himself. “Sorry, pomo, not possible. My baby died.”
I don’t point out that it would have been aborted anyway. I suppose he doesn’t want to face it.
“And besides,” he says, “we have so many enemies, how can we ever make peace with them all?”
Milo ticks them off. “Veikko Saukko, and if Moore doesn’t kill them, the two Corsicans, the minister of the interior, the national chief of police, the Russian diplomats you’re trying to nail for human trafficking. Every fucking one of them is above the law and has people that do their dirty work for them.”
I let out a hopeless sigh. “And don’t forget Roope Malinen.”
He got his seat in parliament, but we hurt the extreme right and fucked up his hate agenda by exposing their drug pushing.
“I have another goal as well,” I say. “Those spreadsheets are all about human trafficking. I want those girls helped, especially Loviise Tamm.”
Milo and Sweetness nod agreement. “The men that brought her feel they own her now,” I say. “She needs protection.”
“Her mother called me,” Sweetness says. “She made arrangements for them to live in the countryside where they can hide and Loviise will be forgotten.” He swills beer. “I know you want Kate to see Loviise to prove something to her. But, pomo, I don’t want you to be disappointed if it doesn’t make everything right between you and your wife. It won’t.”
I built it up in my mind as if it would, but he’s right and I’m aware of it. “I think maybe we should all go stay at my house in Porvoo for a while. The windows are bulletproofed and the river runs in front of it, which is one less angle we can be easily attacked from. Plus, it’s bigger. This place is too small for five adults, a baby and a cat to live in.”
I inherited the house from Arvid Lahtinen. His wife of fifty years was in agony from bone cancer. He helped her die. I helped him cover it up. We became close friends. He was like a grandfather to me and made me his heir. Then, I suppose, feeling he had nothing left to live for, alone at age ninety, he blew his own brains out.
“I’m living here?” Milo asks.
I throw water on the stones. Steam rises and hisses. “I think we all have to stay together. The easiest way to get us is to cut us out of the herd and take us down one at a time.”
“Killing cops is a huge deal,” Milo says. “We take care of our own. If you and I or our families were killed, Helsinki Homicide would pursue it to the ends of the earth, never let the case die.”
I finally understand what has happened. It comes as a revelation, and with it, I see the inevitable outcome. There are certain men in this world who refuse to succumb to pressure, who will see things to the end of the line no matter the cost. Such men are shunned by society as dangers, and feared by the powerful. Such men are begging to be killed.
Milo, Sweetness and I are three such men. Brothers in arms. Brothers in blood. Each of us bound to the others by the knowledge that only we can count on ourselves not to kill one another. We did our jobs too well, observed no limits, not even legal boundaries, and served justice instead of our masters. This, not theft or crime or deaths, was the infraction for which we must be punished.
I know where Milo’s thought train is headed. It’s insanity. Still, I need to let him articulate the plan he’s cooked up so I can punch holes in it. “You have an idea,” I say. “Let’s hear it.”
“Give me a minute to think. Let’s cool off.”
We step out of the sauna into the bathroom, take turns running cold water over ourselves, slurp long hits from the kossu bottle, and go back into the heat.
“OK,” I say, “tell us.”
“We massacre them all in one day.”
This idea is so typical of Milo that I almost laugh. “Spell out who all is included in ‘them.’”
“Veikko Saukko, the national chief of police, the minister of the interior, and Jan Pitkänen.”
“I like it,” Sweetness says.
Now the laughter bursts out of me. “You just talked about how the murder of a couple cops would spark an investigation that would never end without a prosecution,” I say. “You’re discussing a mass murder of historic proportion. We would never, ever, get