Lucifer's Tears Read Free

shot at us, then they separated and ran. I chased the shooter down a street crowded with shoppers and tourists. The thief stopped, turned and fired. My pistol was in my hand, but he surprised me. I was running when the bullet hit me and blew out my left knee, which I had already wrecked playing hockey in high school. I fell hard to the pavement. The thief decided to kill me, but I got a shot off first and the bullet hit him in the side. He went down, but raised his pistol to fire again. I told him to lower his arm. He didn’t. I blew his head off.
    Jyri looks snazzy in a tuxedo, holds an open flask in his hand. He’s mid-fiftyish and handsome, maybe a bit drunk. Judging by the scent, he’s sipping cognac. “Inspector Vaara,” he says. “Please come in.”
    “How kind of you,” I say and enter.
    “How’s your lovely American wife?” he asks. “I understand she’s pregnant.”
    I know Jyri well enough to doubt he gives a damn, and I don’t want his false pleasantries. “Kate is fine. What brings you here?”
    “We have business.” He looks around. “Your office furnishings are nonstandard. I’m not sure they comply with regulations. What did Arto say about it?”
    He means my boss, Arto Tikkanen. The atmosphere of standardissue office junk suffocates me. I decorated with my own stuff, most of it from my office in Kittila, up in Lapland, from when I headed the police department there. A polished oak desk. A Persian rug. A reproduction of the painting December Day, by the nineteenthcentury Finnish artist Albert Edelfelt. A photo I took myself, of an ahma, an Arctic wolverine facing extinction, on the back of a reindeer, trying to get at its throat.
    “I didn’t ask Arto,” I say, “so he didn’t have a chance to say no.”
    Jyri doesn’t give a damn about office furniture. He’s just playing big dog/little dog, establishing his authority. He lets it go. “Go easy on Arto,” he says. “You and he share the same rank. Technically, that’s not supposed to happen. He may find it disconcerting.”
    “Arto is a good guy. I don’t think my position here is a problem for him.” I’m less than certain about that.
    He takes a sip from his flask. “I promised you this job in homicide. How’s it treating you?”
    His tone implies I should thank him. He promised me this job a year ago, so Kate and I moved to Helsinki last March, and I expected to start in homicide right away. He stuck me in personnel and I pushed papers for all that time because, he said, I needed to wait until a position opened up. That was a lie. The Helsinki homicide team- murharyhma -was undermanned, they could have used me. “You fucked me on that deal,” I say. “You made me sit on my ass for eleven months.”
    “I had reasons, some of them for your benefit. That’s an ugly scar on your jaw, by the way. Why didn’t you get it fixed?”
    My sergeant in Kittila accidentally shot me before blowing his own brains out. I was trying to talk him down. When his pistol went off, the bullet passed through my open mouth, took out two back teeth, and went out through my right cheek. Bad luck. The exit wound left a ragged, puckered scar. “Like you,” I say, “I had my reasons.”
    “Probably good for business. I bet it intimidates the hell out of bad guys.”
    I sit down in the chair for visitors beside my desk and say nothing.
    “What you went through was traumatizing,” he says. “I wanted you to have a chance to decompress, and I thought a healthy dose of therapy would be good for you before beginning a new and stressful position.”
    He pulls out a cigarette. I take an ashtray from a desk drawer. We both light up. Smoking is forbidden in the station. Except for the prisoners. They can smoke in their cells.
    “In the future,” I say, “trust me to look after my own emotional well-being.”
    “I had the good of the team to consider, and that’s a little more important to me than hurting your feelings. Helsinki homicide employs