Chasing the Storm
by Martin Molsted
Title: Chasing the
Storm
Author: Martin Molsted
Genre: Thriller (with a
hint of mystery and a tiny dash of romance).
Publisher: EdgeRunner
Publishing - Publisher 978-82-93316.
Publication date
(eBook - Amazon world-wide): November 27th 2013. Other distributors
will be announced in early 2014. Hardcover and Paperbacks also coming 2014.
BUY LINK:
Brief Excerpt from Chasing the Storm
Chapter
1: Orfeoplatz
April
9, 2009
He’d
seen people die before, but never on a pretty afternoon in Hamburg.
Torgrim Rygg was
walking to the bar he’d found near the Chilehaus and was halfway across the
Orfeoplatz, when the pigeons suddenly clattered up and the woman walking
towards him stopped, aghast. She put her hand to her throat and chewed, her
eyes on his face, as though she recognized him and was trying to remember his
name. She was middle-aged, with sturdy dyed-blonde hair and a stiff bosom cased
in satin. She turned in a circle, staggering a little on her heels, and when
she faced him again the top of her blouse was crimson. She was looking at him
as she fell. Her handbag burst open, spilling lipstick, tampons and a glasses
case onto the cobblestones. She kicked for a few seconds, as though she were
still trying to walk, and then, with a gurgling whine, spewed a mouthful of
blood and lay quiet.
In the immensely slow
seconds that followed, he watched the runnels of blood grouting the
cobblestones. Her hand had fallen away from her throat, and the blood beat from
two holes, one on each side of the voicebox. And in that moment, he remembered
the small sound just before the pigeons had scattered: a crisp tok. It was a sound he hadn't heard for
twenty years, and one that sent a line of flame down each nerve.
Rygg glanced quickly
around the square. He was the only
person to have noticed the woman. A businessman strode past with his briefcase
and a mother was fixing the strap on a stroller. Two couples were drinking
coffee under an awning. Then, in the hoop of shadow that was the entrance to an
alley, a darker clot detached from the wall. A mustached face caught the light
for a moment, and then the figure vanished. Shouting, Rygg ran toward the
alley, but it branched almost immediately into three smaller alleys. The figure
was nowhere to be seen. He chose the left-hand branch at random and ran for a
little way, his shoes making a huge racket off the walls, then stopped, gulping
for air. His belly hurt. He leaned against the wall. Massaging his gut, he
labored back to the square.
There was now a huge
throng around the fallen woman, thirty people at least, jostling and craning.
He couldn't imagine where they’d all come from. Four people were facing away
from the crowd, talking on their cell phones and gesturing. The pigeons had
settled at the edge of the square, on the steps of a church. Rygg just stood
there, watching. He glanced around the square. On the far side, by a bank of
flowers, a man sat with his back to a wall, arms crossed. Alone amongst the
onlookers, he seemed unmoved by the commotion. Rygg narrowed his eyes, then he
walked swiftly over to the man and crouched beside him. The man’s face was
gaunt and gray, a stark contrast to the gaudy roses and carnations. He was
clutching his upper arm so tightly the knuckles were white. Blood oozed between
his fingers.
“You've been shot,”
Rygg stated.
The man just stared at
him.
“I’ll get help,” Rygg
said, but the man, with a grimace, stretched the hand of his wounded arm toward
him.
“Please reach into the
breast pocket of my shirt and take out my cigarettes,” he said. His accent was
a little too rounded to be English, and his voice seemed far too steady for a
man who’d just been shot. Rygg did as he asked. They were cheap Gauloises. The
lighter was in the packet. He placed a cigarette between the man’s lips and lit
it.
“Now I’m going to get
someone,” Rygg said.
“Please, sir, if you
want to help me you will not do so.”
“Look, you've just been
shot in the arm. You’re lucky you’re alive – that woman’s dead, I think.” He
pointed back into the square. “But you need to stop the bleeding, get some
stitches. I’ll stay with you if you need me.”
“You are a tourist?”
the man asked unexpectedly.
“Yes. Well, here on
business, but mixing it with some pleasure.”
