by Jo Nesbo
She straddled the bike. ‘I’ve no idea if your plan’s going to work, Will. But if it does then it’s probably the closest you’re going to get to justice without one of those courts of yours.’
‘It’ll be your job to see that those are re-established once everything has totally collapsed and it all has to be built up again from scratch,’ I said.
She rolled her eyes, put on the helmet with the image of Lady Justice executed, and the bike started up with a bestial roar.
I stood watching her until she disappeared from sight around a corner.
* * *
—
I didn’t see a single coyote as I rode down through the valley. I’ve heard that they can smell danger. They’re smart creatures.
XV
The day after I was up at the Adams villa I mounted the light machine gun on the front of my bike so that I could ride and shoot at the same time. Maria watched me wide-eyed and asked if I was going to war.
‘Yes,’ I said.
The slaughterhouse was in an industrial area south of Downtown, on a field surrounded by nodding oil pumps that looked like enormous ants raising and lowering their upper bodies over their front legs. It seemed as though the old pumps – again like ants – just kept on doing what they do regardless of whether the human race was going to hell or not.
The afternoon sun was low in the sky behind me as I turned into the forecourt in front of the slaughterhouse. The timing was carefully chosen. Dumbo had told me they would gather to eat in the main part of the slaughterhouse before heading out to raid after dark. And I needed them all to be together – that was going to be my only chance.
I’d made a reconnaissance trip earlier in the day and established that they didn’t keep watch and that the big sliding door at one end of the hall was always left open, probably because they had no electricity to run the air conditioning. They must have thought that was OK; they probably didn’t feel much threat out here.
I rode into the main hall. It was rectangular and big as two football pitches. Light fell from the windows in the ceiling high above. There were rails and wires with meat hooks up there too, but of course, no meat left hanging from them; anything like that had been consumed long ago. The smooth concrete floor inclined gradually towards the sluices, presumably so the blood would run away before it dried.
The bikes were parked at the far end of the hall and the gang was sitting in the middle at a long table, like in that painting of Jesus and the disciples. Only Jesus wasn’t with them. It had taken me two seconds to count to eleven. Ragnar wasn’t here.
Two of them jumped to their feet and ran towards their bikes. They were new. They didn’t know who I was.
I opened fire, aiming just ahead of them so they could see the bursting showers of plaster and know they would never have time to reach the weapons on their bikes. They threw themselves to the floor.
‘Stay down!’ I yelled.
The walls echoed. They stayed down.
Then I rode slowly forward and stopped between two dangling meat hooks five or six metres from the table, so I was still covering everyone with the machine gun.
‘What do you want?’ asked one of the O’Leary twins – you can never be sure which is which until they’re on their bikes.
‘I want my rifle back,’ I said. ‘And my gang.’
‘Your gang?’ said the other twin.
‘My gang,’ I repeated. ‘When Brad isn’t here I’m the leader of Chaos.’
One guy laughed loudly. Another new one.
‘Where’s Ragnar?’ I asked.
As though in reply came the snarl of an engine starting. A special, hoarse roar. I turned to the parked bikes and saw Ragnar riding towards us on his red Yamaha. He was steering with one hand. In the other he was holding what looked like a shiny new Kalashnikov with a pistol grip. Wonder how he’d come by that. I had my suspicions. He was fifty metres away when I turned the front of the bike towards him and fired off a short burst.
None of the bullets hit him but he braked sharply, only now realising it was a machine gun I had. And that meant superior firepower.
‘Jump her!’ he shouted. ‘She can’t take you all.’
‘But quite a few,’ I said in a voice so low only those at the table heard me.
‘That’s an order!’ shouted Ragnar.
‘The order is that you stay exactly where you are,’ I said. ‘I need you all alive.’
They stared at me. No one moved. Not that they thought I was the new leader. Not yet. But for the time being it was a machine gun giving the orders, not Ragnar. And it looked like he was losing.
But Ragnar knew the rules. He kicked out the stand, dismounted, and held up the Kalashnikov.
‘You and me, no weapons!’ he shouted, releasing the curving magazine and tossing it away so that it bounced and skidded across the floor. ‘Or don’t you dare, Miss Kickboxer?’
Of course I could have turned him down and just shot him there and then.
But I also knew that if the gang was going to accept a girl as leader then I had to show them something more than just that I was capable of pulling a trigger.
I dismounted, took the machine gun and walked over to the table, pulled out the bandolier and dropped it in front of them. Heard that hoarse roaring behind me, turned and saw that Ragnar was back on his bike and already on his way towards me, swinging the hook and chain around his head. I walked towards him, stopped between the meat hooks and waited. I’d seen it so many times. I knew his technique and I could read his body when he was about to throw. And when he did I held the machine gun up in front of me with both hands. The chain hit the top of the barrel, twisted round it once, the hook caught in the middle leaving me one second in which to act. I wedged the barrel down in two of the meat hooks, one on each side of Ragnar’s hook, let go of the gun and took a step backwards. There was a rustling and juddering from the pulleys and wires up by the beam as they tensed, and then a straight line of steel connecting Ragnar’s bike and the beam above. The engine of the Yamaha howled as it came to a sudden stop and the wheels had nothing to grip. Ragnar went flying over the handlebars in a perfect arc that threw him ten metres further down the hall, where he fell to the floor with a thud beneath a row of meat hooks.
