Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (17 page)

At the moment, here in Reykjavík, I wasn’t quite that far gone; just wasted enough to think that following a guy I didn’t know down a side road that looked like it’d been firebombed was a good idea. I skirted potholes bigger than apartments I’ve crashed in. Unfinished construction lined both sides of the street, squat duplexes that looked as though they’d been designed by the winner of the Best Gulag-Inspired Architecture Contest. There were no streetlights, no lights in any of the buildings; just graffiti scrawled on an enormous concrete culvert that, judging from tracks in the slush and a pyramid of cigarette butts, had been recently used as a half-pipe by skate kids. At least someone in Reykjavík was having fun.

About three blocks ahead of me, the Range Rover came to a stop, right before the street ended in a tangle of construction equipment. I swung the Opel down the next side street and turned off the ignition. My entire body shook—adrenaline on top of crystal meth: a cardiac-arrest cocktail. Some booze would have calmed me down, and I did a fast recon of the Opel, hoping Brynja might have stored some Brennivín under the seat.

Unless it was in the wheel well, I was out of luck. I considered hanging on to the keys, but decided I’d risk going on foot. If and when the Reykjavík cops got over their excitement at having a real-life murder victim, they’d start looking for the Opel. I wiped the wheel and keys with my scarf and dropped the keys on the seat. Maybe I’d get lucky and one of the skate kids would make off with the car.

I slung my bag over my shoulder and stepped outside. Sleet lanced my face as my hair froze into a brittle helmet. God knows where I’d left my watch cap. The crank made me sweat, so the cold felt nice; a bad sign, but I was too hyped to care. I walked past empty duplexes and piles of black tephra gravel, treacherous going with the icy pavement underfoot, until I reached the block where the Range Rover was parked in front of the last unit.

These houses looked like they’d been built before the money ran out. There were windows, even if most were broken, and the buildings had doors and bright red sheet-metal roofs. Einar’s vehicle was the only car, though two bicycles leaned against the front stoop. The duplex had a good view of a chain-link fence, beyond which stretched a vacant lot where a forest-green excavator gleamed like a Tonka toy that had just been unwrapped.

I stared at the duplex. Its windows glowed faintly with parchment-colored light, and I heard the throb of bass-heavy music. A broken window had been patched with plywood. A shadow moved across another window, and I crouched behind the Range Rover, expecting Einar to materialize with a tire iron. Instead a woman shouted angrily, her voice immediately drowned by music loud enough to make the door shake. After a minute I straightened and peered through the Range Rover’s passenger window.

Inside was a frozen blur. I scratched the ice with my fingernails, then used the spiked wristband to splinter it so I could see the car’s interior. It was empty except for some oversize magazines strewn across the backseat.

Only they weren’t magazines. I saw a flare like Saint Elmo’s fire erupting from a spoon jammed into a man’s tongueless mouth, and beneath this, the corner of another print.

“Fuck me,” I said.

Ilkka’s photos.

I yanked at the car door. It was frozen shut. I banged my fist against it, glancing at the house. The music thumped on and nothing moved inside, so I hammered at the door until the frozen latch gave way. I scrambled into the backseat. I pushed the photos aside so I wouldn’t drip on them, yanked a T-shirt from my bag, then flattened each print on the seat beside me.

They were badly creased, and a corner had been torn from Svellabrjótur, the man beneath the ice. Worse was a long tear in the photo of the girl in the blizzard, like lightning splitting the sky. Photoshop would make it disappear.

But as an investment, a one-of-a-kind original monoprint, the photo was ruined. They all were. I remembered Ilkka’s eerie calm as he peeled the protective tissue from each one; the rapture that filled his face as his masterworks were revealed for the first time to another pair of eyes.

All that malign, beautiful light had been extinguished, and Ilkka with it. If I’d stayed to have dinner with him in Helsinki, I’d probably be dead myself. But I might have learned the secret of those photos.

I stared through the car window at a street glazed black with ice, the rows of shoddy, half-constructed buildings left to collapse beneath the weight of winter and neglect. Whoever wanted these prints had killed three, maybe four, people to get them, then treated the photos like junk mail. They were worthless now to any collector.

But not to me. I grabbed the photos and began to roll them into a tube, when I realized something was wrong.

There weren’t five photos, but six. I shuffled through them again, trying to remember the bizarre litany of names: Door Slammer, Icebreaker, Window Peeper, Spoon Licker, Meat Hook.

