Life Expectancy

pride.
        When I entered, no one sat at any of the reading tables. The only patron in sight was at the main desk, leaning casually against the high counter, in a hushed conversation with Lionel Davis, the head librarian.
        As I drew near the elevated desk, I recognized the patron. His green eyes brightened at the sight of me, and his big-screen smile was friendly, not mocking, though he said to Lionel, "I think this gentleman will be wanting a book on flying saucers."
        I'd known Lionel Davis forever. He'd made a life of books to the same extent that I had made a life of baking. He was warm-hearted, kind, with enthusiasms ranging from Egyptian history to hard-boiled detective novels.
        He had the worn yet perpetually childlike countenance of a kindly blacksmith or a sincere vicar in a Dickens novel. I knew his face well, but I had never seen on it an expression quite like the one that currently occupied it.
        His smile was broad but his eyes were narrow. A tic at the left corner of his mouth suggested that the eyes more truly revealed his state of mind than did the smile.
        If I had recognized the warning in his face, I could not have done anything to save myself or him. The handsome fellow with the porcelain-white teeth had already decided on a course of action the moment I entered.
        First, he shot Lionel Davis in the head. he pistol made a hard flat noise not half as loud as I would have expected.
        Crazily, I thought how in the movies they didn't fire real bullets, but blanks, so this sound would have to be enhanced in post-production.
        I almost looked around for the cameras, the crew. The shooter was movie-star handsome, the gunshot didn't sound right, and no one would have any reason to kill a sweet man like Lionel Davis, which must mean that all this had been scripted and that the finished film would be in theaters nationwide next summer.
        "How many flies do you swallow on the average day, standing around with your mouth hanging open?" asked the killer. "Is your mouth ever not hanging open?"
        He appeared to be amused by me, to have already forgotten Lionel, as if killing the librarian had been an act of no more consequence than stepping on an ant.
        I heard my voice turn hollow with stunned incomprehension, brittle with anger: "What did he ever do to you?"
        "Who?"
        Though you will think his perplexity must have been an act, tough-guy bravura meant to impress me with his cruelty, I assure you that it was not. I knew at once that he didn't relate my question to the man whom he had just murdered.
        The word insane did not entirely describe him, but it was a good adjective with which to begin.
        Surprised that fear remained absent from my voice even as more anger crowded into it, I said, "Lionel. He was a good man, gentle."
        "Oh, him."
        "Lionel Davis. He had a name, you know. He had a life, friends, he was somebody."
        Genuinely puzzled, his smile turning uneasy, he said, "Wasn't he just a librarian?"
        "You sick son of a bitch."
        As the smile stiffened, his features grew pale, grew hard, as though flesh might transform into a plaster death mask. He raised the pistol, pointed it at my chest, and said with utmost seriousness, "Don't you dare insult my mother."
        The offense he took at my language, so out of proportion to the indifference with which he committed murder, struck me as darkly funny.
        If a laugh, even one of shocked disbelief, had escaped me then, I'm sure he would have killed me.
        Confronted by the muzzle of the handgun, I felt fear enter the halls of my mind, but I didn't give it the keys to every room.
        Earlier in the street, the prospect of a sniper had paralyzed me with dread. I realized now that I'd not been afraid of a rifleman in some high concealment but that I'd been petrified because I did not know if the sniper was real or if instead the mortal threat might be any of a thousand other things. When danger can be sensed but not identified, then everyone and everything becomes a source of concern; the world from horizon to horizon seems hostile.
        Fear of the unknown is the most purely distilled and potent terror.
        Now I had identified my enemy. Although he might be a sociopath capable of any atrocity, I felt some relief because I knew his face.
        The uncountable threats in my imagination had