Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

His wicked grin disappeared. His eyebrows jumped towards his hairline.

The classic pistol takeaway, as I’d practiced so many years ago with Bobby in aikido class, developed with a perfect choreography. I pulled the pistol towards me grip first. Caught in the trigger guard, his index finger—trigger finger—first hyperextended, then cracked in half, then depressed the trigger that moments ago he had been willing to pull to kill me.

The little semiautomatic fired once, a harsh explosion that bounced off the walls of the Victorian and the bungalow and set my ears to ringing, and threw a bullet right through Pants Puller’s left cheekbone. On its way through his skull, it severed the cords to the glowing red lamps in his eyes. The back side of his head exploded and he dropped.

That’s what I’m talking about, Bobby said.

I almost lost the pistol—Pants Puller’s finger was still jammed there in the trigger guard—but I managed to rescue it with a split-second deployment of combat reflexes and I held it out before me as Left and Right dropped the poor woman to the ground for the second time that night. Two sets of hands reached for the sky.

“Don’t move!” I shouted.

Left moved. I don’t know what he was moving to do, but in that instant it didn’t matter; he moved and I shot him once, twice, three times, blood and flesh splattering on the wall of the house behind him. Lighting flashed in the alleyway and for the first time I saw his face and…

He didn’t have one.

What the fuck?

No time to think. Lighting flashed, thunder cracked and while Right may have just been startled by the gunshots and had no intention of giving me the bum’s rush, I saw him move. Automatically, I adjusted my sight picture and fired at him, too—once, twice, three times. Two to the chest, one to the head.

Mozambique drill. Just like Bobby showed me.

Right fell. And just like that, it was over.

I stood in the dark, pistol smoking in my hand. The familiar ammoniac tang of gun smoke reached my nostrils and recalled for me the last time I’d stood in this position—dead bodies bleeding at my feet, my lungs breathing in the sulphur and cordite that Bobby liked to call the “smell of victory.” I looked at the forms laying on the narrow strip of ground in between the two houses—these men who had outnumbered me, outgunned me—and I thought, I’ve killed again .

Good to go, Bobby said.

And despite the blood and bone on the wall, despite the three dead human beings laying right in front of me, I smiled.

“Good to go,” I replied.

Like any good citizen, I called 911 and requested the police and an ambulance—the girl had a pulse, I discovered when I knelt beside her, but she wasn’t moving. I didn’t go to her right away. For a long time, I just stood there and stared at her. Because I honestly believed that the Bald Man could have conjured her just like he conjured these three clowns, and I thought, he has a plan B. And she’s laying right there. Had she gotten up, I may have shot her, too.

But she didn’t get up, and as the seconds ticked by terror melted away from my brain and exposed a modicum of common sense frozen inside of it. I shoved the pistol in my waistband and stepped over the dead men to where she lay on her side, pants down, arms splayed out. I touched her neck, felt the pulse. Understood that while the golems had victimized me, they had victimized her, as well.

Only then did I whip out my phone and dial 911. I gave them my location, the body count and the woman’s approximate description. I gave them the cereal box version of what had just happened, then cut off the phone and called Craig Montero.

“What’s up, man?”

“It happened again.”

“What happened again?”

I looked down at the woman breathing at my feet. I had taken off my trench coat and laid it over the lower half of her body to cover her nakedness there, and now a wind snaked in between the two houses and bit me. I shivered. “I killed somebody. Three this time.”

“You killed three people?”

Not people, Craig, I thought, but golems. The Bald Man sculpted them from plain earth and put his mouth over theirs and into their mouths he breathed life and then he sent them out into the world to do his bidding but it’s okay because I’ve confronted his golems before and right now I’m leading 6 to nothing.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Yes!” I said louder. “I got jumped in Durham.”

“Durham? What the hell are you doing in Durham? Where are you?”

I gave him the address of Ryan’s News & Video and told him to look for the police lights. Neither the Victorian nor its boarded-up Craftsman neighbor still had house numbers.

“Don’t talk to anybody until I get there, okay?”

The police sirens grew louder. “Okay,” I said.

“You have the right to remain silent. I want you to use that—at least until I can get a handle on what happened.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it, Kevin, no telling stories to the police without me there, you run your mouth and I will kill your ass!”

“Okay,” I said one last time.

Exercising your right to remain silent is a lot harder than it sounds. Craig had a reason for concern; upper middle-class people love to talk to the police, because the police are their friends. Upper middle-class parents teach their kids from a very early age that the police protect them from not-so-upper-middle-class people and are therefore their allies in the struggle between good and evil. The notion that an upper-middle-class person could be a suspect —that the police might actually not be his friends or allies—is a real flying saucer of an idea, because upper-middle-class people don’t do the kind of things that might cause the police to look at them sideways. Except for speeding and drunk driving, and even in these situations your typical divorce lawyer or bank manager or accountant will understand that he’s guilty, that he is very naughty—never evil, just naughty—and that he therefore deserves the scrutiny of the police. Whereupon he will fall all over himself to profess his guilt and demonstrate that he is a member of the upper middle class, that he thinks just like the police do and that he’s really one of them.

When the Durham Police Department cruisers rolled up on the curb in front of the two houses that flanked the crime scene, I reacted with very real, very physical relief. I tried and failed to picture myself saying, I’m not giving a statement until I talk to my lawyer . I could entertain the idea of a prank-calling demon conjuring

building, making

bad guys out of clay and sending them to attack me, but I couldn’t conceive of finding myself on the wrong end of the law.

Because I wasn’t on the wrong end of the law. So as soon as the first officer approached me, I began to talk.

Two officers went in between the houses while two more approached me on the porch and asked me my name, which I gave readily. I informed them that I had called 911; that I, along with the girl I’d covered up with my coat, was a victim.

“Whoa! We got bodies over here!”

“How many?”

“Four!”

Out came the handcuffs.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to turn around and give me your hands.”

And they handcuffed me. I stood on the bottom step and stared at the boarded-up front door of the bungalow and felt the cold metal closing around my wrists. Rough hands pressed against my belt line and felt me all over, frisking me for weapons. Finding, of course, the pistol.

“Gun,” called the officer behind me.