And one other. Unlike the rest, it was an interior shot, taken in a darkened room with a wide-angle lens. No windows or lights of any kind. Somehow he’d positioned his camera so that it captured a faint gleam reflected in a fragment of broken glass, a beer bottle, an ashtray where a cigarette still burned.

And eyes. Like the bright pinpoints of rodents trapped in a root cellar—only these weren’t rats but people standing in a loose semicircle, their bodies almost indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness. I could discern the dim outlines of legs and arm, and the curve of a hand cupping a match that illuminated the face above it—a heavyset man with thinning hair and a high forehead, the only figure that might be recognizable to someone who knew him.

Even though I’d never seen him, I knew I was looking at Anton Bredahl. It had to be him: That was why he was so intent on acquiring all six photos. Maybe he thought Ilkka had destroyed it, but here was the proof he hadn’t.

I counted the figures—five. Ilkka would be elsewhere in the room, behind his Speed Graphic. It was a camera you could use for blackout photography: Just replace the ordinary bulb with one that had been coated inside with a special lacquer that would block out all visible rays and only transmit infrared. You’d need a slow shutter speed, like 1/30, and a wide lens.

And your subject would have to be within close range.

I looked closer and saw that there seemed to be a seventh person in the center of the group, head bowed or turned away so that the eyes weren’t visible. When I squinted, I realized what the seventh figure was: an inverted body, suspended from the ceiling by thick chains that I’d mistaken for metal posts. On the floor beneath was a dark object, a bowl or basin.

I swore, rolled the photo into a narrow tube, and stuffed it into the lining of my jacket. I did the same to the others, wrapping them in a spare T-shirt, and stuffed this bulky cylinder into my bag, beneath the Konica. Then I sat and tried to get my shit together.

Snorting crank isn’t like snorting coke. You don’t get that volcanic rush followed by a crash that sends you running for the next line. It’s more a steady pulse of electricity. You’re like one of those corpses hooked up to a battery and galvanized into motion. My heart felt like it was trying to punch through my rib cage. I couldn’t have slept if my life depended on it, though at this point it didn’t seem like my life depended on much.

I looked at the car window and saw a disembodied arm hanging there, fingertips glittering with crystallized blood. I bolted upright. The arm was gone.

I didn’t think I’d done enough crank to get spun, but maybe I should have factored in the general atmosphere of being in a country that looked like the set for a zombie remake of the Shackleton voyage. Nothing was going to make me feel any better, except maybe being able to make someone else feel worse.

I needed a weapon. The glove compartment held only a stash of Icelandic candy bars and documents that identified Einar Broddursson as the Range Rover’s owner. I pocketed the candy bars and retrieved the crank. I guessed Einar had about six inches on me and another sixty pounds. I’d be crazy going up against him, but that was how the berserkers did it, right? I scooped some crystals into my pinkie nail and snorted them. I could smell my own sweat—bleach cut with grain alcohol. Eyes streaming, I grabbed my bag, stumbled out, and walked to the back of the car.

There was still no sign that anyone in the house had noticed me. The sleet had changed back to snow. The rear door’s latch was frozen, so I stepped back and kicked it. The door popped open, and I pulled up the floor liner. There was a large sandbag in the storage area beneath, jumper cables, and a rusted shovel. I grabbed the shovel and headed for the front door of the house.

Inside it was dim and sounded like a battle of the bands where both groups had taken the stage at the same time. The amplified screech of guitars barely held its own against some kind of percolating electronica. I followed the electronica to where candlelight seeped from an open doorway, and stepped inside. Someone screamed, and I saw a figure scramble into the shadows cast by a row of flickering votive candles. There was a narrow bed, a beanbag chair, and a laptop on the floor, opened to a Facebook page.

The music continued to bubble from a tiny speaker beside the laptop. I strode over and stomped on it. The room immediately grew quiet enough that I could hear panting. I grabbed one of the votive candles and traced the sound to a teenage girl cowering against the wall, clutching a blanket. She stared at me, terrified, and babbled incomprehensibly until I ordered her to shut up.

“Where’s Einar?”

She shook her head. I slammed the shovel into the wall so hard the point got stuck in the bare Sheetrock. The girl squealed and gestured toward the hall. I handed her the votive candle, extracted the shovel, and kicked through a litter of shattered plastic back into the corridor. Behind me I heard the front door slam.
Run, rabbit, run,
I thought.

