“Cancún to Houston, Houston to Miami,” he said, handing me a ticket. “We’ll get in around seven A.M.”
After spending most of the night in molded plastic chairs, I can’t remember a time when my hometown looked quite so welcoming, as when the rising sun lit up the runway and the plane finally landed and rolled up to the Miami International terminal. I was warmed by that special feeling of homecoming as we fought our way through the hysterical and often violent crowd and out to get a shuttle to long-term parking.
I dropped Chutsky at the hospital to reunite with Deborah, at his request. He climbed out of the car, hesitated, and then stuck his head back in the door. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out, buddy,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “So am I.”
“You let me know if I can help out in any way to finish this thing,” he said. “You know—if you find the guy and you’re feeling squeamish, I can help.”
Of course that was the one thing I was certainly not feeling squeamish about, but it was such a thoughtful gesture on his part to offer to pull the trigger for me, I just thanked him. He nodded, said, “I mean it,” and then closed the car door and limped on into the hospital.
And I headed home against the rush-hour traffic, making fairly good time, but still arriving too late to see Rita and the kids. So I consoled myself with a shower, a change of clothes, and then a cup of coffee and some toast before heading back across town to work.
It was no longer full rush hour, but as always there was still plenty of traffic, and in the stop-and-go on the turnpike I had time to think, and I didn’t like what I came up with. Weiss was still at large, and for all intents and purposes he was now impossible to find. I was reasonably sure that nothing had happened to make him change his mind about me and move on to somebody else. He would find another way, soon, either to kill me or make me wish he had. And as far as I could tell, there was nothing I could do about it except wait—either for him to do something, or for some wonderful idea to fall out of the sky and hit me on the head.
Traffic wound to a stop. I waited. A car roared past on the shoulder of the road, blasting its horn, and several other cars blasted back, but no ideas fell on me. I was just stuck in traffic, trying to get to work, and waiting for something awful to happen. I suppose that is a terrific description of the human condition, but I had always thought I was immune.
Traffic lurched forward. I crawled slowly past a flatbed truck that was pulled off onto the grass beside the road. The hood of the truck was up. Seven or eight men in dingy clothes sat on the bed of the truck. They were waiting, too, but they seemed a little happier about it than I was. Maybe they weren’t being pursued by an insane homicidal artist.
Eventually I made it in to work, and if I had been hoping for a warm welcome and a cheery hello from my coworkers, I would have been bitterly disappointed. Vince Masuoka was in the lab and glanced up at me as I came in. “Where have you been?” he said, in a tone of voice that sounded like he was accusing me of something terrible.
“Fine, thanks,” I said. “Very glad to see you, too.”
“It’s been crazy around here,” Vince said, apparently without hearing me at all. “The migrant-worker thing, and on top of that, yesterday some douche bag killed his wife and her boyfriend.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.
“He used a hammer, and if you think that was fun …” he said.
“Doesn’t sound like it,” I said, mentally adding, except for him.
“Could have used your help,” he said.
“It’s nice to be wanted,” I said, and he looked at me with disgust for a moment before turning away.
The day didn’t get much better. I ended up at the site where the man with the hammer had given his little party. Vince was right—it was an awful mess, with the now-dried blood spattered across two and a half walls, a couch, and a large section of formerly beige carpet. I heard from one of the cops on the door that the man was in custody; he’d confessed and said he didn’t know what came over him. It didn’t make me feel any better, but it’s nice to see justice done once in a while, and the work took my mind off Weiss for a while. It’s always good to stay busy.
But it didn’t drive away the bad feeling that Weiss would probably think so, too.
THIRTY-FOUR
I DID STAY BUSY, AND WEISS DID, TOO. WITH CHUTSKY’S help, I learned that he had taken a flight to Toronto that left Havana just about the time we arrived at the Havana airport. But what he did after that no amount of computer snooping could uncover. A small voice inside me was stuttering hopefully that maybe he would give up and stay home, but this little voice was answered by a large and very loud bray of laughter from most of the other voices inside me.
I did the very few small things I could think of; I ran some Internet searches that technically I should not have been able to do, and I managed to find a little bit of credit-card activity, but all of it in Toronto. This led me to Weiss’s bank, which was easy enough to make me a little bit indignant: Shouldn’t people guarding our sacred money be a little bit more careful about it? Weiss had made a cash withdrawal of a few thousand dollars, and then that was it. No activity at all for the next few days.
I knew that the cash withdrawal would somehow turn into bad news for me, but beyond that I could think of no way to turn that certainty into any kind of specific threat. In desperation, I went back to Weiss’s YouTube page. Shockingly, the whole “New Miami” motif was completely gone, as were all the little thumbnail film boxes. Instead, the background was a dull gray and there was a rather horrible picture, a nasty-looking nude male body, with the privates partially hacked off. Underneath it was written, Schwarzkogler was just the beginning. The next step is on the way.
Any conversation that starts with Schwarzkogler was just the beginning is not going anywhere that a rational being could possibly want to go. But the name sounded vaguely familiar to me and, of course, I could not possibly leave a potential clue unexamined, and so I did my due diligence and ran a Google check.
The Schwarzkogler in question turned out to be Rudolf, an Austrian who considered himself an artist, and in order to prove it he reportedly sliced his penis off a little bit at a time and took photographs of the process. This was such an artistic triumph that he continued his career, until his masterpiece finally killed him. And I remembered as I read it that he had been an icon of the group in Paris who had so brilliantly given us Jennifer’s Leg.
I don’t know much about art, but I like hanging on to my body parts. So far even Weiss had proven to be stingy with his limbs, in spite of my best effort. But I could see that this whole artistic movement would have a very definite aesthetic appeal to him, particularly if he took it one step further, as he said he was doing. It made sense; why create art with your own body when you can do the same thing with someone else’s and it won’t hurt? And your career would last a lot longer, too. I applauded Weiss’s great common sense, and I had a very deep feeling that I was going to see the next step in his artistic career sometime soon, and someplace far too close to Dexter the Philistine.
I checked the YouTube page several more times over the next week, but there was no change, and the rhythm of a very busy week at work began to make it all seem like an unpleasant memory.
Things at home were no easier; a cop was still waiting at our door when the kids came home, and although most of them were very nice, their presence added to the strain. Rita got a little bit distant and distracted, as though she was perpetually waiting for an important long-distance telephone call, and this caused her usually excellent coo
king to suffer. We had leftovers twice in one week—previously unheard of in our little house. And Astor seemed to pick up on the weirdness and, for the only time since I had known her, she got relatively silent, sitting in front of the TV with Cody and watching all her favorite DVDs over and over, with no more than two or three words at a time for the rest of us.