Now Moreau’s shirt and pants are burning. Sweetness pours kossu on him. The flames leap. Moreau can’t move but winks at Sweetness, as if this is a joke only the two of them can share. Sweetness pulls out his horse dick and pisses on him, says “Adieu.”
I look over. Mari, the pregnant girl, is dead. She bled out. Only Sweetness is functional. I ask him to take Milo’s ear to the boat and put it on ice.
The heroin kept me able to think. The pain is returning in spades. I sniff a little more and push myself up with my cane. I hobble over to Milo and shake a little more onto my thumbnail. It’s hard to talk and I slur. “Sniff thith.”
He inhales it and still doesn’t speak, but I see his body relax.
I hobble to Kate and slump beside her. She stares straight ahead, won’t speak to me. I look at her head. There’s a lot of blood, but that doesn’t mean anything. Head wounds always bleed a lot. I think it’s just a simple cut, nothing more. I pick up her hand and let go. It drops back in her lap, limp. The lights are on but nobody’s home. Traumatic shock.
Sweetness comes back. “I know where the money is,” he says.
I want to beat him to death. “Then why didn’t you tell him?”
“I just figured it out. Look at the graveyard behind the house.”
Set back in the clearing are four cairns marked with wooden crosses. They mean that sometime way back when, fishermen got stranded here, probably waited too long into the winter season to leave and got frozen in and died. The ground was too hard to dig, so they covered their friends in rocks and marked their resting places.
“The weathering is the same, consistent, on all the piles except one,” Sweetness says, “and the cross is a little different, too. The money is under the rocks.”
I have to call for a helicopter to medevac us all out of here, but I will not leave that money to be returned to that racist motherfucker Saukko, or to be stolen, probably by Jyri, when they tear this island apart looking for it. After all the suffering that’s been caused by it, I’ll burn it first. I try to speak as little as possible. It hurts like hell. “Try to get it.”
He brings Anu to me, then goes to work. He throws the rocks onto the other cairns as he digs. Breaks up the cross, leaves no evidence that the cairn was ever there. And people call him stupid. The two sports bags of cash are at the bottom. It took ten minutes.
Milo walks over. He’s a bloody mess, but the heroin pulled him together. He says to Sweetness, “Can you drive a boat to Turku?” Milo points. “It’s that way. The boat’s GPS map will guide you.”
Sweetness nods. “I think so.”
Milo talks slow and pauses in the middle of sentences, but stays focused. “Antti’s is the fastest boat, and it’s long forgotten except by us and Saukko, and he won’t think to start tracking it. The keys are on a nail over the kitchen sink. Make sure it’s fueled and leave now. When you get to Turku, take a bus to Helsinki. While you’re on your way, go for a swim and wash the blood off you the best you can. The wind will dry you before you get there. As soon as you get to Helsinki, before you go home, hide the money where no one would ever think to look.”
Kate rolls over on her side, balls up in a fetal position. I ask Milo, “Can you call?”
He requests the helicopter, tells him there are dead civilians and officers down. Fucking Milo. He can’t part with his toys. He collects the Colts and his sawed-off, puts them in our holsters and pockets, and lies down beside me.
I hold Anu on my chest with one hand. I put the other hand on his shoulder. I say, “Just tell them the truth, except say that Moreau shot Antti.”
“OK,” he says, and passes out.
I think about Moreau. He flew too close to the sun, his wings of Icarus melted, and he fell burning to the earth, plummeted to his death.
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