Life Expectancy

seized by a passionate, urgent desire to become a killing machine, Lorrie could not see any previously overlooked deadly edge to any of the items through which she had earlier sorted. A simple length of rope could double as a garrote. A fork could serve either as an eating utensil or as a weapon. But she didn't have rope or a fork, and she couldn't lip-balm a man to death.
        At the window, the rifleman's voice sounded neither accusing nor hateful, nor hostile in any way. He was twinkle-eyed and smiling, and he spoke in a teasing, you're-naughty-and-you-know-it tone: "You owe me one bouncy baby, one cute itsy little baby."
        Although he was not a dwarf, he was deformed in mind and spirit, which caused Lorrie to think Rumpelstiltskin. He'd come to collect her end of some monstrous bargain.
        When she didn't answer him, he started toward the front of the Explorer, and she knew he would go around to the driver's door.
        This Rumpelstiltskin had never taught her how to spin flax into gold, so there was no way in hell the son of a bitch would get her firstborn.
        Leaning across the console between the seats, she switched on the headlights.
        Thus illuminated, the steeply ascending forest, stark black trunks and silhouetted foliage, seemed as unreal and as stylized as a stage setting.
        Brightened by the beams, Rumpelstiltskin paused in front of the Explorer and peered at her through the windshield. He smiled. He waved.
        Flurries of snow found their way through the thick canopy of interleaved branches. They swirled like celebratory confetti around the grinning, waving man.
        Never had Death looked so festive.
        Lorrie didn't know whether the headlights could be seen all the way up on Hawksbill Road. Probably not in the storm, perhaps not even on a clear night.
        Still leaning toward the steering wheel, she blew the horn. One long blast. Then another.
        Rumpelstiltskin shook his head sadly, as if he were disappointed in her. He sighed out a long plume of breath and continued around the Explorer to the driver's door.
        Lorrie blew the horn again, again.
        When she saw him draw back the assault rifle, she let up on the horn, turned away, and protected her face.
        He smashed the driver's-door window with the butt of the weapon. Wads of gummy, prickly safety glass sprayed over Lorrie.
        He popped the lock and settled in behind the wheel, leaving the door open.
        "This sure hasn't gone anything like I planned," he said. "It's one of those cursed days makes a man believe in bad mojo and the evil eye."
        He switched off the headlights.
        When he put down the assault rifle, laving it across both the console and Lorrie's lap, she twitched with fear and tried to shrink from the weapon.
        "Relax, little lady. Relax. Didn't I already say I wouldn't do you any harm?"
        In spite of having spent time in the cleansing wind and the freshening cold, he reeked of unwholesome things: whiskey, cigarette smoke, gunpowder, and gum disease.
        Switching on an interior light, he said, "For the first time in a long while, I've got hope in my heart. It feels good." Reluctantly, she looked at him.
        He had a kindly and happy expression, but it was so utterly unrelated to the torment in his eyes that the smile might as well have been painted on his face. Anguish issued from his every pore, and chronic anxiety was the underlying smell of him. His eyes were those of a trapped animal, full of throttled fear and yearning that he strove to conceal.
        Sensing that she saw the suffering at the heart of him, he let his expression falter, but then painted it on twice as thick. His wide smile grew impossibly wider.
        She would have pitied him if he hadn't terrified her. "Just because it's on your lap," he said, "don't make a move for the gun. You don't know how to use it. You'd hurt yourself. Besides, I don't want to have to punch you in the face-you being the mother of my boy."
        Lorrie's maternal alarm had gone off when this man had first spoken of the baby through the closed window. Now her mind filled with uncountable steeples full of bells ringing out a tocsin.
        "What are you talking about?" she demanded, dismayed to hear a tremor in her voice.
        When only her own life was at risk, she could maintain a pose of fearlessness. Now she carried in her womb a hostage to