“You are staying in a
hotel?”
“The Crillon-Hapsburg.
On—”
“Hasselbrookstrasse. I
know it. Please. If you want to help me, take me to your room. For one hour,
not more. You will be recompensed.”
“I’m
not after money, I just . . . look, you need a doctor. You can’t just—”
The man turned to Rygg.
His eyes were dark, the eyelids bruised by too much tobacco or too many late
nights. He sucked on the cigarette, then took it out of his mouth and tapped
the ash away. “This is an unusual request, I know,” he said. “I am going to ask
you to trust me. If you want to help me, if you want to keep me out of danger,
take me to your hotel room. For one hour only, I assure you. Then I will leave
you alone.”
Rygg looked at him.
Then he shrugged. “It’s your life, I suppose, but you’re bleeding all over the
place.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, and knotted it
above the wound, pulling it tight.
The man nodded his
thanks. With his bloody hand, he grabbed a bunch of red carnations from the
plastic bucket beside him and clutched them to the wound. Rygg helped him up
and led him around the block – avoiding the open space at the platz – holding
his good arm by the crook like a lover.
If the concierge thought it was
strange that Rygg returned so soon, with a small, pale man bearing a bunch of
carnations, he revealed it only in an excess of courtesy. He handed over the
key with a smile and an inclination of the head.
In the room, the man
handed the flowers to Rygg, who set them in the vase on the dresser, then
followed him into the bathroom. He had shoved up his sleeve and was examining
his arm. The bullet had gone through the meat just above the elbow.
“Did it get the bone?”
Rygg asked, trying to remember what he’d learned about wound triage so many
years ago. The man shook his head. He rinsed off the blood in the sink. His face
was expressionless, but once, when he was running a finger around the rim of
the hole, he stopped and placed his elbows on the sink and breathed hard for a
few seconds.
“Can I—” Rygg started,
but the man shook his head and continued cleaning. The skin around the entrance
and exit wounds was bluish and swollen. Blood welled in the holes and dripped
into the sink. It looked very dark, almost purple, against the white enamel. He
turned to Rygg. “Do you have vodka?”
“Aquavit. I could use a
drink myself. Ice? 7-Up?”
The man shook his head.
Rygg fetched the bottle
of Løiten Linie’s and two glasses. He poured a couple fingers into a whiskey
glass. “More,” the man said. Rygg poured the glass two-thirds full and handed
it to him. But instead of drinking, he sloshed the aquavit across his arm,
angling it so it entered the holes.
“Now,” he said, “many
times in hotel rooms they have a little, how do you call it, a bag of sewing
supplies. Needles, buttons.”
“Sewing
kit. I've got one, actually, I think. Never used it. You’re not going to—?”
“May I use it?”
“Sure.” He rummaged in
the exterior pockets of his luggage until he found the little kit, packed by
his wife before the divorce. He didn't even know how to sew, but she’d said it
might come in handy.
“Thread the largest
needle for me,” said the man.
“What color?”
“Any color. White.” He
took the needle and dropped it into the aquavit, coiling the thread in after
it. He dabbled his fingers in the aquavit, then fished the needle out. Sitting
on the toilet, he began to sew the hole on the far side of his forearm closed,
bending to the wound and working carefully.
Rygg sat on the edge of
the bathtub and watched. “That’s not very sanitary,” he said. “I’d see a doctor
if I were you.” The man didn't answer. After a while, he rinsed the needle in
the glass and asked Rygg to put on another length of thread.
Still
bent over the wound, the man said, “You are not English.”
“Norwegian. I worked in
London for five years, though. Yourself?”
“At this time, the less
you know about me the better.”
When he was done he was
all bloody again, and he washed himself off in the sink once more. The wounds
were closed with little pursed lines of stitches. The man loosened the
handkerchief tourniquet with his teeth and pushed it down over the wounds. He
slid the needle into the towel, then he took out his wallet and handed it to
Rygg. It was ancient, fissured black leather. “Open it,” he instructed. The
wallet contained about a thousand euros, in fifty-euro bills. “You will leave
me fifty euros,” the man said.
