The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [107]
He was lying on his back staring up at the little one’s mother. Her eyes looked completely wild, and a strip of duct tape still dangled from her plaster cast. She could only hold the toolbox with one hand, but she swung it as though it were a handbag.
This time it smashed into his right arm, and he lost all feeling in his fingers and couldn’t even feel the gun anymore. The crazy bitch dropped the toolbox and went for the Glock.
She’ll bloody kill me, he thought. If she gets hold of it, she’ll kill me.
He grabbed a handful of light brown hair with his left hand and pulled her all the way down to the floor. She wasn’t screaming, but she fought like a woman possessed. She kneed him in the chest, and he still couldn’t use his right hand. Then he felt something punch him in the leg, but it wasn’t till the bang registered that he realized that she had shot him. He had no idea how bad it was. He only knew that if he didn’t finish her right now, anything could happen. He rolled over so that his full weight held her pinned to the floor, and with his left hand—unfortunately more clumsy than his right—reached for her head in order to pull it sharply back and to one side, a swift jerk so that the neck would snap.
He didn’t understand why it didn’t work. He only felt another punch, this time on the side of the neck. From the wet heat he understood that he was bleeding. And from the manic racing of his heart, he understood that it was a lot. Strange. It felt almost like the throbbing pump he loved to feel in his body when he was training.
But the throbbing grew fainter. More distant. As though he was moving away from himself. Suddenly he saw the dream family quite clearly. The mother, the father, the two children. They were sitting around the dinner table, laughing. He wanted to call out to them, shout at them, but they couldn’t hear him. He was outside, and he could not get in.
EVEN BEFORE NINA pushed open the door to the hall, she knew the house was enormous. The stairs winding up through the stairwell would not have been out of place at some corporate domicile built to impress, and yet there were enough domestic details to suggest that this was actually a private home—a collection of outdoor boots, neatly lined up on a rack, winter coats and scarves on pegs in the wide space under the stairs, two footballs in a net.
Everything else was white, including the staircase itself, and Nina stood for a moment, trying to adjust to the glare of a multitude of halogen spotlights.
There was a strange silence, as if the house had swallowed everything living and was now busy digesting. She sensed movement, but the sounds that did reach her were muffled and diffuse. Running footsteps, a door being opened and closed, the muted clicking of heels or toes against floorboards. But there had been a shot. Straining to hear, Nina felt adrenalin invading every single tired cell in her body.
Nothing.
Or, no … something. Something closer than the footsteps she had heard. She went up the stairs as quietly as she could, and listened again. A liquid moan reached her through a set of double doors leading off the hallway. She recognized the sound of human pain and felt automatic emergency reflexes kick in, forcing her own pounding headache into the background. Someone was injured. She needed to know whether there was one or more, how critical the injuries were, the priority of treatment.
She checked her watch.
It was 9:37 p.m., later than she would have guessed.
She pushed open the door and entered an enormous living room.
A man and a woman lay on the floor. The woman was immobilized by wide strips of duct tape, but apart from an arm in a cast, which obviously had already been treated and was therefore irrelevant right now,