Life Deluxe by Jens Lapidus Read Free Book Online Page A

robbery—remember that?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Those guys are from Södertälje. They hit the armored car with a fucking steamroller. The papers said they got hold of four million. It was actually twenty-two million. You follow? Twenty-two million. This guy Denny Vadúr might have to sit out a few years, but when he gates out, he’ll laugh all the way to the ditch in the woods where he buried the cash.”
    “They’re kings.”
    “Exactly,
huevon
. They’re kings. One hit, and you can be set financially for the rest of your life. Not have to rot in a café. And you know what the thing is? You know what’s big?”
    “No.”
    “I saved Denny’s life in there. A couple players with fire extinguisher and Denny alone in the Ping-Pong room. They tried to break open his skull with the sprayer, but little J-boy got in the way. You with me? What Vadúr owes me can’t be paid back in cash. So he’s put me in touch with the guy who’s sitting on the recipes for CIT heists in Södertälje. He’s gonna get me in there. I’ve got a chance to do something dope.”
    Jorge took a final hit on the spliff. The ash almost burned his fingers.

    Back to the present. Tom rolled in, an hour late. Time for the next talk.
    Jorge fixed him a latte. They went into the office.
    It was a small room behind the kitchen. No windows. Two folding chairs. A table that was so mini that it hardly fit two coffee saucers. A poster on the wall: a fog-covered bridge over some river in New York City.
    Jorge folded out a chair, sat down. Tom sat down. Drank his latte. Got white foam on his upper lip.
    “Tom, glad you could come so soon.”
    “No prob.”
    “Did you know we started cutting our barista milk with speed?” Jorge looked dead serious.
    Tom looked like a cartoon smiley face. “Yeah, right.”
    “Is that why you’re trying to save it all on your upper lip instead of drinking it?” Jorge grinned.
    Tom laughed. Ran his tongue carefully over his lips.
    Jorge got right down to it. Tom Lehtimäki was the kind of guy you were straight with. An honest man.
    “Yo, I wanna talk business with you.”
    “Don’t you do that every day?”
    “Yeah, but this has nothing to do with the café. This shit is a million times bigger.”
    Tom downed the last drops of coffee. Waited for Jorge to go on.
    “Mahmud and me, we got an in to a CIT.”
    “Fuck, man. Hope it’s as good as the helicopter robbery, except without all the badges watching.”
    Jorge kept talking. The basic ideas—the little info the Finn’d given him so far. Like: how many bodies they needed to be, what kinds of sums they were talking about, where they should strike. He didn’t say anything about the Finn, but Tom wasn’t stupid—he understood that J-boy hadn’t come up with all of it on his own.
    “So we’re not talking some small shit,” Jorge said. “This is gonna be historic. The heli-robbers were smart, but not smart enough. We’re gonna break all records. Based on what we’ve heard, we’re talkin’ at least forty million. You follow? This is not a game, man.”
    Jorge fixed his gaze on the homeboy across from him.
    Tom blinked.
    J-boy popped the question. “Tom, I gotta know, you want in?”

5

    Hägerström was familiar with the police’s undercover routines. But the UC course he had taken on the subject hadn’t really given him much. It was just like everything else within the police force—you learned to do the work in real time, in the field.
    Torsfjäll had given the operation the name Operation Tide. It was supposed to focus on laundry, he said. Money laundering on a high level. For Hägerström, the work would be different from regular undercover work. First of all, it was for a limited period of time—the plan wasn’t that he infiltrate and live like a criminal for several years or that he even hit up some corner and pretend to be a user for a few weeks before switching corners a few weeks later. He would take on the role as a corrections officer and