Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“It just woke up?” I asked in our consultation. “Are you sure you didn’t… hack into it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said with a rueful laugh. Dr. Wingrove was silver-haired, fifty years old. This was his second marriage. His first had ended with him running around on that wife with—drumroll, please—the current Mrs. Wingrove. “I ran into the table and it just popped up there. Like God wanted me to see it.”

Mrs. Wingrove, Dr. Wingrove discovered, could not wait to SUCK the professor’s GIGANTIC COCK. She wanted the naughty scholar to RAM IT UP INSIDE OF HER AGAIN AND AGAIN and to FUCK HER like she’d NEVER BEEN FUCKED BEFORE .All that would have been bad enough, but said professor had treated Mrs. Wingrove to several pictures of the gigantic cock in question. Another email made reference to a recent tryst at the Red Carpet Inn…

“The one down on the interstate…” I began.

“Yeah,” said Dr. Wingrove, cutting me off. “Twenty-nine dollars a night. She paid for the room. With my credit card.”

So Dr. Wingrove did what any self-respecting man of medicine would do. He jumped in his Mercedes, drove the five minutes it took to get to the restaurant from his palatial home in West Burlington, stormed inside and slapped Mrs. Wingrove across the face. Right in front of the waitress.

“Front hand or back hand?” I asked.

“Both.”

He called her a whore; he called her a bitch; he called her worthless and announced that she’d burn in Hell for all that she’d done. True, yes, but it didn’t stop him from getting arrested on his way out of the parking lot. He came to Carwood Allison for the services of Craig Montero in relation to the criminal charges and me in connection with the divorce case. And Mrs. Wingrove’s action for a domestic violence protective order under Chapter 50B.

On the day of Dr. Wingrove’s 50B hearing, we sat in the attorney-client conference room on the second floor of the courthouse. I needed to concentrate on his case, but I couldn’t. Because of the Bald Man.

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like to ask you a question. Completely off-topic. Send me a bill for a consultation if you want.”

The silver-haired fox smiled. “Shoot.”

“A man gets hit on the head with a baseball bat…”

“How hard?”

“Hard enough to knock him out. How likely is it that he wakes up thirty seconds later and is able to climb a set of stairs and operate an assault rifle?”

Dr. Wingrove whistled. He didn’t look like a doctor today; he had eschewed the white lab coat he wore at Alamance Regional Medical Center in favor of a charcoal gray suit woven so tightly that it seemed almost shiny, like his hair. The whitest collar God ever created surrounded his neck. “Depends; is it a direct hit, or more of a glancing blow?”

“Direct hit.”

“Does the skull crack?”

“Skull remains intact.”

He sat back now and looked up at the tiled ceiling of our little room. He looked almost happy at the moment, the concentration-camp expression that had decorated his face all morning banished to a far corner of his mind. For a moment, I had allowed him to escape his current reality and flee to that safe harbor that had always protected him before: work.

“The brain’s a funny thing,” he said. “You ever heard of Phineas Gage?”

I indicated that I had not.

“In the mid-1800s, Gage was a construction foreman working on a roadbed for some railroad up North. This involved, of course, blasting away rock to clear a path for the tracks.”

He shifted in his seat as he crossed his legs and folded his hands behind his silver head. The hem of his pants lifted, and I saw that his socks were shiny, too.

“To blast away rock,” he continued, “you poured blasting powder into a hole, stuck a fuse in there, covered it up with sand and then packed the whole works together with this thing called a ‘tamping iron,’ like a ramrod for a musket only much, much bigger. The one Gage was using was over an inch thick and over three feet long. Made, of course, of pure iron.

“He screwed something up. The charge detonated with the tamping iron still rammed in there and it came shooting out like a bullet—right through Gage’s head. Entered his face, passed behind his left eye and busted out the other side of his head. Again: over an inch wide. Three feet long.”

I listened intently.

“Within a few minutes, he was talking again. Within a few minutes after that, he was sitting up. He walked himself—hole in his head, now, clean shot all the way through—over to the cart and sat upright all the way to the doctor. He lived for another twelve years.”

Dr. Wingrove shrugged.

“So what’s a baseball bat strike to the head going to do to your typical brain case? Answer: who knows? But a good whack will probably kill the patient. Gage’s case is so remarkable because it’s an outlier, a fluke, so rare you can’t help but remember it. If it doesn’t kill him, he’s likely to remain unconscious for some time and when he comes to— if he comes to—he’ll experience nausea, vomiting, disorientation…”

He flipped a hand at the ceiling tile.

“…all kinds of fun stuff. Severe head trauma can cause tissue swelling inside the brain case, which doesn’t bode well for a quick recovery. So if your guy takes a bat to the head and gets up thirty seconds later, I’d bet my money on one thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“He didn’t get hit that hard. Because the batter wasn’t trying to kill him.”

Pinnix and Ramseur hadn’t tried to kill me that night. They hit me hard enough to put me out, but only for a short period of time. They didn’t stop to make sure I was dead; they gave me a love tap with the bat and moved on.

How long was I out? I asked myself in the car on the way home from work that evening. Rural Alamance County, rushing past the windows of the BMW at 55 miles per hour, didn’t answer me.

It didn’t matter—I didn’t think it did, at least. It did matter, though, that the man who’d swung the bat at my head hadn’t actually tried to kill me. Had he put his heart and soul into it, my head would have shattered like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. Dr. Wingrove had said: nausea, disorientation, vomiting. Swelling of the brain. Getting up, loading an assault rifle, stalking the enemy, putting high-powered bullets exactly where they needed to go…

“Not bloody likely,” I growled to the empty air in the passenger seat beside me.

But why? What did the Bald Man want with me?

That’s no man, replied a voice in my head. This one didn’t belong to Bobby or Kate or Allie; I recognized this as my own. I think you know that.

But, again: why me? I understood why he wanted to see me go down so badly now; I’d wasted his two golems when they broke into my house in February. He’d set up this little game where I had a chance to rabbit right on out the basement door, but I hadn’t done it. I’d said fuck these two guys and fuck you —game on, bitch. I hadn’t played the way he thought I would, and now he had to show me who the bitch was, here. I got that. But I didn’t get why he sent golems after me in the first place. What had I ever done to deserve the attention of a demon?

“Who knows why the Devil picks people?” Kate had said on the phone when I’d called her from my cell that afternoon. Bobby was out in the woods near Camp Lejeune, she said, playing war. Bad-asses did that to stay sharp when there’s no enemy in the immediate vicinity for them to kill. “He just does . I don’t know. Maybe he looked at you and saw your house, your career, your wife, your child, and he said: this man is blessed by God. God likes this man, God loves this man; maybe I can’t touch Him, but I can destroy His little pet. And so he picked you.”