Trigger Finger (13 page)

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 where 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.”

I could tell he
wanted to see me read it, so I sat back in my chair and opened the folder.
 
The first few pages contained a police report
listing the names and addresses of everyone involved.
 
The first responding deputy’s narrative; the
detective’s narrative.
 
Neither contained
anything I didn’t already know.
 
But my
eyes hovered for several moments on one particular statement the deputy made.

Mr. Swanson allowed me into the residence,
whereupon I observed the bodies of two males lying in the hallway.

My statement;
Allie’s statement; Abby’s statement.
 
The
detective’s summation of the evidence.
 
A
memorandum from the District Attorney’s Office concurring with the detective’s
opinion that I had acted in defense of home, self and immediate family and
shouldn’t be prosecuted for murder.
 
My
criminal background history, blank except for the single speeding ticket I
incurred my sophomore year at Carolina.

The criminal
backgrounds of both Pinnix and Ramseur: blank.

I frowned. I
flipped from Pinnix to Ramseur, Ramseur to Pinnix.
 
The implications of what I was seeing loomed
above me like an approaching iceberg.
 
My
throat began to tighten in fear.
 
“What
the fuck is this?”

“What the fuck is
what?”

“This!”
 
I poked my finger at Pinnix’s empty criminal
background history.
 
“Their records!
 
They’re squeaky clean!
 
These guys broke into my fucking house with a
knife and handcuffs and I’ve got a longer rap sheet than they do!
 
Craig, they’re thirty and thirty-one years
old!
 
Thirty and thirty-one years without
so much as a parking ticket and the first crime they decide to pull off is a
B&E and rape-murder?
 
How does
something like that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he
said.

I flipped past the
records and saw photographs.
 
The first
one showed a reprint of my driver’s license, but in the next picture my haggard
face stared back at me from its position above the collar of the tee shirt I’d
worn the night of the shooting.
 
Another
shot showed my hands, another the bloody back of my head.
 
The AK-47 leaning against the wall in the
foyer.
 
Various shots of the hallway and
the bodies lying there.

Pinnix and
Ramseur.
 
Their faces bloody and
shattered, their features unrecognizable.
 
Their DMV records offered no pictures of what they looked like before I
got a hold of them, because they’d never bothered getting driver’s licenses in North Carolina or
anywhere else.
 
I flipped through the
rest of the photos—shell casings on the floor, various shots of my basement
man-cave, two cards to a video store in Durham—and
shut the file.

“There’s not a
single picture of what these guys looked like before,” I said.
 
“Not so much as a yearbook photo.
 
No records, no pictures.
 
Is this the real file?
 
Did somebody monkey with this before they
gave it to you?”

“It’s all there,”
he said.

I rocked in my
seat.
 
I bit my lower lip.
 
I said, “It’s like they just walked in out of
nowhere.
 
It’s like they didn’t even
exist before that night.
 
How can not one
but
two
guys like this make it into
their thirties without getting pinched for anything?
 
Without a driver’s license?”

Something else
occurred to me, and I froze.
 
When my
gears unstuck, I snatched the file off my desk and flipped through it frantically.

“Where’s the
car?”
 
I asked.

“What car?”

“Exactly!
 
What car?
 
My house is way out in bumfuck, but when you read through this thing
it’s like they want you to believe they fucking
walked
there.
 
Why is there
no information about the car in here?”

Craig shook his
head again.
 
He didn’t have any answers
for me.
 
Because there weren’t any.

“If you take this
at face value,” I said, “then these two guys appeared out of nowhere.”

Like ghosts, I
thought.
 
Or demons.

Or creatures
conjured from dust and dirt.

“I agree,” he
said, “that there are a couple things that bother me about all this.”

He reached forward
and tapped the top corner of the file.
 
“Know what else is missing?”

“What’s that?”

“Go through that
file and tell me how the cops figured out their names.”

I flipped through
the pitifully small collection of papers.
 
I focused on the photocopies of the membership cards to Ryan’s News and
Video.
 
“Video store cards, I guess.”

“Negative.
 
That’s an
adult
video store, a porn store.
 
They don’t
use names or credit cards.
 
You get a
membership number and post a fifty-dollar deposit; you fail to return a video,
they keep your fifty bucks and you keep the video.
 
They have no record of names.
 
They don’t know who their customers are.
 
So the question is, how do the police know?”

“How do
they?”
 
I asked.

“I don’t
know.
 
And they don’t know, either.
 
I’ve talked to every cop in Burlington and nobody can answer that
question for me.
 
Everybody thinks
somebody else told them, and you go talk to that somebody else and they’re like
no, Joe told me.
 
You talk to Joe, and
Joe says Steve told me.
 
But Steve’s the
one who told you to go talk to Joe in the first place.
 
It’s all fucked up.”

He chuckled then
at something in his head and shifted uncomfortably in the chair.
 
He touched a finger to his lips, supporting
his chin in the can opener created by his thumb and index finger.
 
His dark brow wrinkled.

“I say these
things to you,” he said. “just as I said them to the police.
 
I asked them about this, and they all get the
same weird smile on their faces.
 
I ask,
who are these guys, and they say, these guys?
 
They’re dead, that’s who they are.
 
I say no,
who are
they, and
the cop’ll say, who cares?
 
Old Kevin
Swanson took care of that problem for us.
 
They smile and they change the subject.
 
It’s like…”

He trailed off,
shaking his head.
 
But I finished for
him.

“Some kind of Jedi
mind trick,” I said.
 
“Like they’ve all
been brainwashed.
 
Questions they should
be asking…they’re not.”

“Precisely.”

I closed the file
folder and set it down atop the mess on my desk.
 
I leaned back in my chair, closed my
eyes.
 
What is going on
, I asked the backs of my eyelids.
 
They didn’t answer me, so I opened them again
and looked at Craig.

“Why is nobody
concerned about this?”

He shrugged and
shook his head.
 
“I couldn’t tell
you.
 
But, you know, when you sit here
and think about it…really, who does care?
 
These guys got what they deserved.
 
Who cares where they came from?
 
Who cares who they were?”

I pursed my lips,
staring down at the manila folder.

“I do,” I
said.