Trigger Finger (8 page)

Acrid gun smoke
permeated the kitchen.
 
It smelled
nothing like the smoke of Allie’s candles, firewood in the wintertime or cigars
on Bobby and Kate’s back porch.
 
Sharp,
ammoniac, chemical smoke stung my nose and sinuses and made them ring like my
ears.
 
I thought I heard yelling somewhere
far off, but I couldn’t identify the voice because the gunfire had momentarily
deafened me.
 
I heard now only that
ringing in my ears and popular song from the radio in my law school days.

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

Drowning Pool, I
remembered, a song called, appropriately, “Bodies.”
 
That lead singer had died.
 
Drug overdose, car accident, plane
crash.
 
Something rock-worthy.

Ears clearing
slightly, I identified Allie screaming upstairs.
 
“Kevin?
 
Kevin?”

“I’m okay!”
 
I shouted, advancing into the hallway.
 
“Stay where you are!
 
Call 911!”

“Oh my God, what
happened?”

“Get Abby!”
 
I yelled.
 
“Don’t let her come down!”

The danger, I knew
from the silence and utter lack of motion, had passed.
 
Still, I didn’t want my daughter seeing this
mess.
 
I looked at the wall.
 
My lovely wife, her strapless wedding gown
displaying the tanned shoulders of a movie star, smiled at me from the last
decade.
 
She held a bouquet of flowers in
that picture, but I couldn’t see them now because a piece of somebody’s skull
was sliding down the glass on a snail trail of blood.

I felt strangely
detached.
 
Shock, perhaps; a surreal
quality to my surroundings made it difficult to fully process things like the
red goo all over Allie’s wedding portrait.
 
I saw it, but my brain didn’t fully implement its presence.
 
I had two dead guys in my hallway, blood
everywhere and pieces of their heads all over my family’s pictures, but this
didn’t bug me at all.

I stepped into the
hallway and looked down.
 
The complete
lack of give-a-shit I felt in the kitchen changed not one whit with a closer
look.
 
The second body, the one whose
head had so spectacularly disintegrated, stared up at the ceiling.
 
With the back of his skull gone, the front
had lost the structural support it needed to keep his face lined up, and it had
flattened.
 
It looked not like a human
face now, but rather a mask—stretched, rubbery features, sightless eyes painted
into the sockets.
 
And it was a mask,
really.
 
A demon had put it on just
before breaking into my house.

I looked down at
the dead man and his partner, both of them unrecognizable as human beings.

“Who the fuck do
you think you are?”
 
I asked.

The body didn’t
answer, but I felt like turning the rifle upside down and smashing the butt
into the rubber mask anyway.
 
I wanted
him to be alive, if only so I could kill him again.

Good job,
Bobby said.
 
For
real, that was some serious class-A work.
 
You’re a hard son of a bitch, Swanson.

I smiled.
 
I didn’t know what I looked like, but I knew
this would horrify my wife and child in a way a couple of dead bodies could
never do.

“Good to go,” I
croaked.
 

9.

I told Dr. Koenig
everything.
 
Including how I felt about
it.

He said nothing
for a very long time.
 
His sharp features
remained blank, the workings of the mind behind it veiled and
undetectable.
 
When I finished, he just
adjusted his glasses, rested his face on his open palm and stared.

When he finally
spoke again, he said, “That is an incredible story.
 
I’m sure I said that before, but I have to
say it again; it’s absolutely incredible.
 
On a number of levels.”

“It is.
 
That’s why it’s news.
 
You don’t get a writeup in
Southern Rifleman
for buttering your
toast.”

“You stood over
the bodies and looked straight down and you still don’t remember their faces.”

“There’s nothing
to remember.
 
I mean…have you ever seen a
face with no bone behind it?
 
It’s
skin.
 
That’s all it is, skin—that’s why
I remember a couple of Halloween masks, because that’s all I saw.
 
My bullets took off the backs of their
skulls.
 
Their own mothers wouldn’t have
recognized them.
 
So if you’re going to run
down a theory like I can’t remember their faces because I don’t want to
confront my feelings over having taken two human lives, you’re not going to get
anywhere.
 
I can remember their faces
because by the time I got a good look, they didn’t have any faces for me to
remember.
 
And I think I have a bigger
problem than that.”

“Which is?”

I leaned
forward.
 
I had curled my issue of
Southern Rifleman
into a tube, and now I
let it unroll into a halfpipe.
 
I set it
down on the frat-boy coffee table.

“It doesn’t bother
me,” I said.
 
“What happened.
 
I’m not sorry at all.
 
Actually, when I get anxious or worried or
upset or anything—like when I think about this Bald Man maybe showing up at my
office one day to confront me—I think about those two dirtbags hitting the
floor, and I’m like,
I did that.
 
And I feel proud.
 
