Life Expectancy

in every vein and artery.
        From beneath his suit jacket, he withdrew a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.
        Porter Carson had assured Lorrie that he hadn't come to warn her that Konrad Beezo was on her doorstep.
        He was sincere on two counts. First, he had no intention of warning her. Second, Beezo had already gotten past her doorstep and into her kitchen.
        Likewise, he had been confident that Beezo wouldn't be here tomorrow-because Beezo was here today.
        Konrad Beezo had hazel eyes. Porter Carson's eyes were blue. Colored contact lenses had been available for years.
        Beezo was nearly sixty years old. Carson looked forty-five. Now I could see similarities in body type and bone structure, but otherwise they appeared to be two different men.
        Some of the world's finest plastic surgeons have offices in Rio to serve the jet set from all over the world. If you are rich, if you will accept the medical risks of profound restructuring, you can be redesigned, rejuvenated, fully remade.
        If you are paranoid and obsessed with vengeance, if you believe you were destined for greatness that others conspired to deny you, perhaps you have the motivation to endure the pain and the hazards of multiple surgeries. Madness is not always expressed in reckless action; some homicidal paranoids have the patience to spend years planning their revenge.
        Listening to Beezo's uncanny imitation of me, I remembered that he had mocked Dad by imitating his voice, too, in the expectant-fathers' lounge over twenty-eight years ago.
        In response to my father's amazement, Beezo had said, I told you I'm talented, Rudy Tock. In more ways than you can imagine.
        In those words my father had heard only a boast by a vain and troubled man full of show, fond of flourish.
        Nearly three decades later, I realized that it had not been a boast but a warning. Don't tread on me.
        Now, as the three of us stood around the kitchen table, Beezo's smile was ripe with gloating. His hazel gaze, even filtered through blue lenses, burned with a vicious exultation.
        In his own voice, not in the mellow Southern accent of Porter Carson but the rougher timbre of the man who had harried us in the Hummer, Beezo said, "As I told you, I came here to ask something of you. Where is my compensation?"
        My attention, and Lorrie's, moved on a short vertical track: from his hate-twisted face to the muzzle of the silencer-equipped pistol, to his face again.
        "Where is my quid pro quo?" he demanded.
        Pathetically, to gain time to think, we lamely pretended not to understand his question. Lorrie said, "What quid pro quo?"
        "My recompense, my makeweight," Beezo said impatiently, "my something for something, your Andy for my Punchinello."
        "No," Lorrie said neither angrily nor with apparent fear, but with a flat finality.
        "I will treat him well," Beezo promised. "Better than you treated my son."
        Anger and sharp terror throttled my voice, but Lorrie firmly said again, "No."
        "I've been robbed of the fame that should've been mine. All I ever wanted was immortality, but I'm willing to settle now for a little secondhand glory. If I teach the boy what I know, he will be the greatest circus star of his age."
        "He has no talent for that," Lorrie assured him. "He's the descendant of pastry chefs and storm chasers."
        "Bloodlines don't matter," Beezo said. "All that matters is my genius.
        Among my gifts is mentoring."
        "Go away." Having fallen nearly to a whisper, Lorrie's voice had the quality of an incantation, as though she hoped to cast some spell of sanity upon him. "Father another child of your own."
        He persisted: "Even a boy with a minimum faculty for clownery can be molded into greatness with me as his guide and his master and his guru."
        "Father a child of your own," she repeated. "Even a creep like you can find some madwoman who'll spread her legs."
        A cool scorn had entered her voice, and I could not grasp her purpose in further angering him.
        She continued: "For enough money, some drug-addled slut, some desperate whore, will gag down her nausea and mate with you."
        Incredibly, instead of angering him further, her scorn clearly disconcerted him. He flinched more than once at her words and licked his lips nervously.
        "With the right