Read Raid and the Blackest Sheep Online
Authors: Harri Nykänen
Koistinen played yet another card, and did so with the professionalism only twenty years of experience as a scam-artist can bring.
“Out of our midst, you spawn of the devil. I’ll not allow you to pollute my flock with your dirty lies. Jesus paid dearly for…”
Suddenly he stiffened, his breathing faltered and his eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets. He mashed his lips together a few times, then let out a stream of words, with no emphasis or rhythm, as though read from a dictionary one after another.
“Alema, isa, nader, elia, abba, Israel…”
“And now you can even speak in tongues. Last time we met, all you knew was Finnish, and some fucking terrible Swedish.”
Nygren walked up to Koistinen and slapped him hard on the cheek.
Koistinen’s rapid-fire monologue came to a halt, as though cut with a scissors.
Nygren’s hand dove into his pocket again.
“I have a few more pictures…”
He walked back toward the crowd and passed out the pictures left and right. Then he returned to the altar and seized Koistinen by the tie, jerked him closer and turned toward the congregation.
“After that miraculous display of speaking in tongues, Pastor Koistinen has yet another miracle for you. He’ll show you how to stop a bullet with the strength of his faith.”
Raid drew a second gun from beneath his coat. With the other gun still trained on the wrestler, he aimed it at Koistinen’s forehead.
Nygren jostled Koistinen, now limp and impassive.
“Ready for the bullet-stopping miracle?”
Koistinen searched Raid’s eyes for a hint of mercy, but found none.
“Don’t. I’ll pay,” he whispered to Nygren. “In the back room.”
Nygren looked at the congregation.
“He wants to pay, but you want a miracle. One against many—majority rules. Let’s have a miracle.”
Raid cocked the hammer with his thumb.
Koistinen abandoned his preacher role in favor of survival.
“Tell me what I have to do.”
Nygren’s voice was almost affectionate.
“Can’t you perform one little miracle? Doesn’t your faith move mountains and raise the dead?”
“No.”
“But don’t you speak in tongues and have daily talks with God like he was a friend of yours?”
“No. You know that.”
“Louder!”
Nygren leaned in and cupped his hand to his ear.
“I can’t.”
Nygren’s voice filled the theater. “Why not? How can you speak in tongues then?”
“It’s an act.”
“So speaking in tongues was an act. What about all this?”
Nygren swept his hand over the congregation in an arc.
“Everything is…”
“Everything is what?”
“An act.”
“So you’re a fraud. Do I understand you correctly?”
“Damnit Nygren, we were friends once…”
“Do I understand you correctly?”
“Yes…”
Nygren forced Koistinen to his knees and took a handful of his hair.
“You heard him. He’s a fraud, sadly. The worst kind. A ravening wolf in sheep’s clothing. Men like him are shepherds as long as the sheep have wool to shear and meat to grind. After that, he’ll leave his flock to the beasts. He piles his burdens on others’ backs, but carries none himself. He dictates what you can do, but heeds no rules himself.”
Koistinen tried to jerk free, but Nygren tightened his grip.
“Ask their forgiveness. Ask your followers for forgiveness.”
“Goddamnit, Nygren…”
Koistinen tried to stand, but Nygren shoved him down.
“Ask for forgiveness!”
“Please forgive me.”
“You’re a swindler and a false prophet. What are you?”
“A swindler…a false prophet.”
“And a ravening wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“And a ravening…wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Nygren let go and Koistinen nearly fell on his face.
“Get up!”
Koistinen stumbled to his feet looking drugged.
Nygren scanned the hushed crowd. Not the slightest hint of self-satisfaction or triumph showed on his face. On the contrary, he looked saddened.
“Try not to be so gullible. The world is full of false prophets from the same stock as myself and this black-souled brother Koistinen. Be skeptical, but don’t stop searching. Maybe you’ll find a good shepherd yet. Remember that a tree is known by its fruit, and a bad tree bears no good fruit.”
Nygren stepped down from the lectern, looking every bit as old and stiff as he was.
Outside, it was already dusk and the rain had just picked up. Nygren flipped up the collar of his coat and stepped out of the foyer into the rain.
“What’d you think?”
“An impressive show.”
“I didn’t read the Bible in prison for nothing… Mom always wanted me to be a preacher.”
“You’d have been a good one,” said Raid.
* * *
Raid drove and Nygren sat in the back seat. Nygren watched the landscape disappear into the darkness. He hadn’t said a word for more than half an hour, but that suited Raid just fine.
“You still with me, Raid?”
“Don’t doubt me, Thomas.”
“To the end?”
“To the end.”
2.
“Bend to the side…down…up…now to the right. Stand up straight, Jansson… Down…up…left…right. Jansson, can’t you straighten your back anymore?”
