Read Online Midnight Sun by Jo Nesbø - Free Book Online Page B

fingernail scratched the skin on his forehead. Put me in mind of an eagle’s claw. ‘Quick or drawn out, Mr Hansen?’
    I swallowed. Think, think. But instead of a solution, all I saw was my life – my choices, my bad choices – passing by. As I sat there quietly I heard a diesel engine, voices, untroubled laughter outside the window. The dustbin men. Why hadn’t I become a dustbin man? Honest toil, clearing up, serving society, and going home happy. Alone, but at least I could have gone to bed with a degree of satisfaction. Hang on. Bed. Maybe . . .
    â€˜I’ve got the money and gear in the bedroom,’ I said.
    â€˜Let’s go.’
    We stood up.
    â€˜Please,’ he said, waving the revolver. ‘Age before beauty.’
    As we walked the few steps through the corridor to the bedroom I visualised how it would happen. I would go over to the bed with him behind me, grab the pistol. I’d turn round, not look at his face, and fire. Simple. It was him or me. I just mustn’t look at his face.
    We were there. I headed towards the bed. Grabbed the pillow. Grabbed the pistol. Spun round. His mouth had fallen open. Eyes wide. He knew he was going to die. I fired.
    That’s to say, I
meant
to fire. Every fibre of my being wanted to fire.
Had
fired. With the exception of my right forefinger. It had happened again.
    He raised his revolver and aimed it at me. ‘That was silly of you, Mr Hansen.’
    Not
silly
, I thought. Getting the money for treatment just a week or two after the illness had progressed so far that it was too late,
that
was silly. Mixing Valium and vodka was silly. But not managing to shoot when your own life is in the balance, that’s a genetic disability. I was an evolutionary aberration, and the future of humanity would only be served by my immediate extinction.
    â€˜Head shot or stomach?’
    â€˜Head,’ I said, and went over to the wardrobe. I got out the brown case containing the money belt and the bags of amphetamine. I turned to face him. Saw his eye above the sights of the revolver, the other one screwed shut, the eagle’s claw curled round the trigger. For a moment I wondered what he was waiting for before I realised. The dustbin men. He didn’t want them to hear the shot when they were standing right under the window.
    Right under the window.
    First floor.
    Thin glass.
    Perhaps my Darwinian creator hadn’t deserted me after all, because as I twisted round and ran the three steps towards the window there was just one thought in my head: survival.
    I can’t swear that the details of what followed are entirely correct, but I think I was holding the case – or the pistol – in front of me as I penetrated and shattered the glass as if it were a soap bubble, and the next moment I was falling through the air. I hit the roof of the bin lorry with my left shoulder, rolled over, felt the sun-warmed metal against my stomach, then I slid down the side of the vehicle until my naked feet hit the ground and I was down on the tarmac.
    The voices had fallen silent, and two men in brown overalls stood there frozen to the spot, just staring. I pulled up my pyjama trousers, which had slid down, and grabbed the case and pistol. I glanced up at my window. Behind a frame of broken glass, Johnny was standing looking down at me.
    I nodded at him.
    He gave me a crooked smile and raised the forefinger with the long nail to his forehead. A gesture which in hindsight has come to seem like a sort of salute: I had won that round. But we would meet again.
    Then I turned and began to run down the street in the low morning sun.
    Mattis was right.
    This landscape, this tranquillity, was doing something to me.
    I had spent years living on my own in Oslo, but after just three days here the isolation felt like a sort of pressure, a quiet sobbing, a thirst that neither water nor moonshine could sate. So as I stared out across the empty plateau with the