Read Online The Bodyguard by Leena Lehtolainen - Free Book Online Page B

a while, then I asked whether the militia in Moscow had closed Anita’s case in light of this news. After some expletives Laitio confirmed that they had. He reached into his desk drawer again. This time he produced a bottle of cognac, skipped the glass, and drank straight from the bottle.
    “Get the hell out of here, you whore,” he said. “Go think about what you’ve done. Be happy that we found out about the killer just now—otherwise I’d have you jailed as a suspect. You wouldn’t have been so stupid as to kill her yourself, but there’s no denying that you’re involved somehow!” Laitio took another massive swig out of the bottle and glared at me. The cognac dripped down his chin.
    I stood up and imagined grabbing his cigar and stubbing it out on his bald head. I wanted to stay out of jail, so instead I grabbed my coat and headed down the stairs. Out on the street, I could hear Laitio yelling at me from his window, “And don’t think you’ve seen the last of me! We’ll meet again!”

5
    Riikka was in the kitchen, but Jenni wasn’t home. I pulled a bottle of beer from my backpack and opened it with my teeth. I drank half of it before I asked Riikka whether she’d seen anyone else looking for me besides the police. She said the building had been quiet; only the usual Jehovah’s Witnesses had been knocking on doors. And there had been a Russian student selling paintings he’d made. Our neighbor had bought one and asked the boy in for coffee and quiche. This story about a Russian student didn’t sound quite right, so I called our neighbor to invite myself over later to check out the painting she’d bought. A widow, she was delighted to have some company, and I always enjoyed her baking.
    Before I went to bed, I looked around for anything out of the ordinary. I had carefully chosen my room and situated my mattress in just the right spot: I had made sure nobody would be able to shoot into the room from the street. It might be possible from the roof across the road, but the shooter would have to risk being seen. I set my Glock next to my mattress. It was loaded. Riikka and Jenni had never seen it, and I should have kept it in the gun case behind lock and key, but this time I just wrapped it in Anita’s scarf. It smelled of her perfume, vanilla and patchouli, a greeting from beyond the grave.
    Frida came to me in my dreams. We ran on the frozen lake, and I pulled fish out of a hole in the ice for Frida to play with. When we reached land, we heard a gunshot in the forest, and Frida was suddenly full of seeping wounds, just like the fur Anita had worn on the night of her death. I woke up, startled, and realized that the sound of someone trying to come into our apartment had woken me up. It didn’t sound like a break-in; more like someone attempting to open the door with the wrong set of keys.
    Slowly I stood up and reached for my gun. I peered into our foyer. When the door opened and someone hobbled in, I instinctively raised my gun. Drunk out of her mind, Jenni stared at the gun for a moment and then began to scream.
    I rushed back to my room, closed the door behind me, and hid the gun in my purse. Then I came back to the foyer, pointing my flip phone at Jenni like a gun.
    “Jesus, stop yelling! You’ll wake the whole building!”
    Jenni had collapsed in a heap in the foyer.
    “But there was a gun pointed a t . . . ”
    “A cell phone, Jenni. I thought someone was breaking in with all that noise. I was about to call the cops. You’re so wasted you couldn’t tell a moose from a squirrel,” I whispered so that Riikka wouldn’t wake up. I could hear her stirring in her room. I hoisted Jenni up and pushed her into the bathroom in case she needed to throw up.
    Mary Higgins, my landlady in New York, had occasionally come back to our Morton Street apartment half unconscious from a mix of cocktails and cocaine. She’d made me her hangover maid, asking me to feed her salty foods and meds. It was a great