Read Online Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online

didn't even trust the eighty-year-old lady whose head bobbed with palsy. Some professional thieves were masters of disguise; the tremors might prove to be a brilliant bit of acting. But her chin wart sure looked real.
        In the nineteenth century, they expected banks to be impressive. The lobby had a granite floor, granite walls, fluted columns, and a lot of bronze work.
        When a bank employee, crossing the room, dropped a ledger book, the report, ricocheting off the walls, sounded quite like a gunshot. I twitched but didn't soil my pants.
        After depositing a paycheck and taking back a little cash, I departed without incident. The revolving door felt confining, but it brought me safely into the warm afternoon.
        I needed to pick up several garments at the dry cleaner's, so I left that task for last, and went to the library.
        The Cornelius Rutherford Snow Library is much bigger than one would expect for a town as small as ours, a handsome limestone structure.
        Flanking the main entry are stone lions on plinths in the shape of books.
        The lions are not frozen in a roar. Neither are they posed with heads raised and alert. Curiously, both are shown asleep, as if they have been reading a politician's autobiography and have been thus sedated.
        Cornelius, whose money built the library, didn't have a great deal of interest in books but thought that he should. Funding a handsome library was, to his way of reasoning, as broadening of the spirit and as edifying to the mind as actually having pored through hundreds of tomes. When the building was complete, he thereafter thought of himself as a well-read man.
        Our town isn't named after the form in which most of its annual precipitation falls. It honors instead the railroad-and-mining magnate whose pre-income-tax fortune founded it: Cornelius Rutherford Snow.
        Just inside the front doors of the library hangs a portrait of Cornelius. He is all steely eyes, mustache, muttonchops, and pride.
        When I entered, no one sat at any of the reading tables. The only patron in sight was at the main desk, leaning casually against the high counter, in a hushed conversation with Lionel Davis, the head librarian.
        As I drew near the elevated desk, I recognized the patron. His green eyes brightened at the sight of me, and his big-screen smile was friendly, not mocking, though he said to Lionel, "I think this gentleman will be wanting a book on flying saucers."
        I'd known Lionel Davis forever. He'd made a life of books to the same extent that I had made a life of baking. He was warm-hearted, kind, with enthusiasms ranging from Egyptian history to hard-boiled detective novels.
        He had the worn yet perpetually childlike countenance of a kindly blacksmith or a sincere vicar in a Dickens novel. I knew his face well, but I had never seen on it an expression quite like the one that currently occupied it.
        His smile was broad but his eyes were narrow. A tic at the left corner of his mouth suggested that the eyes more truly revealed his state of mind than did the smile.
        If I had recognized the warning in his face, I could not have done anything to save myself or him. The handsome fellow with the porcelain-white teeth had already decided on a course of action the moment I entered.
        First, he shot Lionel Davis in the head. he pistol made a hard flat noise not half as loud as I would have expected.
        Crazily, I thought how in the movies they didn't fire real bullets, but blanks, so this sound would have to be enhanced in post-production.
        I almost looked around for the cameras, the crew. The shooter was movie-star handsome, the gunshot didn't sound right, and no one would have any reason to kill a sweet man like Lionel Davis, which must mean that all this had been scripted and that the finished film would be in theaters nationwide next summer.
        "How many flies do