Trigger Finger (19 page)

27.

Pinnix and Ramseur
hadn’t tried to kill me that night.
 
They
hit me hard enough to put me out, but only for a short period of time.
 
They didn’t stop to make sure I was dead;
they gave me a love tap with the bat and moved on.

How long was I out?
I asked myself in
the car on the way home from work that evening.
 
Rural Alamance County,
rushing past the windows of the BMW at 55 miles per hour, didn’t answer me.

It didn’t matter—I
didn’t think it did, at least.
 
It did
matter, though, that the man who’d swung the bat at my head hadn’t actually
tried to kill me.
 
Had he put his heart
and soul into it, my head would have shattered like Humpty Dumpty falling off
the wall.
 
Dr. Wingrove had said: nausea,
disorientation, vomiting.
 
Swelling of
the brain.
 
Getting up, loading an
assault rifle, stalking the enemy, putting high-powered bullets exactly where
they needed to go…

“Not bloody
likely,” I growled to the empty air in the passenger seat beside me.

But why?
 
What did the Bald Man want with me?

That’s no man,
replied a voice in my
head.
 
This one didn’t belong to Bobby or
Kate or Allie; I recognized this as my own.
 
I think you know that.

But, again: why
me?
 
I understood why he wanted to see me
go down so badly now; I’d wasted his two golems when they broke into my house
in February.
 
He’d set up this little
game where I had a chance to rabbit right on out the basement door, but I
hadn’t done it.
 
I’d said fuck these two
guys and fuck
you
—game on,
bitch.
 
I hadn’t played the way he
thought I would, and now he had to
show
me who the bitch was, here.
 
I got
that.
 
But I didn’t get why he sent
golems after me in the first place.
 
What
had I ever done to deserve the attention of a demon?

“Who knows why the
Devil picks people?”
 
Kate had said on
the phone when I’d called her from my cell that afternoon.
 
Bobby was out in the woods near Camp Lejeune,
she said, playing war.
 
Bad-asses did
that to stay sharp when there’s no enemy in the immediate vicinity for them to
kill.
 
“He just
does
.
 
I don’t know.
 
Maybe he looked at you and saw your house,
your career, your wife, your child, and he said: this man is blessed by
God.
 
God likes this man, God
loves
this man; maybe I can’t touch Him,
but I can destroy His little pet.
 
And so
he picked you.”

And so he picked
me.

Dead leaves
swirled in my wake as I piloted the BMW up the long driveway and splashed light
across the front of my house.
 
The garage
door opened to receive us but I didn’t enter right away; instead, I sat in the
driveway and tried to survey my palace with the eyes of an outsider.
 
Allie had fallen in love with the porch and
the gabled roof the first time she’d ever laid eyes on it, right here in the
same spot as my car now sat—albeit in much better lighting conditions.
 
Bigger than the Rock Barn house, I
realized.
 
Taller, wider, more square
footage, bigger lot.
 
If a house said
something about a man, mine said:
Kevin
Swanson is a rich son of a bitch.

But the true
riches lay inside, asleep in beds beneath smooth ceilings trimmed with crown
molding.
 
This house, as much as I liked
to sit out here and stare at it like it had boobs or something, provided only a
stage where the best part of my life played out on a daily basis.
 
In a world packed to the gills with disabled
children, drug-addicted children, rotten children, I had Abby.
 
And in the same world, where more than fifty
percent of marriages ended in divorce and people who supposedly loved each
other lied, cheated and stole, I had Allie.
 
I had married my best friend.
 
This year would mark the point where I’d spent more of my life with her
than without her.
 
Maybe the Pinnix and
Ramseur thing made no sense, but what had I done to deserve the incredible good
fortune that constituted the rest of my life?
 
I hadn’t set foot in church since my father’s funeral.
 
I’d never even had my daughter baptized.

And yet I drove a
European sports sedan with clean-smelling leather seats and a motor that purred
like a porn star, and I could park it in a house bigger than the one my
cardiologist father had raised me in.
 
