“Keep your voice down, Sean, she’s asleep. What do you want?”
“What do I want now, or what do Ireallywant?”
“Sean…”
“What I really want is to get so stoned I just disappear. Ireallywant to be the opposite of what you are. And what Ireallywant is for you to throw out that bitch in there from what was oncemyhome. But what I wantnow…” He took a deep, gurgling drag on the cigarette, held the smoke for three long seconds before releasing it. “…is to sell you this revolver for a hundred dollars cash. In my hand.”
Olav Hanson had never seen any reason to regret being born, there really wasn’t much he could do about it anyway. What did cross his mind now and then was that he could have prevented the guy sitting in that armchair from ever having been born.
—
My breath turned to frosty smoke as I watched the YouTube clip on my phone. It was under the item about the murder of Cody Karlstad. The female KSTP reporter was entering a bar that—unless I’d misread the map I studied—was directly across the skyway from the restroom I’d used. She was explaining to the anchor that the police wouldn’t let them any closer to the ongoing action involving the suspect Tomás Gomez, but that she had just seen someone with an MPD ID card go into this bar. She then turned to a man wearing a striking, almost yellow-ocher coat and asked him what was going on as she lifted his ID card and read “…Detective Bob Oz.” Oz was clearly drunk and didn’t realize hewas being interviewed. He talked about how he’d been dumped and suspended from duty, how he spent his time screwing around and drinking, and ended by saying: “How about you, baby?”
I switched off the phone. Watched the fish swimming around the bowl on the bench in front of me. Then I turned my attention to you. You were naked and sitting in a metal chair. You had straps across your chest, around your throat and forehead. Your arms were secured to the armrests and your feet to the legs of the chair. You’d been sitting there for three weeks now and there was a white layer of frost on your skin and your hair. Behind the chest strap I could just make out the tattoo of an Uzi with a heart around it. That was the weapon you used at McDeath’s. Other bullets had killed Monica and Sam, but it was the bullets from your Uzi that took away Anna in the sixth year of her life. When I lured you in here you still didn’t recognize me, it had been so many years ago. And that evening at McDeath’s was probably less memorable for you than it was for me. I showed you around in here, showed you what you’d come here for, offered you coffee, and not until the dope in the coffee wore off and you woke to find yourself in that chair did I reveal to you who I was. And the plans I had for you. They say psychopaths have a higher threshold of pain and fear than other people. That may well be true, because it wasn’t until I pulled on the rubber gloves and the earmuffs and took out the ice spray and the knife that I saw fear enter your eyes. That’s when you wanted to talk about it, explain to me how it was all an accident. That you really wanted to turn yourself in to the police. But that the detective in charge of the case, a tall blond guy they called Milkman, was in Die Man’s pocket, and that he made the whole thing look like the work of another gang. These were just the transparent lies of a desperate man, and I pushed the needle into your ear, most likely puncturing the eardrum, and told you I would do the other ear next if you kept on lying. Youswore it wasn’t lies, that Die Man and Milkman threatened to kill you if you talked to the police. I punctured your other ear too, but you kept repeating it, over and over, as though the confession was your life preserver. I believed you. A tall, blond guy. That would have to be Detective Olav Hanson, the one who consoled me after he’d taken my statement, who promised he’d get the people who had murdered my family. I asked where Die Man was, and when you told me I asked if you were joking, I knew what kind of place that was, but you said it was true, he loved that kind of stuff, was hooked on it the same way his customers were hooked on crack. I was thinking about that as I started to cut into your underarms. You clenched your teeth and didn’t make a sound. It was only after I cut into your throat that you couldn’t hold out any longer. But once you started screaming you only stopped for those brief stretches of time when you were unconscious. In the last minutes of your life all you did was sob. The quiet sobbing of someone who knows it’s too late, that he’s already dead.
