Bad Blood: A Crime Novel Read Free Page A

eluding the FBI for twenty years. But they hope to find out what name he’s traveling under before the plane lands—I have an open line to a Special Agent Larner in New York. And so we need two parallel plans. One: we get the name in time, in which case there’s a risk of a scuffle. Two: we
don’t
get the name in time, in which case we have to try to pick out from among 163 passengers an elusive serial killer whose only known characteristics are that he is a white male, probably over forty-five years old.”
    Hultin stood and pulled the zipper of his old sport jacket up over the butt of his pistol in its shoulder holster. He leaned forward.
    “This whole thing is really quite simple,” he said tranquilly. “If we fail, Sweden has imported its first real American serial killer. Let’s avoid that.”
    He tromped off toward the waiting helicopter, leaving behind the following words of wisdom:
    “The world is shrinking, ladies and gentlemen. The world is shrinking.”

3
    The immense, irreplaceable calm that always appears comes in expanding waves of bliss. He knows he will never stop.
    Outside, the tremendous emptiness stretches on, with the earth as a tiny, negligible exception. A magnificent speck of fly shit on the great white page of perfection, a protocol error that has likely destroyed the limitless divinity of the divine.
    A thin sheet of Plexiglas separates him from the great, sucking holes of nothingness that his serenity makes him part of. He copulates with it in divine, swaying movements.
    The peaceful rocking of the clouds drives the images away. They are far away now. He can even think about them. And at no point does the peaceful smile leave his lips.
    He can even think about the walk down to the cellar. It isn’t a series of images now—if it had been, he would have to conjureit away, smoke it out by the burning sacrifice—it’s a story, with a logical, coherent structure. And even if he knows it will soon be lost again and will call on its sacrificial smoke, he is able to find pleasure in its sudden, crystal-clear perfection.
    He is on his way.
    He is on his way down the stairs he didn’t know existed, down into the cellar he didn’t know existed. The secret passage in the closet. The unforgettable, sweet-dusted air in the stairway. The silent cement stairs that seem to go on forever. The raw, clammy cold of the handrail.
    The completely self-evident logic of the initiation. When eyes can be raised and steps can follow steps on the stairs down into the pitch black, the logic is indisputable. He has been chosen.
    It has to come full circle. That is what has to be done now. Then he can begin for real.
    The stairs lead on. Every trace of light vanishes. He feels his way ahead, step by step.
    He allows himself to pause while the calm rocks him closer to relieving sleep. He follows the imperfect wing of the plane as it swings imperfectly out into the perfect swing of eternity.
    Another light becomes visible, a completely different light, and it accompanies his last steps down the staircase. Like the frame of an icon around a darkness brighter than any light, the light shoots out from behind the door. A halo showing the way. A golden frame around a future work of art.
    Which will now be completed.
    He cracks open the door to the Millennium.
    Outside the window, the Big Dipper slides into the Little Dipper, making an Even Bigger Dipper.
    “Tonight we can offer you the special SAS Swedish-American drink for a long night’s flight, sir,” he hears a gentle female voice half-singing.
    But by then he is already asleep.

4
    The A-Unit lifted off from the helicopter pad atop police headquarters at 07:23 on Wednesday, September 3. The seven of them were crowded together into a group that didn’t really exist anymore. For a split second, Paul Hjelm thought that they were just imitating a unit whose time had come and gone, but the second passed, and he focused on his task, like everyone else.
    He was crammed