The Postcard Killers

    In a fast move, the brother leapt up and stabbed the knife toward Jacob’s chest. Instinctively, Jacob shifted a few inches to the right. The blade cut through the outside and lining of his suede jacket, biting into skin and sinew and muscle. Then it tore veins and arteries and lung tissue. Jacob heard someone scream, a woman screaming.

    He felt warm blood pulsing out of his body and saw the world spin and turn sideways, as if he could fall right off it. A shot rang out, the echo ringing through his head.

    The killer in front of him sank to the ground with his hands over his stomach.

    Then someone was holding him, laying him on the ground, tearing his shirt away.

    It was Dessie, his Dessie. No, it was Kimmy, his Kimmy. Of course it was!

    “Kimmy,” Jacob whispered. “I knew you’d come back.”

Epilogue

Chapter 139

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, USA

    THE WIND CARRIED WITH it the smell of the sea and also exhaust fumes from Leif Ericson Drive. It made the leaves above his head rustle, the electrical wires sing.

    Jacob was sitting on the porch outside his small house, watching the boys from the neighborhood play baseball on the patch of grass on the other side of the street.

    The heat and extreme humidity had finally broken, leaving a hint of autumn behind it.

    The sun was no longer high in the sky, and the leafy trees threw deep shadows along the street.

    His lung had healed. The pain in his arm was almost gone. The wound had started to itch instead. Sometimes he thought that was worse. He looked down toward Shore Road.

Still no taxi.

    He pulled at the shoulder sling in irritation.

    Next week he could take it off.

    They said he must have had a guardian angel.

    The little town on the Arctic Circle where his lung had been punctured and his arm almost sliced off had had no hospital, but there had been a local health center with an emergency room and a Hungarian doctor who specialized in microsurgery. The Hungarian had stitched his muscles and blood vessels together while they emptied the center’s supply of blood plasma into his body, and somehow he had survived.

    Malcolm Rudolph hadn’t been so lucky.

    Jacob’s wild shot had hit his liver. The killer bled to death in the helicopter ambulance. Good riddance to him, and his sister, too. Horrifying bastards.

    When Jacob woke up and remembered what had happened, he started to prepare himself to face the Swedish judicial system. He assumed that he would get away with the actual shots. After all, Gabriella had heard the whole sequence of events over Dessie’s phone. It was obvious that he had fired only in self-defense.

    On the other hand, he would have to explain his weapon, the one he’d purchased in Italy.

    The Europeans were very serious about the illegal possession of firearms. When Mats Duvall had visited him in the hospital, Jacob had been expecting to face charges.

    But the police superintendent had merely informed him that a preliminary investigation could not be carried out. All suspicions had been dropped through lack of evidence. That was what happened in cases like this, he had explained curtly.

    The Swedes weren’t quite as rigid as he had thought.

    But his gun was confiscated when he left the country. Jacob watched as the neighbor’s son got a clean hit on the other side of the street. The ball shot off like a missile toward Johnson’s Garage (which, naturally, was no longer Johnson’s, but belonged to a Polish family, whatever their name was). Jacob held his breath until the ball hit the brick wall, just inches from a window.

    Once upon a time he had played baseball on that same patch of grass. He had broken the windows of Johnson’s Garage on a couple of occasions. He still lived in the house where he’d grown up, where his father had grown up, where Kimmy had grown up.

    Maybe he could take off the wretched rag around his neck. What was the worst that could happen? His arm was hardly going to fall off, was it?

    A taxi came slowly along the street and stopped at the sidewalk below the porch.

    Jacob raised his good arm and waved. He even managed to smile.

Chapter 140

    JACOB DIDN’T GET UP as Lyndon Crebbs got out of the backseat with his scruffy navy bag in tow.

    “So, here you sit, you one-armed bandit!” the FBI agent said. Jacob shifted to make room on the step for his old mentor. “How did the operation go?” he asked.

    Lyndon sighed as he sank beside him on the steps.

    “Well, I’ll never use my dick for anything but pissing from now on, but you have to be grateful. Small mercies.”

    They sat there next to each other. Good friends, the best kind. Through thin and thinner.

    The ball-playing boys on the other side of the street started arguing about something, and a halfhearted fight broke out before they drifted off home, one by one.

    “What happened up in Montecito?” Jacob asked.

    “They found the remains of a woman behind the Mansion,” Crebbs said.

    “She wasn’t buried very deep. Hadn’t been there long. Four or five years, according to the coroner.”

    “Any ID?”