“You’re that lawyer who blew away those two B&E sons of bitches with an AK-47.”
I pursed my lips and nodded slowly. “That’s me.”
“Holy shit! Mac, this is Kevin Swanson, man! From Burlington! He’s that guy we were talking about the other day!”
McAdoo’s dark brow wrinkled. “Get out of here!”
“I am who I am,” I said. My nose began to itch. I decided I would plead guilty to three counts of first-degree murder if only they’d let me scratch it.
The other two officers reappeared from in between the two houses. One helped the staggering young woman towards the nearest patrol car while the other, a black man just as tall as McAdoo but only half the width, came over waving his hands.
“Cut him loose,” he said. “Girl says this guy saved her ass. He’s a hero, man, uncuff him.”
And McAdoo did.
The girl—legally a woman, but at nineteen I’d still call her a girl—worked at a service station four blocks away in the opposite direction from Ryan’s News & Video. She attended North Carolina Central University during the day and worked the gas station full-time at night to earn money to support herself and her three-year-old son. She’d seen the three men sitting on the front steps of the bungalow and had considered crossing the street so as to not pass so close to them, but as she debated this with herself, they suddenly leapt off the porch and dragged her into the alleyway between the houses. They showed her the gun and told her if she screamed, they’d use it. She could cry or moan, but she couldn’t scream. So she had started to cry, she started to cry a lot, because when they started unbuttoning her pants, she understood what was about to happen to her and she could do nothing else.
And then a strange man in a business suit appeared out of nowhere. He talked trash and a minute later, all three assailants lay dead.
“Three guys?” Bradsher marveled. “You took out three guys all by yourself?”
After I related the story of how I’d saved the girl, I regaled them with the tale of my mugging in the parking lot of Carwood, Allison and the night I had shot Pinnix and Ramseur. By the time Craig Montero arrived on the scene, we were talking like old friends. I didn’t need a lawyer anymore; I needed a bartender.
“I have a question for you guys, now,” I said as Craig’s Audi pulled up on the curb two houses up, away from the flashing lights. “Those three shitbags I just wasted—they have any ID on them?”
And Bradsher shook his head.
“No,” he said. “At this point, we don’t have any idea who they are.”
25.
“Three men,” Dr. Koenig said. “You killed three men this time.”
“Body count’s up to six,” I replied.
Thanksgiving had come and gone. It was late afternoon now, close to quitting time for normal people, and the sky had taken on the overcast hue that dominates the end of the day in early winter. No leaves remained on the dogwoods beside the bench outside. I hadn’t seen anyone in the courtyard in a very long time.
In my hands, Southern Rifleman had become a tube, a runner’s baton, a small sword. I laid it down on the couch beside me and sighed.
“It sounds like you’re a hero yet again.”
“I’m a lawyer who’s killed six people in less than a year. I’m more a circus freak than a hero.” I looked down at the hardwood floor. “Honestly, I feel…distant.”
“Distant?”
“Everyone’s kissing my ass,” I said. “And Bobby said this would happen. He said it in February, after I hosed Pinnix and Ramseur. He said: you’re a man apart now. You’re going to get your ass kissed like it’s never been kissed before. Because you’re going to make everybody feel small.”
“Small?”
“Bobby has a unique perspective on this,” I said. “He’s killed a lot more than six people. What he says is, we’ve done the things that other men dream about doing. Not like everybody sits there jonesing to pop somebody, but it’s like…everybody likes to think they’d be a superhero if they ever had to be. They say, I can kill. I can fight. I can do all that. But then they run into a guy who actually did what they like to tell themselves they could do in the same situation, and they compare themselves to this man and they think, could I? They’re not so sure.”
I shrugged.
“So they kiss our asses. Praise us, buy us beers, shake our hands and thank us for our service. They’ve never been tested. We have. And while all these Walter Mittys sit there on the bus or at their desks or in their cars in traffic jams and daydream about what total Billy Bad-Asses they’d be in the right situation, we’ve actually done that.”
Dr. Koenig stared at me. I stared back.
“What does Bobby think about what you did?” He asked. “This most recent incident, I mean. The one in Durham.”
I shrugged again.
“About what you’d think. The first thing he said was whoa, then he said, holy shit, and then he said good job. We got on Skype and I showed him how I took the gun away from that first asshole. He said, congratulations, man, I’m glad for you. He said, you did the only thing you could do. If you’d just let that girl get raped, you’d have never forgiven yourself. If you’d just stood there and let it happen, or if you’d run away…”
All of a sudden, a lump rose up in my throat and blocked further speech. It came on suddenly—one minute I spoke in a normal voice, the kind of tone that follows a shrug like the one I just gave, and the next my voice broke in two. My chest gave a pronounced shudder. My jaw trembled.
“Take your time,” Dr. Koenig said.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
I got myself under control and finished.
“A man’s got to do certain things when he’s called,” I said. “Kate—my sister-in-law—saw it as an act of God. Like God sent me there to intervene, like it was my whole purpose at that particular moment in time. I listened. Because I had to.”
