Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“No.”

“You’d better keep an eye on your briefcase,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I will.”

“It’s all good. I probably don’t want to know what you really think of me, anyway.” I chuckled again and stood up to stretch. On my feet now, I couldn’t resist walking over to the big picture window and looking out at the stone bench in the courtyard. It hadn’t snowed yet—we might get some flurries at the end of January, maybe an inch or two before spring began yawning and stretching—but it looked cold out there anyway. The gray sky matched the bench. “You must think I’m something of a monster. On some level, at least.”

“Why would I think that?”

“I’m like that bench out there. Cold. Hard.”

“You’re a hard son of a bitch,” he said.

I nodded. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel him looking at me. “When I shot Pinnix and Ramseur, I didn’t give one cheek of a rat’s ass. It doesn’t matter, though. I’ve never killed any people. I’ve only killed golems. Conjured from plain earth.”

He didn’t write that down. I was pretty sure he already had it in another pad. Instead of writing, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. When he’d rubbed all the sleep out of them, or whatever he wanted to get rid of, he left them closed. At first, it looked like he was thinking about something very deeply, a subject so difficult that his brain couldn’t process visual stimuli and this other concept at the same time. Then I began to suspect he was just tired and falling asleep.

“Doc?” I asked.

“The Bald Man,” he said.

“The Bald Man.”

His eyes opened and on went his glasses. He filled his narrow chest with a deep breath—a ki breath—and released it in a long, slow exhalation.

“I’d like to talk about the Bald Man,” he said, “in detail. If you don’t mind.”

I sat down on the couch. I reached down to that nasty coffee table and grabbed my plastic-encased Southern Rifleman . “Sure. Let’s talk.”

“In these dreams where he’s… assaulting Allie.”

An image: smooth skin, made for the touch of my hands only, rippling from the violent impact of his hips against the backs of her legs, her buttocks. That slapping sound.

My stomach knotted. I shuddered.

“ Standing isn’t what I’d call it,” I muttered. “If all he does in my dreams from now on is stand , I’ll be a happy man.”

“But he’s behind her.”

“That’s how he likes it.”

Dr. Koenig stared at me.

“In my nightmares, I mean,” I said quickly. “She’s always turned around—I can’t ever see her face. He can’t see her face. Must be how he likes it, because that’s how he always does it.”

“You can’t see her face,” Dr. Koenig said. “But can you see his face?”

I swallowed and shook my head.

“No. In these dreams, I never see the… beginning. How Allie’s pants come off, how his come off. It’s always in the middle of things.”

He appeared to ponder this for several moments, and as he did, I pondered along with him. My mind wandered, and when it did, it wandered back to 1989 and an afternoon spent with Kate and Bobby. A palm reading from a cut-rate fortune teller who plied her trade in an old camper.

Don’t get married. Live alone always.

I spoke up.

“There’s a lot that bothers me about these dreams,” I said. “For obvious reasons.”

Dr. Koenig looked up.

I wet my lips with the tip of my tongue and pressed them together. I had to breathe through my nose when I did this, and so it didn’t last long. I felt a sinus infection coming on.

“But one thing that has occurred to me,” I continued, “is that there’s definitely something… supernatural about all this.”

If he agreed, he gave me no indication.

“These dreams,” I went on, “could be the product of an overstressed mind—Allie thinks it’s my brain training itself on what to do if something like that ever happens—but it could be something else, too. If we accept the postulate that this isn’t a memory… could it be a premonition?”

I leaned forward.

“Could the Bald Man be showing me what he’s working up to?”

Dr. Koenig didn’t act very interested in my premonition idea. For the remainder of our session, he grilled me on what the Bald Man looked like and what he’d been wearing in my dream. Not much information, because he’d been naked from the waist down. And I saw only the back of his head.

My therapist didn’t think much of the idea, but I did. That evening, I called Bobby.

“That’s some crazy-ass shit,” he said, when I’d told him everything. “Hell, maybe you do need to keep seeing this shrink. Maybe he can get you on medication.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“A demon-man making people out of clay and sending them after you? And now you’re psychic?”

“Okay, maybe ‘premonition’ is a bad term. ‘Vision’ works better. Psychics have their own visions. These aren’t mine. They’re his.”

“He’s beaming them into your brain.”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said, “yes.”

“Make a hat out of aluminum foil,” he replied. “That can help.”

“Come on! I’m being serious here!”

“So am I. Kevin, man…”

He trailed off into a sigh.

“Listen to yourself, okay? Go home, get some sleep, and in the morning, go out on your porch and look at the sun and ask yourself if what you’re saying right now still makes a lick of sense. Demons, clay people, visions… it’s too much, man. I can’t dig that.

Papers and file folders lay scattered all over my desk. My law license, my sundry diplomas, hanging on my walls. Mail I hadn’t opened even though Kristin had brought it in shortly after lunch; a large manila envelope that looked like it probably contained interrogatories and document production requests—an invitation to more eyestrain and late nights. My office, my world. My reality.

I looked at my stack of mail. The manila envelope drew my eyes. The edges, I realized; the edges were too crisp. It didn’t look like it had made a run through the Burlington post office.

“Go home,” Bobby said. “You’ve been working too much. Go home, drink a beer. Drink three beers; hell, drink a case. Just get some sleep and get off this shit. And the next time you see this shrink, get a prescription. Okay?”

What had I thought? That he would agree with me? That he would say yes, Kevin, there’s a very evil man—a demon, actually—making dudes out of clay and sending them out to fuck with you. Let’s have a logical discussion about how to deal with that very real problem, because I think it’s completely plausible.

Right.

“Sure,” I said with a sigh as I reached for my mail.

“I’m hanging up now. Bye, man.”

“Bye.”

The connection broken, my phone returned to sleep. I laid it down on the desk and pulled the stack of mail closer to me. I went straight for the manila envelope.

No return address. The sender had addressed it to Kevin Swanson, Esquire, right here at the office. Our street address, not our post office box; it shouldn’t have arrived, because we had no mail receptacle at the building. But here it was.

I opened it. I removed its contents.

I dropped them.

“Mother fucker ,” I whispered.

Craig Montero didn’t answer his phone when I called him from the office, nor did he answer when I called from my cell. I had to wait until the next morning, when I corralled him in the parking lot at Carwood, Allison, with the manila envelope in one hand and my phone in the other.