Life Expectancy

minimize the effect of the blast on the tunnel if the library explosion occurred prematurely, before we had reached absolute safety.
        While Crinkles closed things behind us, Lorrie zippered open her purse and rummaged through it. She found the steel nail file.
        To her shock, with my free left hand, I snatched it from her.
        She expected me to throw it away, and when I didn't, she said,
        "Gimme."
        "I pulled this Excalibur from the stone, and only I have the power to use it," I whispered, going totally literary on her with the hope that this would charm her into acceptance.
        She looked like she wanted to take a swing at me. I suspected her punch would pack one hell of a wallop.
        Rejoining us, moving past us, so arrogant and so sure of our timidity that he actually turned his back on us, Crinkles led the way. "Come on, come on, and don't think I haven't got eyes in the back of my head."
        He probably did. Everyone had back-of-the-head eyes on his native planet.
        "Where are we?" I asked as we followed him.
        The core of him was such a tightly wound ball of psychopathic fury that he could make a direct and simple answer sound fraught with anger:
        "Going under Center Square Park about now."
        "I mean the tunnel. What is it?"
        "What the hell do you mean what is it? It's a tunnel, you shit-for-brains moron."
        Taking no offense, I asked, "When was it built, by who?"
        "Back in the 1800s, before anything else. Cornelius Snow had it constructed-the greedy, grasping bastard."
        "Why?"
        "So he'd be able to get around town secretly."
        "What was he, a Victorian Batman or something?"
        "The tunnels connect four of his major holdings around the square- the belly-crawling capitalist pig."
        Throughout this conversation, Lorrie cast meaningful looks my way, wanting me at once to attack Crinkles with Excalibur.
        As enchanted swords go, the nail file left a lot to be desired. Mostly hidden in my hand, the flat length of steel felt stiff but not as thick as a knife. The point wasn't sharp enough to prick my thumb.
        If Lorrie had been wearing spike-heeled shoes instead of white tennies, I'd have preferred to go at Crinkles with one of those.
        I responded to her increasingly exasperated looks with the broad expressions of a bad mime, telling her not to be impatient, not to be rash, just to give me time to find the right opportunity for nail-file mayhem.
        "So… what four major holdings do the tunnels connect?" I asked Crinkles as we moved forward through wafting candlelight and clinging shadows.
        He listed them with increasing venom: "His mansion, that pile of gaudy excess. His library, which is nothing but a temple to decadent Western so-called literature. His courthouse, that nest of poisonous judges who oppressed the masses for him. And the bank, where he stole from the poor and foreclosed on widows."
        "He owned his own bank?" I asked. "How cool."
        Crinkles said, "He owned most of some things and some of just about everything-the blood-sucking, black-hearted, running dog. If a hundred men had divided his possessions, every one of them would have been too rich to be allowed to live. Wish I'd been alive back then. I'd have cut the imperialist swine's head off and played kick ball with it."
        Even in the inconstant candlelight, I could see that Lorrie's face was red and taut with barely contained-one might almost say hysterical-frustration. I didn't need a facial-language specialist to interpret her expression for me: Go, Jimmy, go, Jimmy, go, go, go! Stab the bastard, stab the bastard! Siss-boom-bah!
        I chose instead to bide my time.
        She was probably wishing she had worn those spike-heeled shoes so she could take them off and tattoo my head.
        A moment later we came to an intersection with another tunnel. A still gentle but stronger draft moved here. To the left and right, more sconces with additional fat yellow candles threw rippling curtains of light into a crawling darkness.
        I should have realized that a cross of passageways must underlie the town square, because each of the four holdings that Crinkles had bitterly enumerated was in a different block from the others: north, south, east, and west of the park.
        Nevertheless, I could not help but be impressed by the abruptly revealed