Life Expectancy. Dean Koontz
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in the street, the prospect of a sniper had paralyzed me with dread. I realized now that I’d not been afraid of a rifleman in some high concealment but that I’d been petrified because I did not know if the sniper was real or if instead the mortal threat might be any of a thousand other things. When danger can be sensed but not identified, then everyone and everything becomes a source of concern; the world from horizon to horizon seems hostile.
Fear of the unknown is the most purely distilled and potent terror.
Now I had identified my enemy. Although he might be a sociopath capable of any atrocity, I felt some relief because I knew his face. The uncountable threats in my imagination had evaporated, replaced by this one real danger.
His hard expression softened. He lowered the pistol.
With perhaps fifteen feet between us, I didn’t dare rush him. I could only repeat, “What did he ever do to you?”
He smiled and shrugged. “I wouldn’t have shot him if you hadn’t come in.”
Like a slowly turning auger, the pain of Lionel’s death drilled deeper into me. The tremor in my voice was grief, not fear. “What’re you talking about?”
“By myself, I can’t manage two hostages. He was here alone. The assistant librarian is out sick. There were no patrons at the moment. He was going to lock the doors—then you came in.”
“Don’t tell me I’m responsible.”
“Oh, no, not at all,” he assured me with what sounded like genuine concern for my feelings. “Not your fault. It was just one of those things.”
“Just one of those things,” I repeated with some astonishment, unable to comprehend a mind that could be so casual about murder.
“I might have shot you instead,” he said, “but having met you earlier in the street, I figured you’d be more interesting company than a boring old librarian.”
“What do you need a hostage for?”
“In case things go wrong.”
“What things?”
“You’ll see.”
His sport coat was cut stylishly full. From one of the roomy interior pockets he withdrew a pair of handcuffs. “I’m going to throw these to you.”
“I don’t want them.”
He smiled. “You are going to be fun. Catch them. Lock one cuff around your right wrist. Then lie on the floor with both hands behind your back, so I can finish the job.”
When he threw the cuffs, I sidestepped them. They rattled off a reading table, clattered to the floor.
He’d been holding the pistol at his side. He aimed at me again.
Although I’d stared down that muzzle before, I didn’t find it any less disconcerting the second time.
I’d never held a handgun, let alone fired one. In my line of work, the closest thing to a weapon is a cake knife. Maybe a rolling pin. We bakers, however, tend not to carry rolling pins in shoulder holsters and are therefore defenseless in situations like this.
“Pick them up, big fella.”
Big fella. He was approximately my size.
“Pick them up, or I’ll do a Lionel on you and just wait for another hostage to walk through that door.”
I had been using my grief and my anger over Lionel’s death to suppress my terror. Fear could diminish and defeat me, but now I realized that fearlessness could get me killed.
Wisely giving recognition to the coward in me, I stooped, picked up the cuffs, and clamped one steel circlet around my right wrist.
Snaring a set of keys off the librarian’s desk, he said, “Don’t lie down yet. Stay on your feet where I can see you while I lock the door.”
When he was halfway between the main desk and the portrait of Cornelius Rutherford Snow, the door opened. A young woman, a stranger to me, entered with a stack of books.
She was prettier than a gâteau à l’orange with chocolate-butter icing decorated with candied orange peel and cherries.
I wouldn’t be able to endure seeing her shot, not her.
She was prettier than a soufflé au chocolat drizzled with crème anglaise flavored by apricots, served in a Limoges cup on a Limoges plate on a silver charger, by candlelight.
The door had swung shut behind her and she had taken a few steps into the room before she realized that this was not a typical library tableau. She couldn’t see the dead man behind the desk, but she spotted the handcuffs dangling from my right wrist.
When she spoke, she had a wonderfully throaty voice, the effect of which was heightened by the fact that she addressed the killer in a stage whisper: “Is that a gun?”
“Doesn’t it look like a gun?”
“Well, it might be a toy,” she said. “I mean, is it a real gun?”
Gesturing at me with the weapon, he said, “You want to see me shoot him with it?”
I sensed that I’d just become the least desirable of available hostages.
“Gee,” she said, “that seems a little extreme.”
“I only need one hostage.”
“Nevertheless,” she said with an aplomb that dazzled me, “maybe you could just fire a shot into the ceiling.”
The killer smiled at her with all the expansive good humor that he had directed toward me earlier, in the street. In fact it was a warmer and even more adorable smile than the one I’d received.
“Why are you whispering?” he asked.
“It’s a library,” she whispered.
“The usual rules have been suspended.”
“Are you the librarian?” she asked him.
“Me—a librarian? No. In fact—”
“Then you can’t possibly have the authority to suspend the rules,” she said, speaking softly but no longer in a whisper.
“This gives me the authority,” he declared, and fired a round into the ceiling.
She glanced at the front windows, where the street was visible only in a succession of wedges between the half-closed Venetian blinds. When she looked next at me, I saw that she was disappointed, as I had been, by the pathetic volume of the shot. The walls, padded by books, absorbed the sound. Outside, it might have been not much louder than a muffled cough.
Giving no indication that his casual gunfire rattled her, she said, “May I put these books down somewhere? They’re quite an armful.”
With the pistol, he indicated a reading table. “There.”
As the woman put down the books, the killer went to the door and locked it, always keeping an eye on us.
“I don’t mean to criticize,” the woman said, “and I’m sure you know your business better than I do, but you’re wrong about needing only one hostage.”
She was so dangerously appealing to the eye that under other circumstances, she could have reduced any guy to his most deeply stupid state of desire. Already, however, I found myself more interested in what she had to say than I was in her figure, more fascinated by her chutzpah than by her radiant face.
The maniac seemed to share my fascination. By his expression, anyone could see that she had charmed him. His killer smile became more luminous.
When he spoke to her,