Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

She raised her chin and regarded me the way teachers habitually did when they stood on the verge of an important revelation about history, literature or algebra.

“He’ll cut you again. Because you can always bleed more. And He likes that.”

“Who likes that?” I whispered.

That crazy, hellborn smile. She raised her index finger, but whether she meant to emphasize her point or to direct my attention heavenwards, I didn’t know.

“Him,” she hissed.

Ten feet away, my brother and Kate tried to complete hospital admissions sheets for a woman they didn’t know. Angela stared at me, watching me digest what she just said. I sensed her waiting for a response, I really didn’t know what to say. Had I been a more enthusiastic disciple of Christ, I would have been better practiced in the logical jiu jitsu employed by the faithful when confronted with things like nuclear weapons, the Holocaust and families dying in car accidents. Maybe I could have provided her with some small measure of comfort in that moment. But, lacking any better ideas, I allowed my lower jaw, that thing dangling from the bottom of my empty skull, to open and I said, “Shit happens.”

As soon as I said it, my face reddened and my skin burned with shame. But her eyebrows rose like I’d just said something incredibly profound and revelatory. She nodded three times, her eyeballs remaining fixed on mine as her head rotated around them.

“Yes,” she said. “And then it happens again .”

I don’t know what became of Angela. After we left her at the hospital, we didn’t speak of her for many months, hoping, maybe, that if we didn’t talk about it we could forget whatever lessons we’d learned that night. It didn’t work—not for me, anyway. I thought about her again and again over the years. And I thought about her yet again on my way out of Dr. Koenig’s office that afternoon, after again agreeing to bring Allie to one of our sessions.

I climbed into the BMW and shut the door, banishing all noise from the outside. Shit happens, I thought. And then it happens again.

It did. But the likelihood that I would have to go all Chuck Norris not just once but twice in a lifetime—let alone a single year—was so miniscule as to be…

“Almost impossible,” I said to the steering wheel.

I looked out the windshield. I’d parked in front of an evergreen hedge that separated Dr. Koenig’s parking lot from the one next door, and this was littered with the castaway leaves from the trees that shaded the lot in the summertime, littered it in the fall. Another leaf fell then and landed on the hood of my car. After several more moments of staring through my windshield, I started the car and pulled away.

Coincidence: a man, a liberal man, a lifelong Democrat, receives an assault rifle as a gift from his mentally incompetent father, learns to use it from his Marine brother and for some reason not only still has it when two yahoos break into his house, but has it in a gun safe in his basement. Where, incidentally, said yahoos leave him for dead.

Coincidence: a fortune teller warns the man, then a boy, about a figure she calls the Bald Man. Two decades later, a prankster who calls himself the Bald Man begins harassing the man by telephone. Two weeks after that , an armed assailant says Bald Man as he dies with his own knife sticking out of his chest.

I was beginning to doubt the outer edges of my reality. But if I had a spooked feeling before I sat down with Craig Montero that afternoon, I had it twice as bad afterwards.

“The cops have an ID on that shitbird who tried to rob me last night?” I asked as Craig entered my office.

He stared at me with pursed lips, appeared to think for a moment, then shut the door. He lowered himself into one of my two client chairs and touched his fingertips together pensively.

“Well?” I asked.

“He’s a John Doe,” he said at last.

“What?”

Craig shook his head. “He had nothing on him. They ran his prints, but they didn’t get a hit. Guy’s never been arrested before, apparently. They’ve passed his photo around to the uniformed patrol and vice officers, but nobody recognizes him.”

He studied my face for a moment.

“What’s up?” He asked.

I shook my head to clear it, if only temporarily, of silly ideas. I cleared my throat and moved papers from one end of my desk to another.

“Nothing,” I said. “But isn’t it a little… I don’t know… strange ? I mean, he tried to stab me. And he’s never pulled anything before?”

“It’s not that strange,” Craig said. “Maybe he was just good at not getting caught. If you don’t get in trouble, the cops probably won’t know who you are. That’s generally a good thing. A bit of a pain in the ass for somebody trying to identify you, but still a plus in the grand scheme of things.”

“How can you degenerate to the point where you’re robbing random people in parking lots and not have a police record?”

“Beats me. Could be he’s on the radar somewhere else. They’re passing his picture around to every police department in the state. ‘Do You Know This Shitbag? Call Burlington P.D.’ That kind of thing. Oh, and all major stations are going to put out his description and ask for information. They’ll probably figure it out by the end of the week.”

Or maybe not, I thought. Maybe they won’t ever figure it out, because the man I stabbed last night isn’t a man at all, but a creature fabricated from dirt and air. Molded from clay by the hands of a faceless demon who kissed him and gave him life and sent him out into the world. Suddenly, I pictured a room with heavy curtains of dark red fabric that gave off its own peculiar light; a head, bald but misshapen, bent over the creature laying on its back on a table like Frankenstein’s monster. I heard a hiss, the passage of breath from one body to another, and a voice that sounded exactly like the one on my telephone.

Go , it said. Find him. Show him who he is.

I shuddered.

“Craig,” I asked, looking out the window at the parking lot where I had stabbed someone—or something—to death last night. “Did you ever find anything out about Pinnix and Ramseur?”

He smiled uncomfortably and shifted in his seat. “Well… kind of. That’s weird, too.”

“How so?”

He bit his lower lip and took a deep breath. He pulled a thin manila folder from the files he had carried in, leaned forward and placed it on my desk.

“Nobody knows who they are, either,” he said. “That’s your police file.”

“It’s thin.”

“That’s because there are no mysteries and you’re the only witness,” he said. His shoulders slumped, he spoke somberly, like he was sad about something. “And I had to move heaven and high water to get that, so don’t knock it.”

I could tell he wanted to see me read it, so I sat back in my chair and opened the folder. The first few pages contained a police report listing the names and addresses of everyone involved. The first responding deputy’s narrative; the detective’s narrative. Neither contained anything I didn’t already know. But my eyes hovered for several moments on one particular statement the deputy made.

Mr. Swanson allowed me into the residence, whereupon I observed the bodies of two males lying in the hallway.

My statement; Allie’s statement; Abby’s statement. The detective’s summation of the evidence. A memorandum from the District Attorney’s Office concurring with the detective’s opinion that I had acted in defense of home, self and immediate family and shouldn’t be prosecuted for murder. My criminal background history, blank except for the single speeding ticket I incurred my sophomore year at Carolina.