This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

The smell triggered sense memories of decomposed bodies she had encountered on the job. Somehow the rot managed to contaminate even the clean-smelling freeze of the blizzard. Brand rocked backward and stood helpless as the animal passed within a few feet of her. Stunned, she watched it go, staring as it became merely an indistinct blond blur disappearing into the wind-blown snow.

But she broke out of her paralysis as the older boy who had fired off her pistol came dashing along after the big dog. He emitted shrill whistles and called out a word in Swedish that Brand did not understand.

“Fenrir! Fenrir!”

The kid paid as little attention to Brand as the monster dog had, just seconds before. But he was running with her Glock in his right hand, so she stepped directly into his path.

“No!” she shouted. Then she thought she’d better try Swedish. “Nej!”

The young boy performed a slapstick slide on the roadway ice. He slammed into her, knocking Brand to the ground. She managed to kick his feet out from under him as she went down. He wound up falling backward against the bank of plow-hardened snow. They sprawled almost side by side. The hallucinatory quality of the moment embellished itself effortlessly. The kid’s leather bomber cap slipped half-way off his head, revealing what looked like pink hair shaved into the style of a punk mohawk.

“Nej!” Brand shouted again.

She watched it happen. First the pink-haired kid took a moment to straighten out his bomber hat. Then with his other hand he raised the Glock and pointed it at her.

Several times in the course of her police career, Brand had faced off weapons on the mean streets of New York City—and in the mean subway tunnels beneath the streets, too. Knives, nunchuks, once a hatchet, once a sword, several times golf clubs and, more often, handguns, both revolvers and automatics. She had also confronted a homemade zip gun, constructed of wood, metal pipe, and rubber bands, with a threepenny nail for a firing pin. The jury-rigged weapon exploded in the face of the attacker, sending him cuffed to a cot in the ER but leaving Brand unscathed.

The clichéd time-slowing-to-a-crawl effect had never happened for her. The lesson from the potentially fatal experiences on the job was always the split-second nature of the threats.

Don’t think. React.

A rock-hard chunk of plowed snow lay near her right hand, so she grabbed that and threw it at the punk. At the same instant he pulled the trigger. The bang sounded huge. The chunk shattered in a huge cloud of ice. The shot seemed to fly harmlessly past Brand to embed itself in the snowbank.

She kicked out again and connected with the hand that held her pistol. It spun out of the punk’s grip and hit the ice of the road. Brand realized that whichever one of them got upright first would likely be the one to survive, so she tried to rise.

The little girl in the black dress scampered forward out of the storm. She flung Brand’s borrowed, half-empty backpack at her. The child’s aim was true. The clumsy pack hit her straight on. Brand’s feet slipped out from under her once again. She collapsed into the snow.

Her mohawked opponent was already on his feet. He grabbed the Glock. Sweeping up the little girl under one arm, he began blasting shots at Brand as he fled back down the road.

Brand could do nothing but curl into a ball and count the rounds. They totalled six—which meant, counting the two slugs put into the corpse when the perp first got his hands on her sidearm—there were eleven left in the 9x19 magazine. Unarmed as she was, seething with fury, Brand still had the good sense not to pursue the punk while he had that many rounds left to throw at her.

The hallucination stuttered to an end. The pink-haired, kid-slinging gunsel vanished into the blizzard. His piercing whistles and his calls to Fenrir faded into the screaming wind.

She sat upright. She was not killed. She would live to fight another day. Brand swore to herself that she would track down her sidearm if it took everything she had. An image floated into her mind of a pink mohawk scalp, bloody, defeated, and nailed to a trophy wall.

A couple of things happened at once. She heard the far-off buzz of a snowmobile. Then the chug of another engine sounded close by. Hammar’s Saab loomed out of the blizzard-blown snow, skidding to a stop a few meters from where Brand sat.

Hammar swung open the driver’s side door, leaning halfway out. His blood-spattered face made him appear as a vision out of the Grand Guignol. The minor crack in the Saab’s windshield, dented by an imprint of a child’s head, completed the package.

“Brand.” Hammar’s voice was oddly cool. “I say we get the hell out of here.”

Leaving the scene of a crime while the incident remained in progress was another cardinal sin of law enforcement. Secure the scene, call in the cavalry, attempt to stabilize whatever confrontation was occurring. Fleeing went against every bit of Brand’s police instinct. She thought of heading out in pursuit of the mohawked Johnny Rotten and his demon-imp sidekick. She realized she didn’t have the heart for it.

She ran toward the driver’s side of the Saab.

“I’ll drive!” Hammar barked back at her, his composure finally rattled.

But Brand simply remained standing next to the half open door.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Hammar said, finally moving over and allowing her to climb behind the wheel.

Before she got in, Brand scooped up one of the hardened chunks of snow. She offered it to Hammar. He stared, but finally accepted it and held it up against his still-streaming nose. Everything inside the car was bloodstained. She noticed his leather satchel on the floor at his feet. She engaged the shift and drove off, feeling an immense sense of relief to leave Västvall behind.

“You got it back,” Brand said, indicating the satchel. “And the ignition keys, too? Did you