Life Deluxe (68 page)

There was no time.

His sister and nephew: had been kidnapped for forty-four hours now.

No time.

Jorge didn’t give a shit about anything—he was ready
now
. Time was a luxury. The CIT planning’d been detailed like a book: What’d that led to?
Nada
.

Now this motherfucking Latino was running on routine. Now he was going on his G-gene. Now he just had to act fast.

Sin mandamiento, sin reglas
. There was no time for planning, for thinking ahead, for tight co-dees. No time. His plans’d grown out of a night on a mattress at a homeless shelter. How much was he thinking ahead? Half a day. And tight buds? He was gonna use an ex-cop,
oooo yeah
.

He thought:
Let whatever happens, happen. I’m prepared to die for you, Paola and Jorgito
.

Violence can solve most things.

You are me, and I am you. My blood will absolve us all from sin
.

Jesus—
joder:
he was gonna sacrifice himself if need be.

He was gonna break Javier out, and then he was gonna settle the score with the Finn—get Paola and Jorgito.

He met Hägerström by the main entrance to Huddinge Hospital. Thirty degrees in the air. Maybe the scarf Jorge’d wrapped several times around his neck didn’t look that shady after all.

Hägerström was wearing a glossy down jacket. Jorge thought it looked gay.

Jorge was rocking baggy track pants and a cardigan. He was carrying a duffel bag.

A new Taurus gun was stuffed in his pants pocket. The same kind of
gat that’d saved him once before. That the poor cabbie’d tasted against his temple.

His cell phone was in his other pants pocket. Bert T. Skogwall, Esquire’d, called thirty minutes ago. Informed him that Javier was now being moved to the closed psychiatric ward at Huddinge. Javier’d started acting weird as early as last night. Been awake all night, banging on his cell door. Cut himself and bled all over the cell. In the morning: the staff found him smeared with his own excrement with a rope made out of torn prison clothes wrapped around his neck. Javier—obviously psychologically unstable. Obviously: a risk to himself. The staff at the Kronoberg jail couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t try to take his own life—he had to be sent to receive proper care.

Javier: a homie. The dude knew how to handle the Department of Corrections. The lawyer briefed Jorge. Javier’d tied a T-shirt tightly around his upper arms so that the veins were clearly visible. Made a tiny cut in the crook of his arm, squeezed out a few drops of blood. Mixed the blood with water and simply splashed the cell with it. Then he shit on toilet paper and hid it under his bed. It stank. Finally, he mixed coffee dregs with bread—the right shit color. Smeared himself and everything around him like a toddler with finger paint.

Jorge and Hägerström took the stairs down.

Within an hour, one of the Department of Corrections’s transport vehicles ought to be pulling into the back of Huddinge’s closed psychiatric unit.

Jorge and Hägerström would play welcome committee.

But before then: they were gonna fix something.

They continued down the stairs. Continued out through the parking garage. Out on the other side. They jumped over a few concrete blocks. They saw it, behind a metal fence ten yards off.

Jorge set the duffel down. Pulled out a pair of bolt cutters that he’d lifted forty minutes ago in the Flemingsberg Mall.

Began cutting a hole in the fence.

The ambulance garage was behind there. Jorge saw the large garage gates. One was open. He could see two ambulances parked right inside.

A hole in the wall large enough so that they could bend it back and climb through.

It was calm outside the ambulance garage. Where were all the ambulance drivers? Where were all the bleeding, screaming patients?

Hägerström said, “This is not where the transports drive into. They arrive upstairs, outside the ER.”

Jorge thought:
Okay, maybe it would’ve been smarter to carjack an ambulance up there. But it was too late for that now
.

They walked into the garage. At least ten ambulances in different models were lined up. Even one that looked like a truck.

Jorge thought:
If anyone were to ask me to draw an ambulance, I would draw a white car with a red cross on it
—but not a single one of the real ambulances was white. They were all yellow with green color fields and blue symbols on them.

He asked Hägerström to position himself behind one of the cars.

He pulled the Palestinian scarf up over his mouth and nose. Positioned himself next to the gray metal door that appeared to be the only entrance to the garage, aside from the route they’d just used.

He waited.

Seconds ticked.

Minutes passed.

He held his hand over the fake gun.

A fluorescent in the ceiling flashed. There were pipes and cables on the walls.

Jorge remembered when Mahmud’d been picked up by the EMTs on the street in Pattaya. Jorge’d thought his friend was dead. But now Mahmud was waiting for him in Thailand.

And Javier was waiting for J-boy in a transport car en route from jail.

It was like one of the computer games that he’d played as a kid. You shot a figure on the uppermost part of the screen. The figure fell down and destroyed two other figures lower down, just by falling on top of them.

Domino effects. All of life, every single thing you did, was like popping computer game dudes. Everything could affect something else. Everything was connected.

He was scared: all the shit he’d set in motion. All the people who were waiting for him. What if he’d taken other steps in life? What if he’d never saved Denny Vadúr there in the Ping-Pong room and never gotten in touch with the Finn? Something good—saving someone from a beating. Had led to something else good—a recipe for a CIT heist. A
talk with Mahmud one night at the café. Led to something half-ass—two and a half million in booty. A small decision—to trick someone: led to the worst thing he’d ever been through. Again: everything seemed to be connected. It was like one giant complicated web of connections and people. Where did it all begin, really?

What if he’d learned to draw like Björn?

What if he’d tested heroin that time when Ashur tried?

What if he’d listened more to Mom? Who would’ve been waiting for him then?

Maybe the same people would’ve been waiting for him, after all. But they would’ve been waiting for something good. Not for him to attack the first best person who walked in through the door of an ambulance garage.

