Dean Koontz - Life Expectancy

“He’s a murderer,” I reminded her.

“But he doesn’t seem to be a particularly rude murderer.”

“He shot Lionel Davis in the head.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s incapable of courtesy.”

“I wouldn’t bet the bank on it,” I said.

She squinched her face in annoyance and still looked darned good. “I hope to God you’re not a congenital pessimist. That would be just too much—held hostage by a librarian killer and shackled to a congenital pessimist.”

I didn’t want to be disagreeable. I wanted her to like me. Every guy wants a good-looking woman to like him. Nevertheless, I could not accept her characterization of me.

“I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist.”

She sighed. “That’s what every pessimist says.”

“You’ll see,” I said lamely. “I’m not a pessimist.”

“I’m an indefatigable optimist,” she informed me. “Do you know what that means—indefatigable?”

“The words baker and illiterate aren’t synonyms,” I assured her. “You’re not the only reader and thinker in Snow Village.”

“So what does it mean—indefatigable?”

“Incapable of being fatigued. Persistent.”

“ Tireless ,” she stressed. “I’m a tireless optimist.”

“It’s a fine line between an optimist and a Pollyanna.”

Fifty feet away, having left the room earlier, the killer returned to his table with an armload of yellowing newspapers.

Lorrie eyed him with predatory calculation. “When the moment’s right,” she whispered, “I’m going to tell him I’ve got a female emergency and need my purse.”

“Sharp or not, a nail file isn’t much use against a gun,” I protested.

“There you go again. Congenital pessimism. That can’t be a good thing even in a baker. If you expect all your cakes to fall, they will.”

“My cakes never fall.”

She raised one eyebrow. “So you say.”

“You think you can stab him in the heart and just stop him like a clock?” I asked with enough disdain to get my point across but not sarcastically enough to alienate her from the possibility that we could have dinner together if we survived the day.

“Stop his heart? Of course not. Second best would be to go for the neck, sever the carotid artery. First choice would be to put out an eye.”

She looked like a dream and talked like a nightmare.

I was probably guilty of gaping again. I know I sputtered: “Put out an eye?”

“Drive it deep enough, and you might even damage the brain,” she said, nodding as if in somber agreement with herself. “He’d have an instant convulsion, drop the gun, and if he didn’t drop it, he’d be so devastated, we could easily just take the pistol out of his hand.”

“Oh my God, you’re going to get us killed.”

“There you go again,” she said.

“Listen,” I tried to reason with her, “when the crunch came, you wouldn’t have the stomach to do something like that.”

“I certainly would, to save my life.”

Alarmed by her calm conviction, I insisted, “You’d flinch at the last moment.”

“I never flinch from anything.”

“Have you ever stabbed someone in the eye before?”

“No. But I can clearly picture myself doing it.”

I couldn’t suppress the sarcasm any longer: “What are you, a professional assassin or something?”

She frowned. “Keep your voice down. I’m a dance instructor.”

“And teaching ballet prepares you to put out a man’s eye?”

“Of course not, silly. I don’t teach ballet. I give ballroom-dancing lessons. Fox-trot, waltz, rumba, tango, cha-cha, swing, you name it.”

Just my luck: to be cuffed to a beautiful woman who turns out to be a ballroom-dance instructor, and me a lummox.

“You’ll flinch,” I insisted, “and you’ll miss his eye, and he’ll shoot us dead.”

“Even if I flub it,” she said, “which I won’t, but even if I do, he won’t shoot us dead. Haven’t you been paying attention? He needs hostages .”

I disagreed. “He doesn’t need hostages who try to stab him in the eye .”

She raised her eyes as if imploring the heavens beyond the ceiling: “Please tell me I’m not shackled to a pessimist and a coward.”

“I’m not a coward. I’m just responsibly cautious.”

“That’s what every coward says.”

“That’s also what every responsibly cautious person says,” I replied, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive.

At the far end of the room, the maniac began to pound one fist against the newspaper he was reading. Then both fists. Pounding and pounding like a baby in a tantrum.

Face contorted fearsomely, he made inarticulate noises of rage. Some rough Neanderthal consciousness, remnant in his genes, seemed to break free from the chains of time and DNA.

Fury informed his voice, then frustration, then what might have been a wild grief, then fury once more and escalating. This was the performance of an animal howling with loss, its rage rooted in the black soil of misery.

He pushed his chair back from the table, picked up his pistol. He emptied the remaining eight rounds in the magazine, aiming at the newspaper he had been reading.

The hard report of each shot boomed off the vaulted ceiling, rang off the brass shades of the inverted torchieres, and crashed back and forth between the metal filing cabinets. I felt echoes of each concussion humming in my teeth.

Cut loose two floors underground, the barrage would be at most a faint crackle at street level.

Splinters of the old oak refectory table sprayed and scraps of paper spun and a couple bullets ricocheted through the air, some fragments trailing threads of smoke. The fragrance of aging newsprint was seasoned with the more acrid scent of gunfire and with a raw wood smell liberated from the table’s wounds.

For a moment, as he repeatedly squeezed the trigger without effect, I rejoiced that he had depleted his ammunition. But of course he had a spare magazine, perhaps several.

While he reloaded the weapon, he seemed intent on delivering ten more rounds to the hated newspaper. Instead, with the fresh magazine installed, his rage abruptly abated. He began to weep. Wretched sobs racked him.

He collapsed into his chair once more and put down the gun. He leaned over the table and seemed to want to piece together the pages that he had ripped and riddled with gunfire, as if some story therein was precious to him.

Still lemony enough to sweeten the air that had been soured by gunfire, Lorrie Lynn Hicks tilted her head toward me and whispered, “You see? He’s vulnerable.”

I wondered if excessive optimism could ever qualify as a form of madness.

Gazing into her eyes, I saw, as previously, the fear that she adamantly refused to express. She winked.

Her stubborn resistance to terror scared me because it seemed so reckless, so irrational—and yet I loved her for it.

Whidding through me, like the spirit of Death’s black horse, came a premonition that she would be shot. Despair followed this dark precognitive flash, and I was desperate to protect her.

In time, the premonition eventually proved true, and nothing I did was able to alter the trajectory of the bullet.

10

Tears damp on his cheeks, green eyes washed clear of bitter emotions, and clear of doubts as well, the maniac had the look of a pilgrim who has been to the mountaintop and knows his destiny, his purpose.

He freed me and Lorrie from the chairs but left us tethered to each other.

“Are you both locals?” he asked as we rose to our feet.

After his violent display and flamboyant emotional outburst, I found it difficult to believe that he now wished to engage in pleasant chitchat. The question had a purpose more important than the words themselves conveyed, which meant our answers might have consequences we could not foresee.