Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

Dr. Koenig stared at me. I stared back.

“What does Bobby think about what you did?” He asked. “This most recent incident, I mean. The one in Durham.”

I shrugged again.

“About what you’d think. The first thing he said was whoa, then he said, holy shit , and then he said good job . We got on Skype and I showed him how I took the gun away from that first asshole. He said, congratulations, man, I’m glad for you. He said, you did the only thing you could do. If you’d just let that girl get raped, you’d have never forgiven yourself. If you’d just stood there and let it happen, or if you’d run away…”

All of a sudden, a lump rose up in my throat and blocked further speech. It came on suddenly—one minute I spoke in a normal voice, the kind of tone that follows a shrug like the one I just gave, and the next my voice broke in two. My chest gave a pronounced shudder. My jaw trembled.

“Take your time,” Dr. Koenig said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

I got myself under control and finished.

“A man’s got to do certain things when he’s called,” I said. “Kate—my sister-in-law—saw it as an act of God. Like God sent me there to intervene, like it was my whole purpose at that particular moment in time. I listened. Because I had to.”

“Did she congratulate you, too?”

“Of course.”

“What about your wife? The conspicuously absent Allie? What was her take on this thing you did?”

Allie; her reaction had been different. On the phone on the way home, I explained to her what had happened, and she’d said you did what— like she didn’t believe me. As soon as I got through the door, she unloaded on me: I’d risked my life, risked it stupidly, I didn’t care about her or Abby or anybody else, I didn’t care what would happen to my family if I got myself killed, blah, blah, blah, I’m an asshole.

Dr. Koenig stared at me again. He’d stared a lot today; it made me wonder if I’d forgotten to shave one side of my face, or I’d suddenly grown a giant mole that looked like the Blessed Virgin.

“And did you guys make up?”

I blinked. She had cursed me, she had hissed my stupidity and my recklessness and my utter lack of sense, but when I pulled her close and kissed her, she kissed me back; kissed me, in fact, with passion. She went after my zipper. And although we had a thirteen-year-old daughter upstairs who may or may not have decided to come downstairs to raid the cookie jar or get a glass of water at some point, we laid down on the floor and made love right there in the living room.

Dr. Koenig studied my face, trying to read the details of my answer. I said, “You could say that.”

He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it with a finger to the lips. He looked down at his notepad, nostrils flaring slightly with his breath. I couldn’t read his thoughts—but then again, I never could.

“You’re the only lawyer in Burlington with a body count,” he remarked.

I sighed, closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead. “I know. Believe me.”

“Have you ever wondered… why this keeps happening to you?”

“I have,” I confessed.

“Any ideas? Has anybody else weighed in on this, maybe noticed that really bad things seem to keep happening to you?”

“Well…” I began.

Dr. Koenig waited.

“There’s the Bald Man,” I said. “I’ve had a… vision, I guess. I don’t know what else to call it. It’s an image so strong that the closest thing I can compare it to is a memory—so I’m thinking it’s something I’ve seen in my nightmares.”

He leaned forward. For the first time today, I’d caught his interest. He had looked bored as I related my Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagall-esque throwdown in Durham, but now that I wanted to talk about dreams, he was all ears. “What did you see?”

I swallowed. My throat had suddenly gone dry.

“A room,” I said. “Dark. There’s light, but not much—it’s like there’s something coming through drawn curtains, just enough to show you the outlines but not the details. There’s a man and there’s a table—dining room table—and there’s another man laying on it. The one standing…”

Something moved outside the picture window. My head snapped sideways to look, but it had only been the wind ruffling the bushes.

“The one standing is the Bald Man,” I went on. “And he’s bent over the one on the table. Breathing into his mouth.”

Lines had developed in Dr. Koenig’s expansive brow, that zone that stretched all the way to the back of his head. I had his attention today. Oh, yes I did.

“And the one on the table sits up. The Bald Man made him. To send after me.”

“A golem,” Dr. Koenig said quietly.

“What do all the guys I’ve killed have in common?”

He sat up a little straighter, taken aback that I’d asked him a question instead of the other way around. Wary, probably, of getting drawn into my silliness. He thought for a moment, studied me, cocked his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Nobody knows who they are,” I said. “Nobody knows who they are because they are nobody. They’re golems. They were made , not born. And they were made by that bald motherfucker for the sole purpose of coming after me.”

“You don’t think the girl in Durham was their target. You think you were.”

“I do,” I said with a nod. “I do think that.”

“So why didn’t they just…” he paused and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “…kill you? They could have hid in the shadows, waited for you to pass, and jumped you from behind. Right?”

I pursed my lips and breathed through my nose.

“And if this… Bald Man… really wanted to get you, why doesn’t he send his minions after Allie and Abby when you’re not home? If he really wanted to hurt you, it seems like that would be a great way to do it.”

I stared at him.

“Because it’s about me ,” I said.

“But why not go after your wife and your child? This idea doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” I said. I stood up, approached the picture window. The bench, cold and hard and empty, sat like a gravestone in the courtyard. Out there, somewhere in the darkness, the Bald Man plotted his next move against me. And I thought I understood his goals now. “He wants to get me, but more than that he wants to overpower me. He wants to show me that I’m nothing special, that I’m not a hero, that he can prevail against me. If he just knocks off my wife and my kid when I’m nowhere around, what does that prove? Nothing. Nobody could prevent that.”

I bit my lip.

“That night with Pinnix and Ramseur, I could have crawled out through the basement door and run away. In the parking lot at the office, I could have handed my wallet and my keys over and let the guy stab me to death. In Durham, I could have walked away and let those guys rape that girl.”

Dr. Koenig’s reflection in the picture window wasn’t writing. He sat motionless in his chair, staring at me where I stood with my hands folded behind my back like a general of Napoleonic times.

“He wants to show that I’m a pussy,” I said. “He wants to make me into a bitch.”

As it turned out, I didn’t have to go far to find a neurologist.

Dr. Jeffrey Wingrove, M.D., respected practitioner of neurology and alumnus of Duke University Medical School, caught his wife cheating on him at roughly the same time as I was planting a knife in the chest of an unknown mugger. Mrs. Wingrove had forgotten to log out of her Gmail account before leaving for dinner with some of her girlfriends. According to Dr. Wingrove, her laptop had fallen asleep on the kitchen table, but he’d bumped into it when he came home from the hospital that night—late, as always—and the screen woke up. Whereupon it showed him evidence of a long email exchange between his wife and a professor at Elon University, where she worked in administration.