What do you call a guy who not only feels no
remorse, no revulsion, no anything over killing somebody but rather
revels
in it?”

“Psychopath,” he
replied.

“Exactly.
 
I think some of my issues relate back to
that.
 
On a significant level, I’m
worried that I might be a psychopath.”

I sat back.

“I’m a lawyer,” I
continued.
 
“My daddy was a doctor.
 
I went to college, I went to grad
school.
 
I wear a suit and tie to work
every day.
 
I stop for red lights.
 
I’ve been with the same woman since I was
eighteen years old and I don’t beat my kid.
 
Up until now, I’ve always thought, Kevin, you’re all right.
 
Nobody’s perfect, but you’re okay.
 
Maybe you haven’t achieved anything great,
maybe you haven’t dedicated your life to serving your country like your
brother, but you’re still a good person.
 
You can be proud of that.”

I shook my head.

“And then this
thing
happens.
 
It’s like a load of dynamite exploded and
blew off the north face of my soul and now I really see what’s in there.
 
I can kill people and not give a rat’s ass.
 
Hell, I get off on it.
 
Doesn’t that make me a bad person?”

“Psychopaths don’t
worry about being psychopaths.”

“Then what’s the
next disorder on the spectrum?”

Dr. Koenig looked
down at his notes.
 
Trying to decide,
probably, what kind of –
opath
I was
if I didn’t quite fit the psychopath mold.
 
Because something was obviously wrong with me.

But as I thought
about that, I found the idea more than a little thrilling.
 
I thought about the Bald Man threatening me,
and the slightest of smiles crept towards the corners of my lips.
 
Motherfucker,
I said into the ether, willing the message into the brain of this faceless
caller.
 
You better watch your ass.
 
You
don’t know who you’re fucking with.

Dr. Koenig cleared
his throat.
 
“Thinking back to what your
troublesome caller said, does the timing of this bother you at all?”

I scowled.
 
“Timing?”

“You got hit on
the head.”

“Yes.”

“With a softball
bat.”

“Yes.”

“These men—Pinnix
and Ramseur—singled your family out because they were attracted to your wife
and perhaps your teenage daughter, too.
 
Hell-bent on rape, correct?”

“Correct.”

“So why do you
think they screwed around in your hallway for such a long time?”

I sat up, eyes
narrowing.
 
I felt defensive then, just
like I’d felt when the Bald Man called in to the Billy Horton Show.
 
I also felt a bolt of anger, because I was
paying
this guy.
 
And he wanted to question my version of
events like some dickweed lawyer doing a cross-examination?
 
Hell, no.

“What are you
implying?”
 
I asked.

“I’m not
implying
anything.
 
I’m asking an honest question.
 
If they wanted to rape your wife and
daughter, and if you consider that everybody knows that bedrooms tend to be on
the second floor of two-story houses, why do you think they hung out in the
hallway long enough for you to get yourself together?”

I stared at
him.
 
The temperature in his office
dropped ten degrees.

“Are you asking if
maybe…”

He stared back at
me, face expressionless.

“…I got them on
their way
down
?”

His nostrils
flared slightly with each breath.
 
He
said nothing.

“You think I was
laying down there unconscious while they…and then I just caught them on the
back end?
 
Is that what you’re
suggesting?”

“I don’t know,
Kevin,” he said softly.
 
“But I think I’d
like to talk to your wife.”
  

10.

My therapist
wanted me to bring Allie in so that we could seriously discuss the possibility
that she’d been plugged by two different guys in her own bed and didn’t
remember it.
 
Like she would come in and
we would all talk about this and she would say, wow, you know, that totally
slipped my mind.

“That’s bullshit,”
Bobby said on the phone that afternoon.
 
He spoke to me from his house in Jacksonville,
three hours away.
 
“Bullshit, bullshit,
bullshit.”

“I know,” I
said.
 
I sat in my office chair, sweat
forming between my ass cheeks and the fabric of my polyester blend pants.
 
Five o’clock had come and gone, but Carwood,
Allison wasn’t a go-home-at-a-reasonable-time kind of outfit on the best of
days.
 
“But he just kind of came out of
nowhere with it.
 
And I didn’t know what
to say because I had never considered it.”

“How is that even possible?
 
Do you honestly think it could have gone down
that way?
 
Seriously?”

I paused.

“Well?”
 
He demanded.

“No,” I said.

“Right.
 
You’d know if something was wrong, you bet
your ass you’d know.
 
Think about it;
does she act any different when you’re having sex?
 
Does she get all weird?
 
Stiffen up?
 
Cry?”

The same sun that
had shown through Dr. Koenig’s picture window tapped at the drawn blinds in my
office.
 
I sat with the door closed,
safely ensconced in familiar surroundings.
 
