Life Deluxe (13 page)

Unfortunately, they couldn’t get too close. The best view they got was from a little hill about three hundred yards away, on the other side of the train tracks. According to the Finn: Wednesday was the day in the week when the CITs were driven. But the cash in transit companies apparently changed their routines a lot; it was impossible to know the exact time. They’d figure it out—the Finn’s insider would have to deliver.

Jorge fished out a pair of binoculars. Aimed, scouted. Spun the focus. Perfect view. Gravel and pavement around the building. The sun was glittering in the warehouse’s metal coating. The loading docks in a row, numbered: twenty-two of them. Yellow trucks with the Postal Service’s logo on them were driving in and out. Backing up. Postal workers in blue shirts were pushing carts with blue crates on them. Rolled the carts, one by one. It was regular mail—uninteresting, really. But could be good to see anyway.

They waited. Jorge unwrapped the plastic-covered sandwiches he’d bought at a deli.

They ate.

Kept their eyes open.

Drank orange soda.

At one o’clock, two black trucks drove in through the southern entrance. But J-boy already knew which loading docks they would stop at if they were carrying the right cargo, the ones that were blocked off: numbers twenty-one and twenty-two.

The point of the Finn’s plan: they wanted to pluck the delivery when it was being unloaded. Not up on the road or when the valuable cargo was in the depot. That way they’d avoid having to force the armored cars or the depot’s security system.

They kept scouting.

Jorge played with the camera, tried to film—they were too far away. The image quality sucked.

People climbed out of the trucks. Green uniforms, dark baseball caps. A few of them: with cell phones or walkie-talkies. A couple of batons. They worked quickly—pushed big steel carts with bars on the sides. The color of the bags with the large handles in the carts was clearly visible.

The Finn’s insider knew what he was talking about, that little snake.
That’s the way the security bags were supposed to look. Big handles. One and a half foot high. Black.

Shit. Bull’s-eye.

Jorgelito vs. the Postal Service’s assets in transit: one, zero.

Back at the 7-Eleven. He thought of the stack of bills at home in his apartment. At least eight large. Collected from the group. Mahmud had an identical stack at his house. One hundred and sixty-five hundred kronor bills wrapped with a rubber band. Stuffed into a plastic bag and hidden in the water tank of the toilet.

Jorge. Mahmud. Tom. Sergio. Javier. Robert. And the Svens: Jimmy and Viktor. Solid soldiers. Mahmud kept nagging:
We should bring Babak on board too
.

Hombre
could forget about it.

It was almost time for a big group meeting. Jorge’d gone over everything with the Finn. He was gonna present the plan to the boys. Bring them up to lightning speed: this shit was on a whole other level.

Jorge deleted the history in Internet Explorer. Closed down the browser. Got up.

In his hand: the duffel with the gat.

Mahmud was waiting outside in a Range Rover Vogue that he’d borrowed from that Babak fag. On paper, some forty-year-old homeless guy was registered for the SUV. Babak: a douchebag, but no dummy.

On their way to the storage facility. They were gonna drop off the Walther. Another of the Finn’s rules: never keep weapons at home.

More difficult that you might think. Jorge and Mahmud: loved to flash heat. Show off at parties. Just let the gun hang nonchalantly in the lining of their pants. Pose for their bros, take pictures, and text them back and forth. Test-shoot in the woods like real g-boys.

None of that now. Every last piece had to be put in storage.

Jorge turned to Mahmud. The Arab was wearing a fanny pack today. What did his bro have in that, anyway? J-boy considered asking if it was his makeup pouch but let it go.

Mahmud turned off the stereo. Said, “I came up with a math thing for the perfect crime.”

“Whattya mean, math thing?”

“Check it, man. You can count coins. Turn coins into bills. Fix and sell shit for years. You can pressure people, do little hits here and there, whatever. But this is the deal: the more dough, the better. The less time you risk sitting, the better. Right?”

“Obviously.”

“Right, so. If you take what you make and divide it by how much time you could get slammed with, you get a number. You with me?”

“
Hermano
, I passed motherfuckin’ math.”

“Right. So, for example, if you can get five million and risk five years in the pen or can get eight million and risk ten years in the pen. What do you do?”

“It depends.”

“But think about it like this, five million divided by five is one million. Eight million divided by ten is only eight hundred large. So you should do the first gig. More kronor per year. That’s how the HA think. They started doing a bunch of white-collar shit ’cause you get no time for it.”

“Okay, I follow. But you might want eight million instead of five, right? Maybe you wanna drive a Ferrari instead of a BMW.”

Fifteen minutes later. They rolled onto Malmvägen. Jorge’s childhood. The Million Program’s ten-story high-rises with peeling concrete. The place where he’d become who he was: J-boy, the C-Señor, the chain-buster, the café owner. Where his mama’d done the best she could. She still lived nearby, in Kista.

He wondered what people were saying about the car. The Range Rover: fucking enormous. Bus feel to it.

He thought: Malmvägen was a country within the country. A Sweden within Sweden. Its own nation where people like him knew the laws. That’s what Sven Sweden would never understand—’cause they’d gotten used to divorced moms, half-siblings, plastic papas, fourteen-year-old chicks who got raped when they were boozed out, old people put in homes, broken A-teamers with cirrhosis stretched out on park benches with families who didn’t give a shit. Far from perfect. So the projects had to protect themselves. Build their own system within the Swedish system. Preserve their thing. Most things in the hood were better than in their Sweden. People cared about each other. Life actually meant something. Friendship, love, hate—the feelings weren’t just fake.

He looked up. The basement storage unit was in building number forty-five.

Behind them: a sound. A light.

He turned around.

