Trigger Finger (17 page)

23.

Where the houses
came together, even the moon couldn’t penetrate the darkness.
 
A narrow alleyway separated a boarded-up
Victorian from the Craftsman bungalow next door, also boarded up—but the
properties weren’t deserted.
 
Up against
the wall of the Victorian, three men stood shrouded in black velvet.
 
I blinked and saw a smaller figure, too, a
woman.
 
And when I saw the positions they
were in, I froze.

Two of the men
stood on either side of the woman, who struggled unsuccessfully against the
hands pinning her arms against the rotten siding.
 
They’d forced her face-first against the
house, the two subduing her while the third, standing behind her, reached
around and did something with the front of her pants.
 
He pulled these down, and as he did so her
struggle seemed to take on a new intensity.
 
She began to moan
no, no, no
over and over, gaining in volume until the man who had just pulled her pants
down grabbed her by the hair and bounced her face off the side of the house.

“Shut up,” he
growled.

The moaning
stopped.
 
So did the struggling.
 
The man began to undo his belt buckle.

I knew what I was
witnessing, but I couldn’t move.
 
The
scene unfolding before me came from another planet, another world whose
gravities and atmosphere I couldn’t process—my muscles couldn’t work there, my
lungs couldn’t breathe.
 
A cold, slippery
feeling writhed in my stomach and I thought that I had never felt so sick in my
life.

“Fuck her brains
out,” said one of her restrainers.

The woman began to
moan again, prompting the third man to take his hands off his belt buckle long
enough to smash her face against the wall again.
 
Her knees buckled this time, and she would
have fallen but for the two other men pinning her up against the house.
 
His hands returned to his waist.
 
I heard the clink of the buckle, then the
snick of his zipper.

Do something,
Bobby shouted.
 
Do it
now!

And so I did.

“What in the
fuck
are you clowns doing?”
 
I barked, stepping forward.
 
“Get your hands off that woman right now!”

Mr. Pants Puller
jumped about a mile in the air, stumbling backwards so fast that he would have
gone sprawling on his backside had the wall of the bungalow next door not
stopped him.
 
But it did stop him, and
when he hit it he bounced forward just as his partners in crime released the
woman and scrambled away from where they’d been holding her for their friend.
 
She collapsed and fell sideways.

“Shit!”
 
One of them exclaimed.

Shit, indeed.
 
Three of them, one of me.
 
Closer in now, I could see that they were all
young—the one fiddling to get his pants zippered back up couldn’t have been
more than twenty, twenty-two.
 
He had his
head down, trying to see his zipper in the dark, but even with this I could
tell that he, like his friends, stood taller than me.
 
Three of them, one of me, and while the two
restrainers held their hands up, in just about five seconds they would figure
out that this newcomer wasn’t anyone to be afraid of and then…

Burn that bridge when we get there,
Bobby said.

“Who is you?”
 
Asked the restrainer on the left.

“Detective Bobby
Swanson of the Durham Police Department,” I said in my best command voice.
 
“You got five seconds to get your asses out
of here!”

Left and Right—the
threat-tracking software in my head had assigned them names already—took two
hesitant steps backwards, arms still raised in the air.
 
They’re
buying it,
my heart sang gleefully as they began to turn,
it’s working
!
 

But then Pants
Puller finished buttoning himself back up and said, “Hold on.”

They stopped.
 
My heart stopped singing in mid-trill.
 
I looked down at the woman on the ground, who
hadn’t moved from where she’d collapsed.
 
If I’d hoped for an ally in all this, I wouldn’t find it in her—she
appeared either dead or asleep.

Why isn’t she moving?
 
She was moving a second ago, why is she so
goddamned
still…

And it dawned on
me then what I’d walked into here.
 
I
blinked at the woman, at Left and Right and Pants Puller.
 
I had thought I was witnessing a gang rape,
but in reality…

A setup
, Bobby hissed.
 
You’ve
been ambushed.

By golems.
 
