A Stone's Throw by James Ziskin (best sci fi novels of all time .TXT) 📕

Instead, they would employ knives, crossbows, and, for flair, the battle axes that they had practiced endlessly with as teens, but never got to use in actual battle. Malte was more than proficient in every weapon imaginable, but in axe technique he yielded to Ylva, who had named her blade after a she-troll.

“Are we being childish, do you think?” She and her close-as-kissing cousin sharpened their axe blades in the motor pool workshop at the Voss family estate in Västvall.

“To me, the challenge of limiting ourselves is invigorating,” Malte replied. “If you told me, ‘bare hands only,’ I’d go along with that, too.”

Ylva felt the same way. Since childhood she and Malte had mirrored each other’s looks, moods, and desires. Twin cousins, they called themselves. “Ylte and Malva,” the other members of the family teased.

So.

Silence, stealth, cunning. Their bywords for the mission.

It was easy enough to pick up the trail of the blue Saab as it left the baron’s estate, heading into the mountains toward the border of Norway. There was only a single main highway threading through the area, running alongside the Hede River. Malte drove the Porsche Macan turbo, hanging back from their quarry, moving up meter by meter for a visibility check before dropping off again.

Ylva agreed with Malte that the New York detective and her Sami partner would be forced to stop before the Norwegian border. They were most likely heading to where their idiot cousin Jarl was hiding out. No one in the Voss family could understand how Hammar and Brand were able to track Jarl’s progress through the country so closely. Everywhere Jarl went, the two seemed to show up.

“Probably some GPS device,” Gabriel Voss had said, igniting a family discussion on whether any technology existed that could track a GPS tracker. After a quick internet search Malte reported that there didn’t seem to be.

“You’ll have to invent one, Gabriel,” he said lightly to his uncle.

“Not a bad idea,” the man said. “But you two can’t wait around for that.”

Following Veronika Brand and Krister Hammar proved to be the next best opportunity. Jarl Voss had clearly gone rogue, embarked on one of his wild-hair adventures. Via GPS tracker or some other mysterious way, Brand and Hammar had known where he was every step of the journey.

“Find the damned idiot,” Gabriel had told Ylva and Malte. “Bring Jarl back and we’ll put him in a barrel, feed him through a hole. He gives us any more trouble, we plug up the hole.”

On getting the call from Magnusson, the baron’s man, Ylva and Malte had geared up, commando style, and moved out. While driving they liked to play opera arias at top volume. The Porsche Macan sported a bumper sticker that said, in Swedish, “How to win a biathlon—Anyone passes you on skis, shoot that fucker in the ass.”

When the Saab had stopped and pulled into the woods, they did the same, posting themselves on a ridge above a cottage along the river.

“The dead man’s place,” Ylva whispered as they examined the chalet through field glasses. “It belonged to Mattias Rapp, Jarl’s right hand.”

Malte nodded. “The body in our game locker at Västvall.”

“So it would make sense Jarl would set up there, waiting to cross the border,” Ylva said.

From their post on the ridge they were blocked from a view of Jarl’s Volvo parked on the other side of the chalet. The sighting would have sealed the deal for them. Neither could they see the big Scania truck parked farther down the highway.

As usual in such situations, they indulged in a quick back and forth over choice of ski wax, with Malte arguing for high fluoro and Ylva rolling her eyes.

“It’s like minus eight and dropping, this snow is way too dry for high fluoro,” she said, kicking a small flurry at him with her boot. “Gotta go blue.”

They were waxing not for grip but for speed. It wasn’t a debate, not really, more a pressure-valve release of nervousness and anticipation. They went with LF, blue low fluoro wax.

It turned out not to matter much. They had great good luck, schussbooming down off the ridgeline like valkyries as darkness dropped. Suddenly there was Krister Hammar, walking alone on the frozen river. Ylva dispatched the meddlesome lawyer with a battle axe blow to the head. Together she and Malte dumped his body through a jagged crevice in the ice, watching it slide into the river’s abyss.

But disaster struck a few minutes later, on their approach to the chalet through the woods. Ylva worried about not knowing the exact location of the New York detective. She feared Brand might be armed. At any rate the woman might prove to be a hard case. Instead, they came upon Jarl Voss, consumed with fear, nose running with snot, fleeing panicked through the woods with a monster wolf on his tail.

She and Malte had to react purely on instinct. Malte dropped the bizarre beast with a single crossbow shot through the heart, a spectacular feat given the low-light conditions and movement of the target. Ylva gave a yell of triumph and approval.

“Fräckt!”

It was to be the last achievement of Ylva’s hero cousin. Yet another strange apparition arrived on the scene, stranger still than the beast, a young punk with his pink hair shorn into a Mohawk style haircut.

The newcomer had a pistol in his hand. He raised a gun and fired.

Her beloved Malte fell next to the downed beast.

Ylva retaliated, killing the shooter.

She knelt and put an arm underneath Malte, cradling her twin cousin, watching the light fade from his eyes.

“Help me!” she screamed at the pathetic, fear-struck Jarl.

The stupid kid stared, paralyzed.

Feeling a rare, gut-wrenching sense of panic herself, Ylva dragged the bleeding Malte out of the woods with no help from her younger cousin. Jarl was a Voss, so she resisted the urge to end his pathetic life. He was the cause of this fiasco. His drug dealing and human trafficking had led