Never Fuck Up: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

should he do now? He looked at the body again. Lifted the arm. Didn’t bother with routine—he should really wait for the technicians and the ambulance.
    He looked at the man’s hands. They were weird somehow—no missing fingers, not unusually clean or dirty—no, it was something else. He turned a hand over. Then he saw it—the tops of the dead man’s fingerswere all messed up. On the top of every fingertip: a blood effusion. It looked like they’d been sliced, leveled, erased.
    He dropped the arm. The blood on the floor’d dried. How long’d the dead guy been lying down here?
    He searched his pockets quickly. No wallet, no cell phone. No money or identification. In one of the back pockets: a slip of paper with a smudged cell-phone number. He memorized the discovery. Put it back.
    The man’s T-shirt was sticking to his skin. He looked closer. Turned the body over a little, even though he shouldn’t. That kind of thing was totally against protocol. Really, they ought to take photographs and search the place before anyone moved the body—but now his interest’d been piqued.
    That’s when he saw the next weird thing, on the arm. Track marks from an injection needle. Small bruises around every puncture. Completely clear: what he had in front of him on the floor was a murdered junkie.
    He heard sounds on the other side of the cellar door.
    Backup was coming.
    Ljunggren entered the room. Two younger inspectors brought up the rear. Thomas knew them, good guys.
    They eyed the body.
    “Damn, he sure slipped on all the blood someone spilled everywhere,” Ljunggren said.
    They grinned. Police humor—blacker than this cellar’d been before Thomas’d switched on the lights.
    Orders started sputtering out from their radios—Hansson, the senior officer, had arrived, gave orders to have the area cordoned off. Did what he usually did: ordered, organized, hollered. Still, it was a small operation. If it’d been anything other than a junkie in the stairwell, they would’ve called in all the squad cars they could get. Cordoned off half the city. Stopped trains, cars, subways. Now there was no real hurry.
    The ambulance crew showed up after seven minutes.
    Let the body lie there for a while. A technician came down, snapped some photos with a digital camera. Analyzed blood. Secured evidence. Investigated the crime scene.
    The ambulance guys brought a stretcher down. Covered the body with blankets. Hauled it up.
    Disappeared.

    When there’s action, it’s fun. When it’s fun, the night flies by. But they’d combed home zilch. Ljunggren sighed. “Why did we even bother making a whole operation out of this thing? It’s just one less drunk who probably would’ve started a fight ’cause the liquor store opened three minutes late some Saturday morning when we’re really not in the mood to deal with bullshit like that.” Thomas thought, Sometimes Ljunggren can really talk.
    They interrogated some neighbors at random. Photographed the area around the basement. Sent two guys to the subway station. Wrote down the names and phone numbers of people in the building next door, promised to be back the following day. The technicians checked for fingerprints and swabbed for DNA traces in the basement. A couple of cruisers blocked off the street and stopped a sampling of cars down on Hägerstensvägen. Hardly anyone out and about at this hour anyway.
    They were quiet on the way back to the station in Skärholmen. Tired. Even though nothing’d happened, it’d been an intense experience. Would feel good to shower.
    Thomas couldn’t stop thinking about the body in the basement. The busted face and the fingertips. Not that he felt sick or thought it was hard to deal or anything—too much nastiness’d crossed his path already; it didn’t affect him. It was something else. The shady aspect of this whole business—the fact that the junkie seemed to have been offed in a way that was just a tad too sophisticated.
    But what was strange,