As Red as Blood (The Snow White Trilogy) (20 page)

“I’ve got something to show you,” Lumikki heard the Russian say in English.

She glanced around. No back door. No place to hide. Nowhere she could go and no way to get out.

Nowhere but the freezers.

Lifting the lid of the closest ice chest, she peered inside, felt her breath catch, and quickly closed it.

Vomit rose in her throat. Her arms and legs trembled. She couldn’t waste time standing there thinking about what she had just seen, though. The party was overflowing with gruesome props, but the contents of that freezer were definitely real. Lumikki glanced into the next freezer and sighed with relief. Nothing but a couple of bags of frozen peas at the bottom. Quickly, she switched off the freezer. It wouldn’t help much, but at least she wouldn’t lose all of her body heat
instantly as the freezer strained to cool 120 pounds of teenager from 98.6 degrees to zero.

Lumikki saw the door move.

Climbing into the ice chest, she crouched in the most comfortable position she could manage and then gently closed the lid just as the men stepped into the room.

The cold began nipping at her bare skin instantly. Even indoors, she couldn’t seem to get away from freezing temperatures. This winter was cursed.

Terho Väisänen was impatient. He didn’t have the energy for playing Boris Sokolov’s games right now. All he wanted was time to polish his strategy for convincing Polar Bear that he deserved some proper severance pay. All the rumors said that no one could blackmail or threaten Polar Bear. No one had ever succeeded, though many had tried.

So he would have to negotiate.

“Where is Natalia?” Terho asked, still speaking English.

Boris Sokolov bared his teeth. The expression was probably meant as a smile.

“That’s just what I wanted to show you,” Sokolov replied. “Your Snow Queen is right here.”

Väisänen watched in astonishment as Sokolov opened the lid of the nearest freezer.

Lumikki heard the retching sound Elisa’s dad made, and she knew what he’d just seen. The image would probably be burned into her retinas for the rest of time. Material for future nightmares.

A young woman in a freezer, naked and dead.

Eyes open, face powder-blue, with dark, dried blood on her lips. And a large hole in her stomach.

“What . . . what did you do to her?” Lumikki heard Elisa’s father ask, his voice quavering.

“I’d think a cop would have seen a dead body before.”

“But . . . why?”

“Are you really trying to tell me you didn’t know? Natalia tried to run off with the money. Your money. Our money. We stopped her. You must have guessed when you got that bag full of bloody money.”

“What money do you keep talking about?”

“Your compensation.”

“Damn it, I keep telling you, the money never came.”

“That’s your problem, not ours. We made the delivery on February 28, as agreed. Three times a year, on the days you requested. But this time, we brought it to your house instead of hiding it in the woods. We thought you’d appreciate such good service.”

“This is . . . nauseating.”

“This is reality. We couldn’t afford to let Natalia leave with the money. Losing thirty thousand euros might not be such a big deal, but the possibility of her informing on us was.”

“I don’t . . . I . . .”

Elisa’s father groped for the words.

“I don’t want to have anything to do with you or your men anymore. Ever. Is that clear? This wasn’t supposed to happen. No one was supposed to die.”

“Oh, but they have. First Natalia and then Viivo.”

“Viivo Tamm?”

“Polar Bear’s men took him out. It was no big deal. Sometimes these things just happen. You should try to be professional about it too. There are always losses. Shipments disappear, money gets stolen, people die. It’s all part of the business.”

“Try to be professional? Professional? Fuck you. You killed a woman!”

Lumikki heard Terho Väisänen’s voice break. He was on the verge of hysteria.

Lumikki could feel her fingers going numb. Her toes already had. Fortunately, she had plenty of oxygen in the freezer. So far.

“I offloaded an unreliable employee. And let me give you a little tip, Väisänen: Think twice before you start talking back to me. All I have to do is say the word and you’ll be in there next to your whore. Hell, maybe I’ll put you there myself.”

Väisänen laughed, but there was an edge of desperation to it.

“But you need me. You’ve needed me for ten years now.”

“Our arrangement has worked nicely. You’ve provided us with information, and we’ve revealed appropriate things to you in return. Our drug business has blossomed, and your narcotics squad’s statistics have never looked better. It’s a win-win. I’m the one you have to thank for your promotion. But you listen to me, Väisänen. I don’t need you. You’re like an ant to me. I can find a new informant anytime I want.”

“That’s good to hear, because I’m done.”

“I decide when you’re done.”

“No, Boris, it isn’t going down like that. What’s going to happen is that I’m going to quit, and you can’t do anything about it.”

Lumikki listened to the silence between the men grow uncomfortable.

“Hmm,” Sokolov finally said. “If you really did quit, how could I be sure you wouldn’t squeal?”

“You’d just have to trust me.”

“No. I’ll tell you how. I could trust you because if you ever broke your word, you’d find that hot daughter of yours at home in your own freezer just like Natalia.”

“You bastard.”

Lumikki heard scuffling as Elisa’s father attacked Sokolov. A moment later came a groan and then silence.

“I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I would take you out myself if I needed to.”

Sokolov sounded out of breath.

“Okay. Okay. I get it. Just put that thing away. I’m sorry I lost it.”

“Remember. Your daughter in a freezer. Cherish that image in your mind if you ever start feeling like you might do something stupid. I’ll make it come true so fast your head will spin. And you know I’m a man of my word.”

Then Lumikki heard the door open and the men exit.

Not a moment too soon. The cold had started to make her seriously numb, and the places her skin touched the freezer walls felt like they were getting frostbitten. Lumikki raised her arm to open the top of the chest.

Then the door opened again. Two sets of footsteps. An intense conversation in Finnish.

“I don’t get how we can go through this much booze so fast. They’re soaking it up like sponges.”

