Trigger Finger (7 page)

8.

Get up.

When I first
regained consciousness, I perceived only pain.
 
Fresh agony detonated in my head with each heartbeat.
 
Lightning bolts flashed across my skull, only
unlike real lightning, these struck in the same place every time.
 
When they did, the colors on the backs of my
eyelids pulsed and changed.

My first thought,
in my own voice:
I’m blind.

The second,
delivered in Bobby’s:
get up.

I can’t,
I thought.
 
I’m
blind.

Open your eyes and get the fuck up.
 
There’s no time.

To my surprise, I
could see.
 
I lay on my side, wedged in
between my coffee table and the beige sectional that once dominated the living
room of the first apartment that Allie and I lived in after we got
married.
 
Too large for the apartment, it
fit just fine in my man-cave, down here with the flat screen television and all
my other fantasy furnishings.
 
I felt the
hard footrest, retracted inside the frame, pressing against my skin through my Carolina tee shirt.
 
My ass felt it through my jogging pants.

Despite what it
had witnessed, the television kept playing.

“SCORE!
 
Another three-pointer by Harrison Barnes, the
freshman from Ames, Iowa!”

The game.
 
The one I was watching right before…

The ceiling creaked
above my head with the pressure of feet on the floor upstairs.
 
I blinked at the acoustic tile I had paid a
man to install last year in order to hide the unsightly ductwork and utility
lines.
 
The speckled pattern came into
focus as my brain continued reassembling itself.

There are men in my house,
I thought.

Oh, yeah
, Bobby said through the thunder
in my skull.
 
Dangerous ones.
 
Move your ass,
Swanson.

I blinked, closed
my eyes and felt my skull.
 
Right there
at the back, where my father used to slap me for one insolent comment or
another, a baseball-sized lump rose from bone and skin.
 
It screamed when I touched it, a shout so
powerful that it stole my breath and dropped my jaw in search for more air.
 
When I opened my eyes again, they fixated on
the foot of the stairs, where someone had haphazardly dropped the aluminum
softball bat that had smashed into my skull.
 
It didn’t belong there; it belonged in the back, with the pool table,
resting against the wall by the short staircase that led up to the backyard,
where I’d leaned it after my last softball game a year, year and a half
ago.
 
They’d cracked me over the head
with it.
 
They’d left me for dead.

But you’re not dead.
 
Game on, motherfucker, you need to move your
ass
right now.

I forgot the door,
I thought.
 
I
didn’t lock the…

Fuck the door; doesn’t matter now how they
got in.
 
It only matters how they get
out.

I got up,
staggered three steps, and collapsed on the far end of the sectional.
 
My balance.
 
They’d knocked the balance clean out of my ears.

I said
get up
, you sorry sack of shit, get the fuck up and handle this!

So I got up
again.
 
On the wall, the 2010-2011
University of North Carolina
men’s basketball squad stared at me in their coats and ties above a calendar
showing the month of February.
 
Smiling,
happy, excited.
 
They’d had a full view
of the back door but hadn’t said a word to me.
 
My eyes zeroed in on Harrison Barnes, he of the recent three-pointer.

Why didn’t you warn me?

Barnes didn’t
answer.

I almost touched
my head again but caught myself.
 
My
stomach balled up around the beer and summer sausage I’d been eating when I
turned around and saw the two men I didn’t know standing right behind my
goddamned sofa in the moment before the one on the left swung the bat.

The police.
 
I have to call the police.

My heart pumped
white-hot adrenaline into my legs.
 
They
quivered and almost dumped me again, but they held.
 
Instinctively, I looked down at the coffee
table in search of my phone.
 
I didn’t
find it there, or on the entertainment center, either, or on the pool table or
the bar or any of the other places I usually chucked it without giving the
first thought to the possibility that it might become vital to my
survival.
 
I’d left it…

Upstairs on the
kitchen counter, in its charger.
 
Up
there with
them
.

You’re on your own, Devil Dog,
Bobby
said.
 
You’ll have time to dial the 9 and maybe a 1 before they realize you’re
not dead yet and they come to finish the job.
 
It’s all you, Swanson.

“And it’s a foul
by Virginia Tech!
 
Tyler Zeller goes to the
line!”

On the wall, the
junior from Washington, Indiana
took to the free throw line in the Dean Dome in Chapel
Hill.
 
His stadium.
 
His court.
 
His home.

I took to the
line.
 
I rounded the edge of the
sectional and headed for the bar, where the gun safe stood beside the
glass-fronted liquor cabinet.

Move your ass,
Bobby hissed again.
 
Move it
fast.
 
You don’t have much time.

I blinked at the
combination dial on the safe’s narrow rectangular door.
 
The combination itself leapt to the front of
my mind easily enough-05-24-77, Allie’s date of birth—but the numbers
themselves presented a challenge.
 
The
dial divided in two, three, two before my eyes, their focusing mechanisms
knocked loose by the impact of bat on bone.

Hurry!

I reached for the
dial.
 
My hand held it still.
 
“I’m trying,” I whispered aloud.

Try harder.
 
Maybe they’ll look around your living room for a few minutes or poke
around in the office, sack your drawers and grab the laptop.
 
But then they’ll go upstairs.
 
And they’ll look in the bedrooms.

Zero.
 
Five.
 
Two.

These motherfuckers have overrun your
perimeter.
 
What do you think’s going to
happen when they find your wife sleeping in her underwear?

Four.
 
Seven.

MOVE YOUR ASS!

“I am!”
 
I whimpered now, tears streaming down my
cheeks as my trembling hands worked the dial.
 
