KIM SLEIZNER TOOK a sip of the juice that Laura’s Bakery, a hipster café on Nørrebro in Copenhagen, had dubbed ‘The Health Booster’, which was ironic since it was sweeter than Jolly Cola. He could almost see the damn spare tyre around his waist growing with each sip.
It had been weeks since he’d weighed in. Lately, the scale, and the hallway mirror, had been no-go zones. But there was no escaping the fact that he had put on weight. Lack of exercise was starting to leave its mark; if he didn’t do something soon, he risked the wobble becoming permanent.
But it was going to have to wait. He had other things to see to. Other things that were so much more important he had, for the first time in his life, put himself second. The reason was spelled Dunja. Or Dunja Bitch Cunt Hougaard, to use her full name.
She’d gone to ground, and she’d done it with such brazen defiance he hadn’t slept for days.
If she’d just stayed in her hole, burnt by everything he’d put her through. Then he would have felt calm. Then he could have gone for his usual run past the opera house and all the way out to the Refshale peninsula and back. He would even have been able to resume his strength training, his yoga practice and so on.
But that wasn’t how this was going to go.
She was after his scalp. He’d sensed it, like the first vague symptoms of flu, of an Ebola virus about to break out. And when he found the message from her in her flat, warning him that she would take him down at any cost, he’d realized she was taking things to the next level. A level where his only option was to utterly annihilate her. Harassing her and rattling her cage wasn’t going to be enough any more. The time for that was long past.
This time, it was about squeezing her goddam throat until her tongue turned blue and her eyes bulged like ping-pong balls. It was about severing her limbs and cutting her head off. About smashing her maimed body parts with a sledgehammer and throwing whatever was left to some hungry fucking sow.
But not even after doing that would he be done. He wouldn’t relax until the pig was slaughtered, roasted and on his plate. Only after he had chewed, swallowed and shat her out would he truly be done.
He just had to find her. And that, despite his extensive network of contacts and the investigative routes open to him as the head of the Copenhagen Homicide Unit, had proved considerably harder than he’d initially thought. The little bitch had apparently planned things out rather carefully.
He’d already found her once. Granted, only for a few seconds in CCTV footage from a bank in Malmö. But that was enough to stay on her scent.
That was why he was now installed in the outdoor seating area of a restaurant in central Copenhagen, feet away from her flat on Blågårdsgade 4, trying to blend into this blasted hipster land by sipping his pathetically colourful Health Booster, having swapped his suit and shirt for a pair of jeans, a hoodie and an equally pathetic baseball cap.
He’d even gone so far as to acquire a bicycle. Even though he despised anything to do with bikes and loathed the people who rode them even more. To him, they were scum, barely worth being lined up and shot at dawn.
And he wasn’t even waiting for Dunja, but for that cocky elephant Chinaman living in her flat. He claimed his name was Qiang Who, but there hadn’t been a single person by that name in any of the databases, despite searching both ‘Qiang’ and ‘Who’ separately.
Who the fuck did he think he was? Doctor Who? It was like some fucking joke. Him and his goddam elephant fetish.
There was nothing to suggest he had any connection with Dunja, but at the moment the Chink was his only lead. For that reason, he’d spent the entire day, save for a few brief minutes, watching the door of his building from various cafés.
He pulled out his phone and scrolled through his inbox. He’d had another email from Mikael Rønning in the IT department regarding some security update for his phone.
But he didn’t have time for technological bullshit right now. A few months back, the same department had done work on their email server, which had resulted in it being down for almost two days. The newspapers had written about it and—
Sleizner stopped himself mid-thought when he realized none other than the pudgy Chinaman himself was stepping out onto the street. With elephant prints on both his baseball cap and his T-shirt, there could be no doubt it was him. He was carrying a backpack and some kind of round, black case.
Sleizner downed his juice and walked over to his bike, stifling the urge to jump on and give chase. He would be too conspicuous. Besides, the Chinaman hadn’t even made it to his own bike yet; he was just standing there in the middle of the pedestrian street, bent over the small round case as though he was looking for something. Probably a stuffed elephant he couldn’t leave home without.
But then he suddenly started gliding forward, seemingly hovering a few inches off the ground. What the fuck? He was moving fast, too. Sleizner didn’t understand until the Chinaman whizzed past him with his feet on either side of the black case, which apparently wasn’t a case at all but rather some godforsaken electrical unicycle.
He’d never seen anything like it, and before he could react, the elephant gook was zooming away from him at a speed that was bound to be illegal in the pedestrian zone. Much too late, he threw himself on his bike and started to pedal after him.
But the bike turned out to be significantly less effective than a unicycle on the crowded street, and when he finally made it out onto Nørrebrogade, he’d lost sight of the man, only to catch a glimpse of his ugly mug a few seconds later at the back of bus 3A, thundering past on its way into the city.
Seven intersections later, it had reached Nørreport Station, where it stopped long enough for Sleizner to catch up and pause for a minute. He was panting like a dog trapped in a parked car and desperately needed something to drink. But before long, the bus was indicating to pull out and the Chink had made no move to get off.
When they reached the Central Station, Sleizner was so exhausted and thirsty he would have given anything for some water. Even another Health Booster would have been gratefully received. But before he could get to the bus, he saw the fat prick get off and get back on his unicycle, which immediately shot off up the wheelchair ramp and disappeared into the station.
Sleizner hurried after him through the open doors, dragging his bike, and saw the Chinaman hover through the crowd without so much as a drop of sweat on his balls. Sleizner used his bike as a scooter, ignoring the shouting guard and ringing his bell incessantly to give people a chance to jump out of his way.
Getting down the escalator to the S train was trickier. Where the elephant man could simply pick up his unicycle in one hand and hurry past the queue to the platform, he had no chance of squeezing by with his bike. People refused to step aside, even though he worked the bell and rammed their bloody bags with his front wheel. In the end, he saw no other way than to simply abandon the bike and push through the doors of the southbound S train before it pulled out.
The Chinaman got off at Sydhavn Station and after walking down the stairs to the pavement, he got back on his bloody unicycle and zoomed off. Sleizner had to run to keep up.
What if the gook was just toying with him? What if he’d spotted him on Blågårdsgade and was now just making him run in circles like a picador tiring out the bull before the matador went in for the killing blow?
Sleizner stopped on the central reservation in the middle of Teglholmsgade and looked around. But there was no sign of Dunja. The Chinaman, on the other hand, was gliding on towards the large building straight ahead, and just like that, hope sprung anew.
The building belonged to the TDC Group, whose president, Stig Paulsen, wasn’t just one of Sleizner’s closest friends, but was also one of the most active members of The Club. If it turned out Qiang Who, or whatever his name was, worked for TDC, he could zip around on his little toy as fast as he pleased. He would still never be able to escape him.