Trigger Finger (22 page)

32.

Dr. Koenig didn’t
act very interested in my premonition idea.
 
For the remainder of our session, he grilled me on what the Bald Man
looked like and what he’d been wearing in my dream.
 
Not much information, because he’d been naked
from the waist down.
 
And I saw only the
back of his head.

My therapist
didn’t think much of the idea, but I did.
 
That evening, I called Bobby.

“That’s some
crazy-ass shit,” he said, when I’d told him everything.
 
“Hell, maybe you do need to keep seeing this
shrink.
 
Maybe he can get you on
medication.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“A demon-man
making people out of clay and sending them after you?
 
And now you’re psychic?”

“Okay, maybe
‘premonition’ is a bad term.
 
‘Vision’
works better.
 
Psychics have their own
visions.
 
These aren’t mine.
 
They’re his.”

“He’s beaming them
into your brain.”

“In a manner of
speaking,” I said, “yes.”

“Make a hat out of
aluminum foil,” he replied.
 
“That can
help.”

“Come on!
 
I’m being serious here!”

“So am I.
 
Kevin, man…”

He trailed off
into a sigh.

“Listen to
yourself, okay?
 
Go home, get some sleep,
and in the morning, go out on your porch and look at the sun and ask yourself
if what you’re saying right now still makes a lick of sense.
 
Demons, clay people, visions…it’s too much,
man.
 
I can’t dig that.

Papers and file
folders lay scattered all over my desk.
 
My law license, my sundry diplomas, hanging on my walls.
 
Mail I hadn’t opened even though Kristin had
brought it in shortly after lunch; a large manila envelope that looked like it
probably contained interrogatories and document production requests—an
invitation to more eyestrain and late nights.
 
My office, my world.
 
My reality.

I looked at my
stack of mail.
 
The manila envelope drew
my eyes.
 
The edges, I realized; the
edges were too crisp.
 
It didn’t look
like it had made a run through the Burlington
post office.

“Go home,” Bobby
said.
 
“You’ve been working too
much.
 
Go home, drink a beer.
 
Drink three beers; hell, drink a case.
 
Just get some sleep and get off this
shit.
 
And the next time you see this
shrink, get a prescription.
 
Okay?”

What had I
thought?
 
That he would agree with
me?
 
That he would say yes, Kevin,
there’s a very evil man—a demon, actually—making dudes out of clay and sending
them out to fuck with you.
 
Let’s have a
logical discussion about how to deal with that very real problem, because I
think it’s completely plausible.

Right.

“Sure,” I said
with a sigh as I reached for my mail.

“I’m hanging up
now.
 
Bye, man.”

“Bye.”

The connection
broken, my phone returned to sleep.
 
I
laid it down on the desk and pulled the stack of mail closer to me.
 
I went straight for the manila envelope.

No return
address.
 
The sender had addressed it to
Kevin Swanson, Esquire, right here at the office.
 
Our street address, not our post office box;
it shouldn’t have arrived, because we had no mail receptacle at the
building.
 
But here it was.

I opened it.
 
I removed its contents.

I dropped them.

“Mother
fucker
,” I whispered.
 

33.

Craig Montero
didn’t answer his phone when I called him from the office, nor did he answer
when I called from my cell.
 
I had to
wait until the next morning, when I corralled him in the parking lot at
Carwood, Allison, with the manila envelope in one hand and my phone in the
other.

“Hey, asshole,” I
said. “I called you last night.”

“I saw it.
 
I was busy.”

“Did you listen to
any of your messages?”

“I had an Elon
grad student in the shower with me.
 
Do
you think checking my voice mail was a priority last night?
 
Single men have to
work
for their poontang, punk.”

I waved the
envelope at him.
 
“You need to see this.”

He reached for it,
but I pulled it away.

“Not here.
 
In your office.
 
We need a computer.”

Fortunately, we’d
both arrived early enough to where the staff remained sluggish, so nobody
assaulted us with messages or questions or reminders or any of the little
nuggets of pure joy that made mornings so much fun.
 
We proceeded to Craig’s office and shut the
door.
 
I handed him the envelope as he
lowered himself into his chair.

“I found this in
my inbox last night.”

“Who’s it from?”

“That dickhead
that called the radio station.”

He opened the flap
and pulled out the sheaf of papers.
 
“This is your Facebook page,” he said.

“Pieces of it,” I
said.

“It’s all your photos.”

“Not all.
 
Just the ones of Allie and Abby.
 
Nobody else.”

He continued
flipping, then returned to the beginning and flipped again.

“That’s a threat,”
I said.
 
“That motherfucker is
threatening my family.”

He reached the
last photo—Allie, Abby and I at Mellow Mushroom for Abby’s twelfth birthday
dinner.
 
He pointed to something
typewritten on the bottom.
 
“Did you see
this?
 
Says, ‘For a preview, go to
www.doithard.com.’ Did you check that out?”

He spun around in
his chair to face his computer and reached for the mouse.

“I did,” I
said.
 
“It’s a porn site.
 
Bondage.
 
S&M.”

He clicked the
mouse and entered the website into the address bar.
 
His computer took its time, as if it didn’t
approve of where he had sent it and found the material highly distasteful.
 
But then the pictures popped up.

“Whoa!”

“Yeah.”

“This is some sick
shit!”

“He calls it a
preview,” I said.
 
I had folded my hands
across my stomach, wanting to look calm, but I didn’t feel calm at all.
 
“I didn’t sleep last night.
 
I sat on the bottom step in my foyer with my
AK-47 and waited for the son of a bitch to try to get in.
 
Or send somebody after me.”

“Why didn’t you
call the police?”

