Free Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz Page B

probably guilty of gaping again. I know I sputtered: “Put out an eye?”
    “Drive it deep enough, and you might even damage the brain,” she said, nodding as if in somber agreement with herself. “He’d have an instant convulsion, drop the gun, and if he didn’t drop it, he’d be so devastated, we could easily just take the pistol out of his hand.”
    “Oh my God, you’re going to get us killed.”
    “There you go again,” she said.
    “Listen,” I tried to reason with her, “when the crunch came, you wouldn’t have the stomach to do something like that.”
    “I certainly would, to save my life.”
    Alarmed by her calm conviction, I insisted, “You’d flinch at the last moment.”
    “I never flinch from anything.”
    “Have you ever stabbed someone in the eye before?”
    “No. But I can clearly picture myself doing it.”
    I couldn’t suppress the sarcasm any longer: “What are you, a professional assassin or something?”
    She frowned. “Keep your voice down. I’m a dance instructor.”
    “And teaching ballet prepares you to put out a man’s eye?”
    “Of course not, silly. I don’t teach ballet. I give ballroom-dancing lessons. Fox-trot, waltz, rumba, tango, cha-cha, swing, you name it.”
    Just my luck: to be cuffed to a beautiful woman who turns out to be a ballroom-dance instructor, and me a lummox.
    “You’ll flinch,” I insisted, “and you’ll miss his eye, and he’ll shoot us dead.”
    “Even if I flub it,” she said, “which I won’t, but even if I do, he won’t shoot us dead. Haven’t you been paying attention?
He needs hostages.
”
    I disagreed. “He doesn’t need hostages
who try to stab him in the eye.
”
    She raised her eyes as if imploring the heavens beyond the ceiling: “Please tell me I’m not shackled to a pessimist
and
a coward.”
    “I’m not a coward. I’m just responsibly cautious.”
    “That’s what every coward says.”
    “That’s also what every responsibly cautious person says,” I replied, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive.
    At the far end of the room, the maniac began to pound one fist against the newspaper he was reading. Then both fists. Pounding and pounding like a baby in a tantrum.
    Face contorted fearsomely, he made inarticulate noises of rage. Some rough Neanderthal consciousness, remnant in his genes, seemed to break free from the chains of time and DNA.
    Fury informed his voice, then frustration, then what might have been a wild grief, then fury once more and escalating. This was the performance of an animal howling with loss, its rage rooted in the black soil of misery.
    He pushed his chair back from the table, picked up his pistol. He emptied the remaining eight rounds in the magazine, aiming at the newspaper he had been reading.
    The hard report of each shot boomed off the vaulted ceiling, rang off the brass shades of the inverted torchieres, and crashed back and forth between the metal filing cabinets. I felt echoes of each concussion humming in my teeth.
    Cut loose two floors underground, the barrage would be at most a faint crackle at street level.
    Splinters of the old oak refectory table sprayed and scraps of paper spun and a couple bullets ricocheted through the air, some fragments trailing threads of smoke. The fragrance of aging newsprint was seasoned with the more acrid scent of gunfire and with a raw wood smell liberated from the table’s wounds.
    For a moment, as he repeatedly squeezed the trigger without effect, I rejoiced that he had depleted his ammunition. But of course he had a spare magazine, perhaps several.
    While he reloaded the weapon, he seemed intent on delivering ten more rounds to the hated newspaper. Instead, with the fresh magazine installed, his rage abruptly abated. He began to weep. Wretched sobs racked him.
    He collapsed into his chair once more and put down the gun. He leaned over the table and seemed to want to piece together the pages that he had ripped and riddled with gunfire, as if some