IN A HELLISH BLUR, Bruno Torenzi whipped his arm around, plunging the scalpel deep into the puffy fold above Marcozza’s left eye. With a good butcher’s precision and hard speed, he cut clockwise around the orbital socket. Three, six, nine, midnight… The blade moved so fast, the blood didn’t have time to bleed.

“ARRRGH!” was a pretty good approximation of the sound Marcozza made.

He screamed in agony as the entire restaurant turned. Now everyone noticed Bruno Torenzi. He was the one carving the eye out of that fat man’s face – like a pumpkin!

“ARRRRRRGH!”

Torenzi was outweighed by over a hundred pounds but it didn’t matter. He’d positioned himself perfectly, his rigid choke hold keeping Marcozza’s head dead still while the rest of his body violently jerked and thrashed. What was premeditated murder if not calculated leverage?

Squish!

Scooped out like a melon ball, Marcozza’s left eye fell to the white linen tablecloth and rolled to a stop.

Next came the right eye. Slice, slice, slice…Beautiful handiwork, to be sure.

But the right eye didn’t pop out like the left one. Instead, it dangled, held by the stubborn red vessel of the optic nerve.

Torenzi smiled and flicked his wrist. He was almost finished here, so hold the applause.

Snip!

Marcozza’s right eye, with a gooey tail of flesh and vein, careened off the bread plate and fell to the floor.

Blood, finally catching up to the moment, now gushed from Marcozza’s empty eye sockets. In medical terms, his ophthalmic artery had been severed from his internal carotid artery, the high-pressure main line to the brain. In layman’s terms, it was just a god-awful, horrifying, and disgusting mess.