Trigger Finger (26 page)

43.

“Go back,” Dr.
Koenig said again.
 
“I know it’s hard,
but I really need you to push through this, okay?
 
We’re out of time.
 
We’re completely out of time.”

Midafternoon.
  
Nobody on the bench outside, although it
looked like the nicest of days.
 
I felt
then like I wanted to go out there and sit on that bench.
 
I decided that I would.
 
Later.

I unrolled my
battered
Southern Rifleman
and
plopped it down on the coffee table.
 
I
pursed my lips and looked down at it, squinting.
 
I breathed deeply, but I did it through my
nose.
 
I closed my eyes.

I opened them.

I remained in Dr.
Koenig’s office.

“Kevin?”

I looked up at him
and shook my head.

“I don’t know
what’s going on here,” I said.
 
I was
lying, but just saying that felt good.
 
I
felt like if I said it enough, it would become true again.
 
“But I’m done.”

“Oh, you’re done?”

“Yeah,” I said,
reaching for my magazine again and rolling it into its familiar tube
shape.
 
“It’s been nice knowing you, but
we’re done here.
 
I’m going back to
work.”

I rose, but his
voice reached out and cracked like a whip.

“Sit down.”

I stopped.
 
Not so much out of any fear of him, but
because he’d never spoken to me with such a firm tone before.

He shook his head,
covered his face.
 
Breathed so loudly
that it qualified as a groan.
 
Then he
stood up.
 
I started to rise, too, but he
held a hand up.

“You stay right
there,” he commanded.
 
“Right there.
 
I don’t want you leaving that couch.”

“Uh…okay.”

He walked briskly
over to his desk and picked up the phone.
 
He pushed a single button, waited.
 
Then he said, “It’s Wheeler.
 
This
isn’t working.”

“What’s not
working?”
 
I asked.
 
“Who’s Wheeler?”

He ignored
me.
 
He turned to one side—not away, not
to where he couldn’t see me, just to one side to make it clear he didn’t want
to hear what I had to say right now—and continued talking into the office
phone.
 
“I tried your way, now we’re
using mine.
 
We’re out of time here.
 
I can’t wait any longer.”

Pause.

“It’s less than
twenty-four hours away.
 
Seriously, we
reconvene in the morning.”

Pause.
 
Then:

“Yes.
 
Absolutely.
 
Okay.
 
If it doesn’t go well, I’ll
call for you.”

He hung up the
phone and walked, slower now, back over to his easy chair.
 
True to his orders, I remained on the couch.

“What was that?”

“Okay,” he
said.
 
“We’re going to try a different
tack.”

I felt like I’d
just stepped into the Twilight Zone.
 
“Uh…okay.”

“Tell me
something; what do you think happened just now?”

“You talked to
somebody on the phone.”

“No.
 
With your house.
 
The guy trying to choke you, Allie’s
keys.
 
The rifle disappearing from your
hands, what do you think all that was?”

I swallowed.
 
Ki
breath.

“I’m suffering
from a particularly serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder,” I
replied.
 
The words came out slippery,
diarrhea from my mouth.
 
“My anxieties
have grown so strong that I’ve blurred the line between reality and fear.
 
I’m having a nervous breakdown.
 
I’m mentally ill.
 
I need medication.
 
I can’t tell reality from bullshit.
 
I should probably be committed right
now.
 
I’ll sign myself in wherever you
want, you just let me know…”

He reached into
his briefcase.
 
At that moment, stark
fear stabbed into me with the speed and violence of a killer’s blade.

His hand came
out.
 
In it rested a fresh, unmolested
copy of
Southern Rifleman.
 
My issue.

“I ordered this
some time ago,” he said.
 
“Had it sent to
my house.
 
And when I got it, I flipped
to the back and discovered a significant difference between what you recited to
me at our first meeting and what is written in this issue.
 
Would you like for me to read the Hero of the
Month article to you?”

My eyes
narrowed.
 
My heartbeat quickened
again.
 
Ragged now, so many times had it
started and stopped in the past few minutes alone.

He flipped to the
back.
 
He began to read.

“Kevin Braxton,”
he read, “an active-duty member of the United States Marine Corps and a veteran
of the Iraq war,
successfully defended his Woodbridge,
Virginia home on the night of
February 1, 2010 after Leon Pinnix and Trayshaun Ramseur gained entry through
an unlocked window in the basement.
 
And
this man’s name is Braxton, by the way.
 
Not Swanson.”

He looked up.

“Says here that
Sergeant Braxton had a Smith & Wesson Model 629 revolver with a 6-inch
barrel,” he said.
 
“They never made it
out of his basement.
 
He got them on the
stairs.”

My hands began
shaking.
 
My stomach twitched once,
twice, in a very credible threat to evict everything I’d eaten that day.
 
I looked out the window and noticed that the
character of the light had changed.
 
Late
afternoon now, very late.
 
Not too far
from a point where you’d have to start calling it night.

“That’s fucked
up,” I said in a voice that shook in time with my hands.
 
“That’s one hell of an error on the printing
line, I’ll tell you that.
 
I bet some
heads rolled for that one.”

“Sergeant Braxton
had a wife and a daughter about Abby’s age.
 
So all that matches.
 
But there’s no
mention of Burlington, North Carolina or a lawyer named Kevin
Swanson anywhere on this page.
 
Anywhere
in this magazine, in fact.
 
