Life Expectancy - Dean Koontz

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with my father’s hand upon his heart.

      As the thunder rolled toward a far horizon, Dad heard another gunshot from beyond the door through which Konrad Beezo had vanished.

      Maddy lay somewhere behind that door—a woman left helpless by a difficult labor. I was back there, too—an infant who was not yet enough of a lummox to defend himself.

      My father, then a baker, had never been a man of action; nor did he become one when, a few years later, he graduated to the status of pastry chef. He is of average height and weight, not physically weak but not born for the boxing ring, either. He had to that point led a charmed life, without serious want, without any strife.

      Nevertheless, fear for his wife and his child cast him into a strange, cold panic marked more by calculation than by hysteria. Without a weapon or a plan, but suddenly with the heart of a lion, he opened that door and went after Beezo.

      Although his imagination spun a thousand bloody scenarios in mere seconds, he says that he did not anticipate what was about to happen, and of course he could not foresee how the events of that night would reverberate through the next thirty years with such terrible and astonishing consequences in his life and mine.

       2

      At Snow County Hospital, in the expectant-fathers’ waiting room, the inner door opens to a short corridor with a supply room to the left and a bathroom to the right. Fluorescent ceiling panels, white walls, and a white ceramic-tile floor imply impeccable antibacterial procedures.

      I have seen that space because my child entered the world in the same maternity ward on another unforgettable night of incomparable chaos.

      On that stormy evening in 1974, with Richard Nixon gone home to California, and Beezo on a rampage, my father found a nurse sprawled in the hallway, shot point-blank.

      He remembers almost being driven to his knees by pity, by despair.

      The loss of Dr. MacDonald, although terrible, had not fully penetrated Dad, for it had been so sudden, so dreamlike. Mere moments later, the sight of this dead nurse—young, fair, like a fallen angel in white raiments, golden hair fanning in a halo around her eerily serene face—pierced him, and he absorbed the truth and the meaning of both deaths at once.

      He tore open the storage-closet door, searching for something he might use as a weapon. He found only spare linens, bottles of antiseptic cleaner, a locked cabinet of medications …

      Although in retrospect this moment struck him as darkly comic, at the time he thought, with grave seriousness and with the logic of desperation, that having kneaded so much dough over the past few years, his hands were dangerously strong. If only he could get past Beezo’s gun, he surely would have the strength to strangle him.

      No makeshift weapon could hope to be as deadly as the well-flexed hands of an angry baker. Sheer terror spawned this lunatic notion; curiously, however, terror also gave him courage.

      The short hallway intersected a longer one, which led left and right. Off this new corridor, three doors served a pair of delivery rooms as well as the neonatal care unit where swaddled newborns, each in his or her bassinet, pondered their new reality of light, shadow, hunger, discontent, and taxes.

      Dad sought my mother and me, but found only her. She lay in one of the delivery rooms, alone and unconscious on the birthing bed.

      At first he thought that she must be dead. Darkness swooned at the edges of his vision, but before he passed out, he saw that his beloved Maddy was breathing. He clutched the edge of her bed until his vision brightened.

      Gray-faced, drenched with sweat, she looked not like the vibrant woman he knew, but instead appeared to be frail and vulnerable.

      Blood on the sheets suggested that she’d delivered their child, but no squalling infant was present.

      Elsewhere, Beezo shouted, “Where are you bastards?”

      Reluctant to leave my mother, Dad nonetheless went in search of the conflict to see what help he could provide—as (he has always insisted) any baker would have done.

      In the second delivery room, he found Natalie Beezo upon another birthing bed. The slender aerialist had so recently died from the complications of childbirth that her tears of suffering had not yet dried upon her cheeks.

      According to Dad, even after her agony and even in death, she was ethereally beautiful. A flawless olive complexion. Raven hair. Her eyes were open, luminous green, like windows to a field in Heaven.

      For Konrad Beezo, who didn’t appear to be handsome under the greasepaint and who was not a man of substantial property and whose personality would surely be at least somewhat off-putting even under ordinary circumstances, this woman was a prize beyond all reasonable expectation. You could understand—though not excuse—his violent reaction to the loss of her.

      Stepping out of the delivery room, Dad came face to face with the homicidal clown. Simultaneously Beezo flung open the door from the crèche and charged into the hall, a blanketed infant cradled in the crook of his left arm.

      At this close range, the pistol in his right hand appeared to be twice the size that it had been in the waiting room, as if they were in Alice’s Wonderland, where objects grew or shrank with no regard for reason or for the laws of physics.

      Dad might have seized Beezo’s wrist and, with his strong baker’s hands, fought for possession of the gun, but he dared not act in any way that would have put the baby at risk.

      With its pinched red face and furrowed brow, the infant appeared indignant, offended. Its mouth stretched open wide, as though it were trying to scream but had been shocked silent by the realization that its father was a mad clown.

      Thank God for the baby, Dad has often said. Otherwise I would have gotten myself killed. You’d have grown up fatherless, and you’d never have learned how to make a first-rate crème brûlée.

      So cradling the baby and brandishing the pistol, Beezo demanded of my father, “Where are they, Rudy Tock?”

      “Where are who?” Dad asked.

      The red-eyed clown appeared to be both wrung by grief and ripped by anger. Tears streaked his makeup. His lips trembled as if he might sob uncontrollably, then skinned back from his teeth in an expression of such ferocity that a chill wound through Dad’s bowels.

      “Don’t play dumb,” Beezo warned. “There had to be other nurses, maybe another doctor. I want the bastards dead, all of them who failed her.”

      “They ran,” my father said, certain that it would be safer to lie about having seen the medical staff escape than to insist that he had encountered no one. “They slipped out behind your back, the way you came, through the waiting room. They’re long gone.”

      Feeding on his rage, Konrad Beezo appeared to swell larger, as if anger were the food of giants. No Barnum & Bailey buffoonery brightened his face, and the poisonous hatred in his eyes was as potent as cobra venom.

      Lest he become a stand-in for the medical staff no longer within Beezo’s reach, Dad quickly added, with no trace of threat, as if only being helpful, “Police are on the way. They’ll want to take the baby from you.”

      “My son is mine,” Beezo declared with such passion that the stink of stale cigarette smoke rising from his clothes might almost have been mistaken for the consequence of his fiery emotion. “I will do anything to keep him from being raised by the aerialists.”

      Walking a thin line between clever manipulation and obvious fawning in the interest of self-preservation, my father said, “Your boy will be the greatest of his kind—clown, jester, harlequin, jackmuffin.”

      “Jackpudding,” the killer corrected, but without animosity. “Yes, he’ll be the greatest. He will. I won’t let anyone deny my son his destiny.”

      With

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