Cold Trail by Jarkko Sipila Read Free Book Online

1980s. The china was the same old set.
    The living room contained a threadbare sofa, an armchair, and an old TV. The room opened onto the kitchen at the far end. Near the dining table, a door led to the bedroom.
    Repo ’s gaze fell on an old photograph on top of the TV. It had been taken some time in the late ’60s, when the family had taken a weekend cruise to Stockholm. Mom and Dad smiled in the middle, with the boys on either side. His buzz-cut brother, Martti, grinned broadly in the photo. Timo remembered that he had had the same kind of haircut. You couldn’t see it, though, because his face had been scrawled out with black marker.
    Repo was exhausted. He didn’t have time to sleep, but he could rest for a while on the couch. First, though, he went into the closet in his father’s bedroom. He found a 9mm Luger in a brown leather holster in the hatbox on the upper shelf. It also held three small cardboard boxes, each containing twenty-five bullets.
    He knew the gun. Dad had taught him to shoot it back in the day. The gun was still in good shape; it had been oiled well enough. He pulled back the pistol’s slide, checked that the chamber was empty, and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. He ripped open one of the boxes, loaded six bullets into the magazine, and pushed it back into the old gun. Repo drew the slide again. The bullet slid in impeccably. Good, no chambering problems . Repo clicked on the safety and shoved the gun back into its holster.
    He stretched out on the couch and decided to c lose his eyes for a minute.
     
    * * *
     
    Suhonen was driving a green Peugeot 206 he had signed out of the police HQ garage. Joutsamo was sitting in the passenger seat. An old song by Metallica was playing on the radio. Joutsamo, a fan of heavy music, thought it was bubblegum rock. Suhonen disagreed heartily.
    The car turned onto Vallesman Road. The houses were old and relatively small, and both sides of the street were lined with parked cars.
    “ I know this area. Picked up a member of the Skulls three, four blocks from here a few years back,” Suhonen said. The Skulls—or, as it read on the gang members’ leather vests, MC Skulls—wasn’t a genuine motorcycle club; it was a criminal organization. “Found two Swedish submachine guns.”
    “L et’s drive past it first and see if there are any lights on,” Joutsamo suggested. “If there are, then we can stake the place out or call in the SWAT team.”
    “Y ou got it,” Suhonen said.
    Joutsamo checked the numbers on the houses. “Two more, then it’s the next one. At that streetlamp.”
    Suhonen slowed down and the car slid past the house, going under 20 mph. The place was dark.
    “ I didn’t see any movement,” Joutsamo said.
    “A nd you’re saying you would have been able to tell if there had been?”
    “O f course. Should we wait or go in to have a look?”
    Suhonen turned right at the next corner and started circling around the block. It would attract less attention than flipping a U-turn on a residential street. Joutsamo didn’t get a response, because Suhonen’s phone rang. It was his fiancée, calling to ask if and when he might be coming home. Suhonen said he didn’t know. The call was a brief one, and Joutsamo chose not to comment on it.
    Suhonen returned to the situation at hand: “We can’t hang out in the car on a residential street like this. We’d need to get a van or do it from one of the neighboring houses. Maybe we should just go have a look and see what there is to see, if anything.”
    “Y eah, but if we’re going by the book, I suppose we ought to have some reason to believe that the suspect’s in there,” Joutsamo said. Once the prison had asked for the help of the authorities in hunting down Repo, the search had turned into a police investigation. “And we don’t have a warrant to conduct a search of that house. Our job is to find the convict.”
    Suhonen grunted. “If you say so. You’re the one who’s always talking