“Better get used to it. This is just the beginning. Wait until you see what it’s like after midnight.”

Servers,
Lumikki quickly deduced.

“What do we need most right now?”

“Bubbly. They always drink that most at the beginning. Then they start asking for white and red at about the same rate. Maybe a little more red in when it’s this cold out. After midnight, it’s mostly harder stuff, whiskey and all that. A surprising amount of rum too. And vodka, of course. Some stick with the same thing the whole time, but most of them want variety.”

Take the champagne and get out of here already,
Lumikki hollered in her mind.
Go have your chat somewhere else.

“Great. Someone stacked the red on top of the champagne again even though I clearly asked for bubbly on top, red on the bottom. Like I just said, they don’t start drinking red wine until later.”

“Big deal. Come on, let it go. Let’s just move them out of the way.”

“It is a big deal to me. This whole thing’ll blow up in our faces if people can’t follow simple instructions. Listen, you have no idea what kind of chaos you’re going to see here by the time this is over. It’s pandemonium. We’ll be carrying drinks with both arms, and it still won’t be fast enough.
Good luck finding some vintage cognac down here then with the system all messed up.”

“Okay, I get it. Let’s do this thing.”

Lumikki silently thanked the second server for moving things along when she heard them start moving crates. Bottles made muffled clinks.

“Not on the floor. They’ll just be in the way there too. Let’s put them on this freezer.”

“Isn’t there anything important in there? Something we might need soon? It would suck to have to keep lugging these crates all over the room. They weigh a ton.”

“There’s nothing in there but a few old bags of frozen vegetables. I just checked an hour ago.”

“Maybe I should make sure.”

Lumikki heard one of the servers grab the freezer lid handle.

Don’t open it. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

Then something heavy thudded down on top of the freezer.

“Hey, are you nuts? You could have crushed my fingers.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t. Are you going to help, or do I have to do everything myself?”

“Calm down.”

Another thump on the lid. And a third. And a fourth. Four full crates of red wine.

“Now hop to it and grab that champagne already.”

Clinking of bottles as each server lifted a crate. Steps receding toward the door.

“Hey, wait a sec,” one of them said, turning back. Steps approached the freezer again. There was a click and the freezer compressor whirred into life.

“Someone must have turned it off by accident. You have to keep these things cold even if there’s just a couple bags of peas in them. You never know when someone might want to freeze half a moose.”

Steps toward the door again. The door opened and closed. Lumikki was alone in the storage room.

That is, if you didn’t count the body of the woman named Natalia resting in the adjacent freezer.

Soon there might be two frozen corpses.

“Come on! At least try. You have to shoot it in the head before it sees you. We keep losing points.”

“Bite me! I’m doing my best. Stop bugging me. I can’t concentrate.”

“Now! Now! Shoot! Damn it, shoot!”

“Oh yeah! His ass is grass.”

“Nice! That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

Elisa felt the headache pounding in her temples and the back of her head. She was sitting in front of her laptop, staring at a red dot that hadn’t moved in hours. That was probably good. It meant that Lumikki had gotten inside the party. If she were stuck in the trunk of the car, she would have called or sent a text by now. Elisa wasn’t willing to think about any of the other alternatives, like the driver or someone else
finding Lumikki and making the trunk of the car her temporary coffin.

Fingertips gravitated toward her mouth, and Elisa tore at her cuticles with her teeth. Her pink-and-black patterned gel nails had long since been ruined. What did it matter? She couldn’t care less about stuff like fingernails and hair right now.

“I think this room could use some new paint. How about red? Oh, you think you can fight back, huh? Go ahead, make my day!”

That was it. Elisa had had enough. Marching over to the outlet, she pulled the PlayStation’s cord out of the wall. Tuukka and Kasper’s roars of protest fell on deaf ears.

Go home and play if that’s all you’re capable of. Children.

“What the hell, Elisa, we were totally going to break the record,” Kasper complained. “We were totally owning them.”

“Can you two even imagine maybe concentrating on what’s going on right now?” Elisa asked, pointing at her laptop.

“Come on, baby, chill. That picture hasn’t changed for two hours. And it isn’t going to change if everything goes like it should. We can’t do anything to help Lumikki right now. Or do you think that if all three of us stare at the screen hard enough we can send her positive energy waves or some crap like that?”

Tuukka had walked up behind Elisa as he talked and now placed his hands on her shoulders. Elisa angrily shook them off. She couldn’t stand Tuukka touching her now. Everything
about him revolted her. She couldn’t believe she had been in love with him once, that just a few days before she had thought they might end up together again once they’d both had time to prove their attractiveness with enough other people. That they were going to be the love story of the century.

If it weren’t for Tuukka, Elisa wouldn’t have to be staring at this scary red dot that represented Lumikki. She wouldn’t have to be afraid for Lumikki or for her father. Tuukka had wanted to keep the money. Tuukka had come up with the brilliant idea of washing it at school. Fine, Elisa knew she was being unreasonable and that she couldn’t really blame everything on this one boy being an ass, but directing her disgust at Tuukka helped her keep from thinking too hard about her father.

Her father. Daddy, as Elisa still thought of him. She’d always been a daddy’s girl, especially since her mom had being traveling for work as long as she could remember. This was the daddy she invented silly games with. The daddy she dragged mattresses and blankets and pillows into the living room with to build giant forts. Sometimes they even slept in them. This was the daddy who made her pancakes shaped like teddy bears and sang bubblegum pop songs with her at the top of his lungs. The daddy who never got tired of her chatter or frustrated with her quirks. The daddy she cried to the first time a boy broke her heart. And barely a year had passed since their last
Star Wars
movie marathon, which always ended in an intergalactic popcorn war. Mom always just rolled her eyes.