An undercover cruiser. Flashing lights on the roof. Jorge couldn’t believe he’d missed it. A Saab 9-5 with dark windows in back and a weird amount of radio antennae—the bucket screamed UC
pacos
.

He looked down at the duffel on the floor between Mahmud’s feet.

He stopped the car. “We’re fucked.”

Jorge turned around again. A civvie stepped out. It looked like there was one left sitting in the car.

He saw drops of sweat on Mahmud’s forehead.

A headache descended like an ambush. Fat jabs against the inside of his skull.

His stomachache churned faster, the gags pushed upward.

Fucked. Royally fucked
.

The cop approached. A chick. She was tall, blond. Hands tucked into her belt: fake relaxed. Jorge glimpsed a holster.

Mierda
.

The chick walked up to the driver’s side. Knocked on the window. Jorge rolled it down. How slowly could a car window be rolled down, anyway?

He stared straight ahead.

His thoughts, in chaos.

No point in playing the pig. No point in even thinking the thought.

At the same time: he was still fast. He was called Shawshank for a reason.

He saw Malmvägen’s weather-beaten walls outside the car. The entrances to the buildings—all the same. Only the graffiti was different. The culverts under the houses, the inner courtyards, the basements.

He knew his way around here.

He knew his way around better than Michael Scofield’d know his way around in
Prison Break
.

The cop chick poked her head in. “Would you please step out of the car?”

Jorge reacted. He slammed his foot on the gas. The car skipped forward. The V8 roared. Three hundred horsepower in full gallop.

The cop chick screamed something. Jorge didn’t care.

Mahmud yelled, “Drive, man! Drive!”

Jorge swung to the right, tugged at the wheel. His body almost slammed into the inside of the door.

He saw the cop car switch its lights on. Heard the sirens.

More pressure on the gas.

Malmvägen, fifty-five miles an hour. The cop car, a hundred yards behind them.

He was thinking with supersonic speed. Wanted to turn into one of the pedestrian walkways. At the same time: if they were able to dump the weapon, the cop fuckers would still try to nail them for reckless driving.

He kept pushing straight ahead. Drove all in.

Screeching right turn onto Bagarbyvägen. Didn’t pick up more speed than necessary.

Mahmud was yelling a bunch of mixed-up shit: “I’m gonna toss the piece!”

Jorge told him no.

They made another turn. An area with one-family homes. Jorge’d nicked so many apples here as a kid, he could’ve started a cider factory. He knew these roads. He knew his way better than Andy Dufresne. That’s right, Shawshank.

A little farther ahead: two side streets that turned. Perfect. If they took one of them, the cops wouldn’t have any idea which one. They shouldn’t be able to see him—as long as he made it around the bend. All they needed to do: stop and dump the duffel with the gat.

They had to get rid of this heat.

No way it could be game over already.

In the pen since a few weeks back. As a screw.

Officially, Hägerström had been fired from the police force.

Unofficially, he was an infiltrator.

Officially, he had a job as a corrections officer at the Salberga Penitentiary. Unofficially, his new assignment spelled: UC agent in the field.

His mom, Lottie, didn’t say much, but he knew that she worried about the fact that he wasn’t working as a police officer anymore.

Martin Hägerström already knew a lot about life on the inside. He had read reports and investigations about institutional life in Sweden, the analyses the Department of Corrections made about the inmates’ circumstances and problems, Torsfjäll’s own memos with insider information. But the real thing was different. The theories and the learned methods melted away in the reality of everyday life. The security routines appeared stiff and marginal. Even the information he had gotten from Mrado Slovovic seemed insubstantial.

What was important were the people; every single person was a challenge he had to tackle. Every single situation was a little theater show. But Hägerström knew he was a pro at that. He was always playing a part—that’s what it felt like, anyway.

A CO colleague took him under her wing. Esmeralda—the girl had at least ten earrings in each ear and arms that were more pumped than Madonna’s—explained the lay of the land. During every coffee break she prattled on about what she thought and what he ought to know. The rumors that were going around. The pecking order among the inmates. What actually happened when the cell doors were closed, who was considered hard, who was considered soft. She was a talker and used more soccer terminology than a sports commentator during live coverage. The prison staff had to read the game, she’d played an away-game
all weekend, some of the female screws were really offside, and so on. Esmeralda was a soccer fanatic and a prison fetishist. Hägerström appreciated the excess of information. There was a lot to learn.

The Salberga Penitentiary was relatively new and therefore in pretty good condition. But that didn’t make it any less hard on the inside—even if wasn’t one of the country’s supermaxes. The security system was carefully developed and fine-tuned. The contrast between the facade and the business going on behind it only reinforced one single truth: life behind bars couldn’t be changed by a fresh paint job and electronic supercameras. Certain things were just an indelible part of the prison institution.

There was no rec yard. The inmates were allowed out five at a time for one hour a day in a fenced-in quad. They could choose whom they walked out with. The division happened naturally: ethnic belonging, gang membership, type of crime. Some guys could go anywhere: bikers, Swedish robbers, drug kingpins. Certain guys went out on their own or in pairs: the ones who were convicted of sex-related crimes or domestic violence. And some stayed in their cells around the clock, no one even wanted to look at them: the snitches. They truly lived dangerously.

When a new inmate arrived, the same routine every time: someone on a block ordered the court papers. Everyone got to read, pronounce, denounce. Play the judge. The snitches had to drink piss out of plastic cups three times a day, got feces in their lunchboxes, were beaten bloody with billiard balls stuffed into socks. The snitches: the ones who requested to switch blocks after less than twenty-four hours and to transfer out after forty-eight. Once a rat, always a rat, they said. Hägerström thought about his assignment. If he succeeded but was found out, he might as well leave Sweden for good.