Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [31]
Events had been rapid and unpredictable. He had ridden over there with Lundin to burn the damned summer cabin down. On the instructions of that goddamned blond monster. And then they had stumbled upon that bitch Salander – all alone, 1.5 metres tall, thin as a stick. Nieminen wondered how much she actually weighed. And then everything had gone to hell; had exploded in a brief orgy of violence neither of them was prepared for.
Objectively, he could describe the chain of events. Salander had a canister of Mace, which she sprayed in Lundin’s face. Lundin should have been ready, but he wasn’t. She kicked him twice, and you don’t need a lot of muscle to fracture a jaw. She took him by surprise. That could be explained.
But then she took him too, Sonny Nieminen, a man who well-trained men would avoid getting into a fight with. She moved so fast. He hadn’t been able to pull his gun. She had taken him out easily, as if brushing off a mosquito. It was humiliating. She had a taser. She had…
He could not remember a thing when he came to. Lundin had been shot in the foot and then the police showed up. After some palaver over jurisdiction between Strängnäs and Södertälje, he fetched up in the cells in Södertälje. Plus she had stolen Magge’s Harley. She had cut the badge out of his leather jacket – the very symbol that made people step aside in the queue at the bar, that gave him a status that was beyond most people’s wildest dreams. She had humiliated him.
Nieminen was boiling over. He had kept his mouth shut through the entire series of police interrogations. He would never be able to tell anyone what had happened in Stallarholmen. Until that moment Salander had meant nothing to him. She was a little side project that Lundin was messing around with … again commissioned by that bloody Niedermann. Now he hated her with a fury that astonished him. Usually he was cool and analytical, but he knew that some time in the future he would have to pay her back and erase the shame. But first he had to get a grip on the chaos that Svavelsjö M.C. had landed in because of Salander and Niedermann.
Nieminen took the two remaining Polish guns, loaded them, and handed one to Waltari.
“Have we got a plan?”
“We’re going to drive over and have a talk with Niedermann. He isn’t one of us, and he doesn’t have a criminal record. I don’t know how he’s going to react if they catch him, but if he talks he could send us all to the slammer. We’d be sent down so fast it’d make your head spin.”
“You mean we should …”
Nieminen had already decided that Niedermann had to be got rid of, but he knew that it would be a bad idea to frighten off Waltari before they were in place.
“I don’t know. We’ll see what he has in mind. If he’s planning to get out of the country as fast as hell then we could help him on his way. But as long as he risks being busted, he’s a threat to us.”
The lights were out at Göransson’s place when Nieminen and Waltari drove up in the twilight. That was not a good sign. They sat in the car and waited.
“Maybe they’re out,” Waltari said.
“Right. They went to the bar with Niedermann,” Nieminen said, opening the car door.
The front door was unlocked. Nieminen switched on an overhead light. They went from room to room. The house was well kept and neat, which was probably because of her, whatever-her-name-was, the woman Göransson lived with.
They found Göransson and his girlfriend in the basement, stuffed into a laundry room.
Nieminen bent down and looked at the bodies. He reached out a finger to touch the woman whose name he could not remember. She was ice-cold and stiff. That meant they had been dead maybe twenty-four hours.
Nieminen did not need the help of a pathologist to work out how they had died. Her neck had been broken when her head was turned 180 degrees. She was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and had no other injuries that Nieminen