“Yeah, I really did. And I meant what I said. The cane you gave me is my favorite possession. Do we have any money left after your spending spree?”
“Oodles. Robbing dope dealers is so lucrative, I’m not sure why more people like us don’t take up the occupation.”
“I’m sure some do, but have short-lived careers. Your sawed-off was a good idea. If you load it with something non-lethal, it could get us out of jams if we got stuck, say, pulling a heist and a few guys walked in. Just don’t do anything weird, like load it with bee-hive rounds or rat-poisoned buckshot.”
The dark circles under his eyes deepened. Always a sign of trouble. Milo was both obdurate and rambunctious, an often annoying, even dangerous combination. Now he wanted a fight. “Well, would it be fucking OK with you if I just fucking carry lethal ammo, should fucking necessity arise?”
I tamed him with the unexpected and then switched gears to disengage his temper.
“Sure. Did you spend much time with Moreau?”
I noticed Kate’s eyes drift from her book to us.
“We dropped off Arvid and Sweetness. I don’t know why he thinks he’s fooling anyone hiding his drinking.”
Now we had Kate’s full attention. She hadn’t caught on to Sweetness’s drinking. It can be hard to tell someone is drunk if you never see them sober.
Milo fired up his machine and fiddled with it for a minute. “Goddamn it. These work, but not well enough. They pick up the cell phones but can’t track enough at one time and the range is too short.”
“What do you need?”
Asking was a mistake. Prolix Milo kicked into gear. “I can’t get my hands on one because of its military-grade sales status, and I couldn’t fake my way through it, and even by our standards, they cost a fortune. A GSM A5.1 Real Time Cell Phone Interceptor. It’s undetectable, can handle twenty phones in quad band and four base stations.”
It meant nothing to me and I wasn’t interested. “What did you do after you dropped off the others?”
Milo doesn’t have a raconteur’s bone in his body. “We went to my place and looked at the weapons. A Remington 870 tactical shotgun to handle ballistic breaching lockbuster shotgun rounds. A Heckler & Koch UMP machine gun. It’s much like the MP5 but state-of-the-art and made from the latest in advanced polymers. And a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle. It’s like something out of Star Wars. The optical ranging system is an integrated electronic ballistic computer…”
He went on. Kate hated this kind of rambling constantly disturbing her tranquillity. This was what she had complained about. It made her feel as if she lived in a police precinct instead of a home, and she had also sacrificed a great deal of privacy having the team ginning around like they lived here.
Milo would have continued but I cut him off. “What do you think of Moreau?”
“He’s a really cool guy. He told me he would teach me how to use the .50 Barrett. Why did you shoot down his idea about selling the heroin?”
“It’s tricky and dangerous. We just keep ripping off dealers. Keep them beaten down.”
Milo switched to Finnish, so Kate wouldn’t understand. “So long as they don’t start a drug war and we have to hide it by dissolving any more bodies in acid. That really skeeved me out.”
But Kate did understand. She set Anu on a cushion, turned around, rested her folded arms on the back of the sofa and her head on her arms. “Pardon me. What was that again? Something about bodies and acid.”
I explained to her what had happened. That one gangster killed another and we had to cover it up, or gangsters would start gunning each other down in the streets, Helsinki Homicide would get involved and inevitably would trail the murders and the reasons behind them back to us.