Trigger Finger (28 page)

“Fill up the jar,”
she commanded.

I filled the Mason
jar with the sand handful by handful, careful not to spill any.
 
Allie hadn’t said not to spill, but I felt
like I needed to put as much in the jar as possible.
 
When the sand reached the rim, I packed it
down with the heel of my hand and added even more.
 
I didn’t ask any questions.

“Put the lid on,”
she said.

I screwed the lid
back on the jar.

“Okay.”

She smiled
again.
 
“How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

I set the jar on
the nightstand and stared at it for a long, silent moment.
 
Allie sat quietly, watching me.

“What did I just
do?”
 
I asked.

She stood up and
motioned for me to do the same.
 
When I
rose without the Mason jar, she took it from the nightstand and pushed it into
my hands.

“We’ve got to take
this with us,” she said.
 
“Come on, let’s
go.”

“I need to pack.”

“No, you
don’t.
 
I’ve got everything you need at
home.
 
This jar is the only thing you can
take out of this room.
 
Now come on,
follow me.”

She opened the
door and led me out into the corridor.
 
The overheads burned brightly out here, and my eyes rebelled at the
sudden introduction of so much light.
 
I
stood there holding the Mason jar, blinking, until Allie grabbed my wrist and
tugged me.

“Come on,” she
said.
 
“The car’s outside.”

We found no nurses
in the hallway.
 
We passed a clock on the
wall reading three in the morning, but this seemed like the kind of place that
would have a night shift.
 
Duty nurses,
orderlies, people patrolling the hallway for wanderers just like me.
 
We passed a nurse’s station—abandoned—and
stepped out into the vacant lobby.
 
Someone had drawn the blinds across the visitors’ window.
 
Across from that, the entire far wall of the
lobby consisted of floor-to-ceiling windows, navy blue with night.
 
Allie pushed open one of the double
doors.
 
I expected an alarm to sound, but
none did.
 
I followed her and stepped out
into the night.

“Breathe,” she
said.

I inhaled the air
that enveloped me as soon as the door closed behind him.
 
We were standing on the broad sidewalk that
ran along the turnaround in front of the facility.
 
The night was cool but not cold, heavy in the
way that only spring evenings can be.
 
I
smelled dogwoods, those vaguely fishy harbingers of spring.
 
It felt like a good night for a walk, a run,
even.
 
Beautiful temperatures like this
didn’t stay around for long.
 
Twice a
year we got this weather from Heaven as the landscape shifted between those few
weeks of balls-freezing cold and the long months of balls-sweating hot.
 
Spring never stayed long; this kind of beauty
always slid away.
 
I took in great,
greedy lungfuls of it.

I caught Allie
looking at me quizzically and realized I was tearing up.
 
“Sorry,” I said with a sheepish grin.
 
“I think it’s been a while since I’ve been
outside.”

“It has.”

“It’s a beautiful
night.”

“It is.”
 
She smiled and pointed to my right.
 
“There’s the car.”

On the curb just a
few paces away sat the BMW, my burgundy chariot, polished and shiny beneath the
lights shining from the awning over the turnaround.
 
I darted forward.

Allie’s hand on my
shoulder stopped me.

She reached around
and tapped the Mason jar.

“You’re going to
take this home,” she said, “and you’re never going to allow it to break.
 
You must never open it.”

I nodded.
 
I clutched it against my chest, not wanting
it to slip from my grasp.
 
“What is
it?”
 
I asked.

She pursed her
lips in a little smile.

“It’s everything
bad that’s ever happened to you in your lifetime,” she said.
 
“It’s all in that jar.
 
We’re going to take it home and you’re going
to put it somewhere safe, but you’re not going to open it because it belongs in
there.
 
There is no need for you to ever,
ever open that jar.”

I nodded.

“No more
questions,” she said gravely.
 
“There’s
no need.
 
You know what the truth
is.
 
Don’t ever question it.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious,
Kevin.
 
Don’t ever question it.
 
No matter what.
 
Don’t ever open that jar.
 
And don’t drop it.
 
Because it can break.”

I looked at
it.
 
“Okay.”

“Do you understand
what I’m saying?
 
Do you understand the
choice you’re making here?”

I took a deep
breath of that exquisite night air, closing my eyes.
 
When I opened them again, she was still
there.

“Yeah,” I said, “I
do.
 
No more questions.
 
Ever.
 
Not a one.”

She smiled again
and opened the passenger door to the BMW.
 
I made as if to get in, but she stopped me again.

“You’re driving,”
she said.
 
“I don’t like stick,
remember?”

I did.
 
Still holding the jar, I rounded the trunk
and got in on the driver’s side.
 
The
leather seat accepted my back and buttocks like a custom-fitted glove.
 
I looked around for a place to set the Mason
jar but couldn’t find anything, so I put it on the floor in the passenger foot
well.

“Ready?”
 
Asked Allie.

“You bet.”

“Then I suggest we
go.
 
Right now.”

I buckled my
seatbelt and pushed the button for my memory setting on the power driver’s
seat.
 
Allie had driven, and she’d about
jammed the seat up against the steering wheel.
 
The seat returned to my position with an aristocratic whir.
 
I reached down and released the parking
brake.

“Take us home,”
Allie said.

I pushed the stick
into first and eased out the clutch.
 
The
rumbling six-cylinder dipped then rose again as the car rolled out of the
turnaround and into the parking lot.
 
