Life Expectancy - Dean Koontz

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matters female, he might be a bit thick, but regarding Machiavellian schemes, he smelled a rat instantly: “What’s really in your purse—a gun?”

      Admitting that she had been caught out, Lorrie shrugged. “No gun. Just a pointy metal nail file.”

      “You were going to—what?—stab me in the carotid artery?”

      “Only if I couldn’t get one of your eyes,” she said.

      He raised his pistol, and though he pointed it at her, I figured that once he started blasting away, he’d drill me, too. I’d seen what he’d done to the newspaper.

      “I should kill you dead right here,” he said, although without any animosity in his voice.

      “You should,” she agreed. “I would if I were you.”

      He grinned and shook his head. “What a piece of work.”

      “Right back at ya,” she said, and matched his grin.

      My teeth were revealed molar to molar, as well, though my grin was so tight with anxiety that it hurt my face.

      “All these years, planning for this day,” the maniac said, “I expected it to be gratifying in a savage sort of way, even thrilling, but I never thought it would be as much fun as this.”

      Lorrie said, “A party can never be better than the guests you invite.”

      The lunatic killer considered this as if Lorrie had quoted one of the most complex philosophical propositions of Schopenhauer. He nodded solemnly, rolled his tongue over his teeth, uppers and lowers, as though he could taste the brilliance of those words, and finally he said, “How true. How very true.”

      I realized that I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversation. I didn’t want him to get the idea that a party of two might be more fun than three.

      When I opened my mouth—no doubt to say something even more inappropriate than my stupid coathangers line, something that would bring me closer to a bullet in the groin—a great hollow peal tolled through the vaulted subcellar. King Kong pounded his mighty fists one, two, three times against the giant door in the massive wall that separated his half of the island from the half where the nervous natives lived.

      The maniac brightened at the sound. “That’ll be Honker and Crinkles. You’ll like them. They have the explosives.”

       11

      As it turned out, Cornelius Randolph Snow not only had a keen appreciation for fine Victorian architecture but also for Victorian hugger-mugger of the kind that flourished in melodramas of the period and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had used with singular effect in his immortal Sherlock Holmes yarns: concealed doors, hidden rooms, blind staircases, secret passageways.

      Hand in hand but only because of the steel cuffs, quickly but only because of the gun prodding us in the back, Lorrie and I went to the end of the room where the maniac had brutally shot the old newspaper.

      Shelves spanned the width of that wall, rose from floor to ceiling. Stored thereon were periodicals in labeled slipcases.

      The maniac studied several shelves, up and down, back and forth, maybe looking for the 1952 run of Life magazine, maybe hoping to spot a juicier spider.

      Nope, neither. He was searching for a hidden switch. He found it, and a section of bookshelves pivoted open, revealing an alcove behind them.

      At the back of the alcove, a stone wall embraced an iron-banded oak door. In an age that demanded harsher punishment for patrons with overdue books, they might have kept a tardy Jane Austen reader here until solitary confinement and a short ration of gruel brought the miscreant to remorse and contrition.

      The maniac pounded one fist three times on the door—obviously an answering signal.

      From the farther side came two knocks, hollow and loud.

      After the maniac responded with two, a single knock came from the space beyond. He answered with one thump.

      This seemed to be an unnecessarily complicated passcode, but the maniac was delighted by the ritual. He beamed happily at us.

      His toothy smile no longer had quite the endearing quality that had marked it previously. He was an adorable-looking fellow, and against your better judgment, you still wanted to be charmed by him, but you kept scanning for dark hairy bits of spider on his lips and tongue.

      A moment after the last knock, the buzz of a small high-speed motor arose from the farther side of the door. Then metal shrieked on metal.

      A diamond-point steel drill bit thrust through the keyhole. The spinning shaft chewed up the lock mechanism and spat metal shavings on the floor.

      Our host raised his voice and reported with boyish enthusiasm: “We tortured a member of the Snow Village Historical Preservation Society, but we couldn’t get keys out of him. I’m sure he’d have given them to us if he’d known where to get them, but it was our bad luck—and his—that we chose the wrong person to torture. So we’ve had to resort to this.”

      Lorrie’s cuffed hand sought my cuffed hand and held it tight.

      I wished that we had met under different circumstances. Like at a town picnic or even at a tea dance.

      The drill withdrew from the lock plate, fell silent. The broken lock assembly rattled, clinked, twanged, and gave way as the door opened into the alcove.

      I had a glimpse of what appeared to be an eerily lit tunnel beyond the door.

      A dour man came through, out of the alcove, past the pivoted section of bookcase, into the library’s subcellar. A similar specimen followed him, pulling a handcart.

      The first newcomer was about fifty, totally bald, with black eyebrows so shaggy that you could have knitted a child’s sweater from them. He wore khakis, a green Ban Lon shirt, and a shoulder holster with gun.

      “Excellent, excellent. You’re right on time, Honker,” said the maniac.

      I had no way of knowing whether the new guy’s name was, say, Bob Honker, or whether this was a nickname inspired by the size of his nose. He had an enormous nose. Once it must have been straight and proud, but time had rendered it a spongy lump, ruddy with a fine webbing of burst capillaries—the nose of a serious drinker.

      Honker appeared to be sober now, but brooding and suspicious.

      He scowled at me, at Lorrie, and said gruffly, “Who’re the bitch and Bigfoot?”

      “Hostages,” the maniac explained.

      “What the hell we need hostages for?”

      “If something goes wrong.”

      “You think something’ll go wrong?”

      “No,” the maniac said, “but they entertain me.”

      The second newcomer stepped away from the handcart to join the discussion. He resembled Art Garfunkel, the singer: a decadent choirboy’s face, electroshocked hair.

      He wore a zippered nylon windbreaker over a T-shirt, but I could see the bulk of a holster and weapon beneath it.

      “Whether something goes wrong or not,” he said, “we’ll have to waste them.”

      “Of course,” the maniac said.

      “It’d be a shame to off the bitch without using it,” said the choirboy.

      More than their casual talk of murdering us, this reference to Lorrie as “it” chilled me.

      Her hand gripped mine so tightly that my knuckles ached.

      The maniac said, “Put her out of your mind, Crinkles. That isn’t going to happen.”

      Whether this was

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