Life Expectancy

had gotten his chin down, wedging it against my arm, making it impossible for me to apply full killing pressure.
        He reached behind his head, clawing with both hands, hoping to blind me. Those cruel hands that had strangled Nedra Lamm. Those merciless hands that had shot Dr. MacDonald, Nurse Hanson.
        I strove to keep my face away from him.
        He snared my bullet-grazed ear and twisted.
        Pain flared so intensely that all breath flew from me, and I almost passed out.
        When Beezo felt the choke hold relent for an instant and then discovered his fingers slick with my blood, he knew my weak spot. He bucked and wrenched this way and that in a bid to break my grip, all the while groping backward for my ear.
        Sooner than later, he would snare it again.
        Next time the pain would trigger a trapdoor, a plunge into unconsciousness, vulnerability, death.
        The pistol lay a few feet away, on the bottom step.
        Simultaneously, I released the choke hold and shoved Beezo away from me.
        One roll carried me to the bottom of the stairs. I plucked the pistol off the step, turned, and fired.
        At such close range, as he reached for me, the' bullet tore out his throat. He flopped faceup, arms spread, the back of his right hand rapping spasmodically against the floor.
        Assuming that my count proved correct, eight shots had been fired. If the weapon contained the usual magazine, two rounds remained.
        Gagging, gushing, whistling air through his ruined throat, Konrad Beezo was dying in wheezes and spurts.
        I wish that I could say mercy motivated me to shoot him twice again, but mercy had nothing to do with it.
        Death took his life, and something worse collected his soul. I could almost feel the chill of that collector stepping in to take what was owed to him.
        His eyes-one blue now and one hazel-looked as round as those of a fish, glazed and senseless, yet filled with the mysteries of ten thousand fathoms.
        My right ear was a cup full to the brim with warm blood, but I still heard Annie in the second-floor hallway, calling "Daddy? Mommy?" I heard Lucy, too, and Andy.
        The kids were not yet at the head of the stairs, but they were coming.
        Frantic to spare them the sight of Beezo torn and dead, I thundered,
        "Get in your room! Lock the door! There's a monster down here!"
        We never teased them about monsters. We treated their fears solemnly and with respect.
        Consequently, they took me at my word. I heard running feet followed by the boom of the girls' bedroom door thrown shut with such force that the walls shook, the windowpanes vibrated, and the sprig of mistletoe hanging from the foyer light fixture trembled on the suspending ribbon.
        "Lorrie," I whispered, hushed by the fear that Death, having come to gather Beezo, might linger for one more harvest.
        I ran to the kitchen. ove can do all but raise the Dead. '
        The mind is quicksand, letting nothing go, and even what is learned reluctantly in school, once thought to be forgotten, rises to the surface less when needed than when some dark spirit would mock us with the uselessness of all we know.
        As I rushed to the kitchen, that line of verse-Love can do all but raise the Dead-returned to me from English studies, as did the name of the poet, Emily Dickinson. She had often written to comfort the heart, but these words tortured mine.
        What we learn is not the same as what we know. Pushing through the swinging door into the kitchen, I knew that my love was so fierce that it could do what the poet said it couldn't.
        Were I to find Lorrie dead, I would resurrect her by an act of will, by the power of my need always to be with her, and lips to lips would pour into her my own life through sweet resuscitative breaths.
        Although I knew a conviction in my reanimating power was crazy, as insane as anything that Beezo had believed, a part of me remained certain of it nonetheless, because to believe that even my love could not raise the dead would be to collapse into hopelessness and a kind of living death.
        In the kitchen, every moment mattered and every action had to be taken not only quickly but also in its proper order. Otherwise all would be lost.
        First, around the broken chair to the telephone, leaving Lorrie unexamined. The handset slippery in my sweaty grip, I