The police Alsatian sniffs around the corners of the container.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
I don’t want to look away.
Thord and one other uniform prise open the box. I zoom in to try to see what’s inside but all I can see is Thord’s face. His expression.
Disgust.
My phone buzzes again. I want to ignore it but I can’t help glancing down. A message from Sebastian Cheekbones: Have I seen Benny Björnmossen today?
I look back to the container.
‘They inside that box?’ asks Sally.
Thord pulls out a black rubber mask with some kind of gag attached to it, some kind of glossy ball. He raises his latex gloved hand to his eyes then drops the mask back into the box.
A car drives around past Sally’s place, past Karl-Otto’s warehouse. It comes up behind us and parks next to the police cars.
It’s Axel.
‘This just got interesting,’ says Sally. ‘Genetic cousins are they?’
Axel climbs out of his car. I can’t hear him but through the binoculars I can read his lips. ‘Nothing illegal’ and ‘I’ll call my lawyer’ and ‘this is private property – a bespoke conversion.’ I tell Sally what he said.
‘Bespoke,’ says Sally beside me. ‘That what they’re calling it these days? Who in their right mind needs a sex container? I mean, what in all the holy hells. You want a water? I’m drier than a scorpion’s elbow crack.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, distracted, my eyes still focused on the container. And the ones still to be unlocked. Sally retreats back to her shack, sashaying in that way she has, almost gliding, and I wonder if the police should have surrounded all three properties before they started? Not enough manpower. Too much land. But surely this gives her, or Karl-Otto, or both of them, the opportunity to hide things. Warn people.
Alexandra calms Axel and they stand together with a cop in a suit. No more yelling. The cousins are standing so close to each other. Same height. Same posture. They look like they were cast from the same mould.
Afternoon turns into evening and the night air cools on my skin. Bugs appear from nowhere, flying insects that arrive with the darkness. I text Lisa’s brother with an update and he tells me there’s been a sighting in Visberg, the next town over, the sinister place up the hill. And another near a cabin on the Norwegian border. They’re going to check them out.
My arms ache from looking through binoculars for hours, I need one of the tripods Karl-Otto keeps his studio cameras mounted on. From my right I see young Viktor drive noisily onto the site in his EPA tractor. He gestures something to his mum and then he drives away again.
This wreck of a truck leans to one side and the smell of fresh mint returns. Sally hands me a glass bottle of water, cold to the touch.
‘Opener?’ I ask.
‘Teeth,’ she says.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Not your teeth.’
She hands me something and it feels too big to be an opener and it feels too light.
‘What the hell?’ I throw it back at her.
She holds the snake head up, its jaws permanently ajar now, the back of its head attached to a standard bottle opener. ‘You could have broke it,’ she says. The curved fangs of this creature look more like bone that tooth. ‘It’s dead,’ she says, taking back the bottle she just gave me and using the snake head to pop off the top.
I drink the water.
‘I’ll stay a little longer,’ says Sally, pulling a pack of Park Lane cigarettes from her pocket and checking the contents. Four cigarettes and what looks like a rusty key. ‘Then I need to fix supper for my friend. His shift will be done soon.’
She means her paramedic Viking lover.
We watch the containers. About half have been either voluntarily unlocked or else broken into by the police. The Alsatian is drinking water from a bowl and the Chief is talking on his phone a little way apart from everyone else.
‘Don’t you move,’ says Sally, a sternness in her voice.
‘What?’
‘Do not move one muscle.’
Has she got a gun? Is this a trap?
‘Close your eyes,’ she says.
‘What…’
‘Flying tick on your ear,’ she says.
‘Let me.’
‘Get it off.’
‘Wait.’
She brings her snakeskin-covered fingernails to my face and squeezes them together and pinches something from the skin of my ear and then she uses the glass base of her water bottle to crush the tick and grind its corpse into the truck roof.
‘Gone,’ she says. ‘Hadn’t hardly started to dig. Got him good and early.’
I touch my ear. A small raised bump.
‘We all hate them, friend. And what with them two woodcutter boys in Utgard woods we’re seeing more than our fair share this summer. Air’s filled with them. Flying ticks. They land on you thinking you’re a tasty mamma roe deer and then they burrow head first, greedy little tykes. They burrow and as soon as their head’s under your skin they discard their wings. No need for them anymore is there? They got their last meal right there. Protein.’
The police dog starts to bark and I raise my binoculars to my eyes once again.
A container painted scarlet red. A cop with her ear pressed to the container wall.
I see police run into the metal unit.
The dog barks louder, I can hear police calling for something. Backup maybe? An ambulance? I want to run down but then I won’t see anything. I stand up on the roof of the wrecked truck and Sally says, ‘Careful, friend.’
My bottle of water rolls down the roof and smashes against a rock on the ground.
I look down, then over to Sally. She points out to the forest edge behind Karl-Otto’s warehouse. Fog is pumping out through the pine trunks and filling Snake River Salvage with thin wisps of floating mist. Like dry ice in a nightclub. Like the wrecks are all floating in mid-air.
‘The elves are dancing tonight,’ she says.
Swedish expression. Mum used to say the exact same thing.
I scope the units and someone’s using an angle-grinder to open a lock or a door that I cannot see. Sparks fly and the Chief jogs over to the red container with the window.
I have never seen Chief Björn jog.
I scurry down off the roof of the truck, into the flatbed, and down to the ground. I run towards the container. Men are yelling. I can’t make out the words but there is urgency. Alarm.
‘Nope,’ says an out-of-town uniform holding his arms out. ‘No entry at present.’
‘It’s my best friend,’ I say, trying to dodge his reach.
He catches me and holds me at arm’s length and he says, ‘I will arrest you unless you step back. You cannot be here.’
‘Let me through.’
He reaches for the cuffs on his belt and I back off.
‘Okay, okay.’
I walk back. Two or three wrecked cars deep.
Sirens.
What does that mean? Is that good or bad? Tammy?
I move around a wrecked raggare car, something with more rust than chrome, an elk window sticker peeling away from its windscreen, and then an ambulance drives into Snake River Salvage and its blue lights flash off the car wrecks. It reminds me of that ice-cream van with the broken devil music. It speeds under and through the mists spreading out from Utgard, and it pulls up close to the red container with the window.
I look back and Sally The Breeder is nowhere to be seen. Lost to the mists.
More yelling.
The police dog barks and growls and then the voices quieten.
Flashing ambulance lights. Mist. The toot of a distant owl.
Oh, god. No. Please, no.
I look up to the sky. A plea to Dad.
Another owl toot.
Thord walks out from the red container.
He’s got Tammy. She’s clinging to him like a child clinging to a parent. Her hair is matted and her eyes are haunted.
There’s blood all over her shirt.