for about six months, after meeting in a bar somewhere in the city centre, and because she had been feeling particularly lonely and in need of physical intimacy she had, against all of her usual principles, gone back to his flat with him that same evening. The sex had been good right from the start and after that it had been difficult to stop.
There was something about him that appealed to her, that got her going. Not that he was especially handsome or exaggeratedly sexy, he was probably somewhere in the middle on both scales. Maybe it was simply the fact that he wasn’t a police officer but just a completely normal bloke who lived in the completely normal world that appealed to her most. Either way, they met up every now and then, usually when she was in the mood. She wasn’t after a relationship and he had never protested against the arrangement that had developed. But she still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was exploiting him. Rebecca suspected, or possibly hoped, that he already had a proper relationship, but she had chosen not to ask and he hadn’t felt obliged to tell her anything more about himself. Whatever it was they shared, it wasn’t about feelings but physical attraction, and that didn’t really call for any details, or at least that was what she liked to think.
Oh well, it probably didn’t matter. They were fuck-buddies, to be blunt about it, even if she wasn’t fond of that particular term. She stroked his back guiltily and heard him mutter something in his sleep.
The Game Master had promised him an entirely new world, and so far he wasn’t fucking disappointed! He could watch the clips any number of times, and by now he probably already had.
Assignment number four had been pretty neat. He had removed the wheel nuts from a Ferrari belonging to a sleazy lawyer while the victim was sitting ten metres away having an after-work drink with his hotshot friends at Sturehof’s pavement café. The car was of course parked in the parking bay for deliveries beside the concrete mushroom in the middle of Stureplan, so that everyone could see his flashy penis extension, but in spite of that no-one had noticed a thing.
The tools were waiting for him, neatly wrapped up in a plastic bag, inside the cistern of one of the toilets in the Sture Gallery, and once HP had got going it had taken him less than three minutes to remove the nuts on the wheels facing the street.
Even though it was Friday evening and the place was crowded, no-one reacted to what he was doing, not even the cop who strolled past just half a metre behind his back. It was actually bloody weird that people cared so little about what other people were doing, at least until Mr Sleazy Lawyer tried to do a wheel-spinning u-turn to head back up Kungsgatan.
Both wheels flew off more or less instantly and suddenly the stupid bastard got considerably more attention than he had been expecting. Apart from the hundred or so who stood there laughing and pointing in an outpouring of Schadenfreude, HP counted at least five others apart from him who were filming the beautiful car as it sat there straddling Sturegatan. The shiny and presumably absurdly expensive disc-brakes were properly embedded in the tarmac, and according to the report in the Dagens Nyheter the following day it had taken almost an hour for the recovery truck to get the vehicle cleared out of the way.
But by then HP was long gone. He hated Stureplan, more than ever at weekends, and didn’t want to spend any more time there than was absolutely necessary.
The last he had seen of the car’s owner was the grown man standing there crying like a little girl, leaning on the boot of his ruined darling car, but HP hadn’t felt the slightest bit of sympathy for his victim. Mr Sleazy must have deserved the treatment, you could tell just by looking at his stuck-up face, his back-slicked hair all greasy with Rogaine, and his flashy suit. With a car like that, you were practically asking for trouble, and that’s precisely what HP had provided.
HP had never liked lawyers anyway. The only time he had ever been stupid enough to employ a law-twister, it hadn’t exactly helped him. The bastard had been completely incompetent, hadn’t done his homework, kept calling him Håkan and stank of drink masked by mints in court. HP should have known better than to accept the first name suggested by the court, but he had only just turned eighteen and even if he knew all the signs of heavy drinking backwards, it would take a bit longer before he had the same sort of grasp of the legal system.
Everything had been a complete fucking mess that time.
Ten months in a secure young offenders’ institution had been the result.
Public defender, my arse! More like ‘public defiler’, as he recalled.
So now at least he got the chance to deliver a bit of payback to the sleazy ambulance chasers, and it felt pretty damn good!
Suck my cock, you stuck-up Stureplan wankers!
And crooks, he thought to himself, to judge by Mr Crybaby’s ridiculously expensive ride.
As per his instructions, he had the wheel nuts couriered anonymously to the law-firm the following week, and for the first time it dawned on him that everything, the whole deal with the Game, was a hell of a lot bigger than he had imagined.
Because what was really the point of sending the wheel nuts back to Mr Sleazy? It was almost like doing him a favour, probably saving him a few thousand kronor on the repair bill. Why not ditch them in the waters of Nybroviken and have done with it?
The only answer he could think of was that someone wanted to see the look on the lawyer’s face when he got the package. And that was when the penny finally dropped. That there were actually other players like him out there, not just in the USA, but here in Sweden, and probably in other countries as well.
He had already worked out that the gorilla on Birkagatan was involved somehow, and that the stupid fucker hadn’t kept his mouth shut and had blabbed about the Game. That was obviously what the text he had sprayed on the door had been about. And it probably wasn’t Lewis Carroll himself who had left the passcard in the book or worked out how to switch off the clock on the NK roof …
But the bigger picture still didn’t really sink in before he realized that someone had been selected to conclude the assignment with the lawyer. That someone would stand there filming as the GQ-reading little wanker opened the parcel and went red upon discovering his own missing wheel nuts. Someone just like himself, with an assignment to carry out, a camera to document it with – and the same applied to whoever it was who managed to come up with a Ferrari spanner and hide it in a toilet-cistern in the Sture Gallery. So at least three little assignments and the same number of Players, all that organization just to give Mr Sleazy a weekend he’d never forget.
The thinking involved was fucking refined, he had to take his hat off to whoever it was who organized all this.
The assignment had given him 1,000 points, and the next morning he had found a foreign credit-card on his doormat. This time he guessed the pin-code correctly first time.
In total the account turned out to contain 2,300 US dollars, which matched the number of points he had on the list. He just had to stick the card into the nearest cashpoint and withdraw what he wanted.
It had been more than enough for the Sopranos box-set he had been dying to get his hands on, and a family-pack of best Moroccan from his friendly neighbourhood dealer. Then he had settled back on the sofa, puffed the magic dragon and blown the heads off some rookies in Counterstrike. Then home-delivery pizza and a bit of male-bonding with the boys in the Jersey mafia. Life was pretty sweet!
But in spite of all this, it was the fifth assignment that was the really cool one. The one that transformed him into Mr Clip of the Week, first Runner-up and, a few hours later, the Omnipotent Pope of Pussy-pranging.
As
