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

smoke, flirting with dying again and again. If Brand’s trespass wouldn’t nail her, the random braap and bang of the engine would.

Complaining all the while, the vehicle took her away down the deserted, snow-packed road.

She got lost in the puzzle of lanes again, doubled back, found the highway. The accursed owner of the stolen Ford had parked it with only a quarter tank of gas. She didn’t know how far that would take her. South, anyway, always south. The broken passenger window bled in cold air.

In a collection of villages huddled beside an immense frozen lake, Brand found a roadside truck-stop type restaurant that looked anonymous enough for her to venture inside. She killed the truck engine without knowing if she would ever be able to revive it. She didn’t care. Her mouth watered with the scent of cooking. Hunger made her reckless.

The place proved nearly empty. No one looked up as she entered. She ordered and consumed a plate of waffles with cream and something called cloudberry jam. What a wonderful name for a sweet, Brand thought, lapping it up. She ordered another plate, and refueled with more hot coffee at the same time.

She was out of cash—possessing no love, as the Romani would say. No credit card either. She would have to beat the check somehow. Brand did not like the cashless society, not one bit. She needed the feel of money, the non-digital kind, the look of it, the exactitude of it. The restaurant had three exits, including one near the restrooms. But the whole dine-and-dash dodge was complicated by the fact that her getaway vehicle would have to be hot-wired.

She turned to a fellow diner, a woman with a young child in the next booth. First she tried in Swedish, slowly, painstakingly sounding out the words.

“Jag undrar om jag kan…,” she began, but the woman interrupted her almost immediately.

“I speak English,” she said.

“Your cell phone, please, for a short call to Stockholm.” Brand understood she looked like a total bum, what with random scrapes and bruises visible on her face from the hospital room beating. One of her eyes had turned various shades of purple and red. Her swollen upper lip resembled a half-flat tire. The formerly white parka had turned gray and looked as though she had slept in it, which she had. The topper was a watch cap that any homeless person would have rejected as beneath his dignity.

Even so, the woman gave up her cell to her.

Brand took the phone, then looked at the woman helplessly, “I don’t have the number!”

The woman took the phone back and tapped in some letters. “What’s her name?” she asked.

“Lehtonen, Aino Lehtonen. Stockholm.”

The woman worked a bit of magic on the phone and handed it back to Brand. The line was already ringing.

“Are you calling from a secure line?” Lehtonen asked immediately when she heard Brand’s voice. “I’m afraid the police might be listening in.”

“What does that mean?” Brand asked. “I borrowed a cell.”

“Listen, I can’t be mixed up in this,” Lehtonen said. “I’m seeing the whole mess all about to blow up. At least one of us has to stay clean.”

She tried to ring off.

“I need help,” Brand said. “I’m out of money. Please, I’m alone out here.”

“We have had two visits from snuten recently. The detectives asked after you and Krister. You aren’t in the newspapers or on the television yet, but that will come. Don’t contact me again.”

The line clicked dead.

Brand handed the cellphone back to its owner. The woman examined her as she did so. Was it a look of suspicion, or was Brand only imagining it? She sat and sucked down more coffee, feeling sleepy from the food but at the same time jazzed from caffeine and anxiety. Fear rose in her gut as she felt an Adderall crash coming on.

Lehtonen was right, the wretch. The Roma photographer hadn’t signed on for this. But who had? Murder and mayhem, multiplying dead bodies in a country that had the lowest murder rate in the civilized world. Her allies were meeting bad ends—Lehtonen frantic with paranoia, Hammar near death in a hospital bed.

Slip out, move on, sleep in the stolen truck. Brand vividly pictured how this would all end, with her waking in the freezing cold to see a SWAT team—they called them piketbilar here—creeping up on her, assault rifles raised, screaming about getting her hands where they could see them.

The woman at the next table fielded a call on her cell phone, listened for a moment, then signaled to Brand.

“Excuse me? It’s for you.”

Moro Part.

With a flood of relief Brand realized Lehtonen had come through after all, and had given the number to the Romani godfather.

By the time she finished the conversation with Moro, the woman had risen and stood next to her, ready to leave. Her child flung himself around at the end of his mom’s arm as if he thought Mama might be a piece of playground equipment.

“Tack så mycket,” Brand said, thanking her in Swedish and returning the cell.

“American, yes?”

“Yes,” Brand said.

The woman placed a two hundred krona bill—twenty bucks in U.S. terms—on Brand’s table. “I keep this for emergencies,” she said, smiling sympathetically before dragging her child out of the restaurant.

50.

Moro Part showed at the roadside restaurant later that afternoon. Darkness had already fallen. Brand knew she should be honored that such an eminence would send not a lackey but come himself. He arrived in a shiny black Mercedes.

“I need to drive,” Brand told Moro when he pushed open the passenger door. “I get carsick otherwise.”

“In the back,” Moro commanded, waving his hand dismissively. “There’s an ice bucket back there if you need to puke.”

Brand had made her request more feebly than she usually did, and was too tired to argue with a man not to be argued with. She climbed into the back seat.

“You are all right?” Moro asked. “You look like home-made shit.”

“Thank you,” Brand said. She lay down as the car eased out