Life Expectancy. Dean Koontz

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.

      Wary, I hesitated to reply, and the same logic led Lorrie to remain silent as well.

      He persisted. “What about it, Jimmy? This is the county library, so people come here from all around. Do you live in town or outside somewhere?”

      Although I didn’t know which answer he would regard favorably, I sensed that silence would earn me a bullet. He had shot Lionel Davis for less, for no reason at all.

      “I live in Snow Village,” I said.

      “How long have you been here?”

      “All my life.”

      “Do you like it here?”

      “Not handcuffed in the subcellar of the library,” I said, “but I like most other places in town, yeah.”

      His smile was uncannily appealing, and I couldn’t figure out how anyone’s eyes could twinkle so constantly as his unless implanted in them were motorized prisms that ceaselessly tracked environmental light sources. Surely no other maniacal killer could make you want to like him just by cocking his head and favoring you with a crooked smile.

      He said, “You’re a funny guy, Jimmy.”

      “I don’t mean to be,” I said apologetically, shuffling my feet on the honed limestone floor. Then I added, “Unless, of course, you want me to be.”

      “In spite of everything I’ve been through, I have a sense of humor,” he said.

      “I could tell.”

      “What about you?” he asked Lorrie.

      “I have a sense of humor, too,” she said.

      “For sure. You’re way funnier than Jimmy.”

      “Way,” she agreed.

      “But what I meant,” he clarified, “is do you live here in town?”

      As I had answered the same question positively and had not been immediately shot, she dared to say, “Yeah. Two blocks from here.”

      “You lived here all your life?”

      “No. Just a year.”

      This explained how I could have missed seeing her for twenty years. In a community of fourteen thousand, you can pass a long life and never speak to ninety percent of the population.

      If I had just once glimpsed her turning a corner, however, I would never have forgotten her face. I would have spent long anxious nights awake, wondering who she was, where she’d gone, how I could find her.

      She said, “I grew up in Los Angeles. Nineteen years in L.A. and I wasn’t totally bug-eyed crazy yet, so I knew I had almost no time left to get out.”

      “Do you like it here in Snow Village?” he asked.

      “So far, yeah. It’s nice.”

      Still smiling, still twinkly-eyed, with his charm in full gear and none of the insane-guy edge to his voice, he nevertheless said, “Snow Village is an evil place.”

      “Well,” Lorrie said, “sure, it’s evil, but parts of it are also kind of nice.”

      “Like Morelli’s Restaurant,” I said.

      Lorrie said, “They have fabulous chicken all’ Alba. And the Bijou is a terrific place.”

      Delighted that we shared these favorite places, I said, “Imagine a movie theater actually called the Bijou.”

      “All those cute Art Deco details,” she said. “And they use real butter on the popcorn.”

      “I like Center Square Park,” I said.

      The maniac disagreed: “No, that’s an evil place. I sat there earlier, watching the birds crap on the statue of Cornelius Randolph Snow.”

      “What’s evil about that?” Lorrie wondered. “If he was half as pompous as the statue makes him look, the birds have got it right.”

      “I don’t mean the birds are evil,” the maniac explained with sunny good humor. “Although they might be. What I mean is the park is evil, the ground, all the ground this town is built on.”

      I wanted to talk to Lorrie about more things we liked, attitudes we might have in common, and I was pretty sure she wanted to have that conversation, too, but we felt we had to listen to the smiley guy because he had the gun.

      “So … did they build the town on an Indian burial ground or something?” Lorrie wondered.

      He shook his head. “No, no. The earth itself was good once long ago, but it was corrupted because of evil things that evil people did here.”

      “Fortunately,” Lorrie said, “I don’t own any real estate. I’m a renter.”

      “I live with my folks,” I told him, hoping this fact would exempt me from complicity with the evil earth.

      “The time has come,” he said, “for payback.”

      As if to emphasize his threat, a spider suddenly appeared and slowly descended on a silken thread from within the shade of one of the overhead lamps. Projected by the cone of light, the eight-legged shadow on the floor between us and the maniac was the size of a dinner plate, distorted and squirming.

      “Answering evil with evil just means everyone loses,” Lorrie said.

      “I’m not answering evil with evil,” he replied not angrily but with exasperation. “I’m answering evil with justice.”

      “Well, that’s very different,” Lorrie said.

      “If I were you,” I told the maniac, “I’d wonder how to know for sure that something I’m doing is justice and not just more evil. I mean, the thing about evil is it’s slippery. My mom says the devil knows how to mislead us into thinking we’re doing the right thing when what we’re really doing is the devil’s work.”

      “Your mother sounds like a caring person,” he said.

      Sensing I’d made a connection with him, I said, “She is. When I was growing up, she even ironed my socks.”

      This revelation drew from Lorrie a look of troubled speculation.

      Concerned that she might think I was an eccentric or, worse, a momma’s boy, I quickly added: “I’ve been doing my own ironing since I was seventeen. And I never