I walked over to him.
He lay with his back to me, apparently unconscious. But as I got closer it was as though the sea monster on the back of his leather jacket flexed, and I saw his hand grab for something in the waistband of his trousers. I ran and kicked his hand as he turned. A glistening pistol – it looked like an expensive Glock – spun through the air. I could have let him get to his feet, I could have taken him anyway, but I had an audience. A gang wondering if this girl who said she was the leader was tough enough. Efficient enough. Merciless enough. So I gave Ragnar a simple but effective foot jab while he was still lying there. And before he’d recovered from that I was behind him with a so-called rear naked choke, my left arm around his throat, the right arm locking it, my forehead pressed against the back of his head as though comforting him. Then squeeze and cut off the supply of blood to the brain. Within ten seconds Ragnar was unconscious. I let go of him, pulled down one of the meat hooks directly above him. Glanced over at the table fifteen metres away and saw they were all watching. Rolled Ragnar onto his stomach, pulled up the red leather jacket and choked back the nausea as I drove the hook into the pale skin of his back. I crossed to the wall and turned the crank and Ragnar was hauled up into the air, the blood running evenly and steadily down his back towards the waistband of his trousers. I left him dangling a half-metre above the ground, walked over to his bike, unfastened the chain and then used it to tie his hands behind his back. Ragnar regained consciousness and began swearing and screaming at me, tried to twist himself loose but soon stopped, probably because he felt the meat hook digging into his muscles and tissue.
I walk
ed back to the table and stood there. I could almost see the questions in their eyes. Who the hell was going to lead them now? Who was going to provide them with their next meal, with clothes, a roof over their heads and a place where they could be safe from their enemies? It wasn’t going to be that loser hanging there on the meat hook, that much was obvious. But could it really be her – a girl?
‘You took something that belongs to me,’ I said. ‘A Remington rifle. Which one of you has it?’
Of course they couldn’t help themselves; everyone turned towards the guy who had it.
‘You,’ I said to him, a boy with big red pimples who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. ‘Go and get it. Now.’
He stood up and began to walk towards the bikes.
‘Run!’
He ran.
‘You others come with me,’ I said, turning and heading back towards Ragnar. I heard nothing behind me and thought: shit, I’ve lost them. But then I heard the clinking of cutlery and the scraping of chair legs.
We stood in a semicircle around Ragnar. He was breathing heavily, his face twisted in pain, but he kept his mouth closed. Though it was nothing like when Dumbo got his throat cut, the blood dripped steadily from his boots and ran down the slope to the nearest sluice just the way it was meant to.
‘This man here forced one of our own to confess to a murder he didn’t commit,’ I said, pointing up at Ragnar. ‘After that he had him liquidated. There aren’t many rules in Chaos, but the ones we do have are all we have.’ I was talking loudly, louder than I had planned. Maybe it was to drown out the echo that made it sound as if I was standing in a church. ‘Rule number one: one for all and all for one. If we follow that then we’re invincible. If we don’t, Chaos will be history inside a month.’
I looked round. A couple of them nodded.
I heard running footsteps. I turned and the pimply guy handed me my Remington.
‘Ragnar,’ I said. ‘This is your jury. Do you plead guilty as charged?’
He groaned and kicked out with one leg, causing his body to half turn.
‘No, all right then,’ I said. I loaded the rifle and raised it. ‘Then…’
He made a hissing sound and I lowered the rifle.
‘I did it for us.’ His whisper was almost inaudible. ‘For Chaos. We wouldn’t get weapons, nothing, if Dumbo withdrew his confession.’
‘How much did you have to offer Kevin to kill Dumbo?’
‘Not much,’ he whispered.
‘No, because Kevin’s serving life already so he had nothing to lose.’
‘Nothing to lose,’ Ragnar repeated. His head was dangling now.
‘I’m presuming you didn’t tell anyone here you were planning to have a member of the gang liquidated?’
‘All the weapons, the food…’ Ragnar groaned, his chin on his chest. ‘Without me we wouldn’t have had anything.’
‘We would have had Dumbo.’
Ragnar didn’t reply. His body had rotated back to its original position.
‘OK,’ I said, addressing the others. ‘Those who are against me sentencing this person to death, raise your hand.’
No hands.
‘The condemned man gets to choose. Do you want to hang there till you die or do you want a bullet?’
Ragnar lifted his head slightly. His eyelids looked heavier. I had to make an effort to hear what he was saying: ‘I’ll take that bullet.’
I raised the Remington, pressed my cheek against the cool, good butt of the rifle. With an effort Ragnar lifted his head again slightly, as though to make my job easier. Aiming for his forehead I had the idea of trying to make the bullet-hole form a triangle with the eyes.
