Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“Which is?”

I leaned forward. I had curled my issue of Southern Rifleman into a tube, and now I let it unroll into a halfpipe. I set it down on the frat-boy coffee table.

“It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “What happened. I’m not sorry at all. Actually, when I get anxious or worried or upset or anything—like when I think about this Bald Man maybe showing up at my office one day to confront me—I think about those two dirtbags hitting the floor, and I’m like, I did that. And I feel proud. What do you call a guy who not only feels no remorse, no revulsion, no anything over killing somebody but rather revels in it?”

“Psychopath,” he replied.

“Exactly. I think some of my issues relate back to that. On a significant level, I’m worried that I might be a psychopath.”

I sat back.

“I’m a lawyer,” I continued. “My daddy was a doctor. I went to college, I went to grad school. I wear a suit and tie to work every day. I stop for red lights. I’ve been with the same woman since I was eighteen years old and I don’t beat my kid. Up until now, I’ve always thought, Kevin, you’re all right. Nobody’s perfect, but you’re okay. Maybe you haven’t achieved anything great, maybe you haven’t dedicated your life to serving your country like your brother, but you’re still a good person. You can be proud of that.”

I shook my head.

“And then this thing happens. It’s like a load of dynamite exploded and blew off the north face of my soul and now I really see what’s in there. I can kill people and not give a rat’s ass. Hell, I get off on it. Doesn’t that make me a bad person?”

“Psychopaths don’t worry about being psychopaths.”

“Then what’s the next disorder on the spectrum?”

Dr. Koenig looked down at his notes. Trying to decide, probably, what kind of – opath I was if I didn’t quite fit the psychopath mold. Because something was obviously wrong with me.

But as I thought about that, I found the idea more than a little thrilling. I thought about the Bald Man threatening me, and the slightest of smiles crept towards the corners of my lips. Motherfucker, I said into the ether, willing the message into the brain of this faceless caller. You better watch your ass. You don’t know who you’re fucking with.

Dr. Koenig cleared his throat. “Thinking back to what your troublesome caller said, does the timing of this bother you at all?”

I scowled. “Timing?”

“You got hit on the head.”

“Yes.”

“With a softball bat.”

“Yes.”

“These men—Pinnix and Ramseur—singled your family out because they were attracted to your wife and perhaps your teenage daughter, too. Hell-bent on rape, correct?”

“Correct.”

“So why do you think they screwed around in your hallway for such a long time?”

I sat up, eyes narrowing. I felt defensive then, just like I’d felt when the Bald Man called in to the Billy Horton Show. I also felt a bolt of anger, because I was paying this guy. And he wanted to question my version of events like some dickweed lawyer doing a cross-examination? Hell, no.

“What are you implying?” I asked.

“I’m not implying anything. I’m asking an honest question. If they wanted to rape your wife and daughter, and if you consider that everybody knows that bedrooms tend to be on the second floor of two-story houses, why do you think they hung out in the hallway long enough for you to get yourself together?”

I stared at him. The temperature in his office dropped ten degrees.

“Are you asking if maybe…”

He stared back at me, face expressionless.

“…I got them on their way down ?”

His nostrils flared slightly with each breath. He said nothing.

“You think I was laying down there unconscious while they… and then I just caught them on the back end? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“I don’t know, Kevin,” he said softly. “But I think I’d like to talk to your wife.”

My therapist wanted me to bring Allie in so that we could seriously discuss the possibility that she’d been plugged by two different guys in her own bed and didn’t remember it. Like she would come in and we would all talk about this and she would say, wow, you know, that totally slipped my mind.

“That’s bullshit,” Bobby said on the phone that afternoon. He spoke to me from his house in Jacksonville, three hours away. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

“I know,” I said. I sat in my office chair, sweat forming between my ass cheeks and the fabric of my polyester blend pants. Five o’clock had come and gone, but Carwood, Allison wasn’t a go-home-at-a-reasonable-time kind of outfit on the best of days. “But he just kind of came out of nowhere with it. And I didn’t know what to say because I had never considered it.”

“How is that even possible? Do you honestly think it could have gone down that way? Seriously?”

I paused.

“Well?” He demanded.

“No,” I said.

“Right. You’d know if something was wrong, you bet your ass you’d know. Think about it; does she act any different when you’re having sex? Does she get all weird? Stiffen up? Cry?”

The same sun that had shown through Dr. Koenig’s picture window tapped at the drawn blinds in my office. I sat with the door closed, safely ensconced in familiar surroundings. Outside the mindfuck world of the shrink’s lair, the idea did seem absurd—while it remained theoretically possible that I’d lain knocked out longer than I’d suspected, neither my wife nor my daughter had shown me any indication of trauma over the past six months. I had the mental problems, not them. And while mine and Allie’s sex life had changed, it had changed in a positive way. A very positive way.

“No, none of that.”

“Right. Exactly. Because that shit didn’t happen. You know what? Ask her. Ask both of them. Say, did either one of you get nailed by one or both of those shitbags I popped in the hallway? Allie? Abby? No? Okay, case closed. They’ll probably laugh at you.”

“They probably will,” I agreed.

“Put this behind you and get your eyes back on the prize. I want to know who this crazy man that called into the radio station is. That could be a dangerous son of a bitch. That’s what you need to be worrying about, not this psychobabble.”

“I know, right?”

“Do some of your lawyer-ninja moves to get your hands on the phone records for that place. Trace the phone number to an address, then go over there and say motherfucker, you want to talk that shit to my face?”

He laughed.

“Tell you what, man, you find him for me, I’ll pack three Haji-killing Marines into the car and we’ll ride on up there to his house.”

Despite the stack of pink message slips by my phone and the even larger stack of neglected files towering beside it, I laughed, too. I felt glad I’d called Bobby. He had a way of putting things in perspective for me.

“In all seriousness, now; concentrate on pinning down this asshole. Good to go?”

The blinds seemed to glow with the sun.

“Good to go,” I repeated.

My sex life had indeed changed in the wake of the shooting. Not that I’d had it bad before, not exactly. Just kind of… routine. After eighteen years, I’d learned to read the cues as to when Allie felt like doing it and when she didn’t. If one of these occasions happened to coincide with a moment where Abby wasn’t up and about and I wasn’t dog-tired from shoveling divorce cases around my office all day, we experienced a few moments of fireworks and then either fell asleep or turned on the TV. I didn’t complain about this; it did the job. Dammit, Jim, I’m a man, not a rabbit.