Life Expectancy

by Dean Koontz

  family would fall as one from their high trapezes and die horribly on impact with the center ring.”

  Glancing at me, Lorrie said, “Wouldn’t you like to have seen Jesus’s face when he read their e-mail?”

  Breathless with the momentum of his story, Punchinello said, “On the night that I was born here in Snow Village, Virgilio hired an assassin who came to the hospital disguised as a nurse.”

  “He would know where to find an assassin-for-hire on a moment’s notice?” she asked.

  Punchinello’s voice wavered between the most caustic hatred and abject fear: “Virgilio Vivacemente, that animated sewage that calls itself a man…he is connected, he sits at the center of a web of evil. He plucks a strand, and criminals half a world away feel the vibrations and answer them at once. He is a pompous charlatan and a fool…but he is also a venomous centipede, quick and vicious, supremely dangerous. He arranged to have us murdered, while he and his devious family were performing—an airtight alibi.”

  This was the story of the night of my birth as reimagined by a drunken lunatic.

  Punchinello had been nurtured on it instead of on mother’s milk and love. Having heard the tale a thousand times, having been raised in an atmosphere of paranoid fantasy and hatred, he believed in this absurd history as idol worshippers once believed in the consciousness and divinity of solid-gold calves and slabs of stone.

  “And in the expectant-fathers’ lounge,” he said, “when the hired killer crept up on my father from behind, Rudy Tock entered at that very moment, saw the fiend, drew his pistol, and shot her before she could carry out Virgilio’s orders.”

  Poor Lois Hanson, young and dedicated, murdered by a psychotic clown, had been transformed by that same clown from a nurse into a combination Ninja assassin and baby-killing agent of King Herod.

  Patting my knee to snap me out of a trance of astonishment, Lorrie said, “Your dad carried a pistol, did he? I thought he was a simple pastry chef.”

  “Back then he was just a baker,” I said.

  “Wow. What’s he packing now that he’s become a pastry chef—a submachine gun?”

  Compelled to tell his woeful tale, Punchinello impatiently pressed on: “Saved by Rudy Tock, my father realized that my mother and I, too, were in great danger. He rushed into the maternity ward, located the delivery room, and arrived as the doctor was suffocating me—me, an innocent newborn!”

  “The doctor was a phony, too?” Lorrie asked.

  “No. MacDonald was a real doctor, but he had been corrupted by Virgilio Vivacemente, that worm from the bowels of a syphilitic weasel.”

  “Weasels can get syphilis?” Lorrie wondered.

  He chose to consider this a rhetorical question, and continued: “Dr. MacDonald was paid an enormous sum, a fortune, to make it appear that my mother died in childbirth and that I was stillborn. Virgilio—may he be cast into hell tonight—believed that the oh-so-precious Vivacemente blood had been polluted by the great Konrad Beezo and that my mother and me, being tainted, must be eradicated.”

  “What a vile man,” Lorrie said as if she actually believed any of this.

  “I told you!” Punchinello cried. “He is lower than a festering canker on Satan’s ass.”

  “That is low,” Lorrie agreed.

  “Konrad Beezo shot Dr. MacDonald as he tried to suffocate me. My mother, my beautiful mother, was already dead.”

  “That’s some story,” I said, for I was concerned that I might be seen as one of Virgilio’s minions if I drew attention to any of the numerous absurdities in this Nuthouse Theater version of those long-ago events.

  “But Virgilio Vivacemente, that spawn of a witch’s toilet—”

  “Oh, I like that one,” Lorrie interrupted.

  “—that animated dog vomit knew how corrupt this town was, how easily he could conceal the truth. He bribed the police, the local journalists. The official story is the outrageous concoction of lies reported in the Gazette.”

  I managed to sound sympathetic to his version: “Seems like such a transparent concoction when you know the truth.”

  He nodded vigorously. “Rudy Tock must have been frustrated to have silence imposed on him all these years.”

  “Dad took no money from Virgilio,” I hastened to assure him, fearing that he might later take a spin across town to gun down Dad, Mom, and Weena. “Not a penny.”