“Did she congratulate you, too?”
“Of course.”
“What about your wife? The conspicuously absent Allie? What was her take on this thing you did?”
Allie; her reaction had been different. On the phone on the way home, I explained to her what had happened, and she’d said you did what—like she didn’t believe me. As soon as I got through the door, she unloaded on me: I’d risked my life, risked it stupidly, I didn’t care about her or Abby or anybody else, I didn’t care what would happen to my family if I got myself killed, blah, blah, blah, I’m an asshole.
Dr. Koenig stared at me again. He’d stared a lot today; it made me wonder if I’d forgotten to shave one side of my face, or I’d suddenly grown a giant mole that looked like the Blessed Virgin.
“And did you guys make up?”
I blinked. She had cursed me, she had hissed my stupidity and my recklessness and my utter lack of sense, but when I pulled her close and kissed her, she kissed me back; kissed me, in fact, with passion. She went after my zipper. And although we had a thirteen-year-old daughter upstairs who may or may not have decided to come downstairs to raid the cookie jar or get a glass of water at some point, we laid down on the floor and made love right there in the living room.
Dr. Koenig studied my face, trying to read the details of my answer. I said, “You could say that.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it with a finger to the lips. He looked down at his notepad, nostrils flaring slightly with his breath. I couldn’t read his thoughts—but then again, I never could.
“You’re the only lawyer in Burlington with a body count,” he remarked.
I sighed, closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead. “I know. Believe me.”
“Have you ever wondered…why this keeps happening to you?”
“I have,” I confessed.
“Any ideas? Has anybody else weighed in on this, maybe noticed that really bad things seem to keep happening to you?”
“Well…” I began.
Dr. Koenig waited.
He leaned forward. For the first time today, I’d caught his interest. He had looked bored as I related my Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagall-esque throwdown in Durham, but now that I wanted to talk about dreams, he was all ears. “What did you see?”
I swallowed. My throat had suddenly gone dry.
“A room,” I said. “Dark. There’s light, but not much—it’s like there’s something coming through drawn curtains, just enough to show you the outlines but not the details. There’s a man and there’s a table—dining room table—and there’s another man laying on it. The one standing…”
Something moved outside the picture window. My head snapped sideways to look, but it had only been the wind ruffling the bushes.
“The one standing is the Bald Man,” I went on. “And he’s bent over the one on the table. Breathing into his mouth.”
Lines had developed in Dr. Koenig’s expansive brow, that zone that stretched all the way to the back of his head. I had his attention today. Oh, yes I did.
“And the one on the table sits up. The Bald Man made him. To send after me.”
“A golem,” Dr. Koenig said quietly.
“What do all the guys I’ve killed have in common?”
He sat up a little straighter, taken aback that I’d asked him a question instead of the other way around. Wary, probably, of getting drawn into my silliness. He thought for a moment, studied me, cocked his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“Nobody knows who they are,” I said. “Nobody knows who they are because they are nobody. They’re golems. They were made, not born. And they were made by that bald motherfucker for the sole purpose of coming after me.”
“You don’t think the girl in Durham was their target. You think you were.”
“I do,” I said with a nod. “I do think that.”
“So why didn’t they just…” he paused and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “…kill you? They could have hid in the shadows, waited for you to pass, and jumped you from behind. Right?”
I pursed my lips and breathed through my nose.
“And if this…Bald Man…really wanted to get you, why doesn’t he send his minions after Allie and Abby when you’re not home? If he really wanted to hurt you, it seems like that would be a great way to do it.”
I stared at him.
“Because it’s about me,” I said.
“But why not go after your wife and your child? This idea doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” I said. I stood up, approached the picture window. The bench, cold and hard and empty, sat like a gravestone in the courtyard. Out there, somewhere in the darkness, the Bald Man plotted his next move against me. And I thought I understood his goals now. “He wants to get me, but more than that he wants to overpower me. He wants to show me that I’m nothing special, that I’m not a hero, that he can prevail against me. If he just knocks off my wife and my kid when I’m nowhere around, what does that prove? Nothing. Nobody could prevent that.”
I bit my lip.
“That night with Pinnix and Ramseur, I could have crawled out through the basement door and run away. In the parking lot at the office, I could have handed my wallet and my keys over and let the guy stab me to death. In Durham, I could have walked away and let those guys rape that girl.”
Dr. Koenig’s reflection in the picture window wasn’t writing. He sat motionless in his chair, staring at me where I stood with my hands folded behind my back like a general of Napoleonic times.
“He wants to show that I’m a pussy,” I said. “He wants to make me into a bitch.”
26.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to go far to find a neurologist.
Dr. Jeffrey Wingrove, M.D., respected practitioner of neurology and alumnus of Duke University Medical School, caught his wife cheating on him at roughly the same time as I was planting a knife in the chest of an unknown mugger. Mrs. Wingrove had forgotten to log out of her Gmail account before leaving for dinner with some of her girlfriends. According to Dr. Wingrove, her laptop had fallen asleep on the kitchen table, but he’d bumped into it when he came home from the hospital that night—late, as always—and the screen woke up. Whereupon it showed him evidence of a long email exchange between his wife and a professor at Elon University, where she worked in administration.
