Trigger Finger (18 page)

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.

“There’s the Bald
Man,” I said.
 
“I’ve had a…vision, I
guess.
 
I don’t know what else to call
it.
 
It’s an image so strong that the
closest thing I can compare it to is a memory—so I’m thinking it’s something
I’ve seen in my nightmares.”

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-1800s,
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.”