Life Expectancy

person I've ever seen. But you've got to-"
        "That's so sweet," she said. "But I'm not sensitive about my looks, and though I like compliments as much as any girl does, I prefer honesty in the long run. I'm aware of my nose, for instance."
        Honker lumbered in from the adjacent room, slouched to the explosives-laden handcart, looking like nothing so much as a troll brooding over whether he'd added enough sage and butter to the child currently cooking in his oven.
        Still holding the detonator in his teeth, Crinkles blew his nose in his hand and wiped his hand on the sleeve of his jacket.
        The maniac prepared the last of the detonators. When he noticed me looking at him, he waved.
        "My nose is pinched," Lorrie said.
        "It's not pinched," I assured her because in truth it was no more pinched than the nose of a goddess.
        "It's pinched," she insisted.
        "All right, maybe it's pinched," I agreed, to avoid an argument, "but it's pinched in a totally perfect way."
        "Then there's the problem with my teeth."
        I was tempted to seize her wonderfully full lips, pull them apart, inspect her choppers as a vet might examine a racehorse, and declare them fit in no uncertain terms.
        Instead, I smiled and kept my voice calm. "There's nothing wrong with your teeth. They're white and even, as flawless as pearls."
        "Exactly," she said. "They don't look real. People must think I have false teeth."
        "No one will think a woman as young as you has false teeth."
        "There's Chilson Strawberry."
        No matter how often I put it through the mill wheels of my mind, that statement wouldn't process. "What is Chilson Strawberry?"
        "She's a friend of mine, my age exactly, she does bungee tours."
        "Bungee tours?"
        "She puts together travel packages, takes groups of people all over the world to bungee jump off bridges and stuff."
        "I wouldn't have dreamed you could make a living packaging bungee tours."
        "She does quite well," Lorrie assured me. "Though I don't like to think what all that taunting of gravity is going to do to her breasts in ten years."
        I didn't know what to say to that. I took some pride in having found something to say throughout the conversation so far, regardless of its mystifying turns. I figured I had earned a time-out.
        Barely pausing for breath, Lorrie said, "Chilson lost every one of her teeth."
        Interested in spite of myself, I said, "How did she do that-did a bungee break?"
        "No, it wasn't work-related. She screwed up on her motorcycle, flipped, rolled, smacked her face into a bridge abutment."
        My teeth throbbed with sympathy pain so bad that for a moment I couldn't speak.
        "When they rebuilt her jaw," Lorrie said, "they extracted what teeth hadn't been broken out in the accident. Later they implanted fabrications. She can crack walnuts with them."
        "Considering that she's a friend of yours," I said with complete sincerity, "I'm wondering what happened to the bridge abutment."
        "Not as much as you might think. They had to hose the blood off. There were a few chips, a little crack."
        Her face was guileless. Her limpid eyes were not evasive. If she was putting me on, she gave no clue of it.
        "You've got to meet my family," I said.
        "Uh-oh," she said. "Something's happening."
        Blinking, mildly disoriented, I looked around, as though coming out of a trance. I had all but forgotten about Honker, Crinkles, and the grinning feeb.
        Although at least half the bricks of plastic explosive remained on the handcart, Honker pulled it out of the room, through the alcove door, into the tunnel by which he had arrived.
        Having synchronized the final detonator, the nameless maniac presented it to Crinkles, along with the handcuff key, and gave him instructions:
        "When you've finished here, bring the babe and the ox with you."
        Ox. The feeb was my size, and I'm sure that he didn't think of himself as an ox.
        He followed Honker into the tunnel.
        We were alone with Crinkles, which was like being alone with Satan in the sadomasochism wing of Hell.
        Lorrie waited a minute to be sure those in the tunnel had gone too far to hear, and then she said, "Oh, Mr. Crinkles?"
        "Don't do this," I pleaded.
        Crinkles had gone to the distant end of