Outside the mindfuck world of the shrink’s lair, the idea did seem
absurd—while it remained theoretically possible that I’d lain knocked out
longer than I’d suspected, neither my wife nor my daughter had shown me any
indication of trauma over the past six months.
 
I had the mental problems, not them.
 
And while mine and Allie’s sex life had changed, it had changed in a
positive way.
 
A very positive way.

“No, none of
that.”

“Right.
 
Exactly.
 
Because that shit didn’t happen.
 
You know what?
 
Ask her.
 
Ask both of them.
 
Say, did either one of you get nailed by one
or both of those shitbags I popped in the hallway?
 
Allie?
 
Abby?
 
No?
 
Okay, case closed.
 
They’ll probably laugh at you.”

“They probably
will,” I agreed.

“Put this behind
you and get your eyes back on the prize.
 
I want to know who this crazy man that called into the radio station
is.
 
That could be a dangerous son of a
bitch.
 
That’s what you need to be
worrying about, not this psychobabble.”

“I know, right?”

“Do some of your
lawyer-ninja moves to get your hands on the phone records for that place.
 
Trace the phone number to an address, then go
over there and say motherfucker, you want to talk that shit to my face?”

He laughed.

“Tell you what,
man, you find him for me, I’ll pack three Haji-killing Marines into the car and
we’ll ride on up there to his house.”

Despite the stack
of pink message slips by my phone and the even larger stack of neglected files
towering beside it, I laughed, too.
 
I
felt glad I’d called Bobby.
 
He had a way
of putting things in perspective for me.

“In all
seriousness, now; concentrate on pinning down this asshole.
 
Good to go?”

The blinds seemed
to glow with the sun.

“Good to go,” I
repeated.
 

My sex life had
indeed changed in the wake of the shooting.
 
Not that I’d had it bad before, not exactly.
 
Just kind of…routine.
 
After eighteen years, I’d learned to read the
cues as to when Allie felt like doing it and when she didn’t.
 
If one of these occasions happened to
coincide with a moment where Abby wasn’t up and about and I wasn’t dog-tired from
shoveling divorce cases around my office all day, we experienced a few moments
of fireworks and then either fell asleep or turned on the TV.
 
I didn’t complain about this; it did the job.
 
Dammit, Jim, I’m a man, not a rabbit.

But my first day
back at work after shooting Pinnix and Ramseur, I arrived home to the glow of
the kitchen light.
 
In the hallway by the
stairs, a single lamp in the office threw a puddle of light into the foyer.
 
When I entered the kitchen, I looked down the
hallway and saw Allie standing in it, smiling.

“Rough day?”
 
She asked.

“Very,” I said,
reaching into the fridge for a Heineken.
 
I popped the top with the bottle opener on my keychain and took a long
drink.
 
“Glad it’s over.”

She padded into
the kitchen and stood by the empty stool at the island where Abby typically
wolfed down breakfast.
 
The red satin
pajama bottoms I’d bought her for Christmas two years ago clung to the gentle
swell of her hips below the Victoria’s
Secret tank top that was just a size too small.
 
An outfit which she hadn’t worn much before I killed somebody.
 
Let’s
be honest
, she’d said the night after that Christmas, looking down at her
breasts pushing against the white fabric of the shirt.
 
You
didn’t buy this for me, you bought it for you.
 
She’d humored me and wore it that night, then
out came the baggy sweatsuit and all its sexless siblings again.

“I missed you,”
she said.

“I missed you,
too,” I replied, setting the bottle down and opening my arms.
 
She folded herself into me and for a moment,
neither one of us said anything.
 
This,
right here, was another thing.
 
I missed you
.
 
No icy wind of disapproval borne on baleful
stares, no guilt trips, no outright aggression over my failure to come home
within shouting distance of five o’clock.
 
Victoria’s
Secret and
I missed you
.

I buried my face
in her hair and raised my eyes to look down the hallway.

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

“Everything
okay?”
 
She asked my chest.

“Same as always,”
I said.

“Sure?”

“Right now, I feel
great.”
 
I dropped my hands to the small
of her back, toned and hard from the hours she spent teaching aerobics every
week.
 
I relaxed instantly.

“Are you
tired?”
 
She murmured.

“A little.
 
Why?”

She reached behind
her and moved my hands from her waist to her bottom.
 
I realized then that she wasn’t wearing any
underwear.

My heart began to
pound.

“Because I missed
you,” she said, unbuttoning my pants and unzipping my fly.

We did it on the
kitchen table, short, intense and explosive.
 
I didn’t last long.
 
That was
okay, though, because she didn’t last long, either.
 
When we finished, I took her hand and led her
down into the basement, where we each had a glass of red wine at the bar and
did it
again
—slower this time—on the
pool table.
 
She didn’t wince, stiffen
up, cry, anything you’d expect the survivor of a brutal rape to do the first
time she has consensual sex after being forced.

