Trigger Finger (11 page)

In
the garage, I cut off the ignition and got out.
 
We had enjoyed unseasonably warm weather for early October, but the
temperature had dropped with the onset of night and my breath came in puffs of
steam that vanished in the air as quickly as they materialized.
 
The driver’s door closed with a solid
thunk
followed only by the ticking
sounds of the cooling engine.
 
The
exterior lights, streaming in through the Plexiglass windows on the garage
door, cast a shadow of my bust over the passenger side fender of Allie’s
Explorer and the wall over my tool bench.

Because I know you
, Bobby had said to
me.
 
And
I know how you think.

Of
course he did.
 
He knew a pussy when he
saw one.
 
None of my degrees or Dean’s
List awards or job offers changed the fact that had that been me on the side of
the road back in 2002, I’d have given the man my wallet.
 
And my keys, and my shoes and anything else
he wanted.
 
Because while I’d thought of
myself then—all the way up until February of this year, actually—as an
optimist, in the modern world “optimist” translated into “pussy.”

With
the bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth and his team down by three, Bobby
had stepped up to the plate and took a swing.
 
And it had been a good one.
 
That
night in 2002, I came to understand that Bobby was a hard son of a bitch
because he’d always been a hard son of a bitch—something inside of him allowed
his mind to work the right way in the right situation.
 
I never stopped admiring him for it, because
I so wasn’t like that.

But
maybe at least a little bad-assedness is genetic.
 
When my own bases were loaded, I had him as
my batting coach.
 
And what happened?

“I
knocked that ball out of the park,” I muttered into the cold air as I made my
way to the door that opened to the little mudroom off the kitchen.
 
“Home fucking run.”

How’s
that for a pussy?

I
stood in the silence of my kitchen and stared down the hallway where I had shot
the two men.
 
I had done this without
hesitation.
 
That same inner power that
had guided Bobby’s decisive actions ten years ago had guided mine eight months
ago.
 
When you looked underneath the suit
and the layer of comfortable fat, you found a cold, hard son of a bitch under
there.
 
A man who didn’t give a rat’s
ass.

I
thought about getting a beer, but that would just make me have to pee twenty
times during the night, so I went upstairs.
 
I changed clothes.
 
I made
passionate love to my beautiful wife and I fell asleep with absolutely no
trouble at all.

And
just before I drifted off, it occurred to me that I had appeared on the Billy
Horton show exactly a month ago.
 
A whole
month, and I hadn’t heard from the Bald Man.

But,
of course, nothing good lasts forever.
 

13.

I awoke to a
ringing telephone.
 
My hand shot out and
grabbed the land line receiver on my nightstand, but the ringing continued and
I realized it came from my cell, sitting atop my dresser.

“Make it stop,”
Allie groaned, kicking me weakly.

Grumbling, I swung
my legs out and stood up.
 
I staggered
over to the dresser and snatched the phone.
 
“Hello?”

Nothing on the
other end but the distant hum of what sounded like a car engine
 
and a radio—the tinny music sounded familiar,
but it sounded so far off I couldn’t identify the tune or the artist.
 
Above all this, the sound of somebody breathing
into the phone.
 
Not the heavy, sexual
breathing of a prank caller, but the easy respiration of someone who simply
doesn’t want to talk.

“Hello?”
 
I said louder.

Still no
answer.
 
I moved to hang up, but then the
caller spoke.

“Forget about me?”

That voice; I knew
the voice.
 
I’d heard it before.

The caller.
 
The Bald Man.

“Who is
this?”
 
I asked.
 
Across the room, Allie sat up.

“You did forget
me.
 
I leave you alone for a couple of
weeks and you forget all about me.”

My head swam for a
moment, and when it stopped, I found my entire bedroom draped in red.
 
I wanted to do the right thing, say the right
thing, but Toothpaste Syndrome kicked in and cut both my IQ and vocabulary in
half.
 
“Answer me, asshole! Who are
you?
 
What’s wrong with you?
 
Why are you making prank calls at three in
the goddamned morning?
 
What kind of
loser does that?”

“What kind of
loser lies to the world?”

Alarmed, Allie
asked, “Who is it?”

I waved my hand to
bat her question away.
 
My irritation had
stoked now into full-blown fury.
 
Lights
flashed all over the control panel in my head, the needles of every gauge
jammed hard into the red zone.
 
“You’re
crazy!”

“Ooh,” he said in
mock terror.
 
“I’d better be
careful.
 
I wouldn’t want the Hero of the
Month to hose me down with his assault rifle.”

“I don’t need a
gun to take your chickenshit ass down.”

“Mmm.
 
Big talk from the world’s biggest coward.”

“So says the
little
bitch
on the phone who talks
mad shit but won’t tell me who he is and blocks his number!”