The Bald Man had set me up, throwing this
cast and crew together to draw me into the shadows using the rope of my own
good nature—the knowledge that Kevin Swanson couldn’t stand by and let
something like this happen.
 
These were
golems.

I saw his bald
head outlined against the window of his darkened room.
 
His eyes glowed with red malevolence and
although I couldn’t see him, I felt him grinning.

Three against one,
he chuckled.
 
Let’s
see how the Hero of the Month handles this!

“If you a cop,”
said Pants Puller, stepping forward towards me, “show me your badge.”

“I don’t have to
show you a goddamned thing!”
 
I growled
with false confidence.
 
I raised my
voice.
 
“You are all under arrest for the
crime of attempted rape!
 
Turn around and
put your hands on the wall!”

Left and Right
didn’t.
 
Their hands began to lower.

“If you a cop,”
Pants Puller said again, “show me your
gun
.”

Which, of course,
I couldn’t do.
 
Because I didn’t have
one.
 
I had an AK-47, but this was locked
up in my gun cabinet in my basement in Burlington.
 

“Mother
fucker!
”
 
Exclaimed Left.

“He ain’t no
cop!”
 
Declared Right.

Pants Puller
grinned now, and I thought in a flash that he might not be a golem at all.
 
This right here was a demon in the flesh, he
had a brain and a malevolent soul, I could read it on his young features and
see it glowing orange and red in his eyes.
 
He reached inside his jacket pocket and came out with a small automatic
pistol.
 
He leveled it at me.

“You in a heap of
trouble now, cracker,” he said.
 
“You
done fucked with the wrong motherfuckers.”

Bobby?
 
I cried.
 
What do I do now?

Before Bobby could
answer, Pants Puller had snatched the front of my London Fog coat and propelled
me against the wall of the bungalow.
 
He
aimed the gun squarely between my eyes.
 
My eyeballs rotated in on themselves to try to focus on the gun.
 
Unlike the knife in the hands of the man who
had tried to mug me in front of my office, the gun didn’t shake.

“You a
dead
motherfucker,” Pants Puller said in
a voice that was half-growl and half-whisper but all grin.
 
“Oh, you is
so
dead!”

“You don’t have to
do this,” I said.
 
My voice sounded
amazingly calm and steady.
 
“I don’t know
who you are; hell, I can hardly see you.
 
We can all just go ahead on and…”

“Shut the fuck
up.”

So I shut the fuck
up.

Over his shoulder,
he said, “Go ahead.
 
Pick that bitch up
and do it.”

Left obeyed.
 
He bent over and hauled the woman to a
standing position while Right first stared, then understood what he was
supposed to be doing and began unbuckling his pants.

“You think you
bad?”
 
Pants Puller asked me.
 
“You ain’t shit!”

Right worked a lot
faster than Pants Puller had.
 
His pants
came undone with lightning speed, and now his hands went into them to free
himself from the constraints of his boxer shorts.
 
He moved forward towards the woman, whose
head lolled from one side to the other.

That could be Abby, that could be somebody’s
daughter and I’m just going to stand here and…

No.

Before I could
launch another thought, my hands shot up and my body shot sideways.
 
My palms connected with Pants Puller’s gun
hand and forced it first up and then violently down as they closed around the
weapon and twisted his wrist, making it mechanically impossible for him to
continue holding it.

His wicked grin
disappeared.
 
His eyebrows jumped towards
his hairline.

The classic pistol
takeaway, as I’d practiced so many years ago with Bobby in aikido class,
developed with a perfect choreography.
 
I
pulled the pistol towards me grip first.
 
Caught in the trigger guard, his index finger—trigger finger—first
hyperextended, then cracked in half, then depressed the trigger that moments
ago he had been willing to pull to kill me.

The little
semiautomatic fired once, a harsh explosion that bounced off the walls of the
Victorian and the bungalow and set my ears to ringing, and threw a bullet right
through Pants Puller’s left cheekbone.
 
