WTF

"So," said Captain Jansen, "I am supposed to believe this boat of yours just left you here because you were late. Why were you late?" Dick and I looked at each other.

"We were, uh," and I was interrupted by the sound of shouting somewhere outside the door. The captain looked at Hanson, who looked at the door. The yelling was loud, but muffled enough to be incomprehensible. It got louder. A loud crashing, a scream, another smashing sound like furniture breaking, and silence. The captain motioned with his head at Hanson, still standing beside us, toward the door. Hanson opened the door, took a step out, and jumped back inside the door, and slammed it shut. A siren started blaring inside the building. Hanson shouted something in Danish to the captain, who responded by looking like he had been slapped. I heard a quiet stuttering noise, like someone playing a drumroll with hands on a table. A line of holes appeared in the door on either side of Hanson, and he arched his back, and fell forward on the floor between me and Dick.

We looked at Hanson lying between us. The back of his blue-black jacket had three holes between the letters that spelled POLITI in bright yellow. The "L" and the first "I"  were turning red fast. 

We jumped to our feet and looked at the Captain. His tiny red-rimmed blue eyes were open pretty wide now. There were two holes on either side of his head in the wall behind him. Hanson had been standing between the captain and the door. He jumped to his feet just as the door smashed open and a huge man in a black coat took a half step into the room.

Dick and I were almost against the wall, and to either side of the door, so he didn't see us at first. In guttural, heavily accented English, he barked, "Where are they?"

The captain looked at him and opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, but nothing came out.

"I give you one chance! Where are the two men?"

The captain bucked up a little, and almost shouted, "You are under arrest! This is the police!"

The gunman answered with a three shot burst from a small, nasty looking gun with a long thick barrel, like a big pistol. It didn't make much noise for being inside and right there.

The captain's face changed shape, and the wall behind his head splattered with grey and red goop and white pieces of bone as the back of his head exploded. Even though he had to be seriously dead, he still stood there, frozen,  for about a half a second and then he dropped to the floor all at once, loose,  like a puppet with his strings cut. 

The man stepped into the room, and as he did, he saw Dick to his right, out of the corner of his eye. In the time it took for him to turn his head to the the right, I had time to suddenly be scared shitless,  fell sorry for myself, and kick him in the side of the knee, brutally perfectly. It made a very loud crack, and I remember being surprised he didn't scream. 

Instead, he bowed his head and sort of growled. I didn't wait to see if he would fall from an injury that would have had anyone I knew, including and especially me, shrieking on the floor. I kicked him again, just as hard, in the exact same place. This time he screamed and hit the floor, dropping his gun to grab his ruined knee. If he hadn't, I might have been willing to let him shoot me. He landed right on top of Hanson, who didn't notice, of course.

.

I looked up from the dark man to Dick. He was almost pale, and I noticed he had a white bloodless  line around his dark lips. 

The siren was still going off, but it sounded miles away at the moment.

I stepped around the writhing hulk and kicked his gun away, harder than I meant to. It slid spinning under the captain's desk, and stopped with a sodden thud when it hit something soft. Oops.

The man looked up at me, still holding his knee, his hard, ugly face contorted in agony. 

He gasped, and through locked teeth hissed, "You are dead. I kill you for this." He closed his eyes for a second, and then looked at me with complete hatred. "Before, just business." He took a deep breath. "Now, it is for me, too." 

I looked down at him, and said, "Who the fuck are you, Chester?" "What have I done to you.? Before now, I mean." 

"All three of you are dead, but now mostly you." He closed his eyes and started making his growling noises again. For some reason I noticed his teeth looked like big Chiclets, all of them almost the same size and shape.

I looked up at Dick. "Do you know this guy?" 

Dick just stared down at the man, and slowly shook his head from side to side. "What are we going to do?" 

I didn't answer, because I had no idea. I went to the door and looked out. The twins were on the floor on either side of door. One was face down, and the other had his back to the wall, head slumped forward like a sleeping drunk. I looked down the hall and could see a pair of feet sticking out from under a desk, and nothing else. The siren seemed louder out here. I had the odd but likely accurate thought that no more than five minutes had passed since we heard the first sounds of a scuffle. 

