Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz

the tuna casserole.
    I loved that peppy little Dodge sheerly for its form: the sleek lines, the black paint job, the harvest-moon-yellow racing stripes. That car was a piece of the night, driven down from the sky, with evidence of a lunar sideswipe on its flanks.
    Generally speaking, I do not romanticize inanimate objects unless they can be eaten. The Dodge was a rare exception.
    Arriving downtown, thus far having been spared from a head-on collision with an ironic speeding hearse, I passed several minutes in a search for the perfect parking spot.
    Much of Alpine Avenue, our main street, features angle-to-the-curb parking, which I avoided in those days. The doors of flanking vehicles, if opened carelessly, could dent my Shelby Z and chip its paint. I took its every injury as a personal wound.
    I much preferred to parallel park, and found a suitable place across the street from Center Square Park, which is in fact square and in the center of town. We Rocky Mountain types sometimes are as plainspoken as our magnificent scenery is ornate.
    I curbed the Shelby Z behind a yellow panel van, in front of the Snow Mansion, a landmark open to the public eleven months of the year but closed here in September, which falls between the two main tourist seasons.
    Ordinarily, of course, I would have stepped from the car on the driver’s side. As I was about to exit, a pickup truck exploded past, dangerously close and at twice the posted speed. Had I opened the door seconds sooner and started to get out, I would have spent the autumn hospitalized and would have met the winter with fewer limbs.
    On any other day, I might have muttered to myself about the driver’s recklessness and then opened the door in his wake. Not this time.
    Being cautious—but I hoped not too cautious—I slid over the console into the passenger’s seat and got out on the curb side.
    At once I looked up. No falling safe. So far, so good.
    Founded in 1872 with gold-mining and railroad money, much of Snow Village is an alfresco museum of Victorian architecture, especially on the town square, where an active preservation society has been most successful. Brick and limestone were the favored building materials in the four blocks surrounding the park, with carved or molded pediments over doors and windows, and ornate iron railings.
    Here the street trees are larches: tall, conical, and old. They had not yet traded their green summer wardrobe for autumn gold.
    I had business at the dry cleaner’s, at the bank, and at the library. None of those establishments was on the side of the park where I’d found a suitable place for my car.
    Of the three, the bank most concerned me. Occasionally people robbed banks. Bystanders were sometimes shot.
    Prudence suggested that I wait until the following day to do my banking.
    On the other hand, though no dry cleaner has ever been charged with causing a catastrophe in the course of Martinizing a three-piece wool suit, I was pretty sure they used caustic, toxic, perhaps even explosive chemicals.
    Likewise, with all the narrow aisles between wooden shelves packed full of highly combustible books, libraries are potential firetraps.
    Halted by indecision, I stood on the sidewalk, dappled with larch shadows and sunlight.
    Because Grandpa Josef’s predictions of five terrible days lacked specificity, I had not been able to plan defensively for any of them. All my life, however, I had been preparing psychologically.
    Yet all that preparation afforded me no comfort. My imagination had hatched a crawling dread that crept down my spine and into every extremity.
    As long as I had not ventured out of the house, the comfort of home and the courage of family had insulated me from fear. Now I felt exposed, vulnerable,
targeted.
    Paranoia may be an occupational hazard of spies, politicians, drug dealers, and big-city cops, but bakers rarely suffer from it. Weevils in the flour and a shortage of bitter chocolate in the pantry do not at once strike us as