And oh, guess
what kind of rifle that is on the cover?”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s an AK-47,”
he said.

I didn’t respond
to that, either.
 
I didn’t respond
because I couldn’t breathe.

He laid the
magazine down on his shitty coffee table.
 
He appeared to be thinking, but then I got the idea that he just didn’t
want to look at me for a while.
 
He
closed his eyes and took a
ki
breath
of his own—apparently, I didn’t hold the patent on that technique.
 
Then he continued.

“If you want to
read anything about you,” he said, “you have to get your hands on a back issue
of the Burlington
Times-News
from February 4, 2010.”

“No,” I whispered.

He reached into
his briefcase again and pulled out a folded-up newspaper.
 
“Do you want me to read this to you?”

I closed my eyes
and willed myself to slide.
 
When I
opened them again, I hadn’t gone anywhere.

“I’ll summarize it
for you,” he said in a softer tone.
 
“What it says is, on the night of February 1, 2010, a single intruder
broke into the home of attorney Kevin Swanson off Highway 62 in southern Alamance County.
 
It’s kind of a dry account, as newspapers often are.
 
Gives the bare minimum facts.
 
A lot of quotes from community members.
 
The February 4 issue is the first story.
 
There were other stories in newspapers across
the country, but this was the first one.
 
Because it happened here.
 
In Burlington.”

“I don’t know what
you’re talking about,” I tried to say.
 
But the words hung up in my throat.

Bobby?
 
I cried out.

No answer.

“I can give you a
lot of detail,” he said.
 
“I’m privy to a
lot of the facts here, most of which aren’t properly reflected in the
newspapers’ accounts.
 
Kevin Swanson
didn’t have an AK-47—he actually didn’t have anything, because he never felt
like he needed to keep firearms in his home.
 
The question had just never come up for him.
 
So when he was downstairs in his basement,
watching the end of the Carolina-Virginia Tech game with his wife and
thirteen-year-old daughter, he didn’t have a gun safe to go digging around in
when he heard a strange noise upstairs.”

“What’s going on
here?
 
What are you doing?”

“Kevin Swanson is
six feet tall,” he continued, “and well within his physical prime.
 
He had taken several years of martial arts
training in his youth and felt generally confident and secure.
 
Had he actually owned a firearm, it probably
wouldn’t have helped him that night, because the deciding factor there was his
mindset.
 
Kevin thought something had
fallen in the kitchen.
 
He wasn’t
thinking there was a burglar.
 
He
thought, something fell, I’m going to go see what it is.
 
Even if he’d owned a whole slew of
semiautomatic weapons, he wouldn’t have taken one with him into the kitchen
because he wasn’t thinking that way.”

I began to rock
back and forth on the couch.
 
I lifted
the front legs with every backward roll.
 
I shook my head—but he kept talking.

“Kevin Swanson
believed in a civilized world,” he said.
 
“He lived a good life, a happy life.
 
He got up every morning, he went to work, he supported his family.
 
He lived right.
 
And he had every reason to believe that if he
continued to live right, if he continued to do the right thing every day, life
would continue for him the way it always had.”

Now I began to
cry.

“That’s
important.
 
People need to understand the
way Kevin thought, and they need to understand that his mindset predetermined
the choices he made that night.
 
Because
it’s easy to judge somebody after the fact and point out the things you think
they did wrong.
 
It’s really easy.
 
Unless you’ve been there.”

What choices did he make?
 
What did he do?

More to the point,
what did he
not
do?

“When a man named
Travis Wayne Arnold accosted him from behind in his kitchen,” he continued, “he
overpowered Kevin with a surprise attack, but the way he really gained control
there was by relying on his victim’s innate belief that everything would
ultimately turn out okay if he just stayed cool.
 
He didn’t know anything about Kevin Swanson,
but he didn’t need to; that’s a common reaction to something like this.
 
A robber sticks a gun in your face, whips out
a knife, whatever, most people just hand over their wallets.
 
Nobody ever fights.
 
They just go along with it.
 
Hope they don’t get killed.
 
Most of the time, they don’t.

“Travis Wayne
Arnold told Kevin everything would be okay if he just stayed cool.
 
And Kevin believed him.
 
He let Travis Wayne Arnold handcuff him,
because Travis Wayne Arnold said the only thing he wanted was electronics,
jewelry, other valuables.
 
You just be
cool, Kevin, and everything’s going to be okay.
 
So Kevin stayed cool.
 
He let
Travis Wayne Arnold take him down into the basement, and then he told his wife
and daughter to stay cool, too.
 
And
Travis Wayne Arnold handcuffed them, as well.

“And then he raped
them.”

My stomach
upended.
 
I leaned forward and opened my
mouth, but nothing came out.
 
Apparently,
I hadn’t eaten anything that day; I couldn’t even upchuck acid.

“He raped Kevin’s
wife and he raped Kevin’s daughter while Kevin laid there on the floor
watching, listening to it happening for the better part of the next day.”

“No,” I choked.

“Yes.”

“No.
 
No.”

He reached out and
grabbed my hands.
 
They shook, and they
didn’t stop when he touched them.

My head swam, but
I didn’t pass out.
 
I didn’t slide,
either.
 
I was beginning to understand
that that was so much bullshit.

A question rose in
my throat and although I didn’t want to ask it, I couldn’t stop it.

“Where are
they?”
 
I asked.
 
“Allie?
 
Abby?
 
Where are they
staying?
 
When can I see them?”