The Wild One

by Nick Petrie

  “Sounds perfect.” Peter walked toward him. “I have to run a few errands and meet a guy at seven. How about eight o’clock?”

  “Another meeting?” The Irishman looked at him. “I’m starting to believe you’re not truly on holiday.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The beating you took, a real tourist would have gone to the clinic,” Seamus said. “Might even have gone home. Instead you braved a hurricane to make your meeting in Seydisfjordur, and again to get here. Also, you’ve changed cars. But I can’t tell if you’re the fox or the hound.”

  “I’m a little confused myself.” Peter took out his Icelandic phone and thumbed open the camera app. “Listen, you really saved my ass, digging me out of the snow back there. How about a selfie?” He went to sling an arm around the Irishman, thumb already on the button.

  “Lord, no.” Seamus knocked the phone down and almost out of Peter’s grasp. The Irishman had extremely fast hands. “I’m old-fashioned. Graven images and all that. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Peter turned off the camera and tucked his phone away. “For the record, I wasn’t trying to steal your soul.”

  The Irishman’s smile was bright but his eyes were dark. “I’ve no soul left to steal, boyo. I was ten years a copper, a black bastard from Belfast. I’ve seen things a man can’t unsee.” He brandished his silver flask. “Explains why I’m so fond of the drink.”

  It also explained the Irishman’s friendly questions, and the way he stood, boots shoulder-width apart, right foot slightly ahead of the left. A policeman’s readiness for what might come.

  But it didn’t explain the Mitsubishi.

  Peter heard the whine of an airplane engine coming from the north. The single runway of the local airport was directly behind them. He glanced up as a small turboprop chased its landing lights down through the clouds. Then Peter caught movement in the corner of his eye and turned to the road.

  Two cars appeared under the lights of the causeway, headed into Akureyri.

  A black Dacia Duster, followed by a shit-brown Skoda.

  * * *

  —

  The Defender was on the far side of the pump and partially hidden from view. Peter stood in the open. The bright causeway was maybe twenty meters away.

  The uncles filled the Dacia like walruses in a fishbowl, but they kept their eyes pointed forward. Bjarni wore his red jacket and drove with his window down. He glanced at the N1 parking area but didn’t seem to notice Peter. He didn’t even touch his brakes. He just followed Ingo and Axel toward town.

  The man had driven a stick-shift hatchback a thousand kilometers through an arctic hurricane with one broken arm. These Vikings were something else.

  Seamus noticed Peter watching the cars. “What’s that about?”

  “The people I’m meeting,” Peter said. “They’re early.”

  40

  He made a plan to meet Seamus for dinner, then set off toward town, hoping like hell he didn’t see anyone he knew, not until he was ready. The streets were full of cars, a busy shopping day before Christmas. Peter realized he didn’t even know what day it was.

  He turned off the sea road into a long municipal parking lot, where he passed an unoccupied police Volvo. He angled into the next row of spots and there they were, the black Dacia Duster and the shit-brown Skoda, side by side. Also empty. No Bjarni, no Ingo, no Axel. No cops.

  They were all in town, on foot.

  He drove out of the lot and past the Hotel Kea, where he was supposed to meet Jerry Brunelli at seven, then up a long curving hill to a tall gray modernist church overlooking the city. He left the Defender on the far side of the church’s parking lot, snug between a jacked-up Blue Bird minibus and a rusty Ford F350 with a camper on the back.

  He wasn’t hiding, he told himself. He was being strategic.

  If Hjálmar had in fact convinced Brunelli to arrange the meeting, Peter didn’t want the police to find the Defender. He’d need it for a few more days, at least. He was still waiting for Kristjan Holm’s report on the man. He checked his Icelandic phone for a message, but there was nothing.

  But he had another question for the investigator. He found the stealth video he’d shot while attempting to set up the selfie with Seamus. Most of it was useless, but somewhere between sky and pavement, he’d somehow managed a quick, clear capture of the man’s face.

