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He wobbled a bit, fingers splayed on his torso over the wetness where chest met shoulder. The bullet hole seeped more blood, dark like ink.
Had he … had he really been shot?
—and the Boss was singing about a knife, edgy and dull and—
He moved toward the valets, fumbling his iPhone from his pocket, thumbing the three digits, but his fingers were numb, insensate, and the slick case slipped from his hand and tumbled before he could pressCALL.
He took a knee to pick it up, but then he couldn’t rise and blood was drooling from his bottom lip and he was crying and the news anchor’s ruddy face filled his mind and he understood for the first time in his charmed life what it meant to feel violated, demeaned, and he couldn’t imagine talking about it ever or about what he’d seen behind the scarlet door, and then the footsteps were coming up behind him, soft on the lush grass, and a shadow stretched slender and sinister beneath the susurrating leaves.
He could see his own face reflected up in the obsidian screen of his phone just beyond his reaching fingers, and then he saw another face appear over his shoulder, the face of the man from the room behind the scarlet door.
Somewhere the backyard band kept ooo-ooo-ooo-ing, and it was floating there, that awful face, inhuman and blank like a ghost’s, the rest of the body lost to shadow, and Johnny whimpered and drooled blood and strained for the phone in the grass, his fingertips brushing it, the screen coming to life, that greenCALLcircle right there millimeters from his fingertips.
But then he heard a thud, and his hand went hot with pain.
He saw that it had been staked to the lawn.
He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a rush of air, and then the man grabbed his hair and a voice whispered in his ear, “Naughty boy.”
The knife slid up and clear of Johnny’s hand with a tug, and then his head was yanked back further, baring the throat, and sensation blended with song, his heart pounding like the distant music, his ears thrumming to the rush of percussion, his nerves on fiii-ire.
1
Hold My Vodka
It wasn’t the first time Evan had drunk vodka atop a glacier.
But it was the first time he’d traveled to a glacier with the express purpose of drinking vodka.
Not just any glacier, but Langjökull, the behemoth nearest Iceland’s capital. Fifteen hundred meters above sea level, the air was frigid enough that Evan sensed it leaking between his teeth, even within the fireplace-warmed interior of the pop-up bar.
It had taken some navigating to get here. A connecting flight to Reykjavik followed by a journey across the tundra with sufficient four-wheel-drive turbulence to make his insides feel as though they’d been tumbled by an industrial dryer.
He’d arrived at the precise coordinates—64.565653°N, 20.024822°W—twenty minutes ago, time enough to shake the numbness from his fingertips and take his first sip from the specialty batch of handmade spirit. Its name derived from the word for “smoke,” Reyka had a barley base, augmented with water filteredby the rock of a four-thousand-year-old lava stream, making it the purest liquid on earth.
The bar here in the middle of the desolate nowhere was little more than a sparse wooden structure composed of beams and walls. Well-loved chessboards on tables. A foursome of burly Icelanders in football jerseys. Picture windows overlooking miles of blindingly white tundra. Decorative puffins peeked out from the shelves of bottles.
Evan took another sip of the limited-edition batch he’d traveled over four thousand miles to sample. Silky mouthfeel, rose and lavender, a hint of grain on the back half. He set his shot glass, fashioned from glacial ice, down on the bar before him.
It was promptly shattered by the elbow of one of the footballers wheeling drunkenly to grab at the waist of a passing female tourist. Evan exhaled evenly and swept the ice remnants from the bar. Though the young men were rowdy, cocky, and redlining their blood-alcohol, he could sense that they weren’t awful guys. But they were on their way to becoming awful if no one provided a course correction.
On Evan’s other side, a lantern-jawed retiree was bragging to a gaggle of Australian coeds and anyone else within earshot that he’d been a member of the legendary Viking Squad S.W.A.T. Team known as Sérsveit Ríkislögreglustjórans. A handsome man a few years past his prime, he basked in the glow of the young women’s attention.
Buoyant and amused, the Australians fumbled through his pronunciation lessons. Well built, with beautiful smiles and generous laughs, they hung on his words, as pleased by the unlikely company as he was.
“—we have no standing army,” the former cop was telling them in near-perfect English. “So we’re the last line of defense when it comes to facing deadly threats.”
Evan leaned forward and flagged the bartender for another shot. As it was being poured in front of him, another of the footballers snatched it from beneath the bottle and slammed it.
Evan stared at the pool of vodka puddled on the bar between hishands. Then up at the bartender, a pale Nordic towhead. “Would you like to talk to them?” Evan said. “Or should I?”
The bartender shrugged. “There are four of them. And we’re way out here. There’s nothing to do.”
“Well,” Evan said. “Notnothing.”
The bartender gave him another shot, this time safeguarding it through the handoff. “American?” he asked. “What did you come to Iceland for? Business? Whale watching?”
Evan hoisted the shot glass. “This.”