“No,” said Rygg. “I’m
not taking any money.”
“I am buying your suit
jacket. You will leave me fifty euros, please, and take the rest of the money.”
Rygg put the wallet on
the edge of the sink and slipped out of his jacket. He helped the man into it.
It was much too big, and he rolled up the sleeves, as if he was helping a child
get dressed. “Do you know who it was?” he asked.
“What?”
“Who the man was. The
man who shot you.”
“That is of no
importance. Listen. Take the money. But please, if people come asking
questions, you know nothing. Not my name, not where I am from. I told you
nothing. Tell them the truth.”
“I’m not taking your
money. If you need anything . . .” Rygg put the wallet in the pocket of the
suit jacket and patted the man’s shoulder. He could feel his bones through the
cloth.
“You have already
helped me more than you can imagine. I give you my thanks. And now you can
assist me, sir, by not contacting anybody about this incident, or even telling
your friends about it.” And suddenly the man was looking straight at him.
Rygg shrugged. “No
problem.”
The man gave a short,
decisive nod. “I thank you again.” Sluicing the blood out of the sink, he ran
his palm around the basin several times, then held his hands under the running
water for a full minute. He was shivering slightly.
“Sit for a minute,”
Rygg said. “Do you want a drink?”
The little man shook
his head. And suddenly he was out the door and Rygg was left staring at the
enormous whorls of the carnations in the vase. He picked up the bottle to pour
himself some more aquavit, and suddenly his hand was shaking so that he had to
set the bottle down. He thought he heard shouts in Arabic, like echoes from the
past, but when he raised his head, there was just a ragged cacophony of car horns
from the street outside.
“Slapp av, Torgrim. Relax,” he told himself. He poured the glass a
third full and made it to the bed. He switched on the television. Some German
variety show. A man in a tuxedo seemed to be trying to get a woman to take off
her shirt. He flicked through the channels until he got something in English.
More about that ship in the Baltic – the hijackers had apparently abandoned it,
but now the ship had disappeared. The Alpensturm.
The announcer pointed to a map with a dotted line tracing the ship’s passage,
and he saw Hamburg, just below the announcer’s wand, nestled in its web of
channels. He flicked through until he found an old Hollywood movie – Bogart and
Bacall squabbling about something – and sat sipping his aquavit and shaking his
head. It seemed like sometime last year that he had been walking through the
Orfeoplatz on his way to a quiet drink. In his memory, the platz before that
soft, crisp tok had an entirely
different texture from the platz following the shooting, when everything moved
so slowly and seemed so bright.
Should he call the
police? Tell them about the woman at least, about the shadow in the alley? He
shook his head. People die all the time. It wasn't that big a deal. If he sat
here sipping his aquavit for a while, everything would be all right. But he
found it hard to concentrate on what the actors were saying. He stared out the
window, at the ornate facades across the street. After a while, he opened the
balcony doors and went and leaned on the railing. He was still shaking his
head.
Did
you enjoy this excerpt?
Author Bio:
Chasing
the Storm is Martin Molsted's debut novel, although he has been actively
engaged in writing shorter fiction, as well as screenplays since 2009. When he
is not working as an Archivist in a Fortune 500 engineering company, he writes
fiction and non-fiction.
He
enjoys playing music, singing, travelling, nice food, great wine, tasty beer,
hot rods and awesome custom built motorcycles.
Martin
Molsted lives in Asker, a small town between the greater cities Oslo and
Drammen, in eastern Norway. He lives together with his French wife and their
two daughters. No cats. No dogs.
He is
currently working on the storylines for a trio of further Rygg & Marin
thrillers, so stay tuned for more compelling and intriguing action.
See
what other readers are saying about Chasing the Storm:
"…An intelligent
thriller…"
"…Realistic Thriller
Delivers…"
"…Fun read!,.."
"…Interesting story, enthralling characters..."
"…Outstanding
Thriller…"
"…A high-octane
adventure…"
"…Real
page-turning thriller,…"
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