Life Expectancy

whatsoever."
        Clearly Jimmy didn't want to risk taking his eyes off Virgilio Vivacemente any more than he would have turned his back on a coiled rattlesnake, but he nevertheless looked at me.
        Most of the time, I could tell what my Jimmy was thinking. The terrain inside his wonderful head was my backyard; I felt at home there.
        This time, his lovely eyes were not windows to his thoughts, as previously they had always been. His expression remained flat, enigmatic.
        A lesser man might have been so hammered by these revelations that he would have been paralyzed by shock, revulsion, and despair. He might be shocked and revolted, but Jimmy never despaired.
        He said, "Does this blow or does it blow?"
        "It blows," I said.
        Sensing triumph, his face crafted for the smug expression that overcame it, Vivacemente put his hands in the pockets of his scarlet robe, rocked back and forth in his red slippers, back and forth. "If you think I can't kill all of you and get clean away with it, you're wrong.
        When the two of you and Rudy and Maddy are dead at my feet, I will dismember the four of you, marinate your remains in gasoline, burn them, urinate on the ashes, put the wet ashes in a bucket, take them to a lovely farm I own, and stir them into the muddy wallow in the corner of a pigpen. I've done it before. There is no vengeance equal to the vengeance of Virgilio Vivacemente."
        His gaze still locked on me, Jimmy quietly said, "With the right psychotic hag, you could father another murderous little maggot as insane as your firstborn."
        Vivacemente cocked his head. "What did you say?"
        I recognized Jimmy's words. He had quoted what I had said to Konrad Beezo in our kitchen on that December night in 2002, just before the clown had shot me.
        I had been trying to rattle Beezo with attitude and insults, and to some extent, I had succeeded. He had flinched at my verbal assault, had looked away from me to Jimmy, giving me the opportunity to draw the pepper spray and squirt him in the face.
        Jimmy was proposing a similar tactic with Vivacemente.
        He saw that I understood.
        Pushing us harder, the maniac said, "When you are nothing but urine-soaked ashes in a pig wallow, I will take your three children to an estate I maintain in Argentina. There I will train Andy and perhaps Lucy to be the finest aerialists of their generation, and perhaps Annie, as well. If she is too old at seven… well, she will have other uses. Lose your lives and all your children, or sell Andy to me.
        Only a clown could not make the right choice between those two options."
        "It's a lot of money," Jimmy told me. "The better part of half a million, cash, no taxes."
        "And we'd still have Annie and Lucy," I said.
        "We can always have another son," Jimmy proposed.
        "With a new baby, we'd forget Andy in no time."
        "I'd forget him in three months," Jimmy said.
        "Might take me six."
        "We're young. Even if it takes us eight months to forget him, we've got a lot of good life ahead of us."
        Vivacemente was smiling, or appeared to be, as best anyone other than his surgeons could tell.
        Incredibly, he seemed to be buying what we were selling. His credulousness did not entirely surprise me. After all, Jimmy and I had enormous experience talking to maniacs in their language.
        "But, hey," Jimmy said to me, "wow, that gives me an even better idea."
        I crafted a mask of bright-eyed curiosity. "What's that?"
        Turning to Vivacemente again, Jimmy said, "Would you buy two?"
        "Two what?"
        "Two boys. If we had another, you could buy him early, right out of the cradle."
        I said, "Jimmy-"
        "Shut up, honey," he warned me. "You've never had a head for finances.
        Leave this to me."
        Jimmy had never before told me to shut up. I knew he meant to convey that he would distract our target to give me the opportunity I needed.
        "I'm a bull in the baby-making department," Jimmy told the crazy aerialist, "and the little lady here, she can really pump them out. She could take a fertility drug, too, and maybe we could have them in batches."
        Jimmy and I were both going to die. We understood that we were cold meat standing. With all the firepower in the tent, we couldn't escape.
        But in dying, we could take Vivacemente