Ларс Кеплер - The Rabbit Hunter

‘You’re right, I’m sorry,’ Rex begins. ‘But... I thought it was over?’

‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

‘You need to live your own life, but I can’t pretend to like him.’

‘Nico’s an artist. He went to art school in Gothenburg.’

‘He’s good-looking, and I can see that he’s exciting, but he put you in danger, and that—’

‘I’m not completely naïve,’ Sammy cuts him off irritably.

Rex holds his hands up towards him apologetically.

‘Can we just try to get through these weeks together, like we said at the beginning?’

The Rabbit Hunter is walking down the narrow pavement on Luntmakar Street, a dark backstreet that runs between the tall buildings in the centre of Stockholm.

Inside his coat the little axe swings on its strap by his waist.

Several pallets laden with shrink-wrapped trays are blocking the pavement in front of one of the restaurants and he’s forced to step out into the road.

The Rabbit Hunter feels beneath his nose, as if he has a nosebleed, and looks at his fingers, but it’s nothing. He thinks of how he used to tie live rabbits to the dead ones, in long chains, and then set them loose. The living and injured would drag the dead bodies with them, darting in different directions and panicking as they tried to get away.

They would draw strange bloody patterns across the dirty cement floor.

He remembers the twitching back legs, the claws clattering as the creatures tried to escape the weight of the dead.Without hurrying, he walks down the street past a half-open garage. The electronic door seems to be broken, and is being held a metre or so off the ground by a sawhorse. He can hear a woman sobbing angrily inside the garage. She sniffs and says something in an agitated voice.

The Rabbit Hunter passes the opening just as the woman stops speaking.

He stops, turns around and listens.

The woman is crying again, and now a man is shouting at her.

The Rabbit Hunter walks back, crouches down and looks in. He sees a steep ramp with dim lights along the concrete walls. The woman is speaking more calmly now, but stops abruptly as if she’s been hit. The Rabbit Hunter ducks under the door and starts to walk down the ramp.

The air inside is stuffy and smells like petrol.

He keeps going until he reaches a small garage. A man in his sixties, wearing a leather jacket and baggy jeans, is shoving a skimpily dressed young woman in between a red van with misted-up windows and a sports car covered in some sort of silvery fabric.

‘Are you having fun?’ the Rabbit Hunter asks in a low voice.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ the man exclaims. ‘You’re not allowed down here!’

The Rabbit Hunter leans against the wall, looks at them and then the van, which is rocking rhythmically, and thinks that he could slice them all open, chop their hands off and watch them run around squirting blood everywhere.

‘Get out of here!’ the man says.

The woman stares at him blankly.

Pieces of an aluminium ventilation system are laid out on a tarp just behind the man, and further away some rolls of artificial grass are stacked against the wall.

The Rabbit Hunter has never had anything against close combat. When he was going house to house helping to clear the combat area in Ramadi, he was always the first man in.

They would break the door down, then throw in some Polish-manufactured shock grenades. The unit commander would stand aside and give orders to the others.

He always went straight for the target with his M4, a pistol or a knife. He was quick, and could kill four or five men single-handed.

‘Get lost,’ the man says, coming closer.

The Rabbit Hunter straightens up, wipes his top lip, and looks at the flickering fluorescent light in the ceiling.

‘This is a private garage,’ the man says threateningly.

‘I heard screams when I was walking past, and—’

‘It’s none of your business,’ the man interrupts, puffing his chest out.

The Rabbit Hunter looks over at the young woman again. She has a sullen look on her face, and one of her cheeks is red from where the man slapped her. She’s wearing a mid-length raincoat and a white wrap-dress, black tights with skulls on them, and platform shoes.

‘Do you want to be here?’ the Rabbit Hunter asks her gently.

‘No,’ she replies quickly, and wipes her nose.

‘Look, you’ve misunderstood the situation,’ the man smiles.

The Rabbit Hunter knows he shouldn’t be here, but he can’t help staying. He doesn’t care about the woman. She’s not going to escape prostitution, whatever happens here. It’s the man who’s the attraction.

‘Let her go,’ he tells him.

‘She doesn’t want to go,’ the man replies, drawing a semiautomatic pistol.

‘Ask her,’ the Rabbit Hunter suggests, feeling shivers of heat radiate from somewhere deep in his gut.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ the man asks. ‘Do you think you’re some kind of hero?’

He points the pistol at the Rabbit Hunter, but is unnerved by his utter lack of fear and takes a few steps back.

‘Nothing’s going to happen to her,’ the man says, a trace of nerves in his voice. ‘She’s just stuck-up and thinks she’s better than the others.’

The Rabbit Hunter follows him, and can’t help smiling.

The man has lowered the gun. It’s pointing at the floor now, its barrel shaking.

He backs into the large ventilation drum, moving aimlessly, trying to get away like a sick rabbit.

‘Leave me the fuck alone.’

The man raises the pistol again, but the Rabbit Hunter gently blocks his hand, turns the gun on him and pushes the barrel into his mouth.

‘Bang,’ he whispers, then pulls the gun out again, releases the magazine onto the ground and empties the bullet from the chamber. It rolls across the floor to the girl’s feet. She’s just standing there, her eyes downcast, as if afraid to look.

The Rabbit Hunter goes back up the ramp, wipes his fingerprints off the pistol and drops it in a bucket of sand and cigarette butts. He ducks under the garage door and walks along the shaded pavement.

At Rehns Street he turns right and walks up to the wooden doorway just as a woman with dyed black hair whose arm is in a cast holds the door open for a man with an attractive face.

The Rabbit Hunter catches the door and thanks them, walks straight into the lift and presses the button for the top floor.

He remembers when he and his mother used to help each other with the traps, spraying the cages with apple cider so the rabbits wouldn’t pick up the scent of humans.

The lift reaches the top floor just as the lights in the stairwell go out. There’s only one door on this floor, a heavy security door.

After Rex dies, he’s going to cut his ears off, thread them onto a leather strap and wear them around his neck inside his shirt.

The thought fills his head with a crackling sound, which turns into a deafening rattle, like when you push a shopping cart full of bottles across the car park.

The Rabbit Hunter closes his eyes and tries to compose himself. He needs to bring the silence outside in, and impose it on the chaos.

He rings the doorbell and hears footsteps approaching from inside the flat. He looks down at the marble floor only to see it rotating beneath his feet.

The door opens and Rex is standing in front of him, his shirt hanging outside his trousers. He lets him in, takes a few steps back and almost falls over a suitcase.

‘Come in,’ he says gruffly.

The Rabbit Hunter goes in and closes the door behind him, hangs his coat up and unties his shoes while Rex goes back upstairs.

He adjusts the axe hanging under his jacket and slowly follows Rex to the brightly lit first floor.