Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

The criminal backgrounds of both Pinnix and Ramseur: blank.

I frowned. I flipped from Pinnix to Ramseur, Ramseur to Pinnix. The implications of what I was seeing loomed above me like an approaching iceberg. My throat began to tighten in fear. “What the fuck is this?”

“What the fuck is what?”

“This!” I poked my finger at Pinnix’s empty criminal background history. “Their records! They’re squeaky clean! These guys broke into my fucking house with a knife and handcuffs and I’ve got a longer rap sheet than they do! Craig, they’re thirty and thirty-one years old! Thirty and thirty-one years without so much as a parking ticket and the first crime they decide to pull off is a B&E and rape-murder? How does something like that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

I flipped past the records and saw photographs. The first one showed a reprint of my driver’s license, but in the next picture my haggard face stared back at me from its position above the collar of the tee shirt I’d worn the night of the shooting. Another shot showed my hands, another the bloody back of my head. The AK-47 leaning against the wall in the foyer. Various shots of the hallway and the bodies lying there.

Pinnix and Ramseur. Their faces bloody and shattered, their features unrecognizable. Their DMV records offered no pictures of what they looked like before I got a hold of them, because they’d never bothered getting driver’s licenses in North Carolina or anywhere else. I flipped through the rest of the photos—shell casings on the floor, various shots of my basement man-cave, two cards to a video store in Durham—and shut the file.

“There’s not a single picture of what these guys looked like before,” I said. “Not so much as a yearbook photo. No records, no pictures. Is this the real file? Did somebody monkey with this before they gave it to you?”

“It’s all there,” he said.

I rocked in my seat. I bit my lower lip. I said, “It’s like they just walked in out of nowhere. It’s like they didn’t even exist before that night. How can not one but two guys like this make it into their thirties without getting pinched for anything? Without a driver’s license?”

Something else occurred to me, and I froze. When my gears unstuck, I snatched the file off my desk and flipped through it frantically.

“Where’s the car?” I asked.

“What car?”

“Exactly! What car? My house is way out in bumfuck, but when you read through this thing it’s like they want you to believe they fucking walked there. Why is there no information about the car in here?”

Craig shook his head again. He didn’t have any answers for me. Because there weren’t any.

“If you take this at face value,” I said, “then these two guys appeared out of nowhere.”

Like ghosts, I thought. Or demons.

Or creatures conjured from dust and dirt.

“I agree,” he said, “that there are a couple things that bother me about all this.”

He reached forward and tapped the top corner of the file. “Know what else is missing?”

“What’s that?”

“Go through that file and tell me how the cops figured out their names.”

I flipped through the pitifully small collection of papers. I focused on the photocopies of the membership cards to Ryan’s News and Video. “Video store cards, I guess.”

“Negative. That’s an adult video store, a porn store. They don’t use names or credit cards. You get a membership number and post a fifty-dollar deposit; you fail to return a video, they keep your fifty bucks and you keep the video. They have no record of names. They don’t know who their customers are. So the question is, how do the police know?”

“How do they?” I asked.

“I don’t know. And they don’t know, either. I’ve talked to every cop in Burlington and nobody can answer that question for me. Everybody thinks somebody else told them, and you go talk to that somebody else and they’re like no, Joe told me. You talk to Joe, and Joe says Steve told me. But Steve’s the one who told you to go talk to Joe in the first place. It’s all fucked up.”

He chuckled then at something in his head and shifted uncomfortably in the chair. He touched a finger to his lips, supporting his chin in the can opener created by his thumb and index finger. His dark brow wrinkled.

“I say these things to you,” he said. “just as I said them to the police. I asked them about this, and they all get the same weird smile on their faces. I ask, who are these guys, and they say, these guys? They’re dead, that’s who they are. I say no, who are they, and the cop’ll say, who cares? Old Kevin Swanson took care of that problem for us. They smile and they change the subject. It’s like…”

He trailed off, shaking his head. But I finished for him.

“Some kind of Jedi mind trick,” I said. “Like they’ve all been brainwashed. Questions they should be asking… they’re not.”

“Precisely.”

I closed the file folder and set it down atop the mess on my desk. I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes. What is going on , I asked the backs of my eyelids. They didn’t answer me, so I opened them again and looked at Craig.

“Why is nobody concerned about this?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. But, you know, when you sit here and think about it… really, who does care? These guys got what they deserved. Who cares where they came from? Who cares who they were?”

I pursed my lips, staring down at the manila folder.

“I do,” I said.

The rising body count didn’t bother Allie. We made love that night, but of course I couldn’t come. After twenty minutes, Allie asked me, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I gasped, sweat dribbling down my face.

“It’s staring to hurt.”

Crazily enough, it started hurting me, too. My hip muscles rumbled with sedition. On the verge of revolt, they threatened to cramp up on me at any second. But I wouldn’t give up. I’d never given up before, and I wouldn’t give up now. What did some of those posters say?

Determination. Perseverance.

I began flipping through the Rolodex of pornographic images in my brain. I found the one from our first night in this house, down in the kitchen amidst the boxes and newspapers and dishes that hadn’t found their home yet—gourmet kitchens, I discovered that night, were like Spanish Fly for upper-class white women. I envisioned Allie bent over the kitchen table, her hair falling in a golden brown waterfall over her shoulders, her pajama bottoms puddled around her ankles and…

She put her lips up to my ear and whispered, “Come on.”

…the Rolodex began to flip on its own. It buzzed like a playing card in the spokes of my bicycle when I was a little boy, and when it stopped flipping it came to rest on an entirely different image. Pinnix. Or Ramseur.

Or a bald man. I really couldn’t tell.

Rough hands on her hips, hairy legs slapping against the backs of her thighs. Her gasps of pain. The pool table, not the kitchen table, and a belt buckle rattled on the basement’s cement floor, metal scraping the concrete as the table itself groaned in rhythm with every violent thrust.

A face. Smiling, laughing, because this was funny to him.

Right then, I knew: this was one of my nightmares.

Say it, you bitch.

And she did, only her voice shook and broke.

Fuck me harder, she whimpered.

My legs seized up and my erection vanished. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

“Kevin? Are you okay? Kevin!”

I was most certainly not okay. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever being this not okay in my life. I rolled off abruptly and lay beside her, gasping for air. “I’m fine.”