The instructor was blonde, about forty years old, and the water slid across her hips as she waded over to Jansson. She placed one hand on his back and the other on his belly. Despite her slenderness, her arms were strong. She looked at Jansson and smiled.
“Relax. Don’t be so stiff.”
Jansson glanced over at the row of amused faces on the pool deck. Huusko laughed aloud.
“Listen to the girl, don’t be so stiff. A man oughta have only one stiff spot, and it’s not your back.”
“Stop it, Huusko,” she snapped, but watered down her scolding with a smile.
Jansson waded to the edge of the pool and pushed himself up. The water gave his body buoyancy, making the feat seem effortless.
“I’ve had enough.”
“Just messin’ around,” said Huusko.
After a quarter mile of swimming, Jansson could have sworn his body was more muscular. But one glance at his stomach told him the feeling was an illusion; the same sixty pounds of excess fat were in the same place as always. Still, his back felt better.
“How can such a big man give up so easy?” the instructor prodded.
“Hey, big man, wait for me at the bar,” Huusko shouted as Jansson padded off.
“You’re here to get in shape, not to get drunk,” the instructor said.
“Why not both?”
Jansson sat in the sauna for a few minutes before stepping into the shower. Then he put on a robe, tucked his towel and shaving kit under his arm and set off down the long hallway toward his room, all the way at the end on the right-hand side. Huusko’s was just across the hall. Once inside, Jansson’s first order of business was to pour himself a shot of whiskey, then he collapsed onto the bed.
The room was intended for two, but there were enough vacancies that Jansson had gotten it to himself. It featured a wardrobe, nightstand, chair, television and a phone. A sappy landscape print hung on the wall. Clean, but impersonal. A month earlier, the room had been remodeled and it still smelled of paint. The rest of the building was still a construction zone.
The window was slightly ajar and Jansson heard a loud argument from the front yard. He picked up his tumbler and went to have a look. A maintenance man was disputing a young construction worker’s choice of parking spots for his trailer.
The front yard of the
physical
rehabilitation
center
was expansive. Nearest the building was an asphalt parking lot for guests. The maintenance man didn’t deem contractors as guests, and even though barely a dozen cars were parked in the front lot, he insisted on ushering the trailer to the rear.
The building was situated in the middle of a gloomy, boulder-ridden spruce forest. With his rehabilitation only on its third day, Jansson was already feeling distressed. How in the hell could he possibly endure two weeks?
In reality, Jansson’s back wasn’t in such bad shape. He had strained it while turning his compost pile. The department’s doctor had examined him and criticized his excess weight and lack of exercise. Jansson couldn’t help but admit the doctor had a point, and he had promised to do something about it. For lack of anything better to say, he had inquired about
physical
rehabilitation.
To Jansson’s surprise, a few days later he received a written notice informing him that he was now enrolled in a physical rehab program. The center was owned by a union affiliated with the Social Democratic Party and was apparently trying to find customers, even if by force. The center’s state funding was determined by its enrollment, so with some shrewdness and cunning, any government employee who didn’t put up much of a fight was being funneled into the program. Half of the police force had been through the same regimen, Huusko more than any other, though his only ailments were the occasional hangover and chronic sweaty feet.
Either the police doctor was a henchman for the Social Democratic Party or a shareholder of the center. Nothing else could explain such enthusiasm for its services.
Jansson had been wary of rehab from the start. It seemed to him that the patients were treated like brainless cretins, ordered to perform strange gesticulations for no justifiable reason.
For Jansson, these water aerobics were little more than ritual humiliation.
Or perhaps he just had an attitude problem. Huusko and the others seemed to be enjoying themselves. The food was free as well as healthy, they were still getting paid, and there was always someone on hand to listen to the patient’s self-diagnoses for aches, pains and joint wear.
Even so, Jansson had been stubbornly resistant from the beginning. To top off the boredom, his conscience bothered him; he felt he was defrauding the public. Jansson put the blame, at least in part, on Huusko, who had painted a tempting but distorted picture of
physical
rehab. Jansson still couldn’t understand how Huusko had managed to lure him out to the middle of nowhere. But Huusko wasn’t the only culprit—Jansson blamed his wife, too. Had she been as suspicious and contrary as usual, he never would have gone.
“Of course you should go, if it’s free,” she had said. “You’ll get some exercise and healthy food, and you can rest and take care of yourself. You’re not getting any younger. Anyway, I warned you about overexerting yourself.”
Even Captain Tuomela hadn’t tried to deter him, though Jansson was in the middle of a murder investigation that was all over the tabloids.
“There’s no statute of limitation for murders,” Tuomela had said. Jansson thought his boss had been suspiciously generous.