I swallowed again. I rolled up my magazine and tapped it on the table. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that maybe…something’s going on here that I don’t understand.”
“Were there reporters?” He asked.
“What?”
“Reporters. Did the media come to your office? Has anyone asked for your statement?”
“Oh, yeah. WXII met me in the parking lot when I showed up for work this morning and shoved a microphone in my face as soon as I got out of my car. I can’t remember the reporter’s name…you watch the news? Ever seen that hot brunette?”
“I have.”
“It was her. She asked me for a comment, and I told her that it was a tragic event, that I was shaken but otherwise okay and that my heart went out to the families of the deceased. I’ve been told that I’m going to be on the six o’clock news. I’ve been talking to reporters all day, Doc. Except for my wife, my kid and my secretary, you’re the only human being I’ve spoken to today who isn’t going to print something I said.”
“So you’re going to be a celebrity again,” he observed.
I sighed. “I guess so.”
He stared at me.
“Does any of this strike you as odd?” He asked.
“Absolutely.”
He moved his stare from my face to his notepad. I watched his lined features, his manicured goatee, and tried unsuccessfully to read his thoughts.
Finally, he capped his pen and clipped it to his notepad, which he slipped into his leather briefcase. “Do something for me,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Our next session, bring Allie. I still need to talk to her. Can you do that?”
I looked at the window and inhaled a deep ki breath.
“Can you do that?” He repeated.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
16.
Getting mugged in the same year that you suffer a home invasion stretches the imagination almost to the breaking point. Lightning, we’re taught from an early age, doesn’t strike twice in the same place. There’s this cosmic bad luck budget and we’re only allotted so much of it in any given time span. Think about it: how many people in their twenties and thirties lose both their parents close together? Not many. It happens, but when it does even people who don’t know you pinch their faces and purse their lips and breathe through their noses and say something like, My God, that’s terrible. Because you’re only supposed to suffer so much suckness. We have faith in the ability of statistics to protect us from receiving more than our fair share of tragedy. He Who Shovels the Shit will only pile so much on you, because, as we know, his wagon has to serve everyone.
I say “we,” but that’s a crock because I don’t actually believe that. I know it to be untrue and I didn’t need to get mugged to understand it. I’ve understood it ever since the day, back when I was a kid, when I met a woman named Angela.
I don’t remember her last name, nor the precise time we met. October, November, something a like that. The leaves had largely vanished from the trees that lined the back roads of Catawba County, a few brown hangers-on dangling from skeletal branches in stubborn refusal to surrender to the oncoming winter. A night wind blowing down from the mountains to the west ruffled these and sent the occasional victim fluttering in the air over the highway, spinning and twirling and dancing before coming to rest on a blacktop that blended seamlessly with the sky. The three of us—Bobby and Kate in the front, I in the back—sat comfortably ensconced in the warmth of my mother’s Mercedes. Driving around, burning up gasoline, trying to postpone the moment when we couldn’t avoid going home any longer.
We found her wandering on
Sigmon Dairy Road outside of Maiden. Not on it, not exactly; she actually sat on the shoulder, legs crossed Indian-style. Bobby fiddling with the tape deck, we almost hit her. Earlier in the week, he had picked up a tape by this new band called “Pearl Jam.” He was half-driving, half-rewinding to listen to the first song again, when Kate suddenly screamed, “STOP!” He slammed his foot to the floor. A machine-gun opened fire somewhere as the antilock brakes deployed, snatching the Mercedes to a chattering and shuddering halt as inertia threw me forward and then jerked me violently backwards just as fast. Had we not just stopped at a gas station ten minutes before, I may have wet myself. Instead, I just said with my eighth-grade eloquence, “What the fuck?”
“You almost hit her,” said Kate.
“Almost hit who?” I demanded.
“Her,” said Bobby.
I followed the invisible beam shining from Bobby’s extended index finger. When he’d slammed on the brakes, he guided the Mercedes partially onto the shoulder and now the headlamps shone in a crazy oblique direction across the pavement and into the barely restrained wilderness that abutted the shoulder. There, on the outskirts of the light, sat the woman.
Long brown hair hung in strings over the shoulders of a pink bathrobe. She sat hunched forward, eyes open but seemingly unaware of our presence. She didn’t move, not even when Bobby moved the car fully onto the shoulder and brought the front bumper to within mere feet of where she sat. In the electric glow of the headlamps, her eyes looked solid black.
“What’s wrong with her?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know,” Bobby said, “but I’m about to find out.”
He unbuckled his safety belt, opened the driver’s door and got out. I swallowed then, my pulse quickening just a little because the woman not only didn’t look at us, but she didn’t even blink, and I thought, who doesn’t blink? My gut flooded with something cold and black, and I wanted to reach forward and grab Bobby back into the car. Leave her alone, I wanted to say. Something’s wrong with her. Something is very, very, very wrong.
“Be careful,” Kate cautioned. It came out as a whisper.
Bobby didn’t hear her. By the time she said it, he’d already made it out of the car and around the front bumper. He knelt beside the woman, said something we couldn’t hear. When they both stood, her bathrobe fell open to reveal a pair of pink sweatpants and a matching T-shirt that read, What Would Jesus Do?