“They don’t give a
rat’s ass about little crap like this.
 
And how are they going to find him?
 
I give them dead bodies and they can’t even get them identified!”

“We need to report
this,” Craig said.
 
“This
is
a threat, Kevin.
 
This guy’s basically saying he’s going to
come over and…do this stuff.”

I covered my face
with my hands and shook my head.

“How long has it
been since you’ve gotten any sleep?”
 
He
asked me.

“Night before
last,” I said.
 
“I got a little
then.
 
A few hours in the past
forty-eight.
 
Kind of hard to get any
meaningful shut-eye when you have to deal with things like this.”

“I’ll call my people
with Burlington
and the Sheriff’s Department.
 
They’ll
take care of this thing.”

Would they?
 
I wanted to believe that, but I wondered how
the criminal justice system would tackle a perpetrator who created his own
accomplices out of dirt and twigs.
 
A
perp who
made
.
 
I wanted to tell Craig that I hadn’t called
the police because this wasn’t a police issue anymore.
 
It had escalated.

“You have court
this morning?”

“Some pissant
motions over in Civil.”

“I’ll continue
them for you.
 
Go home and go to bed.
 
You need to sleep or you’re going to
collapse.”

I dropped my hands
from my face.
 
The flesh beneath my eyes
felt impossibly heavy right then, like my fingers were pulling all my features
down towards my chin.

“Can I ask you a
favor?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You still keep
that gun in your desk?”

I swallowed.

“I think Allie
might need it.”

34.

The Bald Man
didn’t want Allie and Abby.
 
I had
thought that before, but the more I pondered it the more convinced I became of
it.
 
I spent most of my time away from home;
if he wanted to rape and murder my family, going after them when I wasn’t
around—which was most of the time—made the most sense.
 
It required only a well-placed visit to my
house at four in the afternoon, with Abby doing her homework and Allie doing...whatever
Allie did with her time at four in the afternoon.
 
They didn’t constitute hard targets.

But he hadn’t done
that.
 
He’d thrown four golems at me
after Pinnix and Ramseur, but he hadn’t thrown anything at
them.
 
Because, ultimately,
they didn’t really have anything to do with this.
 
This all centered around
me
.
 
He wanted to show me I
wasn’t a hero, put me in my place.
 
Show
me that he stood above me, that he could do anything he wanted and the Hero of
the Month couldn’t stop him.
 
Show me
that I was a bitch.

Hurting Allie and
Abby would only serve his purposes with me there to watch.
 
I saw this as clearly as I saw the
restaurants and offices and shops of West Burlington
flitting past my window as I made my way back to the interstate.
 
He would hurt them, but only in front of
me.
 
And he would do it in such a way
that I would later blame myself; there would be some aspect of the assault that
I could have prevented but failed to do so.
 
I understood this, and I also understood the next logical progression:
remaining around me put both Allie and Abby in serious danger.

“I want you to
leave,” I told Allie at home.

I hadn’t told her
about the envelope last night, but I told her now.
 
I told her about Ruby the Redneck Psychic,
the Facebook pictures of her and Abby and the website the Bald Man had directed
me to.
 
A preview, he’d called it.
 
A preview.
 
I told her about my dreams in great detail and although she flinched,
she did not interrupt.
 
Only when I
finished did she speak.

“A premonition,”
she said.

“A forecast,” I
said.
 
“And to be honest with you, I
don’t know if he’s put it in my head to fuck with me, or if…I don’t know…
God
put it there as a warning.
 
But something’s going to happen, and it’s
going to happen
here
, in this house,
and it’s going to happen soon.
 
So I need
you and Abby gone.”

“Where will we
go?”

“Pennsylvania,” I said.
 
“With your mom and dad.
 
I’m pretty sure you’ll be okay there.
 
He hasn’t hurt you yet because the time
hasn’t been right.
 
Just to make sure,
though…”

I pulled Craig’s Smith
& Wesson .38 revolver out of my belt.
 
It hadn’t looked like much at first glance; a snub-nose meant for
concealed carry, it lacked the heft and visual impact of something like my
AK-47.
 
Yet on my kitchen table, it
glowed with a deadly aura.

“I want you to
take this,” I said.
 
“Just in case I’m
wrong and he does come after you.
 
Or
sends somebody.
 
But I don’t think you’ll
have to use it.”

Allie stared down
at the revolver, then up and me.
 
She
shook her head slowly and closed her eyes.
 
“Kevin…”

“I know.
 
It’s crazy.”

“This is not
good.
 
This is not good at all.”

“All the more
reason for you to get gone.
 
If I’m
acting crazy, do you really want our daughter to stay here and watch her dad’s
downward spiral?”

“I think you’re
having a nervous breakdown,” she said.

“Maybe.
 
But this shit is real.
 
You guys need to
go
.”

“Abby’s got
school.”

“She won’t miss
more than a week.
 
It’ll do her good to
get away from all this for a few days.
 
Visit her grandparents.
 
Reconnect
with her Yankee heritage.”

Devoid of makeup,
flushed from her workout, hair in a messy ponytail, her beauty twisted my
insides.
 
I experienced a moment of
unholy terror at the thought of sending her away—something akin, I imagined, to
the idea of leaving your newborn baby unattended at a flea market in Tijuana.
 
But the moment passed, and I returned to the
solid conviction that come nightfall, she could not remain here.

She looked up at
me.

“We have to let
her finish out the school day,” she said.

“No,” I said.
 
“You guys need to leave now.”

I shoved the
pistol and a box of bullets I’d picked up at Wal-Mart on the way home across
the table at her.

“I’ll help you
pack,” I told her.
 
“I have a feeling
he’s coming tonight.”