Free Vengeance by Jarkko Sipila Page B

lagging back a bit was the bull-like Roge, and on the left, little Osku, sporting a goatee that only made him look more like his beard’s namesake.
         As they reached the Alfa Romeo, a man of about thirty with a blond shag of hair and a jean jacket walked out of the front door of the house. He closed the door behind him before noticing his visitors.
         “What the hell?” he blurted, stopping in front of the door. The trio was about ten yards away. They kept coming.
         “We want to talk to you,” Niko growled.
         “About what,” the man stammered, his eyes darting about for an escape route. There was none and the door behind him was now locked.
         Roge approached from the right and swung his arm back, snapping an eighteen-inch chain from his sleeve to his hand. Without a word, he lashed the back of the man’s left knee.
         The man cried out and stumbled backwards. Niko caught him and slammed him against the door. “You little shit!”
         Osku landed a hard side-kick in the man’s ribs. “Fuck!”
         The man slumped to a sitting position in front of the door. “What is this?” he sputtered. “What’d I do?”
         “The blonde at the bar last Tuesday,” Osku snarled. “That was my girl you tried to pick up. I told you to back off, but you didn’t.”
         “I didn’t…”
         “I told you to back off!”
         “I didn’t…”
         Roge flogged the man’s shins with the chain.
         “Stop! Fuck!”
         Niko squatted down in front of the man.
         “Hopefully you learned something today. You hit on one of the Skulls’ women, you suffer the consequences,” he said, then thundered, “You fucking get it?!”
         “Yeah, yeah. I get it,” he murmured.
         “Good. And if you go to the cops, we’ll come back, nail you to the living room wall and burn this house down.”
         “No, no… I won’t,” he wailed.
         Niko stood, turned and walked away. Roge and Osku followed. As they reached the Alfa Romeo, the bull-like Roge took one last swing with the chain, shattering the passenger side window. “Just a reminder!” he shouted. The man was still lying in a heap at the door.
         Their footsteps quickened on the way to the car, and the lumbering Niko was already out of breath. Roge and Osku didn’t pass him, however.
         Roge swung into the driver’s seat and tossed the chain into the passenger footwell before Niko could sit down. Osku slid into the back seat.
         Roge stepped on the gas and laughed. The adrenaline was still pumping in their veins.
         “Shit, he sure learned his lesson!”
         “You got that right,” said Niko. “How’d it feel, Osku?”
         “Great. Looked like the guy must’ve bleached his hair, though. It was still brown back at the bar. Ha-haa!”
         Niko turned and shot a look at Osku. “It was the same guy, though?”
         “Yeah,” he answered hesitantly. “Pretty sure it was.”
         “Pretty sure?”
         “Yeah. Yes, it was him.”
         Niko turned his gaze back to the road. “Alright. Your word is good enough for me.”
         Osku was satisfied.
         “Drive back to the office,” Niko commanded. Larsson will be there around noon. You guys haven’t even met him yet.”
     
    * * *
     
    Detective Lieutenant Takamäki was sifting through a batch of unsolved cases. The list seemed to grow by the day, and though they were mostly routine crimes, that was only the police’s view. The victims likely had a different opinion.
         If the performance objective of the Helsinki Police Department was a solid ‘B’, the actual grade usually was somewhere around a ‘C-’ or a ‘D+’. The overall percentage of solved cases had declined sharply in the 1990s, though violent crimes continued to be solved at a satisfactory rate. The reason, of course, was that with violent