Whereafter I would go upstairs, undress and lay beside the most
beautiful woman in the world—who had so very recently rediscovered the joys of
having sex with me on an almost daily basis.

Okay, then.
 
God had blessed me.
 
And that made me a target.

A hard target,
though.
 
Six golems later, I still held
this castle while the Bald Man raged and frothed at the mouth in his dark little
rathole and dirtied his hands with the clay of yet another beast.

Which I would
kill.
 
Because I remained, as Bobby said,
a hard son of a bitch—a stone cold killer.

“Fuck you,
motherfucker,” I mumbled.

I put the BMW in
gear and proceeded into the garage.

28.

“You’re an alien,”
Bobby said on Saturday, Christmas Eve.
 
He had homebrewed some beer at his house in Jacksonville
and he had brought twelve bottles with him to Burlington.
 
A glass of the jet-black brew in one hand, he stood in the hallway with
me, observing the wall.
 
The painters had
patched over the bullet holes and painted over the bloodstains that I couldn’t
scrub away.
 
They used Sherwin Williams
paint.
 
I knew this because they’d done
it on a weekend, when I was home, and on their lunch break I had gone and
stared at the cans.
 
The Sherwin Williams
logo showed a can of paint spilling over the Earth above the slogan
Cover the World
.
 
I had always found that a little eerie
before.
 
That day, I found it comforting.

“There’s this
little document called the Ten Commandments that says we’re not supposed to
kill anybody.”
 
With his free hand, Bobby
touched the spots where the bullets had torn through Pinnix and Ramseur and
ripped into the drywall, nearly invisible now.
 
Had I not shown him the exact spots earlier, he’d have never known.
 
“It’s a rule riddled with exceptions, of
course, so what you’re really dealing with is the Nine Commandments and One
Suggestion.
 
Nevertheless, we’re all
brought up to think
thou shalt not kill.
 
But you’ve killed.
 
You’re part of a special group of people
now.”

“The one you’re
in,” I said.

“That’s
right.
 
Welcome to the club.
 
You failed to follow the One Suggestion, but
you popped a bunch of shitbags who deserved it, so you’re a hero.
 
But there’s a downside to that.”

He turned around
and smiled.
 
He leaned back against the
wall, taking a short gulp of beer.

“I’m an alien,” I
said.

“Bingo.”

“That’s not what’s
bugging me.”

“You feel guilty
for wasting shitbags.
 
You’re telling
yourself they were human beings, too, I shouldn’t get so juiced over killing
God’s creatures.”

“No,” I said.

“So what is it
now?”

I told him about
my conversation with Dr. Wingrove and how it dovetailed perfectly with my
theory that I had been somehow selected for special cosmic persecution.
 
I didn’t mention the Bald Man.
 
I had learned long ago that men have thoughts
that make perfect sense within the confines of their own brains, but once
spoken aloud they spoil into madness.
 
This was one of them; the idea that the Bald Man wasn’t just a prank
caller but also a
demon
belonged
inside.

An idea occurred
to me then and I gestured at the watch on his wrist.
 
“That thing have a stopwatch feature?”
 
I asked him.

“Uh…yeah.”

“I need your help
with something.”

“What with?”

“I need you to
time me.”

Allie, Abby and
Kate were busy in the formal living room—upon the floor of which said room
Allie and I had made love after I pulled my ninja act in Durham—and we left
them there as Bobby followed me into the basement.
 
I turned on the lights and laid down on the
floor in between the coffee table and the sofa.

“What are you
doing?”

“Let’s see how
long it takes me to get locked and loaded and get upstairs.”

He frowned down at
me.
 
He regarded me this way for a long
time, and for a moment, I thought he wouldn’t do it.
 
But finally, with a roll of his eyes and
shake of his close-shaven head, he removed the watch from his wrist and began
pushing buttons.

“Okay,” he
said.
 