  “No, no, of course he didn’t,” Punchinello said, and apologized effusively if I had inferred such an accusation. “Konrad Beezo, my father, has impressed on me what a courageous man of integrity Rudy Tock is. I know they must have silenced him in some brutal fashion.”

  Understanding Punchinello’s psychology well enough to suspect that only wild exaggeration and flamboyant lies had the ring of truth to him, I said, “They beat Dad once a week for years.”

  “This evil town.”

  “But that alone wouldn’t have silenced him,” I added. “They threatened to kill my Grandma Rowena if he talked.”

  “They beat her, too,” said Lorrie.

  Whether she intended to be helpful or mischievous, I could not tell.

  “But they only beat her once,” I said.

  Summoning a credible note of outrage, Lorrie revealed, “They knocked out her teeth.”

  “Only two teeth,” I hastened to correct, concerned that we might overplay the lie.

  “They tore off her ear.”

  “Not her ear,” I said quickly. “Her hat.”

  “I thought it was her ear,” Lorrie said.

  “It was her hat,” I insisted in a tone of voice that said enough is enough. “They tore off her hat and stomped on it.”

  Punchinello Beezo buried his face in his hands, muffling his voice: “Tore off an old lady’s hat. An old lady’s hat. We’ve all suffered at the hands of these monsters.”

  Before Lorrie could claim that Virgilio’s henchmen had cut off Grandma Rowena’s thumbs, I said, “Where has your father been these past twenty years?”

  Dropping his mask of fingers, he said, “On the run, always moving, two steps ahead of the law but barely one step ahead of Vivacemente’s private detectives. He raised me in a dozen different places. He was forced to give up the big career. The great Konrad Beezo…reduced to taking clown positions with smaller shows and demeaning jobs like children’s-party clown, car-wash clown, dunk-the-clown in a carnival. Living under false names—Cheeso, Giggles, Clappo, Saucy.”

  “Saucy?” Lorrie asked.

  Blushing, Punchinello said, “For a while he was a clown MC in a strip club. He was so humiliated. The men who go to those places, they didn’t appreciate his genius. All they cared about were boobs and butts.”

  “Philistines,” I sympathized.

  “Grieving, despairing, in a constant seething fury, terrified that an agent of the Vivacementes would find him at any moment, he was as good a father as he could be under the circumstances, though Konrad Beezo had lost all capacity to love when he lost my mother.”

  “Hollywood could make a great tearjerker out of this,” Lorrie said.

  Punchinello agreed. “My father thinks Charles Bronson should play him.”

  “The absolute king of tearjerkers,” Lorrie said.

  “My childhood was cold, loveless, but there were compensations. By the time I was ten, for instance, in preparation for the day that I might have to stalk and destroy Virgilio Vivacemente, I’d learned an enormous amount about guns, knives, and poisons.”

  “Other ten-year-old boys have nothing useful in their heads,” Lorrie said. “Just baseball, video games, and collecting Pokémon cards.”

  “I didn’t get love, but at least he kept me safe from the vicious Virgilio…and he did his best to teach me all the craft and the technique that had made him a legend in his profession.”

  A hard clang, like the toll of a tuneless bell, pealed through the room.

  At the top of the stairs, having torched open the steel door, Honker and Crinkles torqued it from its frame and dropped i
t on the landing.

  “I’ve got to do my part now,” Punchinello said. His anger and hatred dimmed as if on a rheostat, while warmth and what passed for affection brightened his face. “But don’t worry. When this is done, Jimmy, I’ll protect you. I know we can trust you not to rat us out. Nothing will happen to the son of Rudy Tock.”

  “What about me?” Lorrie asked.

  “You’ll have to be killed,” he said without hesitation, his smile fading into a bland robotic expression, his eyes abruptly empty of compassion.

  While all evil is insane and while some insanity can be funny from a comfortable distance, few insane people have a sense of humor. If Punchinello had one, it wasn’t wry enough to produce a line like that. I knew at once that he was serious. He would release me but kill Lorrie.