And this made
perfect sense to me, because she hadn’t been forced.
 
Pinnix and Ramseur saw her walking with my
daughter at the mall and had devised a plan to do that—to force her—but they’d
never got the chance.
 
Because I stopped
them.

But Allie was only
one of two women who lived in my house.
 
So the next evening, I decided to broach the subject with Abby.

Abby had a soccer
game that night, and I took her by myself.
  
Allie had a meeting at the Arts Council, so she couldn’t make it.
 
Normally, this would have meant a phone call
to another parent and a little shuck-and-jive routine to get somebody else to
take her.
 
Post-shooting, however, I could
just get up and walk out the door at a normal time and no one would say
anything to me about it.
 
Other attorneys
would look at me as I walked past their doors on the way out but they’d quickly
look away.
 
Only Craig Montero had the
balls to speak to me when I left at five-thirty.

“Run, Forrest,
run!”
 
He said.

I could count the
number of times I’d taken Abby anywhere by myself on one hand, a natural
outgrowth of having a lucrative but demanding job and a wife who didn’t
work.
 
And as this life went on, my
little pink toddler with her outstretched arms had increased in size to where
she stood nearly as tall as her mother.
 
Something had happened to her eyes and ears along the way, and she
didn’t see or hear me anymore.
 
As the
rest of her form developed, her hands had grown a mobile phone that she used to
constantly text-message other afflicted children and update her Facebook
status.
 
Her ability to communicate in
the English language had deteriorated to the point where she could only express
herself with her thumbs.

So after the game,
I took her to McDonald’s.
 
There, I made
the mistake of letting her stand in line with me while I ordered the food.

“You’re Kevin
Swanson, aren’t you?”

The girl behind
the register looked no older than Abby, although by law she had to be at least
sixteen.
 
Large, blue eyes blinked at me
from beneath her Golden Arches cap.
 

“Uhh…yeah.”
 
My left hand held my wallet, my right the
credit card I had removed to pay the total.
 
I felt suddenly conscious of Abby’s observant presence beside me.

“Dude, you’re the
man.
 
And I mean it, you are the
man
.”

The manager
stopped behind her, looking from my face to the order screen.
 
He wore the shirt and tie that identified him
as a person of authority even though his face identified him as someone who
couldn’t legally buy a beer.
 
His name
tag identified him as RODNEY.
 
He wore a
headset and he adjusted the volume on it as he shook his head.
 
“Uh-uh,” he said.
 
“This guy’s not paying.”

The girl looked
over her shoulder at Rodney when he spoke.
 
I just blinked.
 
“Umm…it’s okay, I
can pay cash if…”

Rodney shook his
head emphatically.
 
“No way.
 
Your food’s free tonight.”
 
He tapped a pimply-faced boy, who had been
preoccupied with making a fudge sundae, on the shoulder.
 
“Steve, check it out.
 
We’ve got Kevin Swanson up in here.”

Not just here;
up
in
here.
 
The distinction wasn’t lost on
Steve, who nearly leapt over the counter to shake my hand.
 
“Kevin Swanson?
 
Holy shit!”

I leaned forward
and accepted the proffered hand.
 
Abby,
her hair pulled back and her uniform shirt streaked with field dirt, watched
silently.

“For real,” Rodney
said, crossing his arms over his skinny chest.
 
“Your money’s no good here.
 
Dumb
bastards all over the country are gonna have to think again before they go busting
up in somebody’s house.
 
You
told
those assholes.”

“Blew them
away
,” Steve added.

“It’s too bad you
had to waste bullets,” the little blue-eyed angel behind the register
offered.
 
“You should have just stabbed
their sorry asses and let them die slowly.”

“Bullet’s better
than they deserved,” Steve agreed.

Rodney shook his
head again and gestured at the tray of food beside the register.
 
“For real, eat up, and if you want more, come
and get it.
 
You’re an American hero,
dude.
 
You can take that to the
bank
!”

My face
burned.
 
Abby glanced down at her
phone—she had put it away for the game, so maybe it wasn’t actually part of her
body, like I’d thought—but I sensed she wasn’t looking at it.
 
She was looking at
me.
 
But I didn’t know what
to say, and so I just said, “Uh…thanks.”

“Sorry to cuss in
front of your kid, man,” Rodney said, “but, we…uh…got robbed here last
month.
 
Couple of ‘hood rats with
sawed-off shotguns.
 
We’re still on edge,
you know?”

“Oh yes,” I
said.
 
“I know.”

I half feared that
Rodney and the rest of his merry but vulgar crew would follow us to our table,
but another group of customers walked in and this distracted them long enough
for me to grab my tray, grab Abby and retreat to a table at the back of the
restaurant.
 
I watched her unwrap her
grilled chicken sandwich and take a bite without saying a single word.