Manx- Heart Removed

  “Vic. I want you to help me think this through. This man, Charlie Manx, we agree he was probably eighty-five years old at the time of his last medical exam. He spent ten years in a coma. Most coma patients require months of rehabilitation before they can walk again. You are telling me you cut him with this tapper key—”

  “Tappet.”

  “—and then he was shot but still had the strength to drive away.”

  What Vic could not say was that Manx wasn’t like other men. She had felt it when he swung the hammer, a coiled strength that belied his advanced age and gaunt frame. Hutter insisted that Manx had been opened up, that his heart had been removed during the autopsy, and Vic didn’t doubt it. For a man who’d had his heart taken out and put back in, a nick in the ear wasn’t that big a deal.

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