Life Expectancy

psychotic hag," she continued, "you could father another murderous little maggot as insane as your firstborn."
        Perhaps because he hadn't the courage to meet Lorrie's eyes any longer or perhaps because in my furious silence he sensed the greater threat, Beezo shifted his attention to me.
        Trembling, the pistol in his right hand followed the interest of his eyes, and the muzzle offered me the dark bore of eternity.
        The instant Konrad Beezo was distracted, Lorrie thrust a hand into a pocket of her cheerful Christmas apron, extracted a miniature pressurized cannister of pepper spray.
        Realizing his error, Beezo turned away from me.
        As he twitched toward Lorrie, she scored a bull's-eye. A rust-red stream of fluid splashed his face.
        At least half blinded, Beezo squeezed off a shot-a hard muffled thup-exploding a pane in a windowed cabinet door, shattering dishes.
        I snatched up a chair and thrust it at him as he squeezed off another wild shot. He fired a third as I drove him backward across the kitchen in the manner of a wild-animal trainer warning off an enraged lion.
        A fourth shot drilled the chair between us. Splinters of pine and soft wads of foam padding flicked my face, but the bullet didn't find me.
        When he backed into the kitchen sink, I rammed the legs of the chair into him.
        He cried out in pain and fired a fifth shot that cracked the oak-plank flooring.
        Cornered, the rat found a tiger in himself. He wrenched the chair from me, fired a sixth round that blew out an oven window.
        He threw the chair. I dodged.
        Gasping for breath, wheezing out the fumes of pepper spray, streaming tears from bloodshot eyes, waving the gun, he staggered across the kitchen, nearly cold-cocked himself with the refrigerator, slammed through the swinging door into the dining room.
        Lorrie had fallen into a terrible silence, a perfect stillness on the oak. Shot. And oh, God, the blood.
        I could not leave her there alone, yet I could not stay at her side with Beezo loose in the house.
        This rending dilemma was in an instant resolved by one of the many tough equations of love. I loved Lorrie more than I loved life. But the two of us loved our children more than ourselves, which in the language of mathematics, you might call love-squared. Love plus love-squared equalled an inevitable choice.
        Sickened by the prospect of an intolerable loss, terrified by the anticipation of another loss unendurable, I went after Beezo, desperate to stop him before he found the kids.
        He wouldn't be content to escape and return another day. We had seen his new Brazilian face. Never again would he enjoy the advantage of surprise.
        We were in the end game. He would have his compensation, his something for something, Andy for his Punchinello. He would murder the girls, too, and call it fair interest on the debt.
        As I crashed through the swinging door into the dining room, he staggered out of there, clipping the frame of the archway with his shoulder.
        In the living room, he shot at me. Pepper-blurred as his vision must have been, luck rather than skill guided the bullet.
        Fire seared my right ear. Although the flash of pain was not disabling, it scared me into a stumble, a fall.
        I scrambled up.
        Beezo had vanished.
        In the foyer, I found him with the pistol in his right hand, his left hand clutching the bannister on the balustrade, doggedly climbing the stairs, with half of the first flight already behind him.
        He must have thought that I had been head-shot and disabled, or even killed, because he didn't look back or seem to hear me in pursuit.
        Before he reached the first landing, I seized him from behind and dragged him down.
        Fear for family and the terror of a life alone made me not courageous, really, but venturous, even heedless.
        We fell against the balustrade. Wood cracked. He dropped the gun, and we tumbled together to the foyer floor.
        I had him in a choke hold, my right arm across his throat, pulling back hard on my right wrist with my left hand. Untroubled by the slightest compunction, I would have tightened the hold until I crushejd his windpipe, would have listened with savage pleasure as he drummed his heels against the floor in death throes.
        Before I'd been able to lock the hold, however, Beezo