Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“I’ll cut your ass!”

His eyes twitched and darted. His pupils fully dilated, they looked like lumps of coal set into his emaciated face. I thought, high as a kite.

Hands held up in front of me, I backed up until I struck the driver’s door of my BMW and could back up no more. He stepped closer, moving the knife back and forth in a motion like the mesmerized sway of a cobra. He clutched the knife in his right hand while his left contracted into a claw down at the waistline of his jeans. It shook.

“I’ll cut your ass, bitch!” He growled. “I’ll spill your guts all over this fuckin’ parking lot, punkass motherfucker! Don’t fuck with me!”

“I’m not fucking with you,” I assured him in a voice that shook like his hands. I heard the warble in it and a small part of me thought, Hero of the Month. Right.

Right behind that, the Bald Man: Not so big and bad without a gun, are you?

“Then do it! Come on! Cell phone! Wallet! Watch!”

Off came the watch. Allie had given it to me for our fifth anniversary, but I slid it off my wrist like some cheap plastic crap from a fast food kid’s meal and handed it over to the tweaking meth addict sticking me up in the parking lot of my office. His left hand darted out and snatched the watch, dropped it into the pocket of his jeans. My smartphone—address book, phone numbers, emails, calendar—followed it a moment later.

“Good. Good. Now gimme your wallet.”

I swallowed a tumbleweed.

“It’s in my right front pocket, okay?” I said.

“Get it, motherfucker!”

“All right. Just be cool, man.”

“Don’t tell me to be cool, bitch!” His voice climbed, agitated. Although it seemed impossible, my pulse raced even faster “Just gimme your fuckin’ money!”

And with my right hand, I reached inside the left front pocket of my suit pants and closed my fingers around my wallet. Ten years ago, Bobby had reached under his seat and came out with a Glock, but I had no Glock. I had a wallet and some ill-conceived delusions about being someone other people could look up to. I began to withdraw the wallet from my pocket and as I pulled it free, I heard Bobby.

Driver’s license, he thought. Don’t give him your driver’s license.

Why?

Because it’s got your address on it.

“That’s it. Gimme that shit!”

Right. Because if he got my address, he might someday decide to come to my house. Where Allie and Abby lived.

I opened the wallet. The man shook his head. “No. Whole thing!”

“L… let me get my driver’s license,” I said. I stumbled on the first word and hated my tongue for it. “I n… need it to get around.”

“Fuck that shit!”

The knife darted forward. With a quick, vicious chop he brought the handle down on the hand that held the wallet, striking it momentarily numb. My wallet fell to the asphalt. Credit cards, driver’s license, cash, store discount cards, picture of my wife and kid, my whole damn life spilled at this guy’s feet.

“Pick it up,” he ordered.

I didn’t move.

“Pick it up!” Roaring now, almost screaming.

And still, I didn’t move. Not because I didn’t want to; I just couldn’t. The whole scene—those nasty teeth, that drawn and puckered face, the knife, the electric lights—shimmered like a desert mirage there before the Carwood, Allison building. A wrinkle passed over my field of vision like someone had grabbed one end of it and flicked his wrist, like snapping a beach towel.

“I said, pick it the fuck up!”

I recognized it right away: I was about to lose it. Just like I had on the radio, and just like I had on the phone the night before.

I looked him right in the eye and said, “Fuck you.”

“What? What did you just say to me?”

I didn’t see the knife now, or I didn’t conceive of it. I knew it was there—I just didn’t care.

“I said ‘fuck you,’” I replied through gritted teeth. The man’s image shrank as my eyes narrowed. “You pick it up, you lazy sack of shit. You want my wallet? Bend your sorry ass over and pick it up your damn self!”

Now the knife hand began to shake.

“Motherfucker, I will cut you !”

“Bring it,” I hissed. “Game on, bitch!”

And he brought it. He lunged forward with his feet as he drove the tip of the knife straight at my chest, but an amazing thing happened then; my left foot shot out at a 45 degree angle and brought the rest of my body with it. The knife found only empty air, because I stood beside him now, my arms moving in a fluid circle that came down one behind his head and one on his outstretched and overextended knife-arm.

I hadn’t set foot in an aikido dojo since high school, but it all came back to me then. My right foot slid behind my left, my hips pivoted and my adversary found himself caught in the whirling dervish my body had become. I spun him once, twice, then stepped back and felt the bones crack in his hand as I folded it over and released the knife into my own.

He fell back against the BMW, bounced off it, stunned. I could have let it go at that—I had disarmed him, I had the knife now—but Bobby was in my head then. And Bobby said:

Handle it.

I darted forward and pinned his body against my car. And I jammed the blade as far as it would go under his right rib cage. Right into his heart.

His eyes widened and his mouth opened.

“Think you’re going to rip me off?” I hissed. “How do you like this? Huh? This how you thought it would go down?”

My face was six inches from his. I could smell tobacco and beer blending with the stench of rotting teeth and gums. Something wet and warm flowed down over my right hand, but I didn’t look at this. I looked at the man. I looked at his face. I looked for recognition of his position, the mistake he had made in attacking me and the understanding that he had accosted the wrong man.

But I found none of this. His face was slack, expressionless. I looked at those dilated pupils and a crazy thought danced across my mind, hooting and hollering and waving its arms as it barked at the moon:

He has no brain. He has no soul.

I swallowed. My jaw shook as I parted my lips to whisper, “Who sent you?”

He opened his mouth. Blood gushed forth, but he managed to say, “The Bald Man.”

And he dropped.

I didn’t even try to catch him. I let the body fall with the knife still buried beneath the rib cage. His blood glistened on my hand and ran from the wound in his chest in a dark, sticky river that soon enveloped my Mastercard, my Visa, my Alamance County Public Library card. His eyes stared sightlessly at my shoes. He didn’t move.

And I stared right back at him, unable to speak. I had killed again, but this wasn’t what gave me pause.

Did he just say the Bald Man? I thought. Did he really say that?

Blood dripped from my hand and splattered on my pants, my shoes, the asphalt. I looked all around me. The Carwood, Allison building, the only witness to my third killing this year, regarded me with dark, silent windows.

“What’s going on?” I asked aloud.

The meth addict—or whatever he was—I’d just stabbed through the heart didn’t answer me. A dark stain blossomed across the front of his jeans from where he’d wet himself when his brain had let go of his involuntary muscle control functions. When I knelt down beside him, my nose detected the stench of his feces mixed in with the coppery-sweet odor of his blood. I breathed in through my mouth and held my lungs still as I reached into his front pocket and fished out my watch and smartphone.

Bewildered and even more terrified now than when I’d seen the knife for the first time, I dialed the police.