Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

He looked directly at me. ‘In the first place I’m going to ask you to do something for me in return. In the second place, I know you weren’t a part of what happened when my wife... That you took Sam out of the room before...’ His voice became thick and hoarse and he blinked twice. We could hear the two of them on the floor above us. He cleared his throat.

‘And in the third place, because you remind me of Amy.’

There were tears and tenderness in his eyes and for a moment I thought he was going to stroke my hair.

‘Same fighting spirit,’ he said. ‘Same sense of justice. When my generation is dead and gone and it’s the turn of others to run the world I hope that it’s people like you who run it, Yvonne. Not people like Brad and Ragnar.’

I nodded slowly. I hadn’t done much to stop the rape, but it probably wouldn’t do any harm if he thought better of me than I deserved. ‘I’ll do the best I can, Mr Adams. What is this thing that you want me to do in return?’

Slowly and in some detail, a look of pain and despair on his face, he told me. I realised this had been a very hard decision for him to take, and that he was still torn by doubt over it. And this time it was me who wanted to stroke his hair.

‘OK,’ I said.

He looked almost surprised. ‘Yes?’

‘Yes. I’m in.’

He checked that his wife and little Sam weren’t nearby, then he followed me out to the bike.

‘You don’t think this is a gruesome plan?’ I asked.

‘Of course it’s gruesome,’ said Yvonne as she packed the stripped-down machine gun into the side pannier of the bike. ‘Leaving the gruesome to the gruesome.’

She straddled the bike. ‘I’ve no idea if your plan’s going to work, Will. But if it does then it’s probably the closest you’re going to get to justice without one of those courts of yours.’

‘It’ll be your job to see that those are re-established once everything has totally collapsed and it all has to be built up again from scratch,’ I said.

She rolled her eyes, put on the helmet with the image of Lady Justice executed, and the bike started up with a bestial roar.

I stood watching her until she disappeared from sight around a corner.

I didn’t see a single coyote as I rode down through the valley. I’ve heard that they can smell danger. They’re smart creatures.

The day after I was up at the Adams villa I mounted the light machine gun on the front of my bike so that I could ride and shoot at the same time. Maria watched me wide-eyed and asked if I was going to war.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The slaughterhouse was in an industrial area south of Downtown, on a field surrounded by nodding oil pumps that looked like enormous ants raising and lowering their upper bodies over their front legs. It seemed as though the old pumps — again like ants — just kept on doing what they do regardless of whether the human race was going to hell or not.

The afternoon sun was low in the sky behind me as I turned into the forecourt in front of the slaughterhouse. The timing was carefully chosen. Dumbo had told me they would gather to eat in the main part of the slaughterhouse before heading out to raid after dark. And I needed them all to be together — that was going to be my only chance.

I’d made a reconnaissance trip earlier in the day and established that they didn’t keep watch and that the big sliding door at one end of the hall was always left open, probably because they had no electricity to run the air conditioning. They must have thought that was OK; they probably didn’t feel much threat out here.

I rode into the main hall. It was rectangular and big as two football pitches. Light fell from the windows in the ceiling high above. There were rails and wires with meat hooks up there too, but of course, no meat left hanging from them; anything like that had been consumed long ago. The smooth concrete floor inclined gradually towards the sluices, presumably so the blood would run away before it dried.

The bikes were parked at the far end of the hall and the gang was sitting in the middle at a long table, like in that painting of Jesus and the disciples. Only Jesus wasn’t with them. It had taken me two seconds to count to eleven. Ragnar wasn’t here.

Two of them jumped to their feet and ran towards their bikes. They were new. They didn’t know who I was.

I opened fire, aiming just ahead of them so they could see the bursting showers of plaster and know they would never have time to reach the weapons on their bikes. They threw themselves to the floor.

‘Stay down!’ I yelled.

The walls echoed. They stayed down.

Then I rode slowly forward and stopped between two dangling meat hooks five or six metres from the table, so I was still covering everyone with the machine gun.

‘What do you want?’ asked one of the O’Leary twins — you can never be sure which is which until they’re on their bikes.

‘I want my rifle back,’ I said. ‘And my gang.’

‘Your gang?’ said the other twin.

‘My gang,’ I repeated. ‘When Brad isn’t here I’m the leader of Chaos.’

One guy laughed loudly. Another new one.

‘Where’s Ragnar?’ I asked.

As though in reply came the snarl of an engine starting. A special, hoarse roar. I turned to the parked bikes and saw Ragnar riding towards us on his red Yamaha. He was steering with one hand. In the other he was holding what looked like a shiny new Kalashnikov with a pistol grip. Wonder how he’d come by that. I had my suspicions. He was fifty metres away when I turned the front of the bike towards him and fired off a short burst.

None of the bullets hit him but he braked sharply, only now realising it was a machine gun I had. And that meant superior firepower.

‘Jump her!’ he shouted. ‘She can’t take you all.’

‘But quite a few,’ I said in a voice so low only those at the table heard me.

‘That’s an order!’ shouted Ragnar.

‘The order is that you stay exactly where you are,’ I said. ‘I need you all alive.’

They stared at me. No one moved. Not that they thought I was the new leader. Not yet. But for the time being it was a machine gun giving the orders, not Ragnar. And it looked like he was losing.

But Ragnar knew the rules. He kicked out the stand, dismounted, and held up the Kalashnikov.

‘You and me, no weapons!’ he shouted, releasing the curving magazine and tossing it away so that it bounced and skidded across the floor. ‘Or don’t you dare, Miss Kickboxer?’

Of course I could have turned him down and just shot him there and then.

But I also knew that if the gang was going to accept a girl as leader then I had to show them something more than just that I was capable of pulling a trigger.

I dismounted, took the machine gun and walked over to the table, pulled out the bandolier and dropped it in front of them. Heard that hoarse roaring behind me, turned and saw that Ragnar was back on his bike and already on his way towards me, swinging the hook and chain around his head. I walked towards him, stopped between the meat hooks and waited. I’d seen it so many times. I knew his technique and I could read his body when he was about to throw. And when he did I held the machine gun up in front of me with both hands. The chain hit the top of the barrel, twisted round it once, the hook caught in the middle leaving me one second in which to act. I wedged the barrel down in two of the meat hooks, one on each side of Ragnar’s hook, let go of the gun and took a step backwards. There was a rustling and juddering from the pulleys and wires up by the beam as they tensed, and then a straight line of steel connecting Ragnar’s bike and the beam above. The engine of the Yamaha howled as it came to a sudden stop and the wheels had nothing to grip. Ragnar went flying over the handlebars in a perfect arc that threw him ten metres further down the hall, where he fell to the floor with a thud beneath a row of meat hooks.