  As he rose to his feet and moved away, shock briefly silenced me. Then I called out, “Punch, wait! I’ve got a secret to tell you.”

  He turned to me. His dark emotions became light as rapidly as a flock of birds radically altering its flight path to catch a sudden change of wind. The robot had vanished, and the cold stare. Now he was all glamor and fellowship: good looks, great hair, twinkling best-friend eyes.

  “Lorrie,” I told him, “is my fiancée.”

  He paid out one of those million-dollar smiles. “Fantastic! You make a perfect couple.”

  Not sure he got the point, I said, “We’re going to be married in November. We’d like you to come to the wedding if that’s possible. But there can’t be a wedding if you kill her.”

  Smiling, nodding, he considered this as I held my breath. And considered it. Finally he said, “I want only happiness for the son of Rudy Tock, my father’s savior and mine. This will be tricky with Honker and Crinkles, but we’ll work it out.”

  The “thank you” came out of me on an explosive exhalation.

  He left us and proceeded to the stairs.

  However reluctant she might have been to show weakness, Lorrie could not repress a shudder of relief that chattered her teeth.

  When Punchinello was out of earshot, she said, “Let’s get one thing straight, baker boy. I’m not naming the first kid either Konrad or Beezo.”

  17

  * * *

  Punchinello swung the sledge and broke blocks. Honker cut the rebar as it was uncovered. Crinkles moved the debris to the bottom of the stairs and out of the way. They were remarkably efficient and coordinated for a trio of clowns.

  Each time that Punchinello paused to rest, allowing Honker to use the acetylene torch, he stepped as far away from his companion as possible, to avoid the sparks showering off the rebar. And each time he consulted his wristwatch.

  Obviously, they had calculated the time that the power company would need to repair the transformer and were confident with their conclusion. They didn’t appear to be nervous. Crazy, yes, but not in the least anxious.

  My watch was on my left wrist, so I could check it without disturbing Lorrie, who was shackled to my right arm.

  Not that she took a nap as we leaned back against the cozy metal filing cabinets. She was wide awake and—I’m sure this will be no surprise to you—talking.

  “I wish my father had been a clown,” she said wistfully.

  “Why would you want to live with such anger every day?”

  “My father wouldn’t be an angry clown. He’s a sweet-tempered man, just irresponsible.”

  “He wasn’t around much, huh?”

  “Always off chasing tornadoes,” she said.

  I decided to ask: “Why?”

  “He’s a storm chaser. That’s how he makes his living, traveling the Midwest in his souped-up Suburban.”

  This was 1994. The movie Twister would not be released until 1996. I had never imagined chasing tornadoes could be a career.

  Assuming that this had to be a put-on, I played along: “Has he ever caught one?”

  “Oh, dozens.”

  “What’s he do with them?”

  “Sells them, of course.”

  “So once he’s caught a tornado, it’s his? He has a right to sell it?”

  “Of course. It’s copyrighted.”

  “So he sees a tornado, and he chases after it, and when he gets close enough—”

  “They’re fearless,” she said, “they get right in there.”

  “So he gets right in there and then he—what?—you can’t just shoot a tornado as if it were a lion on the veldt.”

  “Sure you can,” she said. “It’s pretty much exactly the same.”

  This was beginning to seem less like a put-on than like a kind of madness that Punchinello might embrace.

  “Would your father sell to me?”

  “If you had the money.”

  “I don’t think I could afford an entire tornado. They must be expensive.”

  “Well,” she said, “it depends on what you want to use it for.”

  “I was thinking I could threaten Chicago with it, demand ten million, maybe twenty million, or else.”

  She regarded me with clear impatience and with what might have been pity. “Like I haven’t heard that lame joke a million times.”

  I began to suspect that I was missing something. “I’m sorry. I want to know. Really.”

  “Well, partly he charges by how much video you want to buy—a minute, two minutes, ten.”