As
the facility faded to nothing in my rearview mirror, I didn’t look back.

Afterword

An author shouldn’t confuse the reader.

I read this
comment in a review of an earlier version of
Trigger Finger
, the reviewer making generally positive remarks but
describing a less-than-stellar reading experience in connection with the
ending.
 
Of course, I wanted to write it
off with a
you just don’t get it
.
 
Clearly, I was one brilliant sumbitch and
some of these jokers out there just couldn’t handle me.
 
After hearing the same thing several times,
however, I understood it: people weren’t getting it because I’d written a bad
ending.
 
I didn’t like admitting that,
because there’s an element of criminality in writing a novel and leaving
important questions unanswered.
 
If it’s
not criminal, it’s at least a civil cause of action for breach of contract—a
contract where you give me your time and I give you a quality reading
experience.
 
For some people, I’d fallen
short of full performance.

Providing a
quality reading experience, like any task, is all about the end game.
 
A mechanic can spend days meticulously rebuilding
an engine.
 
He can create a
maximum-security garage environment where not one speck of dust makes its way
into the cylinders and he can use only the highest quality replacement parts.
 
He can create something instead of merely
repairing it, deploy his expertise in such a way that the motor isn’t just
rebuilt but
reborn
.
 
None of this counts, though, with the
customer who drives the car for two or three hundred pages only to have the
motor blow because
somebody
forgot to
tighten the oil pan drain plug.
 
That
last little turn of the wrench—or lack thereof—can ruin everything.
 

End game.

In
Trigger Finger
, Kevin Swanson creates an
alternate reality for himself after a brutal home invasion results in the death
of his family.
 
This reality crumbles as he
picks and pulls at the edges with the assistance of Dr. Koenig—a man who isn’t
a doctor at all, but rather the prosecutor working on a murder case.
 
After several revisions to the ending to make
it more clear, I’ve reached the limits of my abilities.
 
I hope that I’ve improved the experience for
those who disliked it because of a lack of clarity and that I’ve now pared
Trigger Finger
’s detractors down to
those who disliked it because they saw the ending coming a mile away, because
it was riddled with typos and formatting errors or because
That-Was-All-Bullshit is a lame way to end a book.
 
Spin the wheel; there’s something for
everybody.

The home invasion
that forms the core of the story is a mashup of two incidents that occurred in
2006 and 2011.
 
In the first, a family in
Virginia were
accosted in their home by a pair of young men and a female accomplice.
 
The men restrained them, took them down into the
basement, killed them and then set their house on fire.
 
Five years later, a different pair of men
attacked a doctor and his family at their home in Connecticut.
 
They made their way in through an unlocked basement door, beat the
doctor nearly to death with a baseball bat they’d found in the yard, then went
upstairs and corralled his wife and two daughters.
 
Miraculously surviving the assault, the
doctor crawled out of the basement and made his way to a neighbor’s house, and
somebody there called the police.
 
Sadly,
his family didn’t make it.
 

These are highly
simplified summaries of complex, gut-wrenching cases.
 
The intruders were all caught and
successfully tried, but the victims are still dead.
 
And even if the guilty die in prison or run
out of death penalty appeals, I don’t believe you can call it an eye for an eye
in any sense of the phrase.
 
The Code of
Hammurabi required an equal exchange; attempting redress with the lives of
these perpetrators feels a lot like trying to pay for a Cadillac with Monopoly
money.
 
Their currency is worthless.

A husband and
father myself, I have something in common with the patriarchs in each of these
cases, and so they affected me deeply.
 
As
I watched these things unfold in the news, I caught myself analyzing what the
victims had done wrong—what I would have done differently, thereby bringing
about a different result.
 
I sat in the
comfort of my home or car, resplendent with the benefits of hindsight, and
criticized the people whom evil took by surprise.
 
On some level, I knew then—and know now—that
Monday morning quarterbacking is the easiest job in the world.
 
Once you know what happened, identifying what
someone
should have
done as something
you yourself
would have
done in the
same situation is a nice way to make yourself feel better.
 
To assure yourself that this or that tragedy
wouldn’t happen to you, because you’re different.
 
You’re resourceful.
 
You’re courageous.
 
You think quickly on your feet and rise to
the occasion in the face of a threat, because you’re one hard son of a bitch
and nobody’s taking
you
by surprise.

Maybe you
are.
 
And maybe you’re not.
 
Personally, I hope to never learn the truth
one way or another.
 

I hope you enjoyed
Trigger Finger
.
 
I invite you to leave me a review on Amazon,
Goodreads or any other site you care to visit.
 
This is my first novel; as such, I need all the help I can get putting
the word out there.
 
I welcome all
opinions, good and bad.
 
I also welcome
helpful suggestions, so if you’ve seen any mistakes in the text, reach out to
me at
[email protected]
.
 
Indie publishing means you’re on your own in
the marketing world, but it also means you can make quick alterations to your
manuscript when a reader points something out.
 
Nothing’s irrevocable.

If you enjoyed my
first novel, check out my short stories
The
Demon
and
The Man At The Fence
,
and my novella,
Just Hang On
.
 
I’m currently at work on my second
novel.
 
Since I change projects—and
titles—as frequently as I change socks, I’ll refrain from identifying it
here.
 
If you’d like me to notify you
when I release it, or if you’d be interested in serving as a beta reader before
release, send me an email.
 

Thanks for
reading, and take care.

And lock your
doors

-Jackson Spencer
Bell