"Come back here, Lugo!" yelled Doorbal. "Come back here and help me out!" He'd been trying to cut through Krisztina's neck when the saw teeth snagged in her long tresses. What a mess! Doorbal finally yanked the saw out of her hair, but now it was jammed and useless.
Lugo scurried to the front office to share the bad news with Delgado. But fuck it, he said, guarantee or no guarantee he wasn't going back to Home Depot. They still had a hatchet to finish the job. He changed into gym clothes, pulled on some gloves, and went back to help Doorbal. For another ten minutes Delgado sat alone and listened to heavy thumping, loud banging, the cracking of bones, and assorted charnel-house noises as his pals chopped two bodies to pieces.
When power tools failed, more primitive implements got the job done, hacking through faces and teeth and cutting off fingertips
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When it was over, Krisztina's legs, ending in bloody stumps, jutted skyward from a 55-gallon drum. Her torso had been shoved in upside down. Griga's headless neck rose from another barrel. Both receptacles contained a mixture of road tar and a splash of muriatic acid to speed decomposition. The electric saw had whirled clumps of blood, gristle, and tissue about the warehouse floor. To complete the tableau, Krisztina's head lay in a red bucket. Griga's head was in another. A third red bucket held four hands and four feet.
Lugo and Doorbal surveyed their handiwork. Something wasn't right. Of course! The fingers, the teeth! Faces! Identification! They removed the heads from the buckets and placed them on a nearby table. Using pliers, they proceeded to extract their victims' teeth. But the roots wouldn't budge. So they brought out the hatchet again. It had a four-inch curved blade.
The bloodied heads were as slippery as rain-slicked coconuts. The men chopped down through the bridge of the nose, then hacked into the eyes, destroying the orbits at midpoint. Once through the bone of the outer eye sockets, they continued hacking down, clear through the jaw. They pulled the faces back from the skulls. This gave them good access to the gums and teeth from any direction.
Next they went after fingerprints, another way for the bodies to be identified. They carefully sliced off the fingers. For the more delicate work of filleting fingerprints from the flesh, they employed a Pakistani hunting knife with a six-inch blade.
At last it was time for a break. Doorbal relaxed on Schiller's sofa until the phone rang. He'd forgotten he had a dinner date. He'd begun seeing Cindy Eldridge again, the pretty blond Boca Raton nurse he'd met a year before. They'd dated steadily, up through the time of the Schiller kidnapping, and even while Doorbal was pursuing that gorgeous stripper Beatriz Weiland, who danced at Solid Gold. When he dumped her for Beatriz, Cindy was devastated. But Beatriz had turned around and left him a month or two back, and he'd called the nurse again. She was thrilled to be resuming the relationship, and so was he. They'd even set a wedding date: on her 32nd birthday, next month.
Delgado had to return the van and offered to give him a lift home. Lugo, at work sealing the lids on the drums, would stay behind and wrap things up at the warehouse. Delgado dropped off Doorbal, returned the van, picked up his Chevy Suburban, and headed back to the warehouse. Pulling off the street to the warehouse, he couldn't believe his eyes: There was Lugo, standing over a burning barrel. He had carried outside a metal drum, placed the iron grate on top, tossed on hands, feet, and various skull portions, splashed some gasoline around, and started a fire. Occasionally he bent down and torched the remains with a jet of propane flames. He might as well have been at a back-yard barbecue! Flames danced from the drum, highlighting his brow. The huge fans in the warehouse doorway drove the netherworld fumes into the hot Miami night.
Christ, anyone could drive down the street! Delgado yelled, and Lugo reluctantly agreed to stop the performance. He doused the flames and rolled the hot barrel on its bottom edge through the warehouse, out the back door, into the rear alley. There he resumed stewing the leavings of Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton for another twenty minutes.
Back home Doorbal took a long shower then called Cindy. He was too tired for dinner, he said; he needed a nap, but he'd drive to Boca Raton late that night. Cindy tried to wait up but couldn't. Before she went to bed, though, she wrote a note and left it for him on the kitchen counter. It was just the sort of thing she figured he needed to hear tonight.
Cindy was happier than ever -- this was, after all, the fellow who'd proposed to her the first time just a few weeks after he met her -- but there were things she simply didn't understand about him. Doorbal suffered the same excessive mood swings she'd seen before. He'd been in a strange mood all week, in fact. On Tuesday he had an argument with Lugo and afterward felt so despondent, so shaken that he threatened to kill himself, and her! She knew the two bodybuilders were extremely close, that Doorbal depended on Lugo emotionally, even for basic practicalities such as where he should live. But what could have plunged her lover into a murder-suicide funk? Come on, she'd told him, lighten up, and don't talk like that again.
