Life Expectancy

with us. When this beast lay bullet-riddled and dead, our kids would be safe with Rudy and Maddy.
        Expanding upon his proposal with enthusiasm, Jimmy held the old man rapt, and when the moment seemed ideal, I went for my pistol.
        I don't believe Vivacemente saw me from the corner of his eye. I think instead that like a champion poker player, he caught some subtle tell from Jimmy.
        Without taking his hands out of his cashmere robe, he opened fire on Jimmy with a handgun concealed in the deep right pocket. He squeezed off two rounds as I was drawing, both of which hit Jimmy in the abdomen, fired two more as I brought my pistol to bear on him, and those two slammed Jimmy in the chest. By the roar of them, these were high-power rounds. The first two knocked Jimmy backward, and the second two knocked him down.
        Intending his fifth bullet for me, Vivacemente turned my way but not fast enough. I shot him in the head once, and he dropped.
        Screaming like a Valkyrie, possessed of a fury that only the righteous sane can know, that never can be matched by madmen in their moral confusion, I shot him three more times, this thing who raped his own daughter, this monster who bought children, this demon who would make me a widow.
        Beyond the damage to his face, I glimpsed in it an expression of surprise. He hadn't thought that he could die.
        I should have saved my ammunition, because the thuggish-looking roustabouts came toward me at a run. I couldn't take out all of them, however, and in fact I wasn't hot to shoot any of them, not as long as I could be sure that Vivacemente was down for good, forever.
        When I swiveled toward the first of the approaching men, he threw down his shotgun. The second had already discarded his.
        The other three came out of the shadows, past the footlights. One had an ax, and dropped it. One had a sledgehammer, and pitched it aside.
        If the third had been armed, he had chucked his weapon far back near the sidewall of the tent.
        Gasping equally with amazement and astonishment, with terror and horror, I watched those five brawny men gather around the corpse of Virgilio Vivacemente. They regarded it with shock, with awe… and suddenly broke into laughter.
        My sweet Jimmy, my muffin man, lay flat on his back, silent on the ground, and the roustabouts laughed, and one of them cupped his hands around his mouth and called out in circus lingo that made no sense to me.
        As I collapsed to my knees at my Jimmy's side, the troupe of aerialists burst into the tent, still dressed in their costumes, shrieking like birds. or a few days, my chest and stomach hurt so bad that I could almost believe the four bullets had not flattened against the Kevlar vest under my shirt, but had penetrated and done major damage. The hideous bruises didn't fully fade for weeks.
        As Lorrie told you, after leaving the kids at my parents' house, we had dressed as seemed suitable for a "most cordial meeting" with a possible lunatic. We'd gotten the two vests a year earlier through Huey Foster.
        Okay, we yanked your chain again, like we did back in chapter twenty-four. How much fun would it have been, there in the big top, if you'd been absolutely certain that I had survived?
        The Kevlar stopped all four rounds, but the impact, even spread across the surface of the vest, knocked the breath and consciousness out of me. I experienced a brief and not unpleasant dream about chocolate amaretto cheesecake.
        When I came to, some people were laughing robustly. Others were shrieking with what at first might have been shock and fear but which quickly changed to giddy delight.
        The adults and the teenagers and the children alike came to the body of Virgilio. None seemed to be either angry about his death or grossed out by his condition.
        Instead, each regarded the cadaver with stunned disbelief that gradually brightened into an awareness of their freedom.
        Vivacemente had not believed that he could die-and neither had any of the troupe that snapped to the crack of his whip. The collapse of the Soviet Union surely had not surprised them a fraction as much as this did.
        With belief, the aerialists found themselves virtually exploding with energy, with joy. They scampered up rope ladders and loop lines, into the higher reaches of the tent, to their platforms and trapezes.
        As sirens