On its way through his skull, it severed the cords to the glowing red
lamps in his eyes.
 
The back side of his
head exploded and he dropped.

That’s what I’m talking about,
Bobby
said.

I almost lost the
pistol—Pants Puller’s finger was still jammed there in the trigger guard—but I
managed to rescue it with a split-second deployment of combat reflexes and I
held it out before me as Left and Right dropped the poor woman to the ground
for the second time that night.
 
Two sets
of hands reached for the sky.

“Don’t move!”
 
I shouted.

Left moved.
 
I don’t know what he was moving to do, but in
that instant it didn’t matter; he moved and I shot him once, twice, three
times, blood and flesh splattering on the wall of the house behind him.
 
Lighting flashed in the alleyway and for the
first time I saw his face and…

He didn’t have
one.

What the fuck?

No time to
think.
 
Lighting flashed, thunder cracked
and while Right may have just been startled by the gunshots and had no
intention of giving me the bum’s rush, I saw him move.
 
Automatically, I adjusted my sight picture
and fired at him, too—once, twice, three times.
 
Two to the chest, one to the head.

Mozambique
drill.
 
Just like Bobby showed me.

Right fell.
 
And just like that, it was over.

I stood in the
dark, pistol smoking in my hand.
 
The
familiar ammoniac tang of gun smoke reached my nostrils and recalled for me the
last time I’d stood in this position—dead bodies bleeding at my feet, my lungs
breathing in the sulphur and cordite that Bobby liked to call the “smell of
victory.”
 
I looked at the forms laying
on the narrow strip of ground in between the two houses—these men who had
outnumbered me, outgunned me—and I thought,
I’ve
killed again
.

Good to go,
Bobby said.

And despite the
blood and bone on the wall, despite the three dead human beings laying right in
front of me, I smiled.

“Good to go,” I
replied.
 

24.

Like any good
citizen, I called 911 and requested the police and an ambulance—the girl had a
pulse, I discovered when I knelt beside her, but she wasn’t moving.
 
I didn’t go to her right away.
 
For a long time, I just stood there and
stared at her.
 
Because I honestly
believed that the Bald Man could have conjured her just like he conjured these
three clowns, and I thought,
he has a
plan B.
 
And she’s laying right there.
 
Had she gotten up, I may have shot her, too.

But she didn’t get
up, and as the seconds ticked by terror melted away from my brain and exposed a
modicum of common sense frozen inside of it.
 
I shoved the pistol in my waistband and stepped over the dead men to where
she lay on her side, pants down, arms splayed out.
 
I touched her neck, felt the pulse.
 
Understood that while the golems had
victimized me, they had victimized her, as well.

Only then did I
whip out my phone and dial 911.
 
I gave
them my location, the body count and the woman’s approximate description.
 
I gave them the cereal box version of what
had just happened, then cut off the phone and called Craig Montero.

“What’s up, man?”

“It happened
again.”

“What happened
again?”

I looked down at
the woman breathing at my feet.
 
I had taken
off my trench coat and laid it over the lower half of her body to cover her
nakedness there, and now a wind snaked in between the two houses and bit
me.
 
I shivered.
 
“I killed somebody.
 
Three this time.”

“You killed three
people?”

Not people, Craig,
I thought,
but
golems.
 
The
Bald Man sculpted them from plain earth and put his mouth over theirs and into
their mouths he breathed life and then he sent them out into the world to do
his bidding but it’s okay because I’ve confronted his golems before and right
now I’m leading 6 to nothing.

“Yes,” I
whispered.

“What?”

“Yes!”
 
I said louder.
 
“I got jumped in Durham.”

“Durham?
 
What the hell are you doing in Durham?
 
Where are you?”

I gave him the
address of Ryan’s News & Video and told him to look for the police
lights.
 
Neither the Victorian nor its
boarded-up Craftsman neighbor still had house numbers.

“Don’t talk to
anybody until I get there, okay?”

The police sirens
grew louder.
 
