Face of Murder

He didn’t know how he got there. There was nothing in his memory, a gap between getting into the car and then here. Now he was afraid, knowing instinctively that something was wrong. Something had happened.

The car was still around him but not quite quiet. Small noises, like dripping and the settling of metal. He heard those first. Then he pried his eyes open—and why were they closed?—to a light that startled him with its intensity. He gasped and shut his eyes again, wanting to shut it out.

But he had to know. He forced himself to endure the pain of the brightness, his eyes starting to adjust the longer he held them open. Good. Now he could focus a little more, look around. Like he suspected, he was still in the car.

But the car was… well, no longer the car.

On the passenger side, right next to him, everything was mangled metal and twisted and ripped fabric. The seat was destroyed, the frame of the window almost reaching out as if it would touch his elbow. There was something in the car—actually in the car, so close he could touch it—a kind of concrete structure, a block that extended upward.

He followed it up with his eyes and found the source of the startling light. A streetlight.

He had crashed into a streetlight.

The realization flooded in, and in the next moment, the fact that his side of the car was undamaged. The steering wheel was still in place, the door unbent, nothing at all out of order. He had escaped what might have been a very nasty death indeed.

He laughed in relief, but the movement sent pain ricocheting through his head in a way he had never known. He groaned and put his hands up to his temples, grasping there. Something wet—something slick. He pulled his hands down and looked, and saw that his fingers were red with blood.

His eyes focused a little beyond, in front of the steering wheel. There was blood there, too. He had hit his head.

There was the sound of a siren in the distance, and as he looked ahead, he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection from a piece of glass that stubbornly hung on to the bent and twisted structure of the windshield frame. Wide eyes under a forehead smeared with blood, pooling down it. It dripped down, over his left eye and onto his cheek.

The siren was getting closer, as he looked at himself in horror.

Maybe he had not escaped something nasty at all.

The doctor!

He sprang forward, his hands on the handle of the—window. He would get out and go toward him, distract him, get him alone. But—wait!

Over there—the man—another colleague. A robe like all doctors wore, white around his shoulders. The doctor, the doctor! The doctor had to pay! Pay for this agony, this jumble, this mess!