CELL 8 Read Online Free PDF Page A

already at Stadsgård dock waiting.”
    Not that.
    The fear he had not had to feel for so long. That he had nearly learned to forget.
    “I’m sorry, buddy.”
    The green uniform on the bed. John looked at it, took a drag on his cigarette, couldn’t move.
    Not that.
    “John—that is your name, isn’t it? Just one thing. Personally I don’t give a damn if some Finnish bastard who deserves it gets his head kicked in. But you’ve been reported. And the police will take you in for questioning.”
    John didn’t scream.
    He was convinced that that was what he was doing, but no sound came out.
    A single silent scream until his lungs were empty. Then he sat down on the bed, lowered his head, his hands clasped to his cheeks.
    He couldn’t understand why, but he was for a moment in another place, in another time; he was fifteen years old and he had just hit a teacher from behind with a chair: a single blow to Mr. Coverson’s face just as he turned around. He lost his hearing on one side as a result, Mr. Coverson, and John could still remember how he felt when he faced his victim in the courtroom, when he realized for the first time that every blow has a consequence. He had cried as he’d never cried before, not even at his mother’s funeral. He had understood, truly understood that he’d robbed the man of something vital, forever, and he’d known that he’d hit someone for the last time. Three months in that shitty, awful juvenile detention center had not changed that.
    “They’ll stop the shuttle bus.”
    The security guard was still sitting down. He was taken aback by the intensity of John’s reaction, the sudden terror that filled the simple cabin. To be questioned by the police. To risk being charged with assault. Sure, no one would want that. But this—his head was shaking violently, his chalk-white face that couldn’t speak—the guard couldn’t comprehend it.
    “They’ll be waiting for you there. When you drive off.”
    John could hear him somewhere above his head, a voice that dissolved and disappeared in cigarette smoke.
    “But if you went down the ordinary gangway with the other passengers who don’t have vehicles, you might be able to buy yourself a couple of hours more.”
    He left the ferry in a crowd of people with duty-free shopping bags and suitcases on wheels, as the morning rush hour built up in the city, and then hurried along the sidewalk away from the center, toward Nacka. There was moisture in the air and carbon dioxide and something else that carried him to Danvikstull, where he flagged down a taxi with a sweaty hand and said he wanted to go to Alphyddevägen 43. He had been dreading this day for more than six years but had long ago decided he would not run away. He wanted to get home. To Helena, to Oscar. He wanted to hold them and talk about the future and he wanted to eat rice pudding with blueberry jam, as if it were his last meal.

    THE EARLY MORNING STUNG EWERT GRENS’S CHEEKS. HE DIDN’T LIKE THE long fucking winters; there was nothing about them that he liked, especially around now, at the beginning of January. He hated every day of the cold. He had problems moving his neck, and his left leg wouldn’t do as it was told—defects that only seemed to get worse as the temperature plummeted. It made him feel old, older than his fifty-seven years. Every joint, every muscle that had lost its youth, shouted out for spring, for warmth.
    He was standing outside the main door on Sveavägen. The same stair that led to the same apartment on the fourth floor where he had lived for nearly thirty years now. Three decades in the same place, without getting to know even one of his neighbors.
    He snorted.
    Because you don’t want to. Because you don’t have the time. The kind who just get in the way. The kind who hang up notices on the bulletin board by the main door asking people to stop feeding the birds on their balconies. Neighbors who only talked to each other when someone played their