Life Expectancy

and from ear to ear it looked like one big bruise. His smile went flatline.
        "I don't care about money," he said so tightly that the words seemed to escape him without parting his fiercely compressed lips.
        "You're not breaking into a produce market to steal a lot of carrots and snow peas," Lorrie said. "You're robbing a bank." "I'm destroying the bank to break the town." "Money, money, money," she persisted.
        "This is about vengeance. Well-deserved, long-overdue vengeance. And that's close enough to justice for me."
        "Not for me, it isn't," Crinkles interjected, leaving his work with the explosives to contribute to the conversation more directly. "This is about money because wealth isn't just wealth but also the root and stalk and flower of power, and power liberates the powerful while it oppresses the powerless, so to crush what crushes, those who are oppressed must oppress the oppressors."
        I made no attempt to rerun that sentence through my memory banks. I was afraid that by trying to untangle it, my brain would crash. This was Karl Marx filtered through the lens of Abbott and Costello.
        Aware from our expressions that his point had been too blunt to penetrate Crinkles stated his philosophy more succinctly: "Some of that filthy stinking pig's money belongs to me and to lots of other people he exploited to get it."
        "Gee whiz, take a rest from stupid for a moment," Lorrie told Crinkles.
        "Cornelius Snow never exploited you. He died long before you were born."
        She was on a roll now, insulting everyone who had the power and the motivation to kill us.
        I shook my cuffed hand, thereby shaking hers, to remind her that any spray of bullets she invited was likely to leave me dead, as well.
        Crinkles's mass of wiry hair seemed to stiffen until he less resembled Art Garfunkel than he did the bride of Frankenstein.
        "What we're doing here is making a political statement," he insisted.
        Thus far phlegmatic compared to his companions, Honker joined them, so exacerbated by all this talk of vengeance and politics that his caterpillar eyebrows twitched as if jolts of an electric current enlivened them.
        "Cash," he said. "That's all it's about for me. Cold cash. I'm here to take the money and run. If there wasn't a bank, I wouldn't have signed up for this, the rest of it doesn't matter to me, and if you guys don't shut up and get the job done-then I'm out of here, and you're on your own."
        Honker must have had skills essential to the heist, because his threat quieted his partners.
        Their fury, however, did not abate. They looked like thwarted attack dogs, held back on choke chains, faces dark with unspent rage, eyes hot with violent passion that would not cool until they had been allowed to bite.
        I wished that I had some cookies to give them, maybe German lebkuchen or nice crisp Scotch shortbread. Or chocolate pecan tarts. The poet William Congreve wrote, "Music has charms to soothe the savage breast," but I suspect good muffins are more effective.
        As if aware that his associates' submission to a threat did not constitute teamwork, Honker threw a bone to each man's mania, beginning with Crinkles: "There's a clock running and we've got a lot to do.
        That's all I'm saying. And if we just do the job, your political statement will be made, loud and clear."
        Crinkles bit his lower lip in a manner reminiscent of our young president. Reluctantly he nodded agreement.
        To the green-eyed maniac, Honker said, "You planned this caper 'cause you want justice for your mother's death. So let's do the job and get that justice."
        The librarian-killer's eyes grew misty, as they had done when his heartstrings had been strummed by my revelation that my mother used to iron my socks.
        "I found the issues of the newspaper that carried the story," he told Honker.
        "They must have been hard to read," Honker sympathized.
        "I felt like my heart was being ripped out. I could hardly… force myself through them." His voice thickened with emotion. "But then I got so angry."
        "Understandable," Honker commiserated. "Each of us only gets one mother."
        "It wasn't just her being murdered. It was the lies, Honker. Almost everything in the newspaper was a lie."
        Glancing at his wristwatch, Honker shrugged and said, "Well, what do you expect