I ONLY HAD A FEW SECONDS TO ADMIRE THE SPLENDID likeness of myself before, in rapid succession, Cody said, “Cool” Rita said, “Let me see” and —happiest of all —the ambulance arrived. In the confusion that followed I managed to slip the portrait back into the notebook and usher my little family over to talk to the Medical Techs for a brief but thorough examination. Although they were reluctant to admit it, they could find no severed limbs, missing skulls, or mangled internal organs at all and so, eventually, they were forced to allow Rita and the kids to go, with dire warnings about what to watch out for just in case.

The damage to Rita's car was mostly cosmetic —one headlight was broken and the fender was pushed in —so I bundled the three of them into the car. Normally Rita would drop them at an after school program and go back to work, but there is an unwritten law granting you the rest of the day off when you and your children are attacked by a maniac, so she decided to take them all home to recover from the trauma. And since Weiss was still out there somewhere, we decided that I had better do the same, and come home to protect them. So I waved them away into traffic and started the long and weary walk back to where I had parked my car.

My ankle was throbbing and the sweat that ran down my back irritated the ant bites, so in order to take my mind off the pain I flipped open Weiss's notebook and paged through it as I walked.

The shock of that picture of me was past, and I needed to find out what it meant —and where it might be leading Weiss. I was reasonably sure it was not a mere doodle, something he had absentmindedly scratched out while talking on the telephone. After all, who did he have left to talk to? His lover Doncevic was dead, and he had killed his dear pal Wimble himself. Besides, everything he had done so far had been pointed at a very specific purpose, and without exception it had been a purpose that I could do without quite happily.

So I studied the drawing of me again. It was idealized, I suppose —I could not remember noticing that I had such clearly defined washboard abs when last I looked. And the overall impression of a vast and happy menace was, while perhaps accurate, something I tried very hard not to show. But I had to admit he had captured something here, possibly even suitable for framing.

I went through the other pages. It was quite interesting stuff, and the drawings were good, especially the ones that featured me.