You were sitting here in a chair because you owned an Uzi, an automatic killing machine you had purchased quite legally in a state farther west, a weapon no one had ever used to defend his family against an intruder, or his girlfriend against a rape attack, or to put a fresh joint of deer on the dining table. Sure, like the gun lobbyists said, it wasn’t the weapons that killed but the people holding them. They think it’s enough if you just make sure the bad guys can’t get ahold of them. If the assumption was valid then it had to mean that almost all the bad guys in the world lived in the United States, which alone accounts for ninety percent of all young victims of gun crime among the twenty-two wealthiest countries in the world. What was freedom? To be allowed to own a weapon designed to kill people because the guy standing next to you owned one as well? Or was it not having to own a gun because you could feel reasonably certain the guy next to youdidn’t own one either? I could see how fear triumphed over common sense, how—given your socioeconomic position, your education and your bad genes—you were only the first mechanical element in the creation of a gun that had already been fired by the time it came into your hands. And how when you—subject as you are to the laws of psychology and economy, just as the parts of a weapon are subject to physical laws—pulled that trigger, then that was just one link in an unstoppable chain of reactions. But it starts with you. The center, the point at which the stone first hits the water. Now the ripples spread across the still, dark water. The one who sells guns. The weapons activist. The forces behind the killer. The authorities. The executive. The ripples get bigger. And bigger.
I emptied the water from the glass. The little fish flipped and splashed about on the bench and puffed itself up. A protective mechanism. Not to frighten by size but to make itself more difficult to swallow.
When I was done I left, turned the key in the padlock, headed out through the large communal studio, out the door and into the forest that surrounded the low, single-story house. We’d gotten it cheap, and we used to hang out here and study each other’s work. Children had loved it, the woods and all the strange exhibits in here. In the evenings we had partied, the whole gang of us. Talked about the future, how we were going to make it big, how we were going to take over the world. Monica and I had spent the night out here once. I think that must have been the night the boy was conceived. But Monica said she’d never been so afraid, because I told her this was wolf country. And now, I had read, they were here. The wolves were here, the artists had gone, the only one left was me.
A narrow path led down to the main road where the car was parked. It was a walk of about a mile, but I didn’t want anyone tosee or hear me coming and going. So tonight Monica and I were going to sleep out here, like we did back then.
I crept inside my sleeping bag on a mattress of pine branches beneath a tree and looked up into the starry sky. Looked for her. Looked for what was written in shimmering letters and symbols, things that couldn’t be seen above the city.
32
The Password, October 2016
Bob’s eyelids flickered. It was the light that woke him. It came from a combined alarm clock and lamp he’d given Alice as a birthday present. The soft light came on at the hour the alarm was set for and then gradually grew brighter, like a sunrise. That was the idea. He’d taken it with him after Stan appeared, when Alice told Bob he could take absolutely anything he wanted. Bob probably hoped she would be hurt by the fact that he’d taken her birthday present but instead she seemed relieved, she’d never been someone who needed a gentle wake-up.
The radio turned itself on. Bob dozed as he listened to the host say that the opinion polls were still predicting that within a few weeks’ time Hillary Clinton would be elected the country’s first female president. Then came an interview with an election expert who warned against the Bradley effect, this being when pollsters call people on the phone who don’t dare admit they won’t bevoting for the politically correct option, as happened a while back in the case of the black gubernatorial candidate Bradley, or now, with a female presidential candidate. By the end of the show they still hadn’t mentioned the hunt for Tomás Gomez, concluding instead with a report that the NRA conference had sold out the U.S. Bank Stadium more quickly than any Vikings home game.
Bob got up. He was cold and had a throbbing headache from yesterday’s drinking but felt revived after a warm shower. He opened the cabinet above the sink, looked at the pink pill tray, took out the tube of toothpaste and closed the cabinet door. He made coffee while still brushing his teeth, switched on his laptop and registered that his internet was down. After thinking about it he called Mike Lunde. The taxidermist sounded busy.
“My internet’s okay, yes, but this Labrador has to be finished today, so I’ve closed the store to be alone here and to give it my full concentration. I’m not letting any Tomás Gomez in here today either. How about tomorrow?”
Bob hung up. Though he much preferred the coffee at Moresite, they didn’t have Wi-Fi like Starbucks.
After a bus ride to Southdale he bought batteries at the mall and picked up the Volvo, complete with parking ticket, and drove into Dinkytown.
“This isn’t a laptop place,” said Liza when he sat down on one of the stools and put the computer on the counter at Bernie’s.
“Sorry, but I couldn’t find anywhere else that offered a combination of decent coffee and Wi-Fi,” said Bob.
“You’ve never even tasted our coffee as far as I know,” said Liza. “And what makes you think we have Wi-Fi?”
“This is right in the middle of student territory—are you trying to tell me you don’t have Wi-Fi?”
“Not for customers, no.”
“I can see I’m alone here, so this stays between us. How much do you want for the staff password?”
“So you think we can be bought?”
“Not with money, perhaps, but I think you’re open to a bribe at the right price.”
“And what would that be?”
