Jens Lapidus - Never Fuck Up

The ambulance crew showed up after seven minutes.

Let the body lie there for a while. A technician came down, snapped some photos with a digital camera. Analyzed blood. Secured evidence. Investigated the crime scene.

The ambulance guys brought a stretcher down. Covered the body with blankets. Hauled it up.

Disappeared.

When there’s action, it’s fun. When it’s fun, the night flies by. But they’d combed home zilch. Ljunggren sighed. “Why did we even bother making a whole operation out of this thing? It’s just one less drunk who probably would’ve started a fight ’cause the liquor store opened three minutes late some Saturday morning when we’re really not in the mood to deal with bullshit like that.” Thomas thought, Sometimes Ljunggren can really talk.

They interrogated some neighbors at random. Photographed the area around the basement. Sent two guys to the subway station. Wrote down the names and phone numbers of people in the building next door, promised to be back the following day. The technicians checked for fingerprints and swabbed for DNA traces in the basement. A couple of cruisers blocked off the street and stopped a sampling of cars down on Hägerstensvägen. Hardly anyone out and about at this hour anyway.

They were quiet on the way back to the station in Skärholmen. Tired. Even though nothing’d happened, it’d been an intense experience. Would feel good to shower.

Thomas couldn’t stop thinking about the body in the basement. The busted face and the fingertips. Not that he felt sick or thought it was hard to deal or anything—too much nastiness’d crossed his path already; it didn’t affect him. It was something else. The shady aspect of this whole business—the fact that the junkie seemed to have been offed in a way that was just a tad too sophisticated.

But what was strange, really? Someone’d freaked on him for some reason. Maybe a fight over a few milligrams, an unpaid debt, or just a bad trip. It couldn’t have been hard to beat the shit out of the guy. He must’ve been lit like a bonfire. But the missing teeth? Maybe it wasn’t so strange. Addicts’ bodies tended to give up early—too much of life’s good stuff corrodes the fangs. Dentures on forty-year-olds were legion.

Still, the face that’d been beaten beyond recognition, the cut fingertips, the fact that someone’d plucked out the dentures. Getting a positive ID on this guy was going to be a bitch. Someone’d given this some real thought.

It spelled out a job by semipros. Maybe even by total pros.

This wasn’t the work of some fellow addict. No way.

Weird.

Erika Ewaldsson got on Mahmud’s nerves. Annoying, nagging. Wouldn’t, like, give up. But, really, he didn’t give a fuck about her; she was valueless. Nothing would happen if he broke the probation office’s rules just a little bit, anyway. The problem was what they might come up with. What it boiled down to: they thought they could control him, could decide when he went into the city and when he chilled out in the concrete. There was a risk that it looked like he was letting those clowns walk all over him. Make the rules. Control a blatte with thick honor—they could go shit themselves.

Still: the red subway line, on his way into the city from the projects. From Alby to the probation office at Hornstull. From his bros—Babak, Robert, Javier, the others—to Erika: parole officer, pussy-marauder, playboy-saboteur. She wouldn’t cut him any slack. Refused to understand that he was gonna go straight, or at least really meant it when he told her so. She was riding him worse than the counselor back in school when he was thirteen—the Sven loser who’d decided that Mahmud was troublemaker number one.

Bitch.

The train pounded through the tunnels. Mahmud was nearly alone in the car. He tried to study the pattern on the fabric of the seats across from him. What were those shapes supposed to be, anyway? Okay, he recognized the little ball—the Globen arena. And the tower with the three knobs on top—the city’s hall, City Hall, or whatever it was called. But the other stuff. Who drew ugly like that? And who was the train company trying to kid? The subway wasn’t some warm and cuddly place and it never would be.

Still: great feeling—chilling in the train car. Being free. Could get off and on wherever he wanted. Flirt freely with the two chicks sitting a few rows down. Life on the inside was like life on the outside except in fast-forward. Time went so much faster, each part seeming more compact—it felt like his latest stint had never even happened. The only thing that disturbed him: the nightmares he’d been having the last two nights. Spinning Russian roulette. Piss stains eating their way down his leg. Gürhan’s golden grill gleaming. He had to try to forget. Born to Be Hated.

The train pulled up to the station. He got off. Hungry for something. Walked toward the vending machine. When he was ten yards away he saw that it’d been smashed. What amateurs. If they were gonna rob something, why not go big? What good were a couple bucks from a vending machine? Must be junkies. Tragic losers. Why didn’t Erika work on treating them instead? After all, Mahmud didn’t bother anyone unless they bothered him. Priorities were all flipped.

He started walking toward the escalators. The station’s white brick walls reminded him of the Asptuna pen. A month and a half since he’d gated out of there—six months behind bars. And now he had to go to fucking Hornstull once a week and humiliate himself. Sit and lie to the bitch straight to her face—felt like he was back in middle school again. Didn’t work. Some dudes locked themselves into tiny studio apartments that social services lined up for them when they got out. Couldn’t handle cribs that were too big, wanted things to be as similar to the pen as possible. Others moved in with their moms. Couldn’t really handle life on the outside without someone getting their grub and cleaning up after them. But not Mahmud—he was gonna be a soldier. Get a place of his own, travel, move. Slay mad bitches, make fat stacks. STYLE. But then the image of Gürhan’s mug killed all his dreaming like a punch to the face.

He crossed Långholmsgatan. In the background, the traffic thundered. The sky was gray. The street was gray. The buildings were grayest of all.

The parole office shared an entrance with a podiatrist and a pension fund office. He thought, Were only P joints allowed in this pussy place? A janitor was waxing the linoleum floor. Could have been his dad, his abu, Beshar. But his abu wouldn’t have to live that way anymore. Mahmud was gonna provide. Promise.

At the welcome desk, they didn’t even slide back the glass partition for him. He had to lean forward to reach the mike.

“Hey, hi. I’m supposed to see Erika Ewaldsson. Ten minutes ago.”

“Okay, if you’ll have a seat she’ll be with you shortly.”

He sat down in the waiting room. Why did they always make him wait? They acted like the screws in the slammer. Power-hungry humiliation experts: fags.

He eyed the worthless magazines and papers. Dagens Nyheter, Café, and Gracious Home . Grinned to himself: What clowns would show up at the parole office and read Gracious Home ?

Then he heard Erika’s voice.

“Hi, Mahmud. Glad you made it. Almost on time, in fact.”

Mahmud glanced up. Erika looked the way she usually did. Yellow pants and a brownish poncho thing up top. She wasn’t exactly thin—her ass was as wide as Saudi Arabia. She had green eyes and wore a thin gold cross around her neck. Damn, there was that metal taste in his mouth again.