Bobby walked her to the other side of the car and put her in the back with me. She moved under her own power, compliantly obeying his instructions as he told her to get in and watch your head and buckle your safety belt. But she didn’t look at me.
Kate turned and stared from me to the woman, from the woman to me.
“Uh…hi,” Kate said.
The woman didn’t answer. Bobby closed the door and made his way back around to the driver’s side, where he got in and buckled up again. He placed both hands on the wheel and looked in the rearview mirror.
“This is Angela,” he said. “And she needs a ride to the hospital.”
Angela spoke.
“There’s been an accident,” she said in a monotone. “With David. And Johnny.”
“Who are David and Johnny?” I asked.
“Husband and son,” Bobby replied, shifting into drive and pulling back onto the road. He found a driveway and used it to reverse directions, taking us back towards Hickory. “Car wreck.”
“Are they okay?” Kate asked.
“I need to go to the hospital right away,” Angela repeated. “Because there’s been an accident.”
They probably weren’t okay. You didn’t wander out onto the highway when the hospital called to say your husband and your kid have a nasty case of whiplash. Her shuffling walk, her catatonia, that could only follow an earthquake or the detonation of a nuclear bomb inside the brain case.
“Oh. Oh my God.” Kate turned around in her seat to face us. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“There’s been an accident,” Angela repeated.
“Pray,” Kate urged. “That’s what you need to do right now. You pray, and we’ll get you to your family.”
“I’m needed at the hospital right away,” Angela said.
“And we’ll get you there. Bobby, can you move it little
faster?”
“Christ on a stick, what do you think I’m doing?”
“I don’t know, Bobby, what are you doing, move it!”
When we reached the emergency room at Catawba Memorial, Kate hopped out to open the door for her. I hopped out, too, because if I remained in the backseat Kate would ask me to reach over and unbuckle the woman and if I did that our skin might touch. I hung back, not touching, not helping, remaining as far away from her as I could. Bobby and Kate each took a side and guided her into the building, but I hung back. I didn’t want to touch her, because bad luck—really bad luck, like this kind—is contagious. I could smell it on her. She was cursed.
And I was right. Inside, we learned that David and Johnny had lost their lives to a drunk driver on Highway 321 two hours ago. The year before, the nurse said, she’d been in here another time. When her daughter and her other son had died in the same kind of accident.
One husband, three kids, two car wrecks. Everybody dead.
Up at the admissions desk, both of Kate’s hands flew up to her mouth. Bobby just stared at the nurse—he didn’t say anything. I turned to look at Angela, whom they’d planted in a seat beneath a television bolted to the ceiling. Above her head, a rerun of Growing Pains did its best to ease the suffering of the patients waiting in slumped agony for a chance to see a doctor. She stared at the black windows until she noticed me looking at her, and we locked eyes.
“I need you to fill out some paperwork,” the nurse said.
“But we don’t know her,” Bobby protested. “I just found her sitting on her behind out in the middle of nowhere…”
“We’re a little shorthanded tonight, do you think you could help us out a little?”
“I don’t mind helping you out, I’m just saying that I just turned eighteen, like, last week and I don’t even know who this lady is…”
I walked over to Angela, leaving the conversation behind me. She didn’t look away as I approached and sat down in a chair just outside of touching distance.
“God hates me,” she said. “He wants to see me burn.”
How do you argue with that? I didn’t want to get too close to her, but I did want to comfort her, ease her suffering if at all possible. But what do you say? Cheer up? Uh, no. Everything’s going to be okay? Bullshit. Everything would not be okay. Not for her.
“It’s not true what they say,” she told me. She leaned forward and spoke in an almost conspiratorial tone, like she wanted no one but me to hear her. “They tell you He loves everybody, but he doesn’t. They say He punishes the sinners, but that’s not true either.”
“Don’t say that.”
“There’s no one protecting you,” she said. Now she was smiling—or grinning, or grimacing, something that involved an upturn of the corners of the mouth but played something black and out of tune on my ribs because why would anybody do anything but scream at a time like this? “There’s not. You can pray to the empty heavens all day long, but there’s no one listening. You can be a good boy, but that won’t protect you because He doesn’t care. He’ll let your guts spill out all over this floor. He’ll cut you. And when you think you can’t bleed anymore?”
She raised her chin and regarded me the way teachers habitually did when they stood on the verge of an important revelation about history, literature or algebra.
“He’ll cut you again. Because you can always bleed more. And He likes that.”
“Who likes that?” I whispered.
That crazy, hellborn smile. She raised her index finger, but whether she meant to emphasize her point or to direct my attention heavenwards, I didn’t know.
“Him,” she hissed.
Ten feet away, my brother and Kate tried to complete hospital admissions sheets for a woman they didn’t know. Angela stared at me, watching me digest what she just said. I sensed her waiting for a response, I really didn’t know what to say. Had I been a more enthusiastic disciple of Christ, I would have been better practiced in the logical jiu jitsu employed by the faithful when confronted with things like nuclear weapons, the Holocaust and families dying in car accidents. Maybe I could have provided her with some small measure of comfort in that moment. But, lacking any better ideas, I allowed my lower jaw, that thing dangling from the bottom of my empty skull, to open and I said, “Shit happens.”