“Kevin?”
 
Allie wrapped her arms around her knees. “Who
are you talking to?”

“You know what I
think?”
 
I continued.
 
“I think you
are
bald.
 
You’re in your
early forties, and you’ve got kind of a beer gut.
 
Even if you don’t drink beer.”

I had his
attention.
 
The Bald Man didn’t speak.

The thrill of
seizing control shot through the muscles in my core and almost made me
shake.
 
When I got done shining the
spotlight on his soul, he would probably hang up and kill himself.
 
Good riddance.

“Doughy, fleshy,
lower-class features.
 
You’re ugly.
 
And you’re single.
 
You don’t do anything particularly well and
you never have.
 
You’re disabled or laid
off from some low-end, dead-end kind of job.
 
You may or may not be looking for another one, but you’re a loser, and
it’s tough for losers in this economy.
 
So you spend your days on your ass.
 
In either an old single-wide trailer where you’re constantly late on the
rent or a one-bedroom apartment with the Burlington Housing Authority.
 
You watch action movies and you play
role-playing games with other losers over the internet.
 
And you’re pissed at me because you want to
be
me, but you know what?
 
You can’t be me.
 
Because you’re a
loser.
”

Silence from the
other end.
 
That was good, but honestly,
I wanted to hear the secondary explosions from my torpedo strike.
 
But when the Bald Man spoke again, he spoke
in the same amused tone he had used earlier.
 
And I realized that I’d hit nothing.

“You really have
no idea, do you?”

“You blocked your
number and you won’t tell me your name.
 
No, motherfucker, I don’t.”

“
You
are the loser, Kevin.
 
You
are the little bitch.
 
Not me.
 
You’re the Bitch of the World.
 
You
don’t know who
I
am.
 
But I’m going to show you what you are.
 
I’m going to show
everyone
what you are.
 
And
when you find out…”

He laughed.

“Oh my God, Kevin,
it’s going to be precious.
 
Just
wait.
 
Watch and see what’s going to
happen.
 
Watch and see.”

“Game on,
bitch!
 
Bring it!”

“I will.”

And with that, he
hung up.

“Answer me,
Kevin!
 
Who was that?”

I set the phone
back down on the bureau.
 
I picked it
back up again and cut it off.

With my wife’s
eyes upon me, I felt just a little embarrassed.
 
The specifics of what I’d just said escaped me at the moment, because
one of the features of toothpaste syndrome is that you can’t remember
everything you did or said, but you can remember enough to understand that you
came off as a royal dumbass.
 
In my case,
I’d let the enemy reduce me to a pile of barking, cursing carbon-based
garbage.
 
The only saving grace was that
tonight, this hadn’t happened on the radio.

I’d been angry,
but my anger faded.
 
Embarrassment
stepped forward to take its place, but even that didn’t hang around for
long.
 
Another emotion shouldered its way
in, and I recognized this one right away: fear.

“Kevin?
 
Are you going to answer me?”

I rested both
hands on the bureau and hung my head.

“I think I just
challenged a crazy man to a fight,” I said.
 

14.

“His voice sounds
familiar,” I said, “but I couldn’t place it to save my life.
 
I don’t know who it is.
 
But I feel like I should.”

Today, Dr. Koenig
wore a charcoal gray suit over a pure white shirt and a dark, subdued tie.
 
He wore black dress socks and black leather
loafers which he’d obviously worn many times before but which he kept polished
to a healthy shine.
 
He would be giving a
talk today, I theorized, a presentation to psych students at either UNC or
Duke.
 
Then he would go home and eat
kale.

He started out
poking around the Bobby issue, but the phone call last night had piqued his
interest and led him away from that.
 
Now
he nodded as if I’d just said something he understood very well and tapped his
pen on his notepad.
 
“Why’s that?
 
Why do you feel like you should know who it
is?”

I held my
Southern Rifleman
in a pair of sweaty
hands.
 
I rolled it into a tube, unrolled
it.
 
Abby had had a pacifier as a baby;
her father had a gun magazine as an adult.
 
“For starters,” I said, “he had my cell number.
 
I give that out to almost no one.
 
A couple attorneys and judges have it, and
that’s it. So he either knows me or knows somebody who knows me.
 
Either way, I feel like I’ve talked to him
before.”

“Can you describe
the voice for me?”

I closed my eyes
and searched my auditory memory.

“Smooth,” I
said.
 
“No rasp, no roughness, like he
hasn’t done a lot of smoking or screaming.
 
Makes him sound younger than he probably is.
 
It’s higher in the register,
 
not like a squeak, not soprano but not
baritone, either.”

“Tenor,” Dr.
Koenig offered.

“Yes,” I said,
“tenor.
 
