Trigger Finger

by Bell, Jackson Spencer

  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 swea
tsuit 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.

  “Abby,” I said quietly.

  She looked up. Although still a child at thirteen, her face already foretold the woman she would become. She’d inherited Allie’s rich brown hair along with the delicate structure of her mouth and cheeks.

  “You’re famous,” she said with a wry smile.

  I opened the cardstock box in which my McRib sandwich had come. I didn’t feel hungry anymore, but I understood that at this time of day, I was supposed to eat.

  “I never wanted to be famous,” I replied. “Just rich.”

  “Seriously! You’re, like, a celebrity! The guys at school have put together an Abby’s Dad Is Awesome page on Facebook. Know who the profile picture is?”

  “Who?”

  “Dirty Harry.” She talked in between bites. To emphasize the Dirty Harry point, she made a gun with her right thumb and index finger and pointed it at me with a Clint Eastwood grimace. Then it disappeared, and she transformed into a thirteen-year-old girl again. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” I took a bite. I loved McRib. Allie refused to eat it, claiming that while she didn’t know for sure what they put in it. Personally, I didn’t care. It looked like a rib, it dripped with tangy barbecue sauce and it tasted good. Don’t ask questions; just enjoy.

  Barbecue sauce dribbling on my fingers, I set the sandwich down and wiped my hands on a napkin.

  “So,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About what I di
d.”

  She put her sandwich down on the wrapper before her. In the space of just a few moments, she’d almost finished it. She cocked her head to one side, looking away and thinking. Like the hair and face, this gesture very much echoed Allie. “I guess…” she started, then paused. She pursed her lips, her brow wrinkling.

  I waited.

  “I guess it is what it is,” she said. “I mean, what else are you going to do when two guys break into your house? You do what you have to do to survive. When thugs get all up in your house, you either call 911 or you blow them away.”

  She shrugged and appeared to think some more.

  “I don’t know, I guess I do think it’s kind of cool. You have this boring job, you go to work in a suit every day, but now you’re, like, an action hero.”

  From its position in the box, the McRib called to me. Eat me, it said, bleeding barbecue sauce. Eat me now.

  “Death is not cool,” I admonished. “No matter who it is that dies.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Human life is precious,” I said. “All of it.”

  “I know, Daddy, chill.”

  “I’m not happy about what I did,” I continued. I lied, but if she knew how I really felt, she wouldn’t call me “action hero” anymore. She’d realize that her dad was a psychopath, and so I said the things I had to say, because I so badly needed to hide the ugly truth. “I’m not proud of it. I didn’t even want to do it. In fact, if you and your mother hadn’t been home, I’d have gone out through the basement door and run off, because the only reason I did what I did, and I mean the only reason, is to protect you. They could have taken everything else—the TVs, the computer, the jewelry, everything down to the curtains. I’d have let them.”

  She blinked at me. I suddenly felt myself laying it on too thick, preaching now instead of just talking, my tongue dripping not barbecue sauce but bullshit. And the look in her eyes—they were green, like my mother’s—made me realize that I was preaching to myself. She wasn’t listening to me; she was observing me.