Cold Trail by Jarkko Sipila Page A

Everything was gray. Couldn’t they put a fountain in here or something? Salmela clearly remembered the days twenty years ago when he and his buddies used to roll drunks in the area.
    S almela leaned forward far enough to check the giant Pepsi-logo clock on the building to the left: 3:02 p.m. The asshole was late, even though Salmela had sworn him to be on time.
    The criminal eyed the cars in the vicinity, looking for any indications of a police presence. An overly curious, circling gaze, a man sitting alone in a parked car, or a supposedly random loiterer were danger signals.
    An old woman dressed in a black fa ke fur was walking her little Dachshund at the edge of the square. Salmela wondered whether she could be a police officer. Did the female undercover officers take theater classes or something to teach them how to act? He’d have to ask Suhonen about it someday in a nice roundabout way.
    Goddammit, Salmela laughed to himself. Had he really gotten that paranoid? Oh well, better paranoid than in prison.
    The Pepsi clock now showed 3:04 p.m. Salmela would wait two more minutes, and then he was out of there. At that instant there was a knock on the passenger window, and Salmela immediately regretted having stuck around . He could tell from the man’s eyes that he was on something stronger than booze. The door was locked, and Salmela didn’t feel like letting the emaciated junkie into his car. He gestured for him to come around to the other side.
    Juha Saarnikangas looked like he was in pretty bad shape as he circled around the front of the van. His brown hair reached down to his shoulders and probably hadn’t been washed in a week or more. His green army jacket looked foul. He also had a nasty-looking scar on his cheek that Salmela hadn’t seen before.
    Salmela rolled down the window. “What’s up?”
    Saarnikangas’s heroin-decayed teeth turned his smile into a grimace. “Hey, man. Good to see you.”
    “N o, it’s not. What’s so urgent?”
    “I ’ve got some really good stuff for you,” Saarnikangas said, trying to maintain the smile.
    “S orry,” Salmela said tersely. “I’m not buying anything. Shop’s closed.”
    Saarnikangas’s expression grew serious . “Hey, hey, come on, man! You don’t even know what I’m selling.”
    Salmela pulled a cigarette from his pack and listened, mostly out of pity. He used to buy all kinds of stolen goods from Saarnikangas, but not anymore.
    The junkie continued his spiel: “I’ve got a Compaq 6220 right out of the box. Retails at more than a grand! I’ll give it to you for a hundred.”
    Salmela blew smoke into Saarnikangas’s face.
    “A ll right, fifty. Please.”
    “I ’m not buying.”
    “ Come on, thirty... Fuck, man, I need some dough.”
    Salmela’s interest was actually piqued by the time they got down to thirty, because that was almost nothing for a laptop. Juha must be really desperate.
    “L ook, asshole, you said you had something important to tell me. Not that you wanted to unload some junk.”
    Salmela started up the Toyota.
    “ Come on, man, at least give me a smoke,” Saarnikangas begged.
    Without saying a word, Salmela rolled up the window and drove off. He heard a thunk as Saarnikangas kicked the side of the van, and he could see the junkie giving him the finger in the rear-view mirror. If there hadn’t been any bystanders nearby, he would have stopped the van, gotten out, and beat Saarnikangas’s ass. Instead, he just flicked on his blinker and turned south out of the parking lot. The ugly complex belonging to the Federation of Trade Unions rose up at the end of the street.
    Salmela was annoyed that he had wasted his time on Saarnikangas. The question crossed his mind of whether his son, who had been shot a year ago, would have been in the same condition if he had lived. The prognosis had been similar.
     
    * * *
     
    There were no windows in the conference room. Takamäki, Suhonen, and Kulta had mugs of coffee; Joutsamo had tea.