Accent-wise, he’s definitely
Southern.
 
Not cornpone trailer-park
Southern, but maybe like he was raised here by parents from another part of the
country.
 
I say he’s white trash, but
between you and me, that’s not how he sounds.”

“How does he
sound?”

“Crazy.
 
There’s something wrong with him.”

I swallowed.

“That’s what gets
me.
 
You can feel this weird energy when
he’s talking.
 
His
ki
smells bad.
 
Rotten,
spoiled, gone over.
 
And that’s what has
me scared.
 
Him being a mental case.
 
You never know what those people are going to
do.”

“He scares you,
but he also makes you angry.”

I nodded
slowly.
 
“Very.”

“How angry?
 
Angry enough to kill?”

“Definitely.”
 
I took a
ki
breath and stared through the picture window.
 
The temperature had begun to fall outside, but the sun glowed so
brightly that this office could have stood right in the center of it.
 
I almost couldn’t see the bench or the
trees.
 
“And
that
scares me.
 
Everything
gets easier when you do it once, Doc, everything.
 
There’s a certain inertia in all of us that
keeps us from trying new things, and once you overcome it, the task gets
easier.
 
I’ve broken the seal.
 
So now, I get mad and I’m like, I could kill
this son of a bitch.
 
That scares me.”

No immediate
answer.
 
Although I couldn’t see what
he’d written on his pad, at this point it had to be something like
patient has become homicidal. Patient is
eager to kill again.
 
Hospitalize or not?

“Why do you think
he causes these strong feelings?”

“I don’t know,” I
said.
 
“I was hoping you could tell me.”

Craig Montero said
he’d get with his friends in the Burlington Police Department and track down
the source of the call to my cell phone.
 
I figured I’d get a name and address and take a warrant for harassing
telephone calls.
 
I’d also seek a
restraining order.
 
I would do this
because this is the course of action I prescribed to my own clients.
 
Did he hit you?
 
Take a warrant.
 
Threaten you?
 
Take a warrant.
 
Then seek a
restraining order.
 
Take two aspirin and
call me in the morning.

I believed this
would work because ninety-nine times out of one hundred, it did work.
 
Once I figured out who he was, the law would
take care of him for me—as long as I practiced the same self-advocacy that I
preached to my clients.
 
I knew
this.
 
I knew how the system worked.
 
I knew every gear, every spring, every creak
and crack.
  
I knew how to handle the
Bald Man.

I didn’t know
shit.
 
I learned this out in the parking
lot at Carwood, Allison at about seven P.M.
 
I have never so badly underestimated someone in my entire life.

Our building
shared a parking lot with a dental practice in the office building across the
way.
 
Bright lights lit the lot with the
intensity of a mid-day sun, but trimmed hedges almost as tall as me lined every
side not occupied by a building, blocking any view of the parking area from
passing police cars on Church Street.
 
I
exited and locked the building and gave the parking lot the same visual
once-over I had given it every evening for the past ten years.
 
Then I mentally checked out, ambling over to
my BMW on autopilot as I mulled over my completely useless session with Dr. Koenig.
 
Had I paid more attention to my physical
surroundings, I would have seen the man in the bushes.
 
But I didn’t.
 
And because of this, he materialized out of nowhere.

“Hey, you!
 
Hey!”

Keys in hand, I
froze.
 
I turned to see a young man
approaching me with his hands shoved in the front pockets of a gray hooded
sweatshirt.
 
He’d already covered half
the empty parking lot by the time I saw him.
 
Instantly, toothpaste syndrome kicked in and my brain jammed between
hurriedly jumping in the BMW and questioning whether it was wise to turn my
back on this guy.
 
And did I need to do
that, anyway?
 
Did this man necessarily
constitute a threat or did he just want to ask for a cigarette?
 
Was I being paranoid?

I asked so many
questions that I forgot the critical one:
 
Where did he come from?
 
I forgot this question right up until the
point where I couldn’t turn around anymore, because he had closed to within
hailing distance, then within speaking distance, and by that point he had
withdrawn his right hand from the sweatshirt pocket and I saw the knife.

I didn’t hunt, but
I knew a hunting knife when I saw one.
 
Long, sharp, shiny.
 
Perfect for
gutting deer and wild boar.

“Wallet, watch,
cell phone!
 
Break yourself,
motherfucker!”

The blade caught
the sodium glow of the streetlights and reflected it into my eyes in a cruel
wink.
 
The man holding it, I saw, hadn’t
shaved in several days nor brushed his teeth in several months or even
years—his mouth was a fetid cave where lonely, uneven teeth jutted up and down
from his gums like rotten stalactites.
 
The face around it might have been young once, but the skin was
splotched and drawn beneath the beard stubble.