“Okay,” I said.

“You have the
right to remain silent.
 
I want you to
use that—at least until I can get a handle on what happened.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it, Kevin,
no telling stories to the police without me there, you run your mouth and I
will
kill
your ass!”

“Okay,” I said one
last time.

Exercising your
right to remain silent is a lot harder than it sounds.
 
Craig had a reason for concern; upper
middle-class people love to talk to the police, because the police are their
friends.
 
Upper middle-class parents
teach their kids from a very early age that the police protect them from not-so-upper-middle-class
people and are therefore their allies in the struggle between good and
evil.
 
The notion that an
upper-middle-class person could be a
suspect
—that
the police might actually
not
be his
friends or allies—is a real flying saucer of an idea, because
upper-middle-class people don’t do the kind of things that might cause the
police to look at them sideways.
 
Except
for speeding and drunk driving, and even in these situations your typical
divorce lawyer or bank manager or accountant will understand that he’s guilty,
that he is very naughty—never evil, just naughty—and that he therefore deserves
the scrutiny of the police.
 
Whereupon he
will fall all over himself to profess his guilt and demonstrate that he
is
a member of the upper middle class,
that he thinks just like the police do and that he’s really one of them.

When the Durham
Police Department cruisers rolled up on the curb in front of the two houses
that flanked the crime scene, I reacted with very real, very physical
relief.
 
I tried and failed to picture
myself saying,
I’m not giving a statement
until I talk to my lawyer
.
 
I could
entertain the idea of a prank-calling demon conjuring

building, making

bad guys out of
clay and sending them to attack me, but I couldn’t conceive of finding myself
on the wrong end of the law.

Because I wasn’t
on the wrong end of the law.
 
So as soon
as the first officer approached me, I began to talk.

Two officers went
in between the houses while two more approached me on the porch and asked me my
name, which I gave readily.
 
I informed
them that I had called 911; that I, along with the girl I’d covered up with my
coat, was a victim.

“Whoa!
 
We got bodies over here!”

“How many?”

“Four!”

Out came the
handcuffs.

“Sir, I’m going to
have to ask you to turn around and give me your hands.”

And they
handcuffed me.
 
I stood on the bottom
step and stared at the boarded-up front door of the bungalow and felt the cold
metal closing around my wrists.
 
Rough
hands pressed against my belt line and felt me all over, frisking me for
weapons.
 
Finding, of course, the pistol.

“Gun,” called the
officer behind me.

“Sir, you have the
right to remain silent…”

My heart stopped
for several seconds, then began to race.
 
“Hold on!
 
I called you guys!
 
I’m the one that called!
 
You can’t read me
Miranda
!
 
You can’t arrest
me!”

“Anything you say
can and will be used against you in a court of law.
 
You also have the right to an attorney.”

“I am an
attorney!
 
What the hell is going on?”

“If you cannot
afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you.
 
Do you understand these rights, sir?”

My face
burned.
 
My chest thumped.
 
This was insane.

Is it?
 
Asked Bobby.
 
Red and blue lights
danced on the plywood sheaths covering the door and windows of the bungalow and
twinkled in the broken glass on the porch.
 
Think about it, man.
 
You’re a stone-cold killer.
 
That’s all these guys know right now.
 
You’re a dangerous motherfucker, Kevin,
you’re a hard son of a bitch.
 
If I
rolled up on you in the ass-crack of Durham
at night, I’d cuff you, too.

Right.
 
I
was
a stone-cold killer, I
was
a
dangerous motherfucker and I
was
a
hard son of a bitch.
 
These cops saw dead
people on the scene and found a gun in my waistband.
 
They sensed the danger emanating from my
pores; I was a good guy but a bad ass.
 
They had to cuff me and frisk me for officer
safety.
 
They had to Mirandize me in case
I made incriminating statements.
 
They
had to contain me until they got to the bottom of this.

And when they did
get to the bottom of this, they would uncuff me.
 