  He isolated the image and sent it to the Norwegian along with the Mitsubishi’s license plate number. Who is this guy? Says his name is Seamus Heaney. Irish? Police? Hoping Holm could work some investigator database magic.

  Then he pulled a fleece hat down low, grabbed his day pack, and walked to the edge of the church parking lot, where a wide pedestrian stair dropped down the hill.

  At the bottom of the steps, the beige bulk of the Hotel Kea stood across from a street that had been narrowed to one lane as a kind of pedestrian mall. He slipped through the strolling crowd of locals and tourists, his good eye peeled for Bjarni and the uncles.

  That would be a good name for a band, he thought absurdly. Tonight at Snorri’s Rave Cave, please welcome Iceland’s favorites, Bjarni and the Uncles! He blinked and felt a wave of dizziness. He was not at his best. The wind blew ragged and strangely warm. A thin, cold rain began to fall.

  Head on a swivel, he went shopping. First, he bought a new orange-handled fishing knife at a tourist shop because he felt naked without some kind of weapon. Then he went to a 66°North store, Iceland’s answer to The North Face and Patagonia, where he found a waterproof coat and winter bibs that had been designed, according to the serious young salesman, for the Iceland Rescue teams. With his good eye on the door, Peter asked if they came in white. He was hoping to blend into a snowy landscape.

  The salesman stared at Peter like he was mentally challenged. “The clothing is designed to be visible.” He spoke slowly, to make sure Peter understood. “This is Iceland. If things go badly on your expedition, you may need to be rescued.”

  Peter settled for black. He could always pretend to be a rock.

  As he paid, he asked the salesman where he might find a pair of snowshoes. The man suggested several sporting goods stores, but said it would probably take a week or more, as they’d have to come from overseas. He was happy to recommend several tour companies that could take Peter into the mountains. The big storm was circling back around, he said. Peter would be much safer on a tour.

  Peter looked up at a pair of vintage steam-bent snowshoes hung on the wall as decoration. The wood frames, rawhide webbing, and leather bindings looked in decent shape, and they were sized to float a man with a full pack. He pointed and tried to look rich and stupid. “How much for those?”

  The salesman closed his eyes and sighed.

  It took four phone calls and a great deal of Catherine Price’s cash, but Peter left the store wearing his new black coat with the winter bibs in a shopping bag and the big snowshoes tucked under his arm.

  Watching for familiar faces and safely camouflaged among the tourists in his spotless, high-end outerwear, he realized he still had an hour to kill before his meeting with Brunelli. He walked until he found a bakarí with a row of damp tables under an awning. Inside, waiting to order, he glanced at the television, expecting to see more talking heads, or maybe footage of the burning American tanker or the RPG attack against the embassy in Caracas.

  Instead he saw Commissioner Hjálmar being interviewed in front of a shiny building.

  The date was noted in the bottom corner of the screen, indicating the footage was from the day before. The day after Peter had left Reykjavík. The sound was off, which didn’t matter because Peter only had two dozen words of Icelandic.

  The video changed to uniformed police on a city street. Beyond them, a glimpse of what could only be a body covered with a plastic sheet. The snow was dark red around it.

  The screen
changed again, this time to a photograph of a man’s face, probably from a passport. A passport Peter had taken from the man and stashed in the glove box of the Defender.

  On the crawl, Staple’s name.

  Next came Peter’s own passport photo. His own name on the crawl.

  Peter didn’t need to speak Icelandic to know the news.

  Staple was dead and the police thought Peter had killed him.

  41

  He looked around. People were talking and eating. Nobody was watching the television.

  In Peter’s passport photo, he was clean-shaven and impossibly young. Now his face looked like a punching bag, and his unshaven scruff was dark and rough.

