The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

point:
    ‘How much have you got with you?’
    ‘What about three million?’ asked Benny.
    Bosse said nothing for a few moments. He was thinking the situation over. He knew his brother well enough to feel certain that Benny would never call and joke about something like that. My little brother is filthy rich! Three million! Absolutely fantastic! But… perhaps he even had more?
    ‘What about four million?’ Bosse tried.
    But Benny had decided once and for all that he would never allow his big brother to steamroller him again, so he said:
    ‘We can of course stay at a hotel instead, if you think we are too much trouble.’
    Bosse said that his little brother had never been any trouble. Benny and his friends were heartily welcome and if Benny wanted to settle the old differences with two million – or even three and a half if he felt like it – then that was just a plus.
    Bosse gave Benny directions to his house; he thought it would take them a couple of hours to get there.
    Everything seemed to be working out for the best. And now the road was going to be both wide and straight.
    That was just what the Boss needed too, a wider and straighter road. For ten minutes, he had been stuck behind the bus while the BMW had been telling him that he hadn’t filled up with petrol since Stockholm, but when had he had time?
    The nightmare he feared was running out of petrol there in the middle of the forest and not being able to do anything except just look on as the yellow bus disappeared in the distance, perhaps with Bolt and Bucket and the suitcase or whoever and whatever it happened to contain.
    So the Boss acted with the energy and drive that he thought became a boss of a criminal club in Stockholm. He put his foot down on the accelerator, and in a second had passed the bus, continuing for another 150 metres before he put the BMW in a controlled skid and stopped, so his car now blocked the road. Then he pulled out his revolver and prepared to meet the vehicle he had just overtaken.
    The Boss was of a more analytical bent than his now dead or emigrated assistants. The idea of using his car to block the road and force the bus to stop originated of course in the fact that he was about to run out of petrol. But the Boss had also made the completely correct assumption that the bus driver would choose to stop. His conclusion was based on his belief that in general people do not deliberately ram other people on the roads, risking the lives and health of both.
    And indeed, Benny stood on the brakes as soon as he saw the BMW. The Boss had been right – about that, anyway.
    But in his calculations, he had failed to take into account the risk that the bus’s load might include an elephant weighing in at several tons. Had he done so, he would then have considered the effect this might have on the bus’s braking distance, not least bearing in mind that they were still on a gravel road.
    Benny really did do his very best to avoid a collision, but his speed was still almost 50 kph when the fifteen-ton bus, elephant and all, torpedoed the car in its path, upon which the car was thrown up into the air and flung twenty metres landing hard against an eighty-year-old fir tree.
    ‘That was probably number three,’ Julius guessed.
     
    All the two-legged passengers in the bus jumped out (easier for some than for others) to inspect the demolished BMW.
    Hanging over the steering wheel, looking suspiciously dead, was a man the friends did not know, and he was still holdinga revolver of exactly the same make as thug number two had threatened them with earlier that day.
    ‘They must have thought it would be third time lucky,’ said Julius. ‘They can think again.’
    Benny lamely objected to Julius’ light tone. Surely it was enough to be killing one thug a day, but today they had already reached two and it wasn’t yet six in the evening. There was time for more if they were unlucky.
    Allan proposed that they hide corpse number three somewhere because no good at all could come of being too closely associated with people you have done away with, unless you wanted to admit to people that you’d done away with them and Allan didn’t think that the friends had any reason to do that.
    Upon which, The Beauty started shouting angrily at the corpse slumped over the steering wheel, her theme being how the hell he could have been so stupid as to position his car across the road like that.
    The corpse responded by gurgling weakly and moving one