Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

And so he picked me.

Dead leaves swirled in my wake as I piloted the BMW up the long driveway and splashed light across the front of my house. The garage door opened to receive us but I didn’t enter right away; instead, I sat in the driveway and tried to survey my palace with the eyes of an outsider. Allie had fallen in love with the porch and the gabled roof the first time she’d ever laid eyes on it, right here in the same spot as my car now sat—albeit in much better lighting conditions. Bigger than the Rock Barn house, I realized. Taller, wider, more square footage, bigger lot. If a house said something about a man, mine said: Kevin Swanson is a rich son of a bitch.

But the true riches lay inside, asleep in beds beneath smooth ceilings trimmed with crown molding. This house, as much as I liked to sit out here and stare at it like it had boobs or something, provided only a stage where the best part of my life played out on a daily basis. In a world packed to the gills with disabled children, drug-addicted children, rotten children, I had Abby. And in the same world, where more than fifty percent of marriages ended in divorce and people who supposedly loved each other lied, cheated and stole, I had Allie. I had married my best friend. This year would mark the point where I’d spent more of my life with her than without her. Maybe the Pinnix and Ramseur thing made no sense, but what had I done to deserve the incredible good fortune that constituted the rest of my life? I hadn’t set foot in church since my father’s funeral. I’d never even had my daughter baptized.

And yet I drove a European sports sedan with clean-smelling leather seats and a motor that purred like a porn star, and I could park it in a house bigger than the one my cardiologist father had raised me in. Whereafter I would go upstairs, undress and lay beside the most beautiful woman in the world—who had so very recently rediscovered the joys of having sex with me on an almost daily basis.

Okay, then. God had blessed me. And that made me a target.

A hard target, though. Six golems later, I still held this castle while the Bald Man raged and frothed at the mouth in his dark little rathole and dirtied his hands with the clay of yet another beast.

Which I would kill. Because I remained, as Bobby said, a hard son of a bitch—a stone cold killer.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” I mumbled.

I put the BMW in gear and proceeded into the garage.

“You’re an alien,” Bobby said on Saturday, Christmas Eve. He had homebrewed some beer at his house in Jacksonville and he had brought twelve bottles with him to Burlington. A glass of the jet-black brew in one hand, he stood in the hallway with me, observing the wall. The painters had patched over the bullet holes and painted over the bloodstains that I couldn’t scrub away. They used Sherwin Williams paint. I knew this because they’d done it on a weekend, when I was home, and on their lunch break I had gone and stared at the cans. The Sherwin Williams logo showed a can of paint spilling over the Earth above the slogan Cover the World . I had always found that a little eerie before. That day, I found it comforting.

“There’s this little document called the Ten Commandments that says we’re not supposed to kill anybody.” With his free hand, Bobby touched the spots where the bullets had torn through Pinnix and Ramseur and ripped into the drywall, nearly invisible now. Had I not shown him the exact spots earlier, he’d have never known. “It’s a rule riddled with exceptions, of course, so what you’re really dealing with is the Nine Commandments and One Suggestion. Nevertheless, we’re all brought up to think thou shalt not kill. But you’ve killed. You’re part of a special group of people now.”

“The one you’re in,” I said.

“That’s right. Welcome to the club. You failed to follow the One Suggestion, but you popped a bunch of shitbags who deserved it, so you’re a hero. But there’s a downside to that.”

He turned around and smiled. He leaned back against the wall, taking a short gulp of beer.

“I’m an alien,” I said.

“Bingo.”

“That’s not what’s bugging me.”

“You feel guilty for wasting shitbags. You’re telling yourself they were human beings, too, I shouldn’t get so juiced over killing God’s creatures.”

“No,” I said.

“So what is it now?”

I told him about my conversation with Dr. Wingrove and how it dovetailed perfectly with my theory that I had been somehow selected for special cosmic persecution. I didn’t mention the Bald Man. I had learned long ago that men have thoughts that make perfect sense within the confines of their own brains, but once spoken aloud they spoil into madness. This was one of them; the idea that the Bald Man wasn’t just a prank caller but also a demon belonged inside.

An idea occurred to me then and I gestured at the watch on his wrist. “That thing have a stopwatch feature?” I asked him.

“Uh… yeah.”

“I need your help with something.”

“What with?”

“I need you to time me.”

Allie, Abby and Kate were busy in the formal living room—upon the floor of which said room Allie and I had made love after I pulled my ninja act in Durham—and we left them there as Bobby followed me into the basement. I turned on the lights and laid down on the floor in between the coffee table and the sofa.

“What are you doing?”

“Let’s see how long it takes me to get locked and loaded and get upstairs.”

He frowned down at me. He regarded me this way for a long time, and for a moment, I thought he wouldn’t do it. But finally, with a roll of his eyes and shake of his close-shaven head, he removed the watch from his wrist and began pushing buttons.

“Okay,” he said. “Ready… set… go. ”

I laid on the floor with my eyes closed for what felt like a long enough time for two men to creep upstairs into the kitchen. Then I leapt off the floor and made my way over to the gun cabinet.

“Thirty seconds,” Bobby said.

I looked down and worked the combination. My head had begun to pound with the memory. My trigger finger itched for action. When I heard the definitive click, I depressed the handle and opened the cabinet. Bobby said nothing as I withdrew the AK-47, checked the action to make sure the chamber was clear, and rammed an empty magazine into the receiver.

“Locked and loaded,” I said.

“One minute.”

I shouldered past him, barrel pointed towards the ceiling. I mounted the stairs and climbed slowly, careful not to make a sound. I paused at the top, replaying the conversation I’d heard in my head. Then I leapt through the door, spun on my heels, and hit the edge of the sink with my ass cheeks. “Time!” I called, barrel pointed down the empty hallway.

I heard a beep. A moment later, Bobby emerged from the basement.

“One minute, thirty-three seconds.”

I lowered the rifle. I swallowed.

Bobby looked at me blankly. He shrugged his shoulders. “Well? What did we get out of all that?”

One minute and thirty-three seconds. I laid the rifle down on the granite countertop and walked into the hallway. I stood where Pinnix and Ramseur had stood, where I’d seen them, where I’d killed them. Bobby joined me but didn’t say anything. For the moment, we just stood there in the hallway and listened to our women chattering in the living room beyond.

“If I was unconscious for only thirty seconds,” I said quietly, “they stood here for a full minute.”

Bobby looked down at his watch. He didn’t say anything.

I laid a hand on the opposite wall. I pointed at the place on the ceiling where the banister appeared on its way down from the second floor. “The stairs are right there,” I said. “You can see them even in the dark. As soon as they entered this hallway, they would have seen the way to get upstairs.”