Masters of Noir-Volume Four by Anthology

Author:Anthology
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: mystery, detective, noir, anthology
Publisher: Wonder Audiobooks, LLC
Published: 2010-12-15T13:34:18+00:00

FACE OF EVIL by DAVID ALEXANDER

It was noon and the stocky detective with the swarthy face waited in the corridor of the City Hospital. He was a middle-aged man with heavily defined features. His coarse dark hair was salted with gray and a little string of sweat beads glistened on his forehead. His heavy shoulders drooped from fatigue. His eyes were large and dark and there was weary compassion in them as if they had looked upon the thousand faces of human life, neither with despair nor hope, but only with a patient acceptance. The whites of the eyes were filamented with bloody threads. He had not slept the night before. He had stayed on duty because the psychopathic killer the papers called The Butcher was loose again.

The detective's name was Romano. He was a lieutenant of Homicide, Manhattan West.

A doctor in a white coat came out of a nearby hospital room and closed the door after him. He was accompanied by a nurse. The nurse was dark and young and pretty and Romano thought of his own daughter who was a student at Marymount College. Romano rose slowly from the hard chair in the corridor, sighing with exhaustion. His feet had begun to throb and ache. That was always the first sign that his body was rebelling against the demands he made of it. Soon his nervous stomach would start acting up and he'd feel the painful little twinges of rising blood pressure. He was getting old. He would have to take his pension soon. Years ago he would have been driven and sustained by excitement, when a big squeal was this close to the break. He felt nothing like that now. He was just dead-tired.

The man in the hospital room was the only living person who could identify The Butcher, who had murdered five women and dismembered their bodies in a manner horrible enough to justify the name the papers had awarded him.

Romano lumbered slowly toward the doctor, his big feet slapping heavily on the rubber linoleum of the floor.

"Has he come out of it, Doc?” Romano asked.

The doctor was a thin man with high cheekbones and a small mustache. His slim, white fingers toyed with the stethoscope that dangled around his neck.

"He's out of coma, if that's what you mean,” the doctor answered. “But he's hardly rational. I would say he's still suffering from shock. He has a heart condition, we've determined that. The experience he went through last night—well, it's a wonder he's alive under the circumstances. It might be better to wait awhile, Lieutenant."

Romano said, “It's pretty urgent, Doc. It's about as urgent as it can get. Time may mean a lot."

The doctor hesitated. The pretty nurse looked disapprovingly at Romano. She does look kind of like my daughter Ellie, Romano thought. She doesn't like me. Maybe she hates me, even, because she thinks I'm callous, that I want to torture a poor, sick man.

The doctor said, “I suppose you can go in for a little while, if you insist.

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