making itself known. She had to come back to the moment, get busy with the mechanics of driving. Josie sighed and her hand spider-walked toward the radio knob. As if there were any subtle way to start that particular music. Elaine opened her mouth to say something exasperated. The dashboard light blinked on and stayed lit.
The Criminal Mind
F riday afternoon and LAX full of people in a hurry to get everywhere in the world. At peak times the airport achieved the population of a small, restless city: business drones with cell phones, packs of slow-moving, cool-walking teenagers, parents herding kids, skycaps pushing wheelchairs loaded with the apprehensive elderly. There were Taiwanese whose hand luggage consisted of plastic shopping bags, Israelis, Filipinos, sunburned Germans who always seemed to be hefting sports equipment, Indian ladies in saris. Snatches of unknown languages, Russian maybe, or Portuguese. Rolando Gottschalk, heir to all the Americas, liked the big airport. It was one place that even his improbably named and ancestored self might be inconspicuous.
He was leaning against a wall, contemplating one of the security checkpoints. The lines were long and travelers were shifting luggage straps from shoulder to shoulder, crowding into one another with no place to go. Although the weather in Los Angeles was summer-perfect, there was fog in Seattle, there were high winds in Phoenix and thunderstorms over the Great Lakes. There were delays and cancellations, everything backing up, people getting fretful. The five no six security types at the checkpoint were hollering at everyone to step here and stop there and raise your arms, and wasn’t it great what a cheap coat and tie and an ID badge could do for your ordinary dirtbag’s sense of personal power and self-worth.
Rolando picked up the flight bag at his feet and joined the stream of passengers rounding the turn from the ticket counter and slowing as they hit the pileup at the checkpoint. He managed to walk without making any actual forward progress. Echoes bounced and splintered on the tile and glass surfaces. There is a quality of light that is only found in airports, glass reflecting glass reflecting sky. The shrill sunlight bored into his skin layer by layer, warming him, making him sleepy and easeful. He felt like a snake, a magnificent coiling snake, filled with danger and hot blood.
Directly ahead of him was a vacation-bound family, Mom and Pop and three mid- to pint-size kids, distracted and squabbling about who had the tickets and who had to go to the bathroom. Rolando increased his stride so that without rudeness he entered the checkpoint line before them. He was, at this moment, the least memorable traveler in the airport, a thin young man in a windbreaker and dark work pants, thin mustache, green eyes a little too close together in his brown face. When he reached the X-ray belt he placed his flight bag neatly on its side and stepped through the archway. Nothing metal or suspect in his clean, anonymous pockets. On the other side he paused to remove his windbreaker. Behind him Pop was emptying a noisy river of keys and coins into a tray. One of the kids was acting up, whining, and Mom was saying, “Of
course
you want to go see Grandma,” and Pop was emitting a little cloud of peevish exclamation points like a cartoon, and it was the easiest thing in the world (the irritated security guard repositioning the family’s mountain of carry-ons), for Rolando to drop his windbreaker over their camera as he bent to retrieve his flight bag.
Moving neither quickly nor slowly he sought the thickest part of the moving crowd. At the first restroom he entered a stall to examine the camera, a Canon with many desirable features, and placed it in the flight bag. He flushed and washed his hands andmade his usual looking-in-the-mirror face, a stone-cold dead-eyed gaze that did not acknowledge the thing he most hated about his reflection: his peanut-shaped skull and
The Criminal Mind
F riday afternoon and LAX full of people in a hurry to get everywhere in the world. At peak times the airport achieved the population of a small, restless city: business drones with cell phones, packs of slow-moving, cool-walking teenagers, parents herding kids, skycaps pushing wheelchairs loaded with the apprehensive elderly. There were Taiwanese whose hand luggage consisted of plastic shopping bags, Israelis, Filipinos, sunburned Germans who always seemed to be hefting sports equipment, Indian ladies in saris. Snatches of unknown languages, Russian maybe, or Portuguese. Rolando Gottschalk, heir to all the Americas, liked the big airport. It was one place that even his improbably named and ancestored self might be inconspicuous.
He was leaning against a wall, contemplating one of the security checkpoints. The lines were long and travelers were shifting luggage straps from shoulder to shoulder, crowding into one another with no place to go. Although the weather in Los Angeles was summer-perfect, there was fog in Seattle, there were high winds in Phoenix and thunderstorms over the Great Lakes. There were delays and cancellations, everything backing up, people getting fretful. The five no six security types at the checkpoint were hollering at everyone to step here and stop there and raise your arms, and wasn’t it great what a cheap coat and tie and an ID badge could do for your ordinary dirtbag’s sense of personal power and self-worth.
Rolando picked up the flight bag at his feet and joined the stream of passengers rounding the turn from the ticket counter and slowing as they hit the pileup at the checkpoint. He managed to walk without making any actual forward progress. Echoes bounced and splintered on the tile and glass surfaces. There is a quality of light that is only found in airports, glass reflecting glass reflecting sky. The shrill sunlight bored into his skin layer by layer, warming him, making him sleepy and easeful. He felt like a snake, a magnificent coiling snake, filled with danger and hot blood.
Directly ahead of him was a vacation-bound family, Mom and Pop and three mid- to pint-size kids, distracted and squabbling about who had the tickets and who had to go to the bathroom. Rolando increased his stride so that without rudeness he entered the checkpoint line before them. He was, at this moment, the least memorable traveler in the airport, a thin young man in a windbreaker and dark work pants, thin mustache, green eyes a little too close together in his brown face. When he reached the X-ray belt he placed his flight bag neatly on its side and stepped through the archway. Nothing metal or suspect in his clean, anonymous pockets. On the other side he paused to remove his windbreaker. Behind him Pop was emptying a noisy river of keys and coins into a tray. One of the kids was acting up, whining, and Mom was saying, “Of
course
you want to go see Grandma,” and Pop was emitting a little cloud of peevish exclamation points like a cartoon, and it was the easiest thing in the world (the irritated security guard repositioning the family’s mountain of carry-ons), for Rolando to drop his windbreaker over their camera as he bent to retrieve his flight bag.
Moving neither quickly nor slowly he sought the thickest part of the moving crowd. At the first restroom he entered a stall to examine the camera, a Canon with many desirable features, and placed it in the flight bag. He flushed and washed his hands andmade his usual looking-in-the-mirror face, a stone-cold dead-eyed gaze that did not acknowledge the thing he most hated about his reflection: his peanut-shaped skull and
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