LITMIR.BIZ

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irons socks.”

      Lorrie frowned.

      “Not that I mean my mother is an idiot,” I clarified. “She’s a wonderful woman. She’s not an idiot, she’s just caring. I mean other people who iron their socks are idiots.”

      At once I saw that with the language skills of a lummox, I had talked myself into a corner.

      “If either of you irons your socks,” I said, “I don’t mean that you’re idiots. I’m sure you’re just caring people, like my mom.”

      With disturbingly similar expressions, Lorrie and the maniac stared at me as though I had just walked down the debarkation ramp from a flying saucer.

      I thought that being shackled to me suddenly creeped her out, and I figured the maniac would decide that a single hostage was plenty of insurance, after all.

      The descending spider still hung over our heads, but its shadow on the floor was smaller, now the size of a salad plate, and blurry.

      To my surprise, the killer’s eyes grew misty. “That was very touching—the socks. Very sweet.”

      My sock story didn’t seem to have struck a sentimental chord in Lorrie. She stared at me with squint-eyed intensity.

      The maniac said, “You’re a very lucky man, Jimmy.”

      “I am,” I agreed, although my only bit of luck—being cuffed to Lorrie Lynn Hicks instead of to a diseased wino—seemed to be turning sour.

      “To have a caring mother,” the maniac mused. “What must that be like?”

      “Good,” I said, “it’s good,” but I didn’t trust myself to say more.

      Spinning gossamer from its innards, the spider unreeled a longer umbilical, finally dangling in front of our faces.

      With dreamy-voiced eloquence, the killer said, “To have a caring mother who makes you hot cocoa each evening, tucks you in bed every night, kisses you on the cheek, reads you to sleep….”

      Before I myself could read, I was almost always read to sleep because ours is a bookish family. More often than not, however, the reader had been my Grandma Rowena.

      Sometimes the story was about a Snow White whose seven dwarf friends suffered fatal accidents and diseases until it was Snow alone against the evil queen. Come to think of it, a two-ton safe fell on Happy once. That was a lot cleaner than what happened to poor Sneezy. Or maybe Weena would read the one about Cinderella—the dangerous glass slippers splintering painfully around Cindy’s feet, the pumpkin coach plunging off the road into the ravine.

      I was a grown man before I discovered that in Arnold Lobel’s charming Frog and Toad books, there was not always a scene in which one or the other of the title characters had a foot gnawed off by another meadowland creature.

      “I didn’t have a caring mother,” the maniac said, a disturbing note of whiny distress entering his voice. “My childhood was hard, cold, and loveless.”

      Now occurred an unexpected turn of events: My fear of being shot to death took second place to the dread that this guy would harangue us with a droning account of his victimization. Beaten with wire coathangers. Forced to wear girly clothes until he was six. Sent to bed without his porridge.

      I didn’t need to get kidnapped, cuffed, and held at gunpoint to be subjected to a pityfest. I could have stayed home and watched daytime-TV talk shows.

      Fortunately, he bit his lip, stiffened his spine, and said, “It’s a waste of time to dwell on the past. What’s done is done.”

      Unfortunately, the glimmer of teary self-pity in his eyes was not replaced by that charming twinkle, but instead by a fanatical gleam.

      The spider had not continued its descent. It hung in front of our faces, perhaps freaked out by the sight of us and frozen in fear.

      As though he were a vintner plucking a grape from a vine, the maniac pinched the fat spider between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, crushed it, and brought the mangled remains to his nose to savor the scent.

      I hoped he wouldn’t offer me a sniff. I have a highly refined sense of smell, which is one reason that I’m a natural-born baker.

      Fortunately, he had no intention of sharing the heady fragrance.

      Unfortunately, he brought the morsel to his mouth and delicately licked the arachnid paste. He savored this strange fruit, decided it was not sufficiently ripe, and wiped his fingers on the sleeve of his jacket.

      Here was a graduate of Hannibal Lecter University, ready for a career in hospitality services as the new manager of the Bates Motel.

      This spider-sampling had not been a performance for our benefit. The entire incident had been as unconscious as shooing away a fly, except the opposite.

      Now, quite unaware of the effect his culinary curiosity had on us, he said, “Anyway, the time for talking is long past. It’s time for action now, for justice.”

      “And how will that justice be achieved?” Lorrie wondered. For the moment, anyway, she was no longer able to maintain a sprightly, let alone flippant, let alone devil-may-care tone of voice.

      In spite of his adult baritone, he sounded uncannily like an angry little boy: “I’m going to blow up a lot of stuff and kill a bunch of people and make this town sorry.”

      “Sounds pretty ambitious,” she said.

      “I’ve been planning this all my life.”

      Having changed my mind, I said, “Actually, I’d really like to hear about the coathangers.”

      “What coathangers?” he asked.

      Before I could talk my way into a bullet between the eyes, Lorrie said, “Do you think I could have my purse?”

      He frowned. “Why?”

      “It’s a female emergency.”

      I couldn’t believe she was going to do this. I knew I hadn’t won the argument, but I assumed that I’d put enough doubt in her mind to give her second thoughts.

      “Female emergency?” the maniac asked. “What’s that mean?”

      “You know,” she said coyly.

      For a guy who looked like a babe magnet able to draw swooning women like iron filings from a hundred-mile radius, he proved surprisingly obtuse in this matter. “How would I know?”

      “It’s that time of month,” she said.

      He claimed bafflement. “The middle?”

      As if it were infectious, Lorrie caught his bewilderment: “The middle?”

      “It’s the middle of the month,” he reminded her. “The fifteenth of September. So what?”

      “It’s my time of month,” she elucidated.

      He just stared at her, befuddled.

      “I’m having my period,” she declared impatiently.

      The furrows in his brow were smoothed away by understanding. “Ah. A female emergency.”

      “Yes. That’s right. Hallelujah. Now may I have my purse?”

      “Why?”

      If she ever got her hands on that nail file, she would plunge it into him with enthusiasm.

      “I need a tampon,” she said.

      “You’re saying there’s a tampon in your purse?”

      “Yes.”

      “And you need it now, you can’t wait?”

      “No, I absolutely can’t wait,” she confirmed. Then she played to his compassionate side, which he hadn’t shown to the head-shot

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