The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [109]
SIGITA COULDN’T GET clear. The man lay across her, pinning her to the floor, and one hand had closed around a handful of her hair. He was heavy. In a brief flash it reminded her bizarrely of sex with Darius, but this would not end in laughter and release. The gun had slipped from her hand, and she had no idea where it was. The massive body on top of her made it harder and harder to breathe. She knew people died in this way in nightclubs and football stands, but could one be crushed to death by the weight of a single person? It felt like it.
Where was the panicked strength that had driven her a moment ago? She had swung that toolbox at his head as if she meant to knock it clear off his neck. He had taken Mikas. And even though she had pleaded and begged, lying on the stone floor of that absurd ballroom of a living room, he had not told her where her child was. Not even when he took the Dane and returned so quickly that she understood Mikas must be nearby. He had just snarled at her that if she wanted the kid to survive, she had better shut up, and she had dared ask no more questions after that.
Now her head filled with the nightmare visions she had tried to keep at bay these last long days. What if Mikas had been hidden away in a box somewhere, or in the trunk of a car, every breath he took? Or worse. She saw his tiny body in the cargo hold of a refrigerated van, cold and blue and gutted like an animal. Who said he was even still alive? How could she trust anything the man had said? They only needed his kidney, they didn’t care about the rest— his dark blue eyes, his bubbly laugh, the eagerness in his face when the words came tumbling out so quick and jumbled even she could not make heads or tails of them.
The man didn’t move. Was he dying? She began to struggle again, even though she barely had breath left in her heaving lungs.
Then, suddenly, someone was helping her, rolling the heavy form to one side, so that she could sit up. She gasped and drew blessed air in long, shivery sobs, watching while the skinny shorthaired woman who had cut her loose knelt beside the big man’s trembling body. She had no shirt on, only a white bra, and it looked as is someone had sprayed her with red paint. No, not paint. Blood. There was blood on the wall, too, a long red arc like graffiti painted with a spray can. The woman was pressing her hands against the man’s neck, but Sigita could see how the blood spurted between her fingers. One side of the man’s neck had been torn open, and she slowly realized that this was something she had done. She had fired the gun blindly and felt it kick twice in her hand, but she had had no idea if she had hit him, or where. It seemed she had. In the leg, and in the neck. If he died now, she would have killed him.
“Mikas?” she asked, with what little breath she had.
“He is okay,” said the dark-haired woman without looking up, and Sigita had no breath to ask what do you mean, okay, where is he, is he hurt, is he scared?
The battered door eased open a fraction, and Anne Marquart poked her head out. It looked almost comical.
“Was anyone else hit?” asked the dark-haired woman sharply.
“No,” said Mrs. Marquart, staring at all the blood, and at the massive body on the floor. “We’re … we’re okay.”
The dark-haired woman bent even further over the man who had taken Mikas, and said something Sigita didn’t hear. He didn’t answer. After a while, a sound did come from him, but it was just a sort of hissing sigh. The blood was no longer spurting quite so forcefully. Sigita got up slowly. She realized that she was smeared with blood, too, covered with it, in fact, in her hair, on her neck, down the front of her shirt. His blood. It made her skin crawl. Somehow, it was worse than if it had been her own. She felt dirtier. She could hear Anne Marquart saying something in Danish, possibly to Aleksander, who was still somewhere on the other side of that shot-to-pieces door and, Sigita hoped, couldn’t see any of this.
“Is there anything we can do?” asked Sigita belatedly.