Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

But my first day back at work after shooting Pinnix and Ramseur, I arrived home to the glow of the kitchen light. In the hallway by the stairs, a single lamp in the office threw a puddle of light into the foyer. When I entered the kitchen, I looked down the hallway and saw Allie standing in it, smiling.

“Rough day?” She asked.

“Very,” I said, reaching into the fridge for a Heineken. I popped the top with the bottle opener on my keychain and took a long drink. “Glad it’s over.”

She padded into the kitchen and stood by the empty stool at the island where Abby typically wolfed down breakfast. The red satin pajama bottoms I’d bought her for Christmas two years ago clung to the gentle swell of her hips below the Victoria’s Secret tank top that was just a size too small. An outfit which she hadn’t worn much before I killed somebody. Let’s be honest , she’d said the night after that Christmas, looking down at her breasts pushing against the white fabric of the shirt. You didn’t buy this for me, you bought it for you. She’d humored me and wore it that night, then out came the baggy sweatsuit and all its sexless siblings again.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too,” I replied, setting the bottle down and opening my arms. She folded herself into me and for a moment, neither one of us said anything. This, right here, was another thing. I missed you . No icy wind of disapproval borne on baleful stares, no guilt trips, no outright aggression over my failure to come home within shouting distance of five o’clock. Victoria’s Secret and I missed you .

I buried my face in her hair and raised my eyes to look down the hallway.

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

“Everything okay?” She asked my chest.

“Same as always,” I said.

“Sure?”

“Right now, I feel great.” I dropped my hands to the small of her back, toned and hard from the hours she spent teaching aerobics every week. I relaxed instantly.

“Are you tired?” She murmured.

“A little. Why?”

She reached behind her and moved my hands from her waist to her bottom. I realized then that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

My heart began to pound.

“Because I missed you,” she said, unbuttoning my pants and unzipping my fly.

We did it on the kitchen table, short, intense and explosive. I didn’t last long. That was okay, though, because she didn’t last long, either. When we finished, I took her hand and led her down into the basement, where we each had a glass of red wine at the bar and did it again —slower this time—on the pool table. She didn’t wince, stiffen up, cry, anything you’d expect the survivor of a brutal rape to do the first time she has consensual sex after being forced.

And this made perfect sense to me, because she hadn’t been forced. Pinnix and Ramseur saw her walking with my daughter at the mall and had devised a plan to do that—to force her—but they’d never got the chance. Because I stopped them.

But Allie was only one of two women who lived in my house. So the next evening, I decided to broach the subject with Abby.

Abby had a soccer game that night, and I took her by myself. Allie had a meeting at the Arts Council, so she couldn’t make it. Normally, this would have meant a phone call to another parent and a little shuck-and-jive routine to get somebody else to take her. Post-shooting, however, I could just get up and walk out the door at a normal time and no one would say anything to me about it. Other attorneys would look at me as I walked past their doors on the way out but they’d quickly look away. Only Craig Montero had the balls to speak to me when I left at five-thirty.

“Run, Forrest, run!” He said.

I could count the number of times I’d taken Abby anywhere by myself on one hand, a natural outgrowth of having a lucrative but demanding job and a wife who didn’t work. And as this life went on, my little pink toddler with her outstretched arms had increased in size to where she stood nearly as tall as her mother. Something had happened to her eyes and ears along the way, and she didn’t see or hear me anymore. As the rest of her form developed, her hands had grown a mobile phone that she used to constantly text-message other afflicted children and update her Facebook status. Her ability to communicate in the English language had deteriorated to the point where she could only express herself with her thumbs.

So after the game, I took her to McDonald’s. There, I made the mistake of letting her stand in line with me while I ordered the food.

“You’re Kevin Swanson, aren’t you?”

The girl behind the register looked no older than Abby, although by law she had to be at least sixteen. Large, blue eyes blinked at me from beneath her Golden Arches cap.

“Uhh… yeah.” My left hand held my wallet, my right the credit card I had removed to pay the total. I felt suddenly conscious of Abby’s observant presence beside me.

“Dude, you’re the man. And I mean it, you are the man .”

The manager stopped behind her, looking from my face to the order screen. He wore the shirt and tie that identified him as a person of authority even though his face identified him as someone who couldn’t legally buy a beer. His name tag identified him as RODNEY. He wore a headset and he adjusted the volume on it as he shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “This guy’s not paying.”

The girl looked over her shoulder at Rodney when he spoke. I just blinked. “Umm… it’s okay, I can pay cash if…”

Rodney shook his head emphatically. “No way. Your food’s free tonight.” He tapped a pimply-faced boy, who had been preoccupied with making a fudge sundae, on the shoulder. “Steve, check it out. We’ve got Kevin Swanson up in here.”

Not just here; up in here. The distinction wasn’t lost on Steve, who nearly leapt over the counter to shake my hand. “Kevin Swanson? Holy shit!”

I leaned forward and accepted the proffered hand. Abby, her hair pulled back and her uniform shirt streaked with field dirt, watched silently.

“For real,” Rodney said, crossing his arms over his skinny chest. “Your money’s no good here. Dumb bastards all over the country are gonna have to think again before they go busting up in somebody’s house. You told those assholes.”

“Blew them away ,” Steve added.

“It’s too bad you had to waste bullets,” the little blue-eyed angel behind the register offered. “You should have just stabbed their sorry asses and let them die slowly.”

“Bullet’s better than they deserved,” Steve agreed.

Rodney shook his head again and gestured at the tray of food beside the register. “For real, eat up, and if you want more, come and get it. You’re an American hero, dude. You can take that to the bank !”

My face burned. Abby glanced down at her phone—she had put it away for the game, so maybe it wasn’t actually part of her body, like I’d thought—but I sensed she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking at me. But I didn’t know what to say, and so I just said, “Uh… thanks.”

“Sorry to cuss in front of your kid, man,” Rodney said, “but, we… uh… got robbed here last month. Couple of ‘hood rats with sawed-off shotguns. We’re still on edge, you know?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “I know.”

I half feared that Rodney and the rest of his merry but vulgar crew would follow us to our table, but another group of customers walked in and this distracted them long enough for me to grab my tray, grab Abby and retreat to a table at the back of the restaurant. I watched her unwrap her grilled chicken sandwich and take a bite without saying a single word.