“It just woke up?” I asked in our consultation. “Are you sure you didn’t…hack into it?”
“Oh, yes,” he said with a rueful laugh. Dr. Wingrove was silver-haired, fifty years old. This was his second marriage. His first had ended with him running around on that wife with—drumroll, please—the current Mrs. Wingrove. “I ran into the table and it just popped up there. Like God wanted me to see it.”
Mrs. Wingrove, Dr. Wingrove discovered, could not wait to SUCK the professor’s GIGANTIC COCK. She wanted the naughty scholar to RAM IT UP INSIDE OF HER AGAIN AND AGAIN and to FUCK HER like she’d NEVER BEEN FUCKED BEFORE. All that would have been bad enough, but said professor had treated Mrs. Wingrove to several pictures of the gigantic cock in question. Another email made reference to a recent tryst at the Red Carpet Inn…
“The one down on the interstate…” I began.
“Yeah,” said Dr. Wingrove, cutting me off. “Twenty-nine dollars a night. She paid for the room. With my credit card.”
So Dr. Wingrove did what any self-respecting man of medicine would do. He jumped in his Mercedes, drove the five minutes it took to get to the restaurant from his palatial home in West Burlington, stormed inside and slapped Mrs. Wingrove across the face. Right in front of the waitress.
“Front hand or back hand?” I asked.
“Both.”
He called her a whore; he called her a bitch; he called her worthless and announced that she’d burn in Hell for all that she’d done. True, yes, but it didn’t stop him from getting arrested on his way out of the parking lot. He came to Carwood Allison for the services of Craig Montero in relation to the criminal charges and me in connection with the divorce case. And Mrs. Wingrove’s action for a domestic violence protective order under Chapter 50B.
On the day of Dr. Wingrove’s 50B hearing, we sat in the attorney-client conference room on the second floor of the courthouse. I needed to concentrate on his case, but I couldn’t. Because of the Bald Man.
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like to ask you a question. Completely off-topic. Send me a bill for a consultation if you want.”
The silver-haired fox smiled. “Shoot.”
“A man gets hit on the head with a baseball bat…”
“How hard?”
“Hard enough to knock him out. How likely is it that he wakes up thirty seconds later and is able to climb a set of stairs and operate an assault rifle?”
Dr. Wingrove whistled. He didn’t look like a doctor today; he had eschewed the white lab coat he wore at Alamance Regional Medical Center in favor of a charcoal gray suit woven so tightly that it seemed almost shiny, like his hair. The whitest collar God ever created surrounded his neck. “Depends; is it a direct hit, or more of a glancing blow?”
“Direct hit.”
“Does the skull crack?”
“Skull remains intact.”
He sat back now and looked up at the tiled ceiling of our little room. He looked almost happy at the moment, the concentration-camp expression that had decorated his face all morning banished to a far corner of his mind. For a moment, I had allowed him to escape his current reality and flee to that safe harbor that had always protected him before: work.
“The brain’s a funny thing,” he said. “You ever heard of Phineas Gage?”
I indicated that I had not.
“In the mid-180
0s, Gage was a construction foreman working on a roadbed for some railroad up North. This involved, of course, blasting away rock to clear a path for the tracks.”
He shifted in his seat as he crossed his legs and folded his hands behind his silver head. The hem of his pants lifted, and I saw that his socks were shiny, too.
“To blast away rock,” he continued, “you poured blasting powder into a hole, stuck a fuse in there, covered it up with sand and then packed the whole works together with this thing called a ‘tamping iron,’ like a ramrod for a musket only much, much bigger. The one Gage was using was over an inch thick and over three feet long. Made, of course, of pure iron.
“He screwed something up. The charge detonated with the tamping iron still rammed in there and it came shooting out like a bullet—right through Gage’s head. Entered his face, passed behind his left eye and busted out the other side of his head. Again: over an inch wide. Three feet long.”
I listened intently.
“Within a few minutes, he was talking again. Within a few minutes after that, he was sitting up. He walked himself—hole in his head, now, clean shot all the way through—over to the cart and sat upright all the way to the doctor. He lived for another twelve years.”
Dr. Wingrove shrugged.
“So what’s a baseball bat strike to the head going to do to your typical brain case? Answer: who knows? But a good whack will probably kill the patient. Gage’s case is so remarkable because it’s an outlier, a fluke, so rare you can’t help but remember it. If it doesn’t kill him, he’s likely to remain unconscious for some time and when he comes to—if he comes to—he’ll experience nausea, vomiting, disorientation…”
He flipped a hand at the ceiling tile.
“…all kinds of fun stuff. Severe head trauma can cause tissue swelling inside the brain case, which doesn’t bode well for a quick recovery. So if your guy takes a bat to the head and gets up thirty seconds later, I’d bet my money on one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“He didn’t get hit that hard. Because the batter wasn’t trying to kill him.”
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