We were the last passengers to board, and I am sure the flight attendant would not have smiled so pleasantly if we were flying coach. But we even got a glass of champagne to thank us for being wonderful enough to arrive late in First Class, and as they closed and locked the cabin door and I began to think we might really get away, I found that I actually enjoyed the champagne, even on an empty stomach.

I enjoyed it even more when we were finally up in the air, wheels up, and headed for Mexico, and I probably would have had more when we landed in Cancun after our short flight, but the flight attendant didn't offer me any. I suppose my First Class status had worn off somewhere along the line, leaving just enough to earn me a polite smile as we left the plane.

Inside the terminal, Chutsky went to arrange the rest of our trip home, and I sat in a shiny restaurant and ate enchiladas. They tasted like airport food everywhere else I had ever had it —a bland and strange approximation of what they were supposed to taste like, and bad, but not so clinically vile that you could demand your money back. It was hard work, but I had finished them by the time Chutsky got back with our tickets.

“Cancun 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 home town 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 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.

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 I was reasonably sure that nothing had happened to make him change his mind about me and move on to somebody else. He was still after me, and he would find some other 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 —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, since I am not technically human.

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 into work, and if I had been hoping for a warm welcome and a cheery hello from my co-workers 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.

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 his 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 grey 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'.