Lucifer's Tears by James Thompson

Author:James Thompson [Thompson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
ISBN: 039915700X
Amazon: B005K5EZ7Y
Barnesnoble: B005K5EZ7Y
Goodreads: 8854839
Publisher: Windsor
Published: 2011-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

25

I PARK ON VAASANKATU, in front of a shut-down Thai massage parlor. It’s snowing hard now. My knee throbs along with my head, and I limp toward Hilpeä Hauki. I hear a dull creak over my head and look up. Heavy snow on a slanted rooftop breaks free and avalanches toward me. I press up against a building. The avalanche passes in front of my face, lands with a thud and forms a three-foot-high snow dump at my feet. I wade through it and go on to Hilpeä Hauki.

Milo got here before me. He’s sitting on a couch in a rear corner nook, away from other customers, a cup of coffee in front of him. The bar is almost empty. “I’d rather have beer,” he says, “but I’ve been up for more than thirty hours. It’s hard to stay awake.”

I get coffee, too, and sit in an armchair at a right angle to him. “Why haven’t you slept?” I ask.

“I’ll get to it.”

“So what’s this secret information you can’t tell me at work?”

His eyes are red slits. The black circles around them have that excited dull shine. “I said I’ll get to it.”

He’s going to start with the story of creation and work his way forward through the history of the world before he gets to the point. He’s having fun and he’s exhausted. I give him latitude, sink back in my chair and wait.

“What do you want to do with the Silver Dollar case?” he asks.

“I want to send the bouncers to jail for involuntary manslaughter, but it won’t happen. Securitas isn’t guilty of anything. We should turn them loose.”

“They could have tried to stop it, to make the bouncers put Taisto Polvinen down.”

“Not stopping isn’t the same as doing.”

He shifts in his seat. His movements are jerky from exhaustion. “That rent-a-cop girl is a fucking cunt,” he says.

“For a man of your intelligence,” I say, “you have a limited vocabulary.”

Then I get it. His tough talk is a facade. “I think of her as ‘gum-chewing bitch cow,’” I say. “She speaks with this annoying Helsinki teenager accent. When I interrogated her, she repeated the questions back at me and made fun of my northern accent. I don’t care for being mocked. I asked her where she’s from and she said Helsinki, which was a sham. I called her a liar and told her I could tell she’s from the Kotka area. She called me a cocksucker.”

“It’s funny how so many people in Helsinki are from somewhere else,” Milo says, “but pretend they’re from here.”

“They want everyone to think they’re big-city sophisticates, instead of small-town rednecks. It’s the Finnish innate sense of shame. I think some of us feel guilty just for having been born.”

“Yeah, we can be like that,” he says. “We can hold the bouncers until Friday without charging them. Let’s leave them in the tank for a couple more days just to fuck with them. Maybe the prosecutor can make a case out of it later.”

“Agreed.”

Milo finishes his coffee, goes to the bar and comes back with a refill, takes on a furtive smile.

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