Prompt by CrazyforKate
Sitting on the front porch of Harriet Vanger's Outback estate, Mikael Blomkvist fished another bottle of XXXX Gold out of a cooler. Once frozen solid, the ice and beer had managed to melt to a lukewarm temperature in less than ten minutes. Even after eleven at night, the temperature was just two clicks under one hundred degrees. If they were lucky it would get down to around eighty by three before climbing back up to ninety by breakfast. Silently, Blomkvist thanked whatever higher power that was out there that Harriet agreed to catch the flight to Stockholm tomorrow afternoon.
Harriet looked on in amusement from the porch swing as he popped the bottle's top off on the edge of the railing. "What number are you on now?"
"Three," he said, "How much more is left?"
"We'll both be dead from alcohol poisoning before this house ever runs out of beer."
Blomkvist made a sound of approval before taking a swig of the Australian brew. He was perfectly content the way he was; sweating his way through another bottle while leaning against the porch rails and staring at wide-open skies.
It was a completely peaceful moment until a low, yodeling noise started up somewhere out beyond the barbed fence surrounding the property. Foolishly he looked behind him to see if she had heard it as well, and found Harriet aiming a gun straight at his back, inspecting the chamber.
"I know you probably don't appreciate a journalist knowing your darkest secrets, but there's no need to point a gun at my backside." He said jokingly, though if he were in her position it wouldn't be a half-bad idea. She could just shoot him and leave him for the dingoes somewhere in the Outback and go back to being Anita Cochran.
She didn't look up at him as she loaded a five round magazine into the gun, a Ruger by the looks of it. "I'd rather not have to put another horse down over a dingo attack." She opened the bolt and set it back down to lean against the swing, "I'm a good shot."
"I'll bet. The sheep are right up against the barrel when you kill them off. Pretty hard to miss a shot like that."
Harriet looked up at him with a quirked eyebrow, resting a hand across her chest in mock offense. "I'll have you know I've taken down wild dogs at five-hundred yards from a moving Jeep."
"Really?"
"Really." She affirmed.
"Fair enough then. How good are you at shooting beer bottles off fence posts?"
"Is that a challenge Little Micke?"
"Little Micke?" He shook his head, their conversation heading into stranger and stranger waters. "You're just as horrible as my sister. I just figured that these last two days have probably been the two shittiest days you've had in forty years. Why not have some fun?"
"Maybe I don't trust Little Micke with a gun."
"I served as a rifleman in Kiruna."
"Is that your way of saying we're evenly matched?"
"Would you accept if I said we were?"
"I think so."
She stood and wandered off to somewhere in the house and returned with an unopened box of ammunition.
Jeff sat in his mother's office that night, calculating just how deep the loss would be for the station after the culling of almost seven hundred heads of sheep while trying to ignore the hooting and hollering and rifle shots coming from the porch outside. Early the next morning he found his mother and the man who claimed to be formerly babysat by her in Sweden laying passed out against the porch rails with a fifty round box of .30-06 ammunition completely empty. Six beer bottles were still sitting on the fence posts less than a hundred feet away.