couldn’t hear a bomb drop.

We all get in the Wrangler. I sit up front with Sweetness. Saukko’s man hasn’t made a sound. Apparently, he’s smart enough to know it won’t help, and he’s just waiting, pondering how to get through this, preparing himself for the worst. This marks him as a cool professional. Sweetness hits his flask.

“This may rank as one of the longest nights of our lives, but we’re going to have to make this a murder of opportunity,” I say.

He doesn’t catch the double entendre. “What do you mean?”

I’m rattled and overwrought, exhausted and in pain. I haven’t had this much physical activity since I was shot. I rub my knee. “Saukko said he had nothing to do with knocking out my windows and harassing me. I believe him, do you?”

I start chain-smoking, try to clear my mind with nicotine.

“
Pomo
, that evil fuck is ten times smarter than I am. I don’t know.”

“Pitkänen isn’t doing this alone, that leaves the minister of the interior, the national chief of police, and our new parliamentarian and Finland’s best hater, Roope Malinen. I don’t think Malinen has the stones for it, but the minister and the chief do.”

“What about Adrien Moreau? He was after the ten million and we killed him. Maybe somebody associated with him?”

I shake my head. “He was a self-sufficient loner. I don’t believe he would have involved anyone else.”

“It could be hate groups as well. We really put the fucks to those neo-Nazis for selling strychnine-laced heroin. And all the groups are interconnected.”

Over thirty people died of strychnine poisoning before dealers figured out what they were selling and pulled the bad smack off the streets. “But they don’t have a SUPO agent on their side, or if they do, it’s because the minister ordered him to work with them. I think we need to interrogate the minister and the chief, and that crime scene is the place to do it.”

“Why?”

“Because I told the chief if he didn’t fuck off about the money, I’d frame him for a crime and kill him in the process of arresting him. It’s late on a weeknight. They’re probably in their beds. We should abduct them.”

Sweetness chuckles. “Cool. You really gonna kill the chief?”

“No, not cool. Crazy. And I don’t want to hurt anybody. But Saukko and his Shit List and his threats, plus the attacks and other threats against my family, have me scared shitless. I’ll murder whoever I have to and sit my jolt in prison before I’ll let anyone hurt my family. Later, we’ll interrogate the guy in the back, and I hope before we go home we’ll know where the truth lies and who our enemies are and aren’t. We can’t protect ourselves and ours until then. That includes Jenna and even your mother.”

That possibility seems to have not struck him yet, and when it does, as it did for me, it carries fear with it. He nods his head slow, shakes a cigarette out of a pack and lights it. “You’re right,” he says. “We deal with this now.”

I feel sorry for whoever Sweetness decides is to blame. He’ll kill them—after punishing them—and if we can’t discover who is guilty, he’ll take the position of the crusader leader, a bishop who, when asked by his troops how to tell who was Catholic and who wasn’t, answered, “Kill them all, God will recognize his own.”