Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“You blocked your number and you won’t tell me your name. No, motherfucker, I don’t.”

“ You are the loser, Kevin. You are the little bitch. Not me. You’re the Bitch of the World. You don’t know who I am. But I’m going to show you what you are. I’m going to show everyone what you are. And when you find out…”

He laughed.

“Oh my God, Kevin, it’s going to be precious. Just wait. Watch and see what’s going to happen. Watch and see.”

“Game on, bitch! Bring it!”

“I will.”

And with that, he hung up.

“Answer me, Kevin! Who was that?”

I set the phone back down on the bureau. I picked it back up again and cut it off.

With my wife’s eyes upon me, I felt just a little embarrassed. The specifics of what I’d just said escaped me at the moment, because one of the features of toothpaste syndrome is that you can’t remember everything you did or said, but you can remember enough to understand that you came off as a royal dumbass. In my case, I’d let the enemy reduce me to a pile of barking, cursing carbon-based garbage. The only saving grace was that tonight, this hadn’t happened on the radio.

I’d been angry, but my anger faded. Embarrassment stepped forward to take its place, but even that didn’t hang around for long. Another emotion shouldered its way in, and I recognized this one right away: fear.

“Kevin? Are you going to answer me?”

I rested both hands on the bureau and hung my head.

“I think I just challenged a crazy man to a fight,” I said.

“His voice sounds familiar,” I said, “but I couldn’t place it to save my life. I don’t know who it is. But I feel like I should.”

Today, Dr. Koenig wore a charcoal gray suit over a pure white shirt and a dark, subdued tie. He wore black dress socks and black leather loafers which he’d obviously worn many times before but which he kept polished to a healthy shine. He would be giving a talk today, I theorized, a presentation to psych students at either UNC or Duke. Then he would go home and eat kale.

He started out poking around the Bobby issue, but the phone call last night had piqued his interest and led him away from that. Now he nodded as if I’d just said something he understood very well and tapped his pen on his notepad. “Why’s that? Why do you feel like you should know who it is?”

I held my Southern Rifleman in a pair of sweaty hands. I rolled it into a tube, unrolled it. Abby had had a pacifier as a baby; her father had a gun magazine as an adult. “For starters,” I said, “he had my cell number. I give that out to almost no one. A couple attorneys and judges have it, and that’s it. So he either knows me or knows somebody who knows me. Either way, I feel like I’ve talked to him before.”

“Can you describe the voice for me?”

I closed my eyes and searched my auditory memory.

“Smooth,” I said. “No rasp, no roughness, like he hasn’t done a lot of smoking or screaming. Makes him sound younger than he probably is. It’s higher in the register, not like a squeak, not soprano but not baritone, either.”

“Tenor,” Dr. Koenig offered.

“Yes,” I said, “tenor. Accent-wise, he’s definitely Southern. Not cornpone trailer-park Southern, but maybe like he was raised here by parents from another part of the country. I say he’s white trash, but between you and me, that’s not how he sounds.”

“How does he sound?”

“Crazy. There’s something wrong with him.”

I swallowed.

“That’s what gets me. You can feel this weird energy when he’s talking. His ki smells bad. Rotten, spoiled, gone over. And that’s what has me scared. Him being a mental case. You never know what those people are going to do.”

“He scares you, but he also makes you angry.”

I nodded slowly. “Very.”

“How angry? Angry enough to kill?”

“Definitely.” I took a ki breath and stared through the picture window. The temperature had begun to fall outside, but the sun glowed so brightly that this office could have stood right in the center of it. I almost couldn’t see the bench or the trees. “And that scares me. Everything gets easier when you do it once, Doc, everything. There’s a certain inertia in all of us that keeps us from trying new things, and once you overcome it, the task gets easier. I’ve broken the seal. So now, I get mad and I’m like, I could kill this son of a bitch. That scares me.”

No immediate answer. Although I couldn’t see what he’d written on his pad, at this point it had to be something like patient has become homicidal. Patient is eager to kill again. Hospitalize or not?

“Why do you think he causes these strong feelings?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

Craig Montero said he’d get with his friends in the Burlington Police Department and track down the source of the call to my cell phone. I figured I’d get a name and address and take a warrant for harassing telephone calls. I’d also seek a restraining order. I would do this because this is the course of action I prescribed to my own clients. Did he hit you? Take a warrant. Threaten you? Take a warrant. Then seek a restraining order. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

I believed this would work because ninety-nine times out of one hundred, it did work. Once I figured out who he was, the law would take care of him for me—as long as I practiced the same self-advocacy that I preached to my clients. I knew this. I knew how the system worked. I knew every gear, every spring, every creak and crack. I knew how to handle the Bald Man.

I didn’t know shit. I learned this out in the parking lot at Carwood, Allison at about seven P.M. I have never so badly underestimated someone in my entire life.

Our building shared a parking lot with a dental practice in the office building across the way. Bright lights lit the lot with the intensity of a mid-day sun, but trimmed hedges almost as tall as me lined every side not occupied by a building, blocking any view of the parking area from passing police cars on Church Street. I exited and locked the building and gave the parking lot the same visual once-over I had given it every evening for the past ten years. Then I mentally checked out, ambling over to my BMW on autopilot as I mulled over my completely useless session with Dr. Koenig. Had I paid more attention to my physical surroundings, I would have seen the man in the bushes. But I didn’t. And because of this, he materialized out of nowhere.

“Hey, you! Hey!”

Keys in hand, I froze. I turned to see a young man approaching me with his hands shoved in the front pockets of a gray hooded sweatshirt. He’d already covered half the empty parking lot by the time I saw him. Instantly, toothpaste syndrome kicked in and my brain jammed between hurriedly jumping in the BMW and questioning whether it was wise to turn my back on this guy. And did I need to do that, anyway? Did this man necessarily constitute a threat or did he just want to ask for a cigarette? Was I being paranoid?

I asked so many questions that I forgot the critical one: Where did he come from? I forgot this question right up until the point where I couldn’t turn around anymore, because he had closed to within hailing distance, then within speaking distance, and by that point he had withdrawn his right hand from the sweatshirt pocket and I saw the knife.

I didn’t hunt, but I knew a hunting knife when I saw one. Long, sharp, shiny. Perfect for gutting deer and wild boar.

“Wallet, watch, cell phone! Break yourself, motherfucker!”

The blade caught the sodium glow of the streetlights and reflected it into my eyes in a cruel wink. The man holding it, I saw, hadn’t shaved in several days nor brushed his teeth in several months or even years—his mouth was a fetid cave where lonely, uneven teeth jutted up and down from his gums like rotten stalactites. The face around it might have been young once, but the skin was splotched and drawn beneath the beard stubble.