Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [250]
Salander watched in astonishment as he disappeared from view.
She shuffled to the doorway and gazed into the darkness, but she couldn’t see him. After a while Zalachenko stopped screaming, but he lay moaning in shock. She opened the pistol, checked that she had one round left, and considered shooting him in the head. Then she remembered that Niedermann was still there, out in the dark, and she had better save it. She would need more than one .22 bullet for him. But it was better than nothing.
• • •
It took her five minutes to put the crossbar in place. She staggered across the yard and into the house and found the telephone on a sideboard in the kitchen. She dialled a number she hadn’t used in two years. The answering machine clicked in.
Hi. This is Mikael Blomkvist. I can’t answer right now, but please leave your name and number and I’ll call you as soon as I can.
Beep.
“Mir-g-kral,” she said, and heard that her voice sounded like mush. She swallowed. “Mikael. It’s Salander.”
Then she did not know what to say.
She hung up the receiver.
Niedermann’s Sig Sauer lay disassembled for cleaning on the kitchen table in front of her, and next to it Sonny Nieminen’s P-83 Wanad. She dropped Zalachenko’s Browning on the floor and lurched over to pick up the Wanad and check the magazine. She also found her Palm PDA and dropped it in her pocket. Then she hobbled to the sink and filled an unwashed cup with cold water. She drank four cups. When she looked up she saw her face in an old shaving mirror on the wall. She almost fired a shot out of sheer fright. What she saw reminded her more of an animal than a human being. She was a madwoman with a distorted face and a gaping mouth. She was plastered with dirt. Her face and neck were a coagulated gruel of blood and soil. Now she had an idea what Niedermann had encountered in the woodshed.
She went closer to the mirror and was suddenly aware that her left leg was dragging behind her. She had a sharp pain in her hip where Zalachenko’s first bullet had hit her. His second bullet had struck her shoulder and paralyzed her left arm. It hurt.
But the pain in her head was so sharp it made her stagger. Slowly she raised her right hand and fumbled across the back of her head. With her fingers she could feel the crater of the entry wound.
As she fingered the hole in her skull she realized with sudden horror that she was touching her own brain, that she was so seriously wounded she was dying or maybe should already be dead. She couldn’t comprehend how she could still be on her feet.
She was suddenly overcome by a numbing weariness. She wasn’t sure if she was about to faint or fall asleep, but she made her way to the kitchen bench, where she stretched out and laid the unwounded right side of her head on a cushion.
She had to regain her strength, but she knew that she couldn’t risk sleeping while Niedermann was still at large. Sooner or later he would come back. Sooner or later Zalachenko would manage to get out of the woodshed and drag himself to the house. But she no longer had the energy to stay upright. She was freezing. She clicked off the safety on the pistol.
Niedermann stood, undecided, on the road from Sollebrunn to Nossebro. He was alone. It was dark. He had begun to think rationally again and was ashamed that he had run away. He didn’t understand how it could have happened, but he came to the logical conclusion that she must have survived. Somehow she must have managed to dig herself out.
Zalachenko needed him. He ought to go back to the house and wring her neck.
At the same time he had a powerful feeling that everything was over. He had had that feeling for a long time. Things had started to go wrong and kept going wrong from the moment Bjurman had contacted them. Zalachenko had changed beyond recognition when he heard the name Lisbeth Salander. All the rules about caution and moderation he had preached for so many years had been blown away.