Life Expectancy

I could not tell.
        "But they only beat her once," I said.
        Summoning a credible note of outrage, Lorrie revealed, "They knocked out her teeth."
        "Only two teeth," I hastened to correct, concerned that we might overplay the lie.
        "They tore off her ear."
        "Not her ear," I said quickly. "Her hat."
        "I thought it was her ear," Lorrie said.
        "It was her hat," I insisted in a tone of voice that said enough is enough. "They tore off her hat and stomped on it."
        Punchinello Beezo buried his face in his hands, muffling his voice:
        "Tore off an old lady's hat. An old lady's hat. We've all suffered at the hands of these monsters."
        Before Lorrie could claim that Virgilio's henchmen had cut off Grandma Rowena's thumbs, I said, "Where has your father been these past twenty years?"
        Dropping his mask of fingers, he said, "On the run, always moving, two steps ahead of the law but barely one step ahead of Vivacemente's private detectives. He raised me in a dozen different places. He was forced to give up the big career. The great Konrad Beezo… reduced to taking clown positions with smaller shows and demeaning jobs like children's-party clown, car-wash clown, dunk-the-clown in a carnival.
        Living under false names-Cheeso, Giggles, Clappo, Saucy."
        "Saucy?" Lorrie asked.
        Blushing, Punchinello said, "For a while he was a clown MC in a strip club. He was so humiliated. The men who go to those places, they didn't appreciate his genius. All they cared about were boobs and butts."
        "Philistines," I sympathized.
        "Grieving, despairing, in a constant seething fury, terrified that an agent of the Vivacementes would find him at any moment, he was as good a father as he could be under the circumstances, though Konrad Beezo had lost all capacity to love when he lost my mother."
        "Hollywood could make a great tearjerker out of this," Lorrie said.
        Punchinello agreed. "My father thinks Charles Bronson should play him."
        "The absolute king of tearjerkers," Lorrie said.
        "My childhood was cold, loveless, but there were compensations. By the time I was ten, for instance, in preparation for the day that I might have to stalk and destroy Virgilio Vivacemente, I'd learned an enormous amount about guns, knives, and poisons."
        "Other ten-year-old boys have nothing useful in their heads," Lorrie said. "Just baseball, video games, and collecting Pokemon cards."
        "I didn't get love, but at least he kept me safe from the vicious Virgilio… and he did his best to teach me all the craft and the technique that had made him a legend in his profession."
        A hard clang, like the toll of a tuneless bell, pealed through the room.
        At the top of the stairs, having torched open the steel door, Honker and Crinkles torqued it from its frame and dropped it on the landing.
        "I've got to do my part now," Punchinello said. His anger and hatred dimmed as if on a rheostat, while warmth and what passed for affection brightened his face. "But don't worry. When this is done, Jimmy, I'll protect you. I know we can trust you not to rat us out. Nothing will happen to the son of Rudy Tock."
        "What about me?" Lorrie asked.
        "You'll have to be killed," he said without hesitation, his smile fading into a bland robotic expression, his eyes abruptly empty of compassion.
        While all evil is insane and while some insanity can be funny from a comfortable distance, few insane people have a sense of humor. If Punchinello had one, it wasn't wry enough to produce a line like that.
        I knew at once that he was serious. He would release me but kill Lorrie.
        As he rose to his feet and moved away, shock briefly silenced me. Then I called out, "Punch, wait! I've got a secret to tell you."
        He turned to me. His dark emotions became light as rapidly as a flock of birds radically altering its flight path to catch a sudden change of wind. The robot had vanished, and the cold stare. Now he was all glamor and fellowship: good looks, great hair, twinkling best-friend eyes.
        "Lorrie," I told him, "is my fiancee."
        He paid out one of those million-dollar smiles. "Fantastic! You make a perfect couple."
        Not sure he got the point, I said, "We're going to be married in November. We'd like you to come to the wedding if that's possible. But there