  He got back in line and ordered two large cappuccinos, trying not to look like a murderer. The young woman at the counter smiled and took his money. When his coffees came, he carried them outside to the chairs under the awning and sat with his back to the shop window and his hood pulled low and his good eye on the street. Hiding in plain sight.

  He took out his phone and found an English-language Icelandic news site. Staple’s murder popped up as the lead story. The website ran Staple’s photo right beside Peter’s. It was a huge deal, the nation’s first murder in three years, and particularly gruesome. The police believed Staple, an American tourist, was killed with a knife, stabbed from behind. He was found stuffed under his car almost twenty-four hours after Peter had mugged him outside the embassy.

  Someone had asked Staple—had almost certainly paid him—to keep Peter out of Iceland. Why kill him now?

  To shut him up, Peter assumed. Unless the mugging outside the embassy had changed something, although Peter couldn’t figure out what. Maybe they’d killed him to throw suspicion on Peter, to give the police a more urgent reason to find Peter and put him out of commission.

  If that was the plan, it was certainly working.

  It didn’t matter why Staple was murdered, or that Peter hadn’t done it. What mattered was that Hjálmar was no longer merely annoyed that Peter had walked away from the arrest at the food hall. He wouldn’t be distracted by the storm. He would be actively working to locate and arrest Peter. That was a problem.

  Most of all, it mattered who’d taken the man’s life. Because Staple’s assassin had been bird-dogging Peter’s tracks this whole damn time.

  He stood abruptly, looking up and down the street. He had to walk. He had to keep moving. Then he knew.

  It was the Irishman, of course.

  But who the hell was behind the Irishman?

  He called Holm and got no answer. Shit.

  The rain turned to sleet.

  * * *

  —

  He crossed the street to a narrow pedestrian path that angled up the hillside. The snowshoes were awkward under his arm. He climbed to a winding road that ended above the hilltop church where he’d left the Defender. His binoculars showed no police cars, no black Dacia or shit-brown Skoda, no watchers in the rain, so he walked down to the parking lot. The Blue Bird minibus was gone but the rusty pickup with the camper on the back was still there.

  He unlocked his truck and nobody stopped him. He offloaded everything but the orange-handled knife and his binoculars, then started down the long diagonal steps toward the blocky concrete hotel where he was due to meet Brunelli. On the other side of the central railing, a bearded man and a boy climbed the stairs, hand in hand.

  Peter couldn’t see their faces. They were below him, the man in a hip-length brown leather jacket, the boy in a bright blue parka. Their wool hats were beaded with water. Engrossed in a quiet conversation, they climbed without haste.

  A dozen steps below, the man raised his eyes to Peter and nodded a polite greeting. The boy stared at Peter’s swollen eye and leaned into his father. The man didn’t look anything like Erik and the boy was too young to be Óskar. But how badly Peter wanted them both to be here, alive and well and together.

  The sleet stung his battered face. Peter raised his hand to wipe his eyes and found that he still held the binoculars. He had work to do.

  He scanned down the stairs, which ended at the corner of the hotel. He had no view around the corner to the entrance. He wondered if Brunelli had caught the news and called the police. It was bad tactics to make an appointment and keep it, but it was even worse to keep it without recon.

  Through the lenses, he saw a small, faint cloud appear briefly against the line of the hotel wall. It vanished, then came again. A plume of breath in the cold air. Someone was standing on the far side of that corner, waiting.

  Peter hopped the side rail and slipped laterally across the slick hillside, trying to get a glimpse around the corner of the hotel. He was a black shape on white snow and he hoped the shadows were deep enough to hide his passing. He stopped behind a sparse evergreen tree, still not far enough to get an angle on the corner, but now he had a good view across the street. At the mouth of an alley, a man leaned against a red Jeep and watched the hotel entrance. Something familiar about him, that athletic slouch. Peter raised the binoculars again.

  He’d seen the man before, in the hallway of the Litla Guesthouse in Reykjavík.

  The grad student with the swimmer’s build in the Ohio State sweatshirt.