“Ready…set…
go.
”

I laid on the
floor with my eyes closed for what felt like a long enough time for two men to
creep upstairs into the kitchen.
 
Then I
leapt off the floor and made my way over to the gun cabinet.

“Thirty seconds,”
Bobby said.

I looked down and
worked the combination.
 
My head had
begun to pound with the memory.
 
My
trigger finger itched for action.
 
When I
heard the definitive click, I depressed the handle and opened the cabinet.
 
Bobby said nothing as I withdrew the AK-47,
checked the action to make sure the chamber was clear, and rammed an empty
magazine into the receiver.

“Locked and
loaded,” I said.

“One minute.”

I shouldered past
him, barrel pointed towards the ceiling.
 
I mounted the stairs and climbed slowly, careful not to make a
sound.
 
I paused at the top, replaying
the conversation I’d heard in my head.
 
Then I leapt through the door, spun on my heels, and hit the edge of the
sink with my ass cheeks.
 
“Time!”
 
I called, barrel pointed down the empty
hallway.

I heard a
beep.
 
A moment later, Bobby emerged from
the basement.

“One minute,
thirty-three seconds.”

I lowered the rifle.
 
I swallowed.

Bobby looked at me
blankly.
 
He shrugged his shoulders.
 
“Well?
 
What did we get out of all that?”

One minute and
thirty-three seconds.
 
I laid the rifle
down on the granite countertop and walked into the hallway.
 
I stood where Pinnix and Ramseur had stood,
where I’d seen them, where I’d killed them.
 
Bobby joined me but didn’t say anything.
 
For the moment, we just stood there in the hallway and listened to our
women chattering in the living room beyond.

“If I was
unconscious for only thirty seconds,” I said quietly, “they stood here for a
full minute.”

Bobby looked down
at his watch.
 
He didn’t say anything.

I laid a hand on
the opposite wall.
 
I pointed at the
place on the ceiling where the banister appeared on its way down from the second
floor.
 
“The stairs are right there,” I
said.
 
“You can see them even in the
dark.
 
As soon as they entered this
hallway, they would have seen the way to get upstairs.”

“And that’s
significant…why?”

“Because they
stood here for a solid minute.
 
At the
least.
 
They were carrying a rape kit,
man, they weren’t interested in stealing any of my property; they wouldn’t have
looked around for any goodies.
 
The
goodies they wanted were upstairs.
 
They
knew that.
 
But they stood here for a
solid minute.”

We stood in
silence as I tried to imagine standing still in a strange house for that
long.
 
Funny; a minute had never seemed
like a long time before.
 
The seconds
ticked by in our heads with the speed of molasses running down frost-covered
iron.
 
With each passing moment, the
absurdity of what Pinnix and Ramseur had done only grew.

When a minute had
passed, Bobby rolled his eyes again.
 
He
retreated into the kitchen and returned with our beers, which we had laid on
the counter on our way to the basement.
 
“They stood there for a while and listened,” he said.
 
“Trying to hear if there was anybody else in
the house other than the dumbass in the basement and the girls they were
after.
 
A little recon would have made
sense.”

He handed me my
beer.
 
I accepted it but did not drink; I
studied his expression and saw the discomfort there, the thoughts beneath his
words.
 
One minute doesn’t sound like
much, but in the context of an assault it becomes an eternity.
 
They wouldn’t have stood there for a full
minute.
 
Bobby understood this.
 
I could read this in the tension set in his
jaw, born of the effort it took to hold the corners of his mouth up in that
wry, this-is-all-a-bunch-of-bullshit smile.

And he understood,
too, that this exercise assumed I had lain on the floor for only a half a
minute.
 
It was entirely possible—and
likely—that I had been out for far longer than that.

“Are you still
obsessed with that stupid idea that you caught them on their way out?
 
Do you still honestly believe it’s possible
that your wife and maybe your daughter got raped by two strangers and don’t
remember a second of it?”

No, I didn’t
honestly believe that.
 
Not anymore.
 