On the final seven, the tumblers clicked and I twisted the handle,
pulling open the fireproof door.
 
On the
top shelf, my and Allie’s life insurance papers shared a file folder with our
wills.
 
Documentation of Abby’s college
fund, the deed to our house.
 
Account
numbers, passwords, the entirety of our financial lives on paper.
 
Two boxes of Russian surplus 7.62mm
cartridges.
 
Standing on its stock
against the green velvet interior, the Kalashnikov.

Come on!
 
Man up!

I took the thirty-round
banana clip from its resting place beside the box of bullets.
 
The cartridges, copper-coated stingers
crimped into the rocket of the brass casing, gleamed in the dim light over the
bar.
 
The magazine contained ten rounds;
Bobby had said to always keep a loaded magazine, always, because you won’t have
time to prepare one when the shit hits the fan.
 
Load ten so you don’t stress the spring.
 
Change to a different magazine every month, two months.
 
Leave any magazine loaded too long, the
spring will weaken and your weapon will jam.

I hadn’t changed
the magazine in two years.

Too late now.
 
Lock and load!

I tapped the
magazine on my thigh to align the rounds, as Bobby had shown me.
 
Holding the rifle by the pistol grip, I
slipped the mag home just fore of the trigger guard, feeling it slide into
place.
 
I pulled the charging handle and
released it.
 
It slammed forward with a
metallic
click
, pulling a round from
the magazine and seating it in the firing chamber.

“Locked and
loaded,” I whispered.

Safety off
.

My right thumb
reached up and flicked the switch.

Game on, bitch
.

“Game on,” I
repeated.

The door stood
partially open at the top of the stairs.
 
They hadn’t thought enough of me to even close the door on my body.
 
The light over the stove peeked through the
foot-wide space as I mounted the stairs and began my slow climb.
 
I kept the AK-47 trained on that light.
 
The wooden stock rested in the pocket of my
shoulder, my trigger finger extended and ready beside the trigger guard
  
No
prisoners
, Bobby said.

“No prisoners,” I
murmured.

My stairs were
wood, plain pine board, but I had paid to carpet them in the basement
renovation.
 
The carpet and the pad
beneath it muted the creaks from the wood as I moved my weight over it.
 
The men would not hear me.
 
They couldn’t have heard me, not over the
creaking of the floorboards.
 
Not over
their furtive whispers, which grew in volume as I neared the top of the
staircase.

“Sure he’s dead?”

“I split his
fuckin’ head.
 
‘Course he’s dead!”

“Go down and
check.”

“I ain’t checkin’
shit!”

Only dimly
conscious now of the pounding in my head, I pushed the door open with the
rifle’s barrel.
 
The door creaked softly
on its unoiled hinges.
 
I stopped.

Home Invading
Bastard Number One: “You hear that?”

Home Invading
Bastard Number Two: “Hear what?”

Home Invading
Bastard Number One: “Door.”

Home Invading
Bastard Two: “I ain’t heard a damn thing.”

I couldn’t
shoulder through such a narrow space.
 
I’d have to push the door open at least another foot, foot and a
half.
 
When I did that, the hinges would
scream.
 
Their voices put them in the
hallway that shot off the kitchen and led into the living room.
 
They stood right beside me; just inches of
studs and drywall separated my right ear from their knees.

There they are, man,
Bobby said.
 
You
need to bust up in there like Jackie Chan, homeslice.
 
Don’t give them time to react.

I won’t,
I thought.

Don’t hesitate
.

I won’t,
I said again.

Engage the enemy with extreme prejudice.

I will
.
 
And at that, I charged the door.

The door hinges
screeched as I hit the wood.
 
I covered
the last three steps in a single leap that launched me into the kitchen.
 
The AK-47 held out before me commando-style,
I rocketed past the breakfast nook and collided with the edge of the
counter.
 
I spun on my feet, running
backwards now.
 
I stopped when my ass
slammed up against the kitchen sink.

There.
 
In the hallway.
 
Two men dressed in dirty winter coats and
black jeans, one carrying a bag.
 
Skull
caps.
 
One right behind the other.

Blurry faces.

“Fuck,” said the
first one.

Game on, bitch!

I pulled the
trigger.
 
Then I pulled it again.

The AK-47 barked,
and in the muzzle flash I caught sight of the blur that constituted the man’s
face.
 
Although I couldn’t make out his
features, I knew in my heart they showed shock, surprise, fear and
astonishment.
 
Something in the darkest
part of my soul sang with glee.
 
His body
jerked like a paper target as bullets tore into his chest.
 
Two to the chest, one to the head, the Mozambique
drill that Bobby had shown me, because the recoil will automatically align the
barrel with the enemy’s face after round two and…

My trigger finger
curled again, quick but controlled.
 
The
man dropped.

Shell casings
ejected from the semiautomatic action and pinged off of the Wolfgang Puck
cookware Allie had hung from the ceiling rack.
 
Ping ping ping
, like a demon
playing the triangle.
 
The first man
dropped, but his partner staggered backwards, blood and brains on his
chest.
 
I charged forward, bringing the
barrel down for another Mozambique
drill, two to the chest, one to the head.
 
Lightning flashed in the kitchen and sent shell casings skittering
across the travertine floor.
 
Two to the
chest, one to the head.
 
The last bullet
struck him between the eyes—pure luck, because my aim sucked even under the best
conditions—and his head jerked backwards, the cap flying off just before the
backside of his skull disappeared in a shower of bone and brain that splattered
the portrait of Allie and I on our wedding day.
 
The body fell.