Hägerström was crouching behind one of the ambulances.

He saw Jorge standing by the side of the garage entrance. His face was hidden by his hat and scarf, only his dark eyes peeked out. And in those eyes, Hägerström saw the same thing he had seen when they met at the law firm: desperation, panic. Except now the panic almost seemed to have taken over.

Torsfjäll was informed about the situation. Jorge wanted to free Javier so that Javier could help him settle the score with the Finn and get his sister and nephew back. A rescue mission was a dangerous operation, but Torsfjäll had said, “The ends justify the means in this industry. That’s just how it has to be, or else us cops would never get anywhere. This will lead us to the brain behind the CIT robbery.”

The inspector was right. Within twenty-four hours, they ought to have Jorge, Javier, the Finn, Bladman, and JW, each in a cruiser on his way to be placed in custody. As long as Jorge didn’t totally lose it. As long as no one was injured unnecessarily. As long as Hägerström could control this thing.

At the same time, he longed for Javier. It was as though he had a mosquito bite—in the heart. Every other minute it itched so badly that he had to muster all his concentration not to feel too much.

A few seconds passed.

The gray metal door opened. An ambulance driver walked out. Green clothes with yellow reflectors over the shoulders. A radio attached to her breast pocket. A Bluetooth earpiece hanging around her neck.

Hägerström saw how Jorge took a step forward, raised the Taurus pistol. Pressed it against the woman’s head. Covered her mouth with his hand. He leaned over and whispered something in her ear.

Everything was so quiet. Hägerström had expected Jorge to yell and carry on. Wave the gun around. That the person who walked out through the door would cry or scream something.

Ten seconds later Jorge was beside him. A pair of keys in his hand. They ran to an ambulance. Jumped in. Hägerström climbed into the driver’s seat.

He used the keys to start the engine.

The window was open. Jorge kept the fake gun aimed at the ambulance woman the entire time. She was still standing by the entrance. Her cell phone and the radio on the floor in front of her, destroyed.

One of the two garage doors was already open. Hägerström carefully put the vehicle in drive.

Rolled out of the garage.

Ten minutes later. Huddinge’s closed forensic psychiatric ward was only five hundred yards from the ambulance garage in a separate fenced-in building—they didn’t want the criminal crazies in the same building as the regular spooks, plus, of course: they had to keep them from escaping. Hägerström and Jorge had parked the ambulance two hundred yards from the insane asylum, in a staff parking lot.

Now they were sitting in a different car, an old Opel. Jorge said he’d boosted it earlier that day. They saw the driveway and the entrance to the closed ward twenty yards off.

Soon one of the cars from the Department of Corrections ought to pull in with Javier.

Jorge was smoking a cigarette. The window was rolled down. Still, he didn’t bother blowing the smoke out through the opening. Stared straight ahead instead.

Hägerström said, “Are you okay?”

Jorge exhaled smoke. “I’ve got a Kalashnikov in the duffel. Can you work one of those?”

Hägerström nodded. He thought:
It’s better that I have the real weapon
.

Jorge grabbed the duffel from the backseat and pulled out the assault rifle.

He held it low so that no passersby could see that they were handling a real AK-47.

He handed Hägerström the weapon. Images from his military service flickered past. Coastal rangers were educated in intelligence service work on enemy territory. If you came across an enemy weapon, you needed to be able to handle it as well as you could your own.

He ran his finger along the bolt. This was a model with an elongated
barrel. Probably from some Eastern Bloc country. The magazine box was altered so that you could use Russian military ammo made for a Mosin-Nagent rifle.

Jorge looked at him. Handed over the magazine.

They waited. The weapon was resting in Hägerström’s lap. Loaded and ready.

Huddinge’s closed forensic psychiatric ward was in a one-story concrete building with a worn-looking facade and barred windows. The building was surrounded by a well-maintained lawn. Where the lawn ended, a six-foot fence with barbed wire at the top began. There were surveillance cameras attached to the fence and to metal rods in the lawn. He didn’t see any movement in the building.

The visitors’ entrance was located on the other side. Here by the gates that were used for transport, everything appeared quiet as the grave.

“According to that dirty lawyer,” Jorge said, “he should’ve come by now.”

“Yeah, but you can never trust lawyers. He’ll be here. And I know the Department of Corrections—everything takes longer than you think. I promise.”

Five minutes later a Volvo V70 pulled up to the gates. It was painted red, white, and blue. The Department of Corrections’s logo on its side.

It was a prisoner transport vehicle. Hopefully, it was
that
prisoner transport vehicle.

The back windows were tinted. Impossible to see whom they were transporting.

Hägerström turned on the engine.

Started the Opel with a jerk. The car jumped forward fifteen feet.

He turned in front of the transport vehicle. Blocked the entrance through the gates.

It was all in now. They took a chance that it actually was Javier back there in the vehicle.

Jorge threw himself out. Hägerström opened the car door, also jumped out.

Jorge was holding the Taurus pistol with both hands.

Hägerström hesitated for a millisecond. Then he saw Javier’s face in front of him. He raised the assault rifle.

Jorge pressed his gun to the driver’s-side window. Yelled, “Open the back door now!”

Hägerström caught a glimpse of a terrified face in there.

Then one of the backseat doors opened. He could see Javier back there, sandwiched between two transport guards. His hands were cuffed, and there was a chain running from the handcuffs to a broad leather belt around his waist.

Jorge pointed with the gun. “Let him out.”

Hägerström kept the AK-47 pointed at the two staffers in the backseat throughout.

Javier pushed his way past the guard sitting closest to the door.

Hägerström met his eyes. They glittered.