What possessed me now—what quickened my
heartbeat and narrowed my eyes and brought a sheen of sweat to my skin even
though it was only sixty-eight degrees in here—was that the results of our
experiment didn’t jibe with my theory of this attack.
 
I had concluded that they hadn’t hit me that
hard because the Bald Man had wanted my brains unscrambled and my faculties
intact enough to send me running out the back door to get help—whereupon I
would have to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had run while
these men raped and then killed my family.
 
But then, once they’d knocked me down, they should have proceeded upstairs
post-haste.
 
Not stood there in the
hallway waiting for me.
 
Why would they
have waited for me?

Because the Bald Man knew you were coming
up.

Not possible.

Yes, it is.
 
Because he not only
makes
, but
he also
sees.

Bobby clapped me
on the shoulder and spun me around to face the foyer.
 
“You know what, man?
 
I want you to take a look at something.
 
Don’t say anything; just shut up and
look
.”

He propelled me
into the foyer and then jerked me to a stop.
 
We stood in the dark, the lights off.
 
The only illumination in the foyer came from the lamps and the Christmas
lights in the living room.
 
The two
beautiful women and one beautiful girl seemed oblivious to our presence.
 
Sundry boxes of ornaments, basking in the
warmth of their yearly furlough from the attic, stood open all around
them.
 
Allie pulled a little porcelain
Barbie doll out and smiled as she showed it to Abby, her lips moving to the
tune of the story that came with it.
 
All
of Allie’s ornaments had a story—Abby had heard each one every Christmas since
she was old enough to hold her head up.
 
But she listened anyway.
 
Mama’s
little stories were as much a part of her Christmas as beer was of mine and
Bobby’s.

“Look at their
faces,” he whispered.

I did.
 
The contours of my wife’s already lovely face
seemed highlighted, made somehow finer, in the warmth of the Christmas
lights.
 
My daughter, the best of this
woman’s essence mixed with the best of my own, could have been an ornament
herself—even thought she stood now, I realized, as tall as her mother.
 
She laughed.

“They look happy,
don’t they?”
 
Bobby asked.

Santa Claus
peddling an ice cream cart, the front wheel immobilized.
 
Your
uncle Steve broke it when he was four,
Allie’s lips moved.
 
Crimson and full in the soft glow of the
lamps, they drew my eyes.
 
He blamed it on his Superman doll.

“Yes,” I whispered
back.

A little
train.
 
My grandfather made this for me when I was your age, Abby.
 
He was good with his hands.

My daughter took
the train and examined it with a curiosity that made her look four again.

“So leave it
alone,” Bobby said.
 
I turned away from
the Norman Rockwell painting forming up in my living room and faced my
brother.
 
Beneath his shock of blond hair
cut close to the skull in the typical Marine fashion, his face glowed with a
tan bestowed by hours spent outside in the winter sun.
 
Beer and good health ruddied his cheeks.
 
But his eyes were serious.
 
“Stop seeing this therapist; he’s not doing
you any favors.
 
Quit calling people and
riding around and poring through files—quit
investigating
.
 
If you see the edges, don’t pick at
them.
 
Because you know what?
 
If these guys really did come in here and
fuck Allie and Abby’s brains out and they simply don’t remember it?
 
Then good.”

He leaned
forward.
 
I smelled the beer on his
breath.

“Reality is
overrated,” he said.
 
“And if you can
hide deeply enough, it really doesn’t matter.”

The furnace kicked
on with a click and a whoosh.
 
Outside
the door to my right, freezing wind tore down Highway 62 and wrapped winter’s
shroud around everything it touched.
 
It
buffeted under the eaves and rattled the screens, scratched at my doors and
windows with a blind desire to get inside and do its work here just as it had
out there.
 
Winter, I thought, the dying
season.
 
The great Darwinian colander of
nature that separated the old, the sick and the weak from everything else.
 
Winter was cold and hard because nature
itself was cold and hard; it had no soul, knew no mercy.
 
In winter, God went to sleep.