Then I fired.
XVI
I met Adele Matheson and Chief Inspector Gardell at the airport in the morning. It had been closed during the pandemic, when most of the privately owned airlines had gone bankrupt and never opened up again.
I’d parked out on the runway and could see the cars driving towards me like undulating spectres through the shimmering heat haze. As they got closer their outlines became clearer; one was a police car, the other a low, red sports car. They parked one on each side of me and we all got out.
‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.
‘No need, but I don’t have much time,’ said Adele Matheson.
‘Why here?’ asked Gardell, who was still wearing sunglasses.
‘The visibility’s good,’ I said. I knew they had noticed the Kalashnikov lying on my passenger seat. ‘I just wanted to let you know that as from this afternoon Brad Lowe will be a free man. I’ve arranged for one of his relatives to fetch him.’
Matheson nodded. ‘Chief Inspector Gardell and I take this as being simply information you possess and not implying in any way involvement in any potential case of false imprisonment.’
‘I expressed myself in such a way as to allow of that interpretation.’
‘Then you won’t get any problems from us,’ said Adele Matheson.
‘What remains to be seen, of course, is how Brad Lowe interprets it. If he makes a complaint against me then you know where I am.’
‘If that’s all, then I have a case in court in an hour’s time,’ said Matheson.
I offered my hand. At first she just looked at it as though I had made a gesture that was obscene or at best old-fashioned. Then she shook it lightly. Gardell remained standing where she was as Matheson headed back to her Ferrari. ‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Haven’t I answered that question once before?’
‘That business about respect for the courts and the rule of law? I don’t buy any of that. Put it another way: I think you’re as driven by revenge as the rest of us.’
‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ I said as I watched Matheson’s red wonder turning dreamlike in the haze. ‘It’s from the law of Moses, one of the earliest collection of laws we know of. It says the perpetrator must pay in kind for the harm done to others. But how can a perpetrator pay for having taken away a member of someone else’s family? The greatest harm isn’t necessarily to the one whose life has been lost but to those who have lost someone they love. The ones left behind who have to live with the loss, the pain and the guilt. The perpetrator should have to live with the same pain.’
‘An eye for an eye,’ said Gardell.
‘It’s a good law,’ I said.
And once she had left I got back into my car and looked at the gun.
I waited. Peering into the haze. Waited.
Then it came. A large black SUV, the same one I had seen driving away from the villa after the attack. Colin Lowe’s car.
* * *
—
Brad wept when I told him I was setting him free and that soon someone I hoped he loved would come and pick him up.
‘I don’t deserve it,’ he sniffled as the tears dripped down onto the mattress.
‘You’ve been here for a while now.’ Then I had to steel myself for what I said next: ‘And everyone deserves a second chance.’
‘You know what, Mr Adams? I’ve learned more from you in the short time I’ve been here than I did from my father during all of my upbringing.’ His mouth opened and closed before a sob came out. ‘I’m so sorry Amy’s dead. I know there’s nothing I can do for you, but…’
I laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘There is something you can do. Chung and Larsen moved out yesterday and I need a strong man to help me move the ammo back here.’
He gave me a puzzled look.
‘Heidi and I need somewhere in the basement to store food,’ I lied. ‘In here it’ll just attract rats through the sewage pipe, so I’m going to have to use this room for ammo.’
‘I’m ready.’
Brad didn’t even ask me why I didn’t simply block off the pipe but just got down to work carrying crate after crate of bulle
ts, grenades, dynamite and petrol.
By the time we were finished we were both sweating and exhausted. Maybe there’s something in the idea that hard physical labour creates a bond between men. I offered him a beer but he declined, saying he knew beer was in short supply and asked if he could have some water instead. It made me recall something a forensic psychiatrist told me once, how people will often say they made a mistake and were taken in by a man who devoted all his spare time to helping the poor and then turned out to have been a serial child abuser. But, said the psychiatrist, they hadn’t made a mistake or been fooled. What was good in the man had really helped these people. It wasn’t done as a cover for the other things he was doing. It’s simply that people aren’t either all good or all bad. Not Brad, not his father, and not me.
* * *
—
Night descends over the Lowe building as the enormous, insect-like helicopter prepares to land with a deafening roar. We stand watching in silence as the air is whipped up and the hairstyles and ties and dresses whirl about us. A few drops of champagne from Colin’s glass sting my face like icy sleet and I taste the bitter sweetness in my open mouth.
And then the helicopter is down, the engine turned off and the rotor arms still spinning as the high-pitched whining gradually descends and decreases in volume and pitch.
Colin looks at me. Liza and Beth are standing by his side.
‘Final group, board now!’ shouts a voice from the helicopter door.
A dozen people swarm towards him.
Colin straightens his back, and I feel my eyes filling with tears.
The way they had done five days ago, when the Larsens and the Chungs took their few possessions and moved out. Larsen spent his money on a smallholding in the south, a place where they could grow their own food and be less affected by the collapse than in the cities. Chung had bought a fishing boat, and a lighthouse for his family to live in.
