Life Expectancy

the room to insert the last detonator in the charge that he had packed around another column. He appeared not to have heard Lorrie.
        "Even if he thinks you're cute," I said, "he's the kind of guy who'd be as happy to rape you after he's killed you as before, and how does that help us?"
        "Necrophilia? That's a terrible thing to say about a person."
        "He's not a person. He's a Morlock."
        She brightened. "H. G. Wells. The Time Machine. You really are a reader. Of course you could have seen the movie."
        "Crinkles isn't a person. He's Grendel."
        "Beowulf," she said, naming the work in which the monster Grendel lurked.
        "He's Tom Ripley."
        "That's the psychopath in some books by Patricia Highsmith."
        "Five books," I said. "Tom Ripley is the essential Hannibal Lecter thirty years before anyone had heard of Hannibal."
        Having finished his work at the distant end of the long room, Crinkles returned to us.
        As our Grendel approached, I expected Lorrie to tell him she had a female emergency. She smiled at him and batted her eyelashes, but hesitated to speak.
        Crinkles's mouth was puckered strangely. He appeared to be rolling something on his tongue as he unlocked the second set of handcuffs that secured our cuffs to the chair.
        As we got to our feet, still tethered to each other, Lorrie tossed her head to fluff her hair. With her free hand, she undid a button at the top of her blouse to better reveal her lovely throat.
        Trouble.
        She was making herself look more seductive before announcing that she had a female emergency.
        Being seductive with Crinkles made no more sense than trying to unwind a coiled rattlesnake by kissing it. He would see through her even quicker than had the nameless maniac, and he would be so pissed by her attempt to manipulate him that he'd put the nail file through her eye.
        Apparently, my credentials as a reader and the analogies I had drawn between Crinkles and various monstrous fictional characters gave her reason to pause. She glanced at me, hesitated.
        Before she could speak, Crinkles spat into his hand the object he had been rolling on his tongue. It was round, the size of a large gum ball gray and glistening with saliva.
        The ominous glob might have been something other than a wad of the plastic explosive, but that's sure what it appeared to be.
        Maybe he got a thrill from holding in his mouth a couple ounces of concentrated death so potent that if detonated it would turn his head into a spray of mush.
        Or maybe this was a good-luck ritual, the equivalent of kissing the dice before throwing them across the craps table.
        Or maybe he just liked the taste. After all, some people enjoy creamed Spam. He might really have a festival of flavor if he first rolled the round treat in crushed spiders.
        Without a comment about it, he put the gray wad on the chair in which I had been sitting, and he said, "Let's get out of here. Move it."
        On our way to the alcove that waited behind the secret door in the bookshelves, we walked by the table on which stood Lorrie's purse. She boldly picked it up as we passed. Behind us, Crinkles raised no objection. bout eight feet in width, the limestone-clad tunnel. featured a low barrel-vaulted ceiling but straight walls. Underfoot, the rectangular paving stones had been laid in a herringbone pattern.
        Cast off by fat yellow candles in bronze sconces, draft-stirred light shimmered lambently along the walls and, with shadows, wove an ever-changing tapestry across the curve of the ceiling.
        This forbidding passageway appeared to be long, dwindling into a confusion of shadows and sinuous sylphs of light before an end could be glimpsed.
        I would not have been surprised to encounter Edgar Allan Poe, but there was no sign of him, nor of Honker and the nameless maniac.
        Although the cool-but not damp-air smelled surprisingly clean and free of moldy mal odors scented by nothing but raw limestone and hot candle wax, I expected bats, rats, roaches, scuttling mysteries, but at the moment we had only Crinkles.
        We had proceeded hesitantly ten or fifteen feet when he said, "Stop there a minute."
        While we waited, he closed the secret door in the bookshelves from this side and then shut the ironbound oak door to the alcove. Perhaps the intention was to