  Peter scanned farther, looking for stillness in the thinning sea of pedestrians, and found Ohio State’s friend, the young woman with the spatula and the silver bangles on her wrist. She wore a dark parka and stood at the back of the raised hotel patio, sheltered from the wind with views down both sides of the intersection.

  Peter dropped to the snow and slid farther across the hillside until he came to a concrete retaining wall that rose a half meter above the snow and, on the other side, dropped four meters to the sidewalk below.

  Sheltered in the retaining wall’s slim shadow, he could finally see around the corner of the hotel. A third figure stood out of the light, a very large man almost invisible in a watch cap and a gray utility jacket. Peter had never seen him before.

  The sleet came down hard, dampening the sound from the street. The snow was cold and wet against his legs and butt. Ohio State and Spatula Woman weren’t Hjálmar’s people. They’d been with Seamus at the Litla, so Peter assumed they were with Seamus. But who the hell was Seamus with?

  Peter dug out his phone and called Holm again.

  The phone rang and rang. The downside of modern communication, Peter thought, was that everyone knew who was calling before they answered.

  When the Norwegian finally came on the line, he was more abrupt than usual. “Tell me you didn’t kill David Staple.”

  Of course Holm had seen the news. Staple’s death and Peter’s picture would be all over his feed.

  Peter kept his voice quiet. “I didn’t kill David Staple.” It was a good sentence to practice. If Hjálmar caught him, he’d need to be convincing.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you.” Holm’s voice rose. “Interpol could charge me for assisting in a crime. I should hang up right now.”

  “So hang up,” Peter said. “But first let me tell you about this SUV I found.”

  Holm didn’t say anything, but he didn’t hang up, either. Even the wheelchair was silent.

  “It’s a big white Mitsubishi,” Peter said. “Recently painted. Used to be silver or gray. It’s had some repair work done on the front end, like it was in some kind of collision.”

  The cheap cell gave off the eerie silence of a digital connection. Peter missed the faint carrier hum of the old rotary phone in his parents’ kitchen. It was a comfort, reminding him that someone was still listening on the other end of the line. Just the thought made Peter feel like some kind of antique unsuited to the modern world. He was too young to feel so goddamn old.

  Then the Norwegian lit a cigarette, and the crackle of the slow burn came over the line. “Okay,” Holm finally said. The wheelchair rattled softly across some threshold. “Th
at’s the plate number you sent earlier?”

  “Yes. And the photo of the man driving it.”

  Fingers clacked across keys. “The plate is for a Mitsubishi Pajero. The color is given as silver. Registered in the United Kingdom to a man named Seamus Heaney. Like the poet.” More keystrokes. “A citizen of Ireland? He is not Icelandic?”

  “He says he’s Irish. He sounds Irish to me.”

  “You talked with him?”

  “He dug me out of a snowdrift this morning.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Good question. I’ll ask him.”

  “What?”

  “We’re supposed to meet later. For dinner. He says he was a cop in Belfast. Maybe you could find out a little more about him?”

  Holm took another long drag on the cigarette. “Já. I will.” He exhaled. “Thank you, Peter.”

  “My pleasure. Did you have time to look into Brunelli?”

  “Ha.” The laugh like a bark. “First let me tell you about David Staple. Remember how he started at the White House, worked his way up to a nice law partnership, but somehow ended up as a low-level attorney at the State Department? I found out why. I didn’t think it was important until just now. Staple resigned from his partnership when the Washington Post revealed that he was a person of interest in an FBI investigation into money laundering. For something called the True IRA.”

  “Oh, shit,” Peter said.

  The original Irish Republican Army was a separatist group responsible for many decades of political bombings and assassinations throughout Ireland and England, until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement made an uneasy but growing peace. But the most violent element of the IRA had formed a splinter group called the True IRA, which was less political and more criminal, pursuing everything from gun running to bank robberies to murder for hire, all over the world.