Even in Greenland, lots of people would be here very soon.

 I turned back into the room to get Dick just in time to see  the gunman roll off of Hanson's body and lurch himself almost upright on his good right leg, with his left hanging uselessly. He caught himself on the front edge of the captain's desk, braced himself with his left hand and reached under his coat with his right. Out it came, holding a small pistol. 

Unbelieveable. Any normal human would have, should have passed out from sheer agony by now. I happen to know about these things, unfortunately. My heritage, my destiny, maybe even. Fighting. Shit.

Before he could figure out a way to turn around, I kicked him between the legs from behind as hard as I could. He crashed forward onto the desk, stayed there for a moment, and then slowly slid to the floor. I gave him a minute to get his balls back down out of his throat, and reached down and heaved him over on to his back. He was heavy as hell. He rolled over with his face two feet from mine. I jumped back like I had been bitten by a snake. I heard Dick hiss, "Shit!"

There was a metal square in the middle of his face where his nose should have been, right below his wide open, unblinking eyes. The base of the Captain's memo holder. Even Super Thug couldn't keep going with a six-inch nail stuck through his nose. 

I didn't want to touch him anymore, but I had to know who wanted to kill me. Us. I searched him, trying not to look at his face. 

There was nothing in any of his pockets but a crumpled note that had my name, Rommel's and Dick's, and the name of our hotel. as well as our former bar hangout. And another word I couldn't read, because it was written in Cyrillic alphabet. Russian?

"Jesus." 

"He isn't here, I am most sure of that.  And maybe we should not be either."

Dick was right. Time to go. I pocketed the scrap of paper, and snatched our passports off the desk.

We walked out of the room, past the twins, careful to step around the wide wet bloodstains on the cheap grey carpet. The lobby was a mess. There were at least three more bodies there in uniform, and no telling if they were dead or just close. Good thing it was a skeleton crew this time of night...or morning. 

The siren was semi-deafening now. I heard noises outside and below and looked out of the window. A dark sedan pulled away from the front of the building and accelerated down the frozen, gleaming street. Before it had gone a block, I could here more sirens mixing with the one that seemed to be right next to my head. The street cops were here. Four marked SUV's stopped suddenly in front of the building, each sliding a little on the slippery street, so that they were jumbled instead of in a line. Cops jumped out in pairs and started running to the doors. 

"Stairs," I said to  Dick, and we ran past the elevators to a door at the end of the hall. Dick threw it open, and we ran through. Closet. Shit. We ran out. There was another door at the other end. As I threw open that door, I heard the bell ringing at the elevator announcing the arrival of the car, and bad news. Stairs. We ran down, the stairwell door closing as the elevator doors opened.

We got to the bottom of the stairs and there was another hall, with a door at either end again. I started to open the one closest to us, and decided to have a peek out first. Lucky. The police SUV's were ten feet outside the door. 

I closed it.

We went to the other end of the hall, and peeked out. A parking lot, with only a half a dozen  old cars in it. Probably belong to the guys on the floor upstairs.  We exited the building. I started to run and so did Dick, but then I thought better of it, and said, "Let's walk." I was starting to shake. Dick looked pretty grim, too. We crossed the parking lot and went through an alley between two short squat buildings, and ended up on another street. There wasn't a soul to be seen. I realized I could here sirens blaring behind us, several, in layers of uneven sound. I looked at my watch. It was 3 a.m. In Greenland. It was dark and freezing, and it would be just about the same at noon. I never thought it would happen, but I wished I was back in Dallas, or even Louisiana. 

We walked in silence, heading back in the direction we had come from when we were at the bar before we met the Eskimo twin policemen, after the Eskimo girl died on our table and spilled our beers. Our boots made clacking sounds that echoed off the frozen buildings on either side of the street.

Dick was the one that broke the silence. 

"Now we are truly the most fucked of all, ever. And all because the fucking midget Rommell made us miss the boat."

I thought he might cry. I thought I might too. He was so right.