The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [104]
If he came back, could she pretend she was still unconscious? She reached for the plastic bag, but couldn’t bring herself to pull it over her head again.
Then the lights went out, and darkness descended once more. She crouched, still waiting. But no one came.
Loosening all the screws took a while, and she had to pause twice to fight back nausea. But finally the mesh came free, and she slid it to one side.
“Mikas?”
Silence reigned up there. She wormed her way past the head rest of the driver’s seat and tumbled forward into the cabin. She could feel the boy move beside her, in trembling jerks, but she couldn’t see him properly. Quickly, she opened the driver’s door, and light from the overhead bulb flooded the cabin and revealed Mikas’s face, frightened and blinking. Did he even recognize her? She wasn’t sure. He had been strapped into a child’s car seat, the way one would normally secure a three-year-old child for a trip to visit a grandmother, or an outing in a park. Nothing else was necessary. Mikas’s soft short fingers picked at the buckle, which he couldn’t undo, and his lips moved in a murmur of weeping.
She undid the buckle for him, with a soft click.
Then she heard the shot.
ANNE AND SOME other woman were lying on the stone floor in the living room with their arms raised like the victims of a bank robbery. One of Jan’s own toolboxes had been upended on the coffee table so that pliers, bits of wire, screwdrivers and duct tape were scattered over the glass surface. It was only then he realized, in his daze, that Anne’s hands and feet had been taped to the floor so that she couldn’t move from her odd position. Her face was completely expressionless. She didn’t look frightened or angry, just … he wasn’t quite sure what to call it. “Determined” seemed too weak a word. Her eyes were the color of shadows on snow.
The other woman lay in much the same way, except that one arm was in a cast. That, too, had been forced to one side and stuck down with tape at a different angle. She looked a bit like Aleksander, he thought. And then a pounding shock went through his diaphragm as he realized who she must be. He had no idea how or why, but it had to be his son’s biological mother who was lying there.
He felt a trickle of blood from one nostril on his upper lip and wiped it away reflexively. He had to get a grip. He had to get control of this situation, not just let himself be dominated. He turned to the Lithuanian.
“This isn’t necessary,” he said, slowly and carefully in English, wanting to make sure the man understood. “What is it you want?”
“What you owe me,” said the man.
“Okay. But what about your end of the deal?”
The man stood still for a moment. Then he jerked his gun hand in the direction of the door. “That way,” he said.
The other woman, Aleksander’s Lithuanian mother, started to shout something incomprehensible. The man snarled at her, and she fell abruptly silent.
For a moment, Jan hesitated. But getting the man out of the room Anne was in had to be a good idea. If only he would also let go of Aleksander. He could see Aleksander was scared to the point of panic. His eyes looked huge in his pale, thin face, and there were tear tracks on his cheeks. Jan attempted a smile, but knew it came out wooden.
“It’s okay, Sander,” he said. “The man will leave in a minute.”
“Shut up,” said the Lithuanian. “Speak English. I don’t want you to say things I don’t understand.”
“I just told the boy not to be frightened.”
“Don’t do it again.”
“Okay. Okay.” Don’t anger him. Or … don’t anger him more. The man’s suppressed fury was vivid in every move he made.
They went into the hallway and down the stairs to the back door, which the man made Aleksander open. With his gun hand, he flipped the switch and turned on the light in the garage. There was an unfamiliar car in there, some kind of van. And inside, on the front seat, a child.
It was him—the boy from the photograph. Jan recognized him immediately. But what was he doing here? It wasn’t the child Jan had paid for. Just one of his kidneys.