Read Online Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page B

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 gateau a Vorange 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 souffle au chocolate drizzled with creme 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