Raney & Levine Read Online Free PDF

Soccer Mom too, got her in profile as she
     turned and saw them. Checked out their faces, their navy scrub pants, and edged
     closer.
    “I’m a cop,” she said low.
    Jill was surprised. “Oh! What’s your name?”
    “Keri Blasco.”
    “What’s the pamphlet?”
    “Picked it up in a church. Stay cool.”
    She spoke quickly and moved away, joined two men in plain
     clothes at the edge of the sidewalk.
    “She wore leather gloves,” David said. “Handled her pamphlet
     by its edges.”
    Jill nodded. Experience with their murderous stalker last
     July had taught them about fingerprints. “Professional.”
    She was watching the man in the corduroy jacket. He seemed
     to be trying to persuade Zealot it was time to leave, even took the megaphone
     from him. Zealot frowned and resisted at first, then finally looked tired and
     gave in. Together they gathered up Zealot’s things and headed out, onto the
     sidewalk and toward the downtown subway.
    “I’d so like to follow them,” Jill said.
    David checked the time. “We have to get back.”
    Jill’s phone buzzed. She answered, and for a second her face
     lit. “Hey!”
    She listened. Then frowned.
    “Be right there.”

5
    S he hugged Hutch, her lab professor not so long ago. He
     and David knew each other and shook hands. David had gone to a different med
     school.
    Carl Hutchins never changed. He still wore a colorful bow
     tie (today, blue paisley) with an oxford shirt under his lab coat, and his office
     was its usual debris of piled-high journals and specimens in jars. His desk was
     encircled by stacks of folders, and in front of the folders was…a snake. A
     coiled black snake.
    “Relax,” Hutch said. “It’s fake.”
    Jill dropped into a chair. “Gaa-a, I even hate fake snakes.”
    David picked up the snake and stood turning it in his hands.
     Hutch told them what had happened. The whole anatomy lab horror-struck by a
     snake seeming to jump out of a cadaver. Said he’d called the cops who’d come,
     two uniforms who took a report and pronounced it a crude prank, at worst
     desecration of a human body.
    “Criminal mischief or a class B misdemeanor,
     whatever that means,” Hutch said with a grimace. “But I’m worried. It
     could be something else. I called hospital security after the cops left.”
    “What’s with the six heads sewn on?” David said.
    “That’s what bothers me. Have a seat.” Hutch took the snake
     back, laid it coiled on his desk and stared at it unhappily. His eyes blinked
     nervously behind his wire rims.
    “I see this a lot,” he said. “Seven-headed snakes scrawled
     on graffiti - not that the kids have any idea what it means.” He shook his
     head. “If this hadn’t happened today, I’d be
maybe
less worried.
     Security said the same.”
    They looked at him.
    He glanced out the window. It was nearly dusk. Reporters had
     left and the crowd with their signs was dispersing. Lights had come on in the
     emergency bay.
    Exhaling, he looked back and pulled open a lower drawer.
    “Y’know what was my hardest part of growing up?” he said,
     pulling out an old clothbound Bible. “It wasn’t life in the projects. It was my
     grandmother, a mean ol’ polecat who actually
left
the Baptist Church
     because she thought they’d become too liberal. She’d hit me and scream at me
     because I was studying
science
…devil teachings, she called it. And
     called me The Beast.”
    His brow arched at Jill and David. Two blank expressions.
    Then he opened to a Bible page he’d bookmarked, and read out
     loud. “Revelations, Chapter thirteen, verse one: ‘And
     I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea,
     having seven heads, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’”
    Silence. Then Jill said quietly,
     “Oh damn.”
    “My feelings exactly.” Hutch put
     the bible down. “It bothered me
befor
e I saw a sign in that crowd
     reading SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.”
    “We saw it,” David said.