  Video. Film. Of course. He wasn’t out there lassoing tornadoes. I had become so accustomed to her cockeyed conversation that when she said her father chased tornadoes, I hadn’t been able to believe that she meant exactly what she said.

  “If you’re a scientist,” she continued, “he charges you a lower rate than he’d charge a television network or a movie studio.”

  “Geez, that really is dangerous work.”

  “Yeah, but it seems now like even if he had been a clown, that wouldn’t have been a cakewalk, either.” She sighed. “I just wish he’d been around more when I was a kid.”

  “The tornado season doesn’t last all year.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But he also chases hurricanes.”

  “I guess he figures he’s already geared up for it.”

  “That’s exactly what he figures. When one season ends, the other is beginning, so then he’s tracking weather reports along the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic seaboard.”

  At the top of the stairs, the three larcenous jackpuddings had opened a hole large enough to afford them entrance to the vault.

  With flashlights, Punchinello and Crinkles disappeared through the broken masonry. Honker stayed behind, keeping a watch on us from the landing.

  “When the generator didn’t come on after the power went off,” Lorrie said, “maybe an automatic alarm went out over the phone line, and the police are in the bank right now.”

  Although I hoped her unshakable optimism would prove justified, I said, “These guys would’ve covered that. They seem to have thought of everything.”

  She fell silent. So did I.

  I suspected that our thoughts were occupied with the same worry: Would Punchinello keep his promise to let us go?

  His cohorts were going to be the problem. Neither of them seemed tightly wrapped, but they weren’t insane in the way that the son of the great Konrad Beezo was insane. Their feet were more solidly on the ground than his. Honker was motivated by greed, Crinkles by greed and envy. They would not be in the least sentimental about the son of Rudy Tock.

  Silence sucked. Worry thrived in it.

  I felt better just hearing Lorrie talk, so I tried to start her up again. “I’m surprised your mother and you didn’t travel with your father. If I were married to a storm chaser who was away from home all the time, I’d want to be with him. Well, her.”

  “Mom has her own successful business. She loves it, and if she left L.A., she’d have to give it up.”

  “What business is she in?” I asked.

  “She’s a snake handler.”

  This seemed promising.

  Lorrie said, “Having a mother
who’s a snake handler isn’t as much fun as you’d think.”

  “Really? I think it would be a delight.”

  “Sometimes, yeah. But she worked out of our home. Snakes—they aren’t as easy to train as puppies.”

  “You can housebreak a snake?”

  “I’m not talking potty training. I mean tricks. Dogs love to learn stuff, but snakes get bored easily. When they’re bored, they try to slither away, and sometimes they can move fast.”

  Punchinello and Crinkles came out of the vault, onto the high landing where Honker waited for them. They were carrying boxes which they put down and from which they removed the lids.

  Honker whooped when he saw the contents. The three men laughed and high-fived one another.

  I figured the boxes contained something more exciting than either snakes or pastries.

  18

  * * *

  They brought sixteen boxes out of the vault, carried them down the stairs, and loaded them on the handcart that had previously held the explosives. These were cardboard cartons with removable lids, similar to the kind in which movers pack books.

  “Over three million in cash,” Punchinello said when he urged Lorrie and me to our feet and led us to the loot.

  I remembered something he’d said earlier: To all appearances, it’s not a major bank, not worth knocking over.

  “There wouldn’t be this much cash on hand in most big-city banks,” Punchinello said. “This is a Treasury Department collection center for what’s called ‘fatigued currency.’ All banks cull worn currency from circulation. Those in a twelve-county district send it here on a weekly basis for retirement, and in return they receive freshly printed bills.”

  “Two thirds of this,” Honker said, “is fatigued currency, and the other million is new and crisp. Don’t matter. It’ll all spend the same.”

  “We just drained some blood out of a capitalist leech,” said Crinkles, but his weak metaphor reflected his physical exhaustion. His explosion of wiry hair had gone limp with sweat.

  Consulting his watch, Punchinello said, “We’re going to have to shake ass to beat the fireworks.”