They would uncuff me quickly.

“Yes,” I
said.
 
“I understand.
 
And I wish to give a statement at this time.”

The officer who
had cuffed me turned me around.
 
I found
myself looking at a black ex-Marine—I could spot them from miles away—with
shoulders as wide as I was tall.
 
I
squinted in the darkness at his nametag: this was MCADOO.
 
His partner, a white ex-Marine with equally
linebacker-ish proportions, stood back and to the side.
 
I couldn’t see his nametag, as he stood too
far away.
 
Younger than McAdoo, this one
regarded me with a suspicion and wariness that his superior didn’t.
 
He kept his right hand close by the holster
of his pistol.

“Girl’s alive,”
called an officer around the corner.
 
“She’s coming to.”

“Who are
you?”
 
Asked McAdoo.

“Kevin
Swanson.
 
Wallet’s in my right
pocket.
 
Driver’s license is in the
flap.”

McAdoo reached
into my pants and fished out my wallet.
 
He removed my driver’s license and handed it to the younger man.
 
“Check him for warrants,” he said.

The younger man—I
could see his nametag now and it read BRADSHER—studied my license.
 
Probably trying to figure out how anyone who
seemed this dangerous out on the street could look so stupid in front of the
DMV camera.

“I said, go check
him for warrants,” McAdoo growled.

Bradsher looked up
from the license and studied my face.
 
His cold, businesslike expression had vanished, replaced now with a
lopsided grin. “Kevin Swanson of Burlington?”

“In the flesh.”

“You’re that
lawyer who blew away those two B&E sons of bitches with an AK-47.”

I pursed my lips
and nodded slowly.
 
“That’s me.”

“Holy shit!
 
Mac, this is Kevin Swanson, man!
 
From Burlington!
 
He’s that guy we were talking about the other
day!”

McAdoo’s dark brow
wrinkled.
 
“Get out of here!”

“I am who I am,” I
said.
 
My nose began to itch.
 
I decided I would plead guilty to three counts
of first-degree murder if only they’d let me scratch it.

The other two
officers reappeared from in between the two houses.
 
One helped the staggering young woman towards
the nearest patrol car while the other, a black man just as tall as McAdoo but
only half the width, came over waving his hands.

“Cut him loose,”
he said.
 
“Girl says this guy saved her
ass.
 
He’s a hero, man, uncuff him.”

And McAdoo did.

The girl—legally a
woman, but at nineteen I’d still call her a girl—worked at a service station
four blocks away in the opposite direction from Ryan’s News & Video.
 
She attended North Carolina Central
University during the day
and worked the gas station full-time at night to earn money to support herself
and her three-year-old son.
 
She’d seen
the three men sitting on the front steps of the bungalow and had considered
crossing the street so as to not pass so close to them, but as she debated this
with herself, they suddenly leapt off the porch and dragged her into the
alleyway between the houses.
 
They showed
her the gun and told her if she screamed, they’d use it.
 
She could cry or moan, but she couldn’t
scream.
 
So she had started to cry, she
started to cry a lot, because when they started unbuttoning her pants, she
understood what was about to happen to her and she could do nothing else.

And then a strange
man in a business suit appeared out of nowhere.
 
He talked trash and a minute later, all three assailants lay dead.

“
Three
guys?” Bradsher marveled.
 
“You took out
three
guys all by yourself?”

After I related
the story of how I’d saved the girl, I regaled them with the tale of my mugging
in the parking lot of Carwood, Allison and the night I had shot Pinnix and
Ramseur.
 
By the time Craig Montero
arrived on the scene, we were talking like old friends.
 
I didn’t need a lawyer anymore; I needed a
bartender.

“I have a question
for you guys, now,” I said as Craig’s Audi pulled up on the curb two houses up,
away from the flashing lights.
 
“Those
three shitbags I just wasted—they have any ID on them?”

And Bradsher shook
his head.

“No,” he
said.
 
“At this point, we don’t have any
idea who they are.”