Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

His eyes burned with intensity.

“It’s a fucked-up world out there,” he said. “Nice guys don’t finish last; they don’t finish at all. You remember that shit.”

I frowned. “Why are you saying that?”

“Fuck why ,” he said. “Just remember it. Don’t ever forget how many fucked-up people exist in this world. They outnumber us. We have to stay frosty. You know what I’m saying?”

My head bobbed like one of those stupid plastic dolls you see on people’s desks sometimes. Bobbleheads; empty lumps of plastic.

“It’s important for you to hear this,” he said. He took a long drink of beer and set the glass down on the table with a solid thwack. Not hard enough to slosh the remaining beer out of the glass, but close. “And it’s important for you to understand that. How fucked up this world and everybody in it actually is. Because I know how you think.”

That conversation played again in my head now, ten years later. The lights in Abby’s bedroom and the master glowed on my approach up the winding driveway from 62 South, the tires of the BMW crunching over the dry shreds of autumn color that had fallen and obscured the driveway. Home late yet again—but I hadn’t missed my girls. I could still say goodnight.

In the garage, I cut off the ignition and got out. We had enjoyed unseasonably warm weather for early October, but the temperature had dropped with the onset of night and my breath came in puffs of steam that vanished in the air as quickly as they materialized. The driver’s door closed with a solid thunk followed only by the ticking sounds of the cooling engine. The exterior lights, streaming in through the Plexiglass windows on the garage door, cast a shadow of my bust over the passenger side fender of Allie’s Explorer and the wall over my tool bench.

Because I know you , Bobby had said to me. And I know how you think.

Of course he did. He knew a pussy when he saw one. None of my degrees or Dean’s List awards or job offers changed the fact that had that been me on the side of the road back in 2002, I’d have given the man my wallet. And my keys, and my shoes and anything else he wanted. Because while I’d thought of myself then—all the way up until February of this year, actually—as an optimist, in the modern world “optimist” translated into “pussy.”

With the bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth and his team down by three, Bobby had stepped up to the plate and took a swing. And it had been a good one. That night in 2002, I came to understand that Bobby was a hard son of a bitch because he’d always been a hard son of a bitch—something inside of him allowed his mind to work the right way in the right situation. I never stopped admiring him for it, because I so wasn’t like that.

But maybe at least a little bad-assedness is genetic. When my own bases were loaded, I had him as my batting coach. And what happened?

“I knocked that ball out of the park,” I muttered into the cold air as I made my way to the door that opened to the little mudroom off the kitchen. “Home fucking run.”

How’s that for a pussy?

I stood in the silence of my kitchen and stared down the hallway where I had shot the two men. I had done this without hesitation. That same inner power that had guided Bobby’s decisive actions ten years ago had guided mine eight months ago. When you looked underneath the suit and the layer of comfortable fat, you found a cold, hard son of a bitch under there. A man who didn’t give a rat’s ass.

I thought about getting a beer, but that would just make me have to pee twenty times during the night, so I went upstairs. I changed clothes. I made passionate love to my beautiful wife and I fell asleep with absolutely no trouble at all.

And just before I drifted off, it occurred to me that I had appeared on the Billy Horton show exactly a month ago. A whole month, and I hadn’t heard from the Bald Man.

But, of course, nothing good lasts forever.

I awoke to a ringing telephone. My hand shot out and grabbed the land line receiver on my nightstand, but the ringing continued and I realized it came from my cell, sitting atop my dresser.

“Make it stop,” Allie groaned, kicking me weakly.

Grumbling, I swung my legs out and stood up. I staggered over to the dresser and snatched the phone. “Hello?”

Nothing on the other end but the distant hum of what sounded like a car engine and a radio—the tinny music sounded familiar, but it sounded so far off I couldn’t identify the tune or the artist. Above all this, the sound of somebody breathing into the phone. Not the heavy, sexual breathing of a prank caller, but the easy respiration of someone who simply doesn’t want to talk.

“Hello?” I said louder.

Still no answer. I moved to hang up, but then the caller spoke.

“Forget about me?”

That voice; I knew the voice. I’d heard it before.

The caller. The Bald Man.

“Who is this?” I asked. Across the room, Allie sat up.

“You did forget me. I leave you alone for a couple of weeks and you forget all about me.”

My head swam for a moment, and when it stopped, I found my entire bedroom draped in red. I wanted to do the right thing, say the right thing, but Toothpaste Syndrome kicked in and cut both my IQ and vocabulary in half. “Answer me, asshole! Who are you? What’s wrong with you? Why are you making prank calls at three in the goddamned morning? What kind of loser does that?”

“What kind of loser lies to the world?”

Alarmed, Allie asked, “Who is it?”

I waved my hand to bat her question away. My irritation had stoked now into full-blown fury. Lights flashed all over the control panel in my head, the needles of every gauge jammed hard into the red zone. “You’re crazy!”

“Ooh,” he said in mock terror. “I’d better be careful. I wouldn’t want the Hero of the Month to hose me down with his assault rifle.”

“I don’t need a gun to take your chickenshit ass down.”

“Mmm. Big talk from the world’s biggest coward.”

“So says the little bitch on the phone who talks mad shit but won’t tell me who he is and blocks his number!”

“Kevin?” Allie wrapped her arms around her knees. “Who are you talking to?”

“You know what I think?” I continued. “I think you are bald. You’re in your early forties, and you’ve got kind of a beer gut. Even if you don’t drink beer.”

I had his attention. The Bald Man didn’t speak.

The thrill of seizing control shot through the muscles in my core and almost made me shake. When I got done shining the spotlight on his soul, he would probably hang up and kill himself. Good riddance.

“Doughy, fleshy, lower-class features. You’re ugly. And you’re single. You don’t do anything particularly well and you never have. You’re disabled or laid off from some low-end, dead-end kind of job. You may or may not be looking for another one, but you’re a loser, and it’s tough for losers in this economy. So you spend your days on your ass. In either an old single-wide trailer where you’re constantly late on the rent or a one-bedroom apartment with the Burlington Housing Authority. You watch action movies and you play role-playing games with other losers over the internet. And you’re pissed at me because you want to be me, but you know what? You can’t be me. Because you’re a loser. ”

Silence from the other end. That was good, but honestly, I wanted to hear the secondary explosions from my torpedo strike. But when the Bald Man spoke again, he spoke in the same amused tone he had used earlier. And I realized that I’d hit nothing.

“You really have no idea, do you?”