Life Expectancy

child, worried that my aching left leg-having taken so much punishment-would fail me at a crucial moment, I was further distracted by the hospital greens. I wasn't comfortable in them.
        After taking off the elasticized cloth booties that covered my shoes, I didn't feel much better. I felt as though I were decked out for a masquerade party.
        Halloween had arrived nine months early this year. At any moment, a maniac clown would come trick-or-treating, out of costume but scary as hell nonetheless.
        Ding!
        I swallowed my Adam's apple, which bounced around inside my stomach.
        Following the chime, the second floor seemed more hushed than ever.
        This was the high-noon stillness of a dusty street in a small Western town, with every citizen gone to ground and the gunfighters about to appear.
        Instead of a gunfighter, out of the elevator alcove came Dad, Mom, and Grandma Rowena.
        I was stunned that they had gotten here so soon, half an hour before I expected them. Their presence lifted my heart and renewed my courage.
        As they started toward me, waving, I moved to meet them, eager to have a hug fest.
        Then I realized that everyone I most loved-Mom, Dad, Grandma, Lorrie, and my baby-were gathered in the same place. Beezo could kill all of them in one bloody spree.
        Outdoors in winter, Grandma only wore full-body | snowsuits, which she sewed from quilted fabrics.
        Having no tolerance for cold weather, she believed that she had been Hawaiian in a previous life. Occasionally she enjoyed dreams in which she wore puka-shell necklaces and a grass skirt, and danced at the foot of | a volcano.
        She and everyone in her village had been killed in a volcanic eruption.
        I You might think this would lead to a fear of fire. But she suspected that in yet another and more recent previous life, she had been an Eskimo who died with her dogsled team in a furious blizzard through which they were unable to find their way back to the igloo.
        In a puffy white snowsuit with a closely fitted hood zippered snugly under her chin, leaving only her face revealed, Weena toddled toward me, arms wide in anticipation of an embrace. I couldn't decide whether she looked more like a three-year-old togged out for play in the snow or| like the Michelin Tire Man.
        Neither Mom nor Dad had a taste for flamboyant couture-or if they did, they never indulged it, because they knew there were times when Grandma was determined to be the center of attention.
        They were full of questions. With all the hugging and the excitement about the baby, I needed a minute to get their attention and make them understand that Beezo was back. Then they formed up around me with the steely determination of the Praetorian Guard, as though they had plenty of practice taking down would-be assassins.
        This scared me more than if they had quaked with fear. I was greatly relieved when a few minutes later the first of Huey Foster's officers arrived, uniformed and armed.
        Soon a deputy had stationed himself in the stairwell. Two others covered the corridor that provided all access to the maternity ward, and the fourth took up a post in the elevator alcove.
        The last of these men brought word that Nedra Lamm had been murdered in her home. Preliminary examination of the body indicated that she had been strangled.
        By the time I settled my folks in the expectant-fathers' lounge, a nurse brought me word that Lorrie was still in labor and that Huey Foster was on the phone for me.
        Leaving Mom, Dad, and Grandma in the care of the deputies, I took the call at the nurses' station, as before.
        Huey was by nature an ebullient guy. Even a small-town cop sees more grisly sights than the average citizen; the consequences of catastrophic car crashes alone ensure that he will be familiar with bloody deaths. But Huey Foster had never allowed his work to twist him through an emotional wringer.
        Until now. He sounded grim, angry, and sickened, all at once. Several times he had to stop and collect himself before he could continue.
        Nedra Lamm had been strangled, as Officer Paolini reported, but no one could yet determine at what point in her ordeal she had been murdered.
        As proudly self-sufficient as she was cranky, Nedra had been a deer hunter with an enormous freezer full of venison. Konrad Beezo piled the