Trigger Finger

by Bell, Jackson Spencer

  “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 i
n 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.

  I hadn’t set foot in an aikido dojo since high school, but it all came back to me then. My right foot slid behind my left, my hips pivoted and my adversary found himself caught in the whirling dervish my body had become. I spun him once, twice, then stepped back and felt the bones crack in his hand as I folded it over and released the knife into my own.

  He fell back against the BMW, bounced off it, stunned. I could have let it go at that—I had disarmed him, I had the knife now—but Bobby was in my head then. And Bobby said:

  Handle it.

  I darted forward and pinned his body against my car. And I jammed the blade as far as it would go under his right rib cage. Right into his heart.

  His eyes widened and his mouth opened.

  “Think you’re going to rip me off?” I hissed. “How do you like this? Huh? This how you thought it would go down?”

  My face was six inches from his. I could smell tobacco and beer blending with the stench of rotting teeth and gums. Something wet and warm flowed down over my right hand, but I didn’t look at this. I looked at the man. I looked at his face. I looked for recognition of his position, the mistake he had made in attacking me and the understanding that he had accosted the wrong man.

  But I found none of this. His face was slack, expressionless. I looked at those dilated pupils and a crazy thought danced across my mind, hooting and hollering and waving its arms as it barked at the moon:

  He has no brain. He has no soul.

  I swallowed. My jaw shook as I parted my lips to whisper, “Who sent you?”

  He opened his mouth. Blood gushed forth, but he managed to say, “The Bald Man.”

  And he dropped.

  I didn’t even try to catch him. I let the body fall with the knife still buried beneath the rib cage. His blood glistened on my hand and ran from the wound in his chest in a dark, sticky river that soon enveloped my Mastercard, my Visa, my Alamance County Public Library card. His eyes stared sightlessly at my shoes. He didn’t move.

  And I stared right back at him, unable to speak. I had killed again, but this wasn’t what gave me pause.

  Did he just say the Bald Man? I thought. Did he really say that?

  Blood dripped from my hand and splattered on my pants, my shoes, the asphalt. I looked all around me. The Carwood, Allison building, the only witness to my third killing this year, regarded me with dark, silent windows.

  “What’s going on?” I asked aloud.

  The meth addict—or whatever he was—I’d just stabbed through the heart didn’t answer me. A dark stain blossomed across the front of his jeans from where he’d wet himself when his brain had let go of his involuntary muscle control functions. When I knelt down beside him, my nose detected the stench of his feces mixed in with the coppery-sweet odor of his blood. I breathed in through my mouth and held my lungs still as I reached into his front pocket and fished out my watch and smartphone.

  Bewildered and even more terrified now than when I’d seen the knife for the first time, I dialed the police.

  15.

  “He mentioned the Bald Man?” Dr. Koenig asked.

  Outside, the dogwood trees flanking the concrete bench had largely shed their leaves. The weather had turned colder as we slid into that time of year when a body feels the first chills borne on the winds of autumn and understands that the temperature will continue falling, and falling and falling.

  “He did,” I said with a sigh. I felt exhausted from too little sleep but wired at the same time—the lingering effects of this morning’s massive infusion of coffee and the adrenaline rush of the evening before.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed them underneath his glasses. He too looked tired and I wondered then what challenges he himself faced on a daily basis. I wanted to know more about his life outside of his office and my problems, but to date my attempts to uncover facts about his personal life had met with deft changes of subject and therapeutically appropriate reminders that we needed to focus on my case and avoid the small talk. Which, he noted, Southerners have a hard time doing.

  “So…” he trailed off as he finished rubbing his eyes and had to readjust his glasses. “You killed this guy. Without a gun.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He had a knife. You took it away from him?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Tell me again how you did this. No; show me.”

  So I recreated the scene right there in his office. I showed him how I had stood with my hands up, pantomimed the robber’s own body movements. When it ended, I realized that my face and whole body had grown pleasantly warm. I was smiling.

  “That’s amazing,” he said.

  “It is,” I agreed.

  “How long has it been since you
’ve attended an aikido class?

  Now I rubbed my own eyes, and I sat down. “About twenty years.”

  “Two decades. And yet you remembered that move. That’s incredible.”

  True. Toothpaste syndrome vanished and everything I knew deployed exactly where it needed to. “It is,” I admitted.

  “You’re a hero again.”

  “Yep.”

  But I didn’t feel like one. Instead, I felt scared. The mugger had said “Bald Man.” I knew this to a moral certainty. But why?

  He’s not a man, a voice inside me said. Not Bobby or Kate or Allie or any of the other people who habitually talked to me in my head—it wasn’t even me. I didn’t know who it was. He’s so much more than that.

  I cleared my throat.

  “When the Burlington Police got there,” I said, “Both of the responding officers knew who I was. One of them told me I’d done a good job. The other one whistled and said, you’re one hard son of a bitch, Mr. Swanson. Then a detective sergeant arrived and ‘investigated.’”

  I raised my fingers and put quotation marks in the air around that last word.

  “I say it that way because his ‘investigation’ consisted of him telling me what happened, closing his notebook and offering to buy me a beer. I’m not kidding. He said, so this guy tried to mug you, and I said yes, Sergeant. Then he said, then he attacked you with the knife when you didn’t comply fast enough, and I said, yeah, you know, basically that’s what he did. So, he concluded, you had to wrestle the knife away from him and defend yourself. You had no choice. I said, you’re right, I didn’t. He didn’t ask me a single question, Doc. He told me what happened and I agreed with him.”

  “Did you want him to take you downtown? Book you for murder?”

  “Not at all,” I said with a shake of my head. “And I’m not a criminal lawyer, so what do I know, maybe they do that all the time. But it was….”

  I hunted for the right word. When the detective arrived, I’d been standing there over the body with the two uniformed patrol officers—who had done absolutely nothing to secure the crime scene. They’d let me stand there, leaning against the BMW, while they asked me questions not about the dead guy at my feet, but Pinnix and Ramseur.