As soon as I said it, my face reddened and my skin burned with shame. But her eyebrows rose like I’d just said something incredibly profound and revelatory. She nodded three times, her eyeballs remaining fixed on mine as her head rotated around them.
“Yes,” she said. “And then it happens again.”
I don’t know what became of Angela. After we left her at the hospital, we didn’t speak of her for many months, hoping, maybe, that if we didn’t talk about it we could forget whatever lessons we’d learned that night. It didn’t work—not for me, anyway. I thought about her again and again over the years. And I thought about her yet again on my way out of Dr. Koenig’s office that afternoon, after again agreeing to bring Allie to one of our sessions.
I climbed into the BMW and shut the door, banishing all noise from the outside. Shit happens, I thought. And then it happens again.
It did. But the likelihood that I would have to go all Chuck Norris not just once but twice in a lifetime—let alone a single year—was so miniscule as to be…
“Almost impossible,” I said to the steering wheel.
I looked out the windshield. I’d parked in front of an evergreen hedge that separated Dr. Koenig’s parking lot from the one next door, and this was littered with the castaway leaves from the trees that shaded the lot in the summertime, littered it in the fall. Another leaf fell then and landed on the hood of my car. After several more moments of staring through my windshield, I started the car and pulled away.
17.
Coincidence: a man, a liberal man, a lifelong Democrat, receives an assault rifle as a gift from his mentally incompetent father, learns to use it from his Marine brother and for some reason not only still has it when two yahoos break into his house, but has it in a gun safe in his basement. Where, incidentally, said yahoos leave him for dead.
Coincidence: a fortune teller warns the man, then a boy, about a figure she calls the Bald Man. Two decades later, a prankster who calls himself the Bald Man begins harassing the man by telephone. Two weeks after that, an armed assailant says Bald Man as he dies with his own knife sticking out of his chest.
I was beginning to doubt the outer edges of my reality. But if I had a spooked feeling before I sat down with Craig Montero that afternoon, I had it twice as bad afterwards.
“The cops have an ID on that shitbird who tried to rob me last night?” I asked as Craig entered my office.
He stared at me with pursed lips, appeared to think for a moment, then shut the door. He lowered himself into one of my two client chairs and touched his fingertips together pensively.
“Well?” I asked.
“He’s a John Doe,” he said at last.
“What?”
Craig shook his head. “He had nothing on him. They ran his prints, but they didn’t get a hit. Guy’s never been arrested before, apparently. They’ve passed his photo around to the uniformed patrol and vice officers, but nobody recognizes him.”
He studied my face for a moment.
“What’s up?” He asked.
I shook my head to clear it, if only temporarily, of silly ideas. I cleared my throat and moved papers from one end of my desk to another.
“Nothing,” I said. “But isn’t it a little…I don’t know…strange? I mean, he tried to stab me. And he’s never pulled anything before?”
“It’s not that strange,” Craig said. “Maybe he was just good at not getting caught. If you don’t get in trouble, the cops probably won’t know who you are. That’s generally a good thing. A bit of a pain in the ass for somebody trying to identify you, but still a plus in the grand scheme of things.”
“How can you degenerate to the point wh
ere you’re robbing random people in parking lots and not have a police record?”
“Beats me. Could be he’s on the radar somewhere else. They’re passing his picture around to every police department in the state. ‘Do You Know This Shitbag? Call Burlington P.D.’ That kind of thing. Oh, and all major stations are going to put out his description and ask for information. They’ll probably figure it out by the end of the week.”
Or maybe not, I thought. Maybe they won’t ever figure it out, because the man I stabbed last night isn’t a man at all, but a creature fabricated from dirt and air. Molded from clay by the hands of a faceless demon who kissed him and gave him life and sent him out into the world. Suddenly, I pictured a room with heavy curtains of dark red fabric that gave off its own peculiar light; a head, bald but misshapen, bent over the creature laying on its back on a table like Frankenstein’s monster. I heard a hiss, the passage of breath from one body to another, and a voice that sounded exactly like the one on my telephone.
Go, it said. Find him. Show him who he is.
I shuddered.
“Craig,” I asked, looking out the window at the parking lot where I had stabbed someone—or something—to death last night. “Did you ever find anything out about Pinnix and Ramseur?”
He smiled uncomfortably and shifted in his seat. “Well…kind of. That’s weird, too.”
“How so?”
He bit his lower lip and took a deep breath. He pulled a thin manila folder from the files he had carried in, leaned forward and placed it on my desk.
“Nobody knows who they are, either,” he said. “That’s your police file.”
“It’s thin.”
“That’s because there are no mysteries and you’re the only witness,” he said. His shoulders slumped, he spoke somberly, like he was sad about something. “And I had to move heaven and high water to get that, so don’t knock it.”
Trigger Finger Page 11