Three Minutes Read online

  THREE MINUTES

  Also by Roslund and Hellström

  Pen 33

  Box 21

  Cell 8

  Three Seconds

  Two Soldiers

  New York • London

  © 2016 by Roslund and Hellström

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Elizabeth Clark Wessel

  Cover credit: Photographs © Arcangel Images; Design © Ghost

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  eISBN 978-1-68144-411-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Roslund, Anders, 1961– author. | Hellström, Börge, 1957– author.

  Title: Three minutes / Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström.

  Other titles: Tre minuter. English

  Description: New York : Quercus, 2017. | First published in Swedish as Tres Minuter ([Stockholm] : Pirat Förlaget, [2016]).

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016039046 (print) | LCCN 2016055304 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681444130 (hardback) | ISBN 9781681444123 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681444116 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681444109 (library ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Police—Sweden—Fiction. | Undercover operations—Sweden—Fiction. | Drug traffic—Sweden—Fiction. | Political kidnapping—Fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT9877.28.O77 T7313 2016 (print) | LCC PT9877.28.O77 (ebook) | DDC 839.73/8—dc23

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Roslund and Hellström

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Always Alone

  Trust Only Yourself

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  The Next Day

  Four Months Later

  Another Four Months Later

  Heartfelt thanks from the authors

  Guide

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Contents

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  iv

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  always alone.

  IT’S A GOOD day. Sometimes you just know.

  Hot, like yesterday, like tomorrow. But easy to breathe. It rained recently, and he takes a deep, slow breath and holds the air inside, lets it lie there in his throat before releasing it a little bit at a time.

  He exits a city bus that was once painted red, that departed just an hour ago from a bus stop in San Javier, Comuna 13—a few high-rises and some low-rises, as well as buildings that aren’t entirely walled in. Some call it an ugly neighborhood, but he doesn’t agree, he lives there, has lived there for all of his nine years. And it smells different. Not like here, in the city center. Here the scent is unfamiliar—exciting. A large square that has probably always been here. Just like the fish stalls and meat stalls and vegetable stands and fruit stands and the tiny restaurants with only three or four seats. But all these people crowding around, jostling each other, surely they haven’t always been here? People are born, after all, and die—they’re replaced. That’s how it works.

  Camilo crosses the square through narrow aisles and continues into La Galería. Here there are even more people. And it’s a little dirtier. But still lovely with all those apples and pears and bananas and peaches lying in heaps, changing colors. He collides with an older man who swears at him. Then he walks a little too close to the bunches of big blue grapes and some fall to the ground. He picks them up and eats as many as he can before a woman who resembles his mother starts screaming the same curses that the older man just screamed at him. But he doesn’t hear them, he’s already moved on to the next stall and the next and the next. And when he passes by the last stalls of fish and long-since-melted ice—and here the smell is not exciting, dead fish don’t like the heat and the ones that haven’t sold by lunch smell even worse—he knows he’s almost there. A few more steps and there they are. Sitting on wooden benches and wooden chairs in front of the heavy tables that don’t belong to the merchants or the kitchens, which someone put at the far end of the market, where everything is sold out. That’s what they do, sit and wait together. Before this year he hadn’t been here too many times, he’s only nine. But he does as they do—sits down and waits and hopes that today, today he’ll get a mission. He hasn’t gotten one yet. The others are a little older—ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, a few even as old as fourteen, their voices are starting to drop, cutting through the air and occasionally losing grip, falling out of their mouths and fluttering here and there just when they’re about to speak. He wants to be like them, earn money like them. Like Jorge. His brother. Who is seven years his elder. Who was seven years his elder, he’s dead now. The police came to their home, rang the doorbell, and told his mother that a body had been found in Río Medellín. They thought it might be him. They wanted his mother to come with them and identify him. She had. He hadn’t been in the water long enough to become unrecogni
zable.

  “Hi.”

  Camilo greets them timidly, so timidly that they don’t even notice, or at least it seems so to him. He sits at the very edge of one of the benches where the other nine-year-olds are sitting. He comes here every day after school now. The voices that cut the air, who’ve been here longer, don’t go to school at all, nobody forces them to, so they sit here all day. Waiting. Talking. Laughing sometimes. But meanwhile they keep glancing at the space between the last stalls—cauliflower and cabbages like soft footballs piled up on one side and large fish with staring eyes on the other—glancing, but pretending they don’t care at all. Everybody knows they’re fooling each other and still everybody pretends their eyes aren’t glancing in that direction, when that’s all they’re actually doing. Because that’s the direction they usually come from. You have to be ready. Clientes. That’s what they call them.

  Camilo takes a deep breath and can feel a cloud forming in his belly, white and fluffy and light. And a kind of pleasure fills his whole body, his heart beats faster, and the red on his cheeks deepens.

  He wants it so much.

  He’s known since this morning. Today somebody is going to give him his very first mission. After today, he’ll have done it. And once you’ve done it, you’re forever somebody else.

  It’s hotter now. But still easy to breathe. A city that’s fifteen hundred meters above the sea, and when people come just for the day, as customers often do, they complain about the lack of oxygen, their lungs seize up, and they swallow again and again trying to get more.

  There. There. A cliente.

  Camilo sees him at the exact same time as everybody else. And he perks up just like everybody else, stands up, and hurries toward him, flocking around him. A fat man with no hair wearing a black suit and black hat with small, sharp eyes like a bird. The man examines the kids flocking around him and after a fraction of a second, as intense as the beating of a drum, he points to someone in the middle. Someone who’s eleven, almost twelve, who’s done this before. And they go off together.

  Shit. Camilo swallows what could be a sob. Shit, shit, shit. That might be the only one who comes today. And he’d been so sure it was his turn.

  An hour passes. Then another. He yawns, decides not to blink an eye, counts how many times he can raise and lower his left arm in sixty seconds, sings the kind of silly children’s song that gets stuck in your head.

  Someone is coming. He’s sure of it. Determined steps, headed straight for them. And everybody does exactly like last time, like always, jumping up, flocking around him, fighting to be seen.

  A man this time too. Powerfully built, not fat like the other one, but big. An Indian. Or maybe not. Mestizo. Camilo recognizes him. He’s seen him here before. He comes all the way from Cali, and he’s older than Camilo’s father. Or he thinks so anyway, he’s never seen his father and his mother won’t say much about him. The Indian, or Mestizo, usually gives his missions to Enrique—Enrique who hasn’t been around for a while, who’s done this a total of seventeen times.

  They are all filled with expectation. Usually no more than a few come here with a mission, and this is probably today’s last chance before they all have to head home having accomplished nothing more than waiting. They surround the Mestizo, and he watches them try to look like adults.

  “You’ve all done this before?”

  They all answer simultaneously. “Sí!”

  Everyone but Camilo. He can’t raise his hand and say yes, can’t lie. The others shout: eight times and twelve times and twenty-one times. Until the man looks at him.