With the electronica silenced, there was only the blare of some kind of grindcore. I hoisted the shovel and walked toward a glow at the end of the corridor. Tiptoeing was hardly necessary: The chain-saw Muzak made the walls shake. I passed a room filled with cardboard boxes, furniture, rolled-up rugs, lamps. Tarps were nailed across unfinished windows; bare wires poked from the walls. The air smelled of mildew and rotten eggs.

But it was still a lot cleaner than any squat I’d ever seen. And it was warm, which made me think that whoever lived here must’ve figured out a way to tap into the geothermal grid.

Abruptly the clanging music fell silent. I stopped, held my breath, and heard a woman’s querulous voice; then a man’s, reedier than I’d expected from a guy Einar’s size. He sounded pissed off. The music roared back on, then off, then on. I headed for the kitchen and halted just outside the door.

Einar and a buxom, well-coiffed blond woman sat at a table with the remains of a take-out pizza, a bottle of vodka, and an iPod, screaming at each other. Plywood had been nailed across the room’s sole window, but someone had tacked a brightly colored piece of fabric onto it, and a matching rug covered the concrete floor. Coats hung from the wall—Einar’s loden-green overcoat; a black anorak; a cotton-candy-pink fake-fur jacket. A laptop and a stack of papers had been shoved into a corner beside a set of iPod speakers.

It was like some weird diorama of twenty-first-century domestic life, illuminated by a conical, battery-powered Ikea lantern:
Homeless Middle-Class Couple Arguing Over the iPod.
I waited till the music rose to a deafening pitch, then walked over and kicked the chair out from under Einar. He hit the floor, bellowing. I grabbed the battery lamp and shone it in the woman’s face.

“Get out of here,” I said.

Her face twisted as she swung at me but missed. I clocked her with the shovel’s handle, and she dropped like a stunned grizzly. The room fell silent as the iPod skidded across the floor. Einar cried out, bending over her, then turned to me, his face white.

“You killed Gilda!”

I nudged her with my boot. “She’s not dead.”

He shouted and lunged at me, and I decked him with the shovel. He fell, groaning. I waited for him to catch his breath, then prodded him with the shovel’s blade.

“Where’d you get those photos?” He stared at me blankly. “Where’s Quinn?”

“Who?”

“Don’t you fuck with me.” I swung the shovel across the table, scattering plastic glasses and plates. “What did you do with Quinn?”

“Nothing! I haven’t seen him.”

“Like you haven’t seen Baldur? Or Ilkka? Who are you?”

“Einar. Einar Broddursson.” He raised a hand imploringly. “I’m sorry, you’re in the wrong house. We have no drugs here, no money—”

“I don’t care about your goddamn house. I’m looking for Quinn O’Boyle. Since you just killed his partner, I figured you might know where he is.”

“Quinn? What are you talking about?” The reedy voice cracked. “I didn’t kill Baldur! Fucking shit—”

He started to bolt. I kicked him and he reeled against the wall. I drew the shovel’s blade to within an inch of his throat.

“I saw you at Baldur’s apartment. I went inside your car; I found the photos. I know where they came from; I know who took them. Don’t lie to me; I was fucking
there.
Now tell me where Quinn is.”

“I don’t know. It’s true! I swear it. I drove by, I saw the accident and recognized Baldur, that’s all. Just like you, if you stopped to watch.” He stared at the door behind me, his eyes widening. “Where’s my daughter? If you hurt her, I’ll—”

“If you want to keep being her daddy, you better answer me. Inside the flea market—I saw you watching me, and then you came after me with a gun.”

“A gun?”

“Or something. You were reaching into your pocket.”

“I was reaching for my fucking mobile.” He looked incredulous. “I saw that Quinn was gone; I thought I would help you find him. You looked lost. Yes, I know, I’m a terrible, stupid person.”

He had to be lying, though it was hard to square this whimpering hedge-fund manager with whoever had crushed Ilkka’s head with a silver punch bowl. This guy was big, but he didn’t look like he’d spent much time at the gym lately. Maybe it was the crank, but I couldn’t get a fix on him. He was unshaven and wore a pinstriped suit jacket and trousers, creased button-down shirt, leather shoes stained white with road salt. It was a look incongruous with his feral amber eyes and the fact that he reeked of cheap vodka. He kept glancing at Gilda’s unconscious form like it was the
Pietà
someone had taken a hammer to.