Life Expectancy. Dean Koontz

you have only one hostage, how are you going to convince them you would actually kill the person, that you’re not bluffing?”

      “How?” he and I asked simultaneously.

      “You couldn’t make them believe you,” she said. “Not beyond a shadow of a doubt. So they might try to rush you, in which case both you and the hostage wind up dead.”

      “I can be pretty convincing,” he assured her in a mellower tone that suggested he might be thinking of asking her for a date.

      “If I was a cop, I wouldn’t believe you for a minute. You’re too cute to be a killer.” To me, she said, “Isn’t he too cute?”

      I almost said I didn’t think he was that cute, so you can see what I mean by her bringing out the deeply stupid in a guy.

      “But if you had two hostages,” she continued, “you could kill one to prove the sincerity of your threat, and after that the second would be a reliable shield. No cop would dare test you twice.”

      He stared at her for a moment. “You’re some piece of work,” he said at last, and clearly meant to compliment her.

      “Well,” she replied, indicating the stack of books that she had just returned, “I’m a reader and a thinker, that’s all.”

      “What’s your name?” he asked.

      “Lorrie.”

      “Lorrie what?”

      “Lorrie Lynn Hicks,” she said. “And you are?”

      He opened his mouth, almost told her his name, then smiled and said, “I’m a man of mystery.”

      “And a man with a mission, by the look of it.”

      “I’ve already killed the librarian,” he told her, as if murder were a resumé enhancement.

      “I was sort of afraid you had,” she said.

      I cleared my throat. “My name is James.”

      “Hi, Jimmy,” she said, and though she smiled, I saw in her eyes a terrible sadness and desperate calculation.

      “Go stand beside him,” the maniac ordered.

      Lorrie came to me. She smelled as good as she looked: fresh, clean, lemony.

      “Cuff yourself to him.”

      As she locked the empty ring around her left wrist, thereby linking our fates, I felt I should say something to comfort her, in response to the desperation I’d glimpsed in her eyes. Wit failed me, and I could only say, “You smell like lemons.”

      “I’ve spent the day making homemade lemon marmalade. I intended to have the first of it tonight, on toasted English muffins.”

      “I’ll brew a pot of bittersweet hot chocolate with a dash of cinnamon,” I told her. “That and your marmalade muffins will be the perfect thing to celebrate.”

      Clearly she appreciated my confident assertion of our survival, but her eyes were no less troubled.

      Checking his wristwatch, the maniac said, “This has taken too much time. I’ve got a lot of research to do before the explosions start.”

       9

      All our yesterdays neatly shelved, time catalogued in drawers: News grows brittle and yellow under the library, in catacombs of paper.

      The killer had learned that the Snow County Gazette had for more than a century stored their dead issues here in the subbasement, two stories under the town square. They called it a “priceless archive of local history.” Preserved for the ages in the Gazette morgue were the details of Girl Scout bake sales, school-board elections, and zoning battles over the intent of Sugar Time Donuts to expand the size of its operation.

      Every issue from 1950 forward could be viewed on microfiche. When your research led you to earlier dates, you were supposed to fill out a requisition form for hard copies of the Gazette; a staff member would oversee your perusal of the newspaper.

      If you were a person who shot librarians for no reason, standard procedures were of no concern to you. The maniac prowled the archives and took what he wanted to a study table. He handled the yellowing newsprint with no more consideration for its preservation than he would have shown for the most current edition of USA Today.

      He had parked Lorrie Lynn Hicks and me in a pair of chairs at the farther end of the enormous room in which he worked. We were not close enough to see what articles in the Gazette interested him.

      We sat under a barrel-vaulted ceiling, under a double row of inverted torchieres that cast a dusty light acceptable only to those scholars who had lived in a time when electricity was new and the memory of oil lamps still fresh from childhood.

      With another set of handcuffs, our captor had linked our wrist shackles to a backrail of one of the chairs on which we were perched.

      Because not all the archives were contained in this one room, he paid repeated visits to an adjacent chamber, leaving us alone at times. His absences afforded us no chance to escape. Chained together and dragging a chair, we could move neither quickly nor quietly.

      “I’ve got a nail file in my purse,” Lorrie whispered.

      I glanced down at her cuffed hand next to mine. A strong but graceful hand. Elegant fingers. “Your nails look fine,” I assured her.

      “Are you serious?”

      “Absolutely. I like the shade of your polish. Looks like candied cherries.”

      “It’s called Glaçage de Framboise.”

      “Then it’s misnamed. It’s not a shade of any raspberries I’ve ever worked with.”

      “You work with raspberries?”

      “I’m a baker, going to be a pastry chef.”

      She sounded slightly disappointed. “You look more dangerous than a pastry chef.”

      “Well, I’m biggish for my size.”

      “Is that what it is?”

      “And bakers tend to have strong hands.”

      “No,” she said, “it’s your eyes. There’s something dangerous about your eyes.”

      This was adolescent wish fulfillment of the purest kind: being told by a beautiful woman that you have dangerous eyes.

      She said, “They’re direct, a nice shade of blue—but then there’s something lunatic about them.”

      Lunatic eyes are dangerous eyes, all right, but not romantic dangerous. James Bond has dangerous eyes. Charles Manson has lunatic eyes. Charles Manson, Osama bin Laden, Wile E. Coyote. Women stand in line for James Bond, but Wile E. Coyote can’t get a date.

      She said, “The reason I mentioned the nail file in my purse is because it’s a metal file, sharp enough at one end to be a weapon.”

      “Oh.” I felt inane, and I couldn’t blame my dunderheadedness entirely on her stupidity-inducing good looks. “He took your purse,” I noted.

      “Maybe I can get it back.”

      Her handbag stood on the table where he sat reading old issues of the Snow County Gazette.

      The next time he left the room, we could stand as erect as a chair on our backs would allow and hobble in tandem and as fast as possible toward her purse. The noise would most likely draw him back before we reached our goal.

      Or we could make our way across the room with stealth foremost in mind, which would require us to move as slowly as Siamese twins negotiating a minefield. Judging by the average length of time that he