“I’ll cut your
ass!”

His eyes twitched
and darted.
 
His pupils fully dilated,
they looked like lumps of coal set into his emaciated face.
 
I thought,
high as a kite.

Hands held up in
front of me, I backed up until I struck the driver’s door of my BMW and could
back up no more.
 
He stepped closer,
moving the knife back and forth in a motion like the mesmerized sway of a
cobra.
 
He clutched the knife in his
right hand while his left contracted into a claw down at the waistline of his
jeans.
 
It shook.

“I’ll cut your
ass, bitch!”
 
He growled.
 
“I’ll spill your guts all over this fuckin’
parking lot, punkass motherfucker!
 
Don’t
fuck with me!”

“I’m not fucking
with you,” I assured him in a voice that shook like his hands.
 
I heard the warble in it and a small part of
me thought,
Hero of the Month.
 
Right.

Right behind that,
the Bald Man:
Not so big and bad without
a gun, are you?

“Then do it!
 
Come on!
 
Cell phone!
 
Wallet!
 
Watch!”

Off came the
watch.
 
Allie had given it to me for our
fifth anniversary, but I slid it off my wrist like some cheap plastic crap from
a fast food kid’s meal and handed it over to the tweaking meth addict sticking
me up in the parking lot of my office.
 
His left hand darted out and snatched the watch, dropped it into the
pocket of his jeans.
 
My
smartphone—address book, phone numbers, emails, calendar—followed it a moment
later.

“Good.
 
Good.
 
Now gimme your wallet.”

I swallowed a
tumbleweed.

“It’s in my right
front pocket, okay?”
 
I said.

“Get it,
motherfucker!”

“All right.
 
Just be cool, man.”

“Don’t tell me to
be cool, bitch!”
 
His voice climbed,
agitated.
 
Although it seemed impossible,
my pulse raced even faster
 
“Just gimme
your fuckin’ money!”

And with my right
hand, I reached inside the left front pocket of my suit pants and closed my
fingers around my wallet.
 
Ten years ago,
Bobby had reached under his seat and came out with a Glock, but I had no
Glock.
 
I had a wallet and some
ill-conceived delusions about being someone other people could look up to.
 
I began to withdraw the wallet from my pocket
and as I pulled it free, I heard Bobby.

Driver’s license,
he thought.
 
Don’t
give him your driver’s license.

Why?

Because it’s got your address on it.

“That’s it.
 
Gimme that shit!”

Right.
 
Because if he got my address, he might
someday decide to come to my house.
 
Where Allie and Abby lived.

I opened the
wallet.
 
The man shook his head.
 
“No.
 
Whole thing!”

“L…let me get my
driver’s license,” I said.
 
I stumbled on
the first word and hated my tongue for it.
 
“I n…need it to get around.”

“Fuck that shit!”

The knife darted
forward.
 
With a quick, vicious chop he
brought the handle down on the hand that held the wallet, striking it
momentarily numb.
 
My wallet fell to the
asphalt.
 
Credit cards, driver’s license,
cash, store discount cards, picture of my wife and kid, my whole damn life
spilled at this guy’s feet.

“Pick it up,” he
ordered.

I didn’t move.

“Pick it up!”
 
Roaring now, almost screaming.

And still, I
didn’t move.
 
Not because I didn’t want
to; I just couldn’t.
 
The whole
scene—those nasty teeth, that drawn and puckered face, the knife, the electric
lights—shimmered like a desert mirage there before the Carwood, Allison
building.
 
A wrinkle passed over my field
of vision like someone had grabbed one end of it and flicked his wrist, like
snapping a beach towel.

“I said, pick it
the fuck up!”

I recognized it
right away: I was about to lose it.
 
Just
like I had on the radio, and just like I had on the phone the night before.

I looked him right
in the eye and said, “Fuck you.”

“What?
 
What did you just say to me?”

I didn’t see the
knife now, or I didn’t conceive of it.
 
I
knew it was there—I just didn’t care.

“I said ‘fuck
you,’” I replied through gritted teeth.
 
The man’s image shrank as my eyes narrowed.
 
“You pick it up, you lazy sack of shit.
 
You want my wallet?
 
Bend your sorry ass over and pick it up your
damn self!”

Now the knife hand
began to shake.

“Motherfucker, I
will
cut you
!”

“Bring it,” I
hissed.
 
“Game on, bitch!”

And he brought
it.
 
He lunged forward with his feet as
he drove the tip of the knife straight at my chest, but an amazing thing
happened then; my left foot shot out at a 45 degree angle and brought the rest
of my body with it.
 
The knife found only
empty air, because I stood beside him now, my arms moving in a fluid circle
that came down one behind his head and one on his outstretched and overextended
knife-arm.