Jackson Spencer Bell

TRIGGER FINGER

For Angel

1.

The typical nightmare ends with the victim shooting bolt-upright in bed and trying to orient himself to his surroundings as the dream he just escaped melts away. Mine didn’t end that like that. I woke up but didn’t sit up; au contraire, I awoke in a prone position and stayed that way, hollering at the top of my lungs, panicked but motionless. Whatever had happened in my dream, I took it lying down. So while I may have been less than a lion in real life, in my nightmares I was a complete pussy.

“Kevin! Wake up!”

Allie, my wife. She shook me vigorously, either trying to shake me awake or shake me to death so I would shut the hell up. I opened my eyes and quickly catalogued everything around me. My bedroom, my senses said. A hand on my shoulder, not a claw. My wife, not the enemy. My house. I’d had a bad dream. Nothing to see here, nothing to look at, all’s well, sorry for the interruption, carry on.

I stopped yelling. I lay still for a moment and stared into the master bathroom before flipping over and pressing my face into Allie’s chest. Her warm skin smelled like lavender. She held me as my heart rate returned to normal and confusion and terror yielded to understanding and shame.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“It’s okay,” she said.

Silence. Then:

“What was it about?”

“You know,” I replied.

I let her hold me for a long time, because it felt good and she smelled good and I needed pleasant things just then. She made it easier to resist the urge to remember my dream. My mind likes to pick at scabs. Left to its own devices, it wouldn’t rest until it made me unhappy again.

“I think you need to see somebody,” she said.

“I’m just nervous about doing the show,” I replied, still talking to her chest. I intended to keep my face there until she forcibly evicted me. “Stage fright. It’ll pass.”

“This is more than stage fright.” She pushed me back so she could look at me. My recent behavior had dug deep lines of concern into her face. “You need help.”

“I need to drink more and work less.”

“You should go see Tom’s friend, the psychologist. You shouldn’t have to go through this.”

“I don’t need a shrink,” I said, pulling away.

“Okay, Kevin, I need for you to see Tom’s psychologist friend. I shouldn’t have to go through this.”

Tom Spicer, the Spicer in Carwood, Allison, Spicer and York, P.A., held a certain amount of influence over me. I had practiced with the firm for ten good years. Maybe not so good the last six months, but the nine and a half years before those had earned me enough brownie points that my personality issues resulted in a cautious referral to a shrink instead of a Go Work Somewhere Else meeting with the equity partners. Tom had given me a business card and said: Talk to this guy right here. You can trust him.

He had given me the card two days ago. I hadn’t called the number on it yet.

“I don’t like seeing you like this,” she said. “It’s not right.”

I snuggled back up to her. “I can handle it,” I said into her chest.

“But I can’t. I need this to be over. We need this to be over. And it can’t be over until this stops. Not really.”

I inhaled her scent. The nightmare seemed far away now, the mindless terror a distant memory. My heart rate fell. I remembered Abby as a tiny baby, how Allie would hold her just like she was holding me and how she would first stop fussing, then stop moving and then fall totally asleep. Maybe it was the smoothness of her skin or the steady heartbeat beneath it; either way, Allie’s presence reached a place inside me that nothing else could, an elemental control panel where she could slow my heart or speed it up at will.

She kissed the crown of my head.

“You’re still my hero, you know,” she murmured. “Getting help isn’t going to change that.”

I was falling asleep now. “Mmmhmm.”

“You won. You did it. Now it’s time to clean everything up, okay?”

“Mmhmm.”

“So you’ll call that number in the morning?”

“First thing,” I mumbled.

She continued to hold me until I fell out of the world again. This time, I had no nightmares.

2.

In early February of this year, I shot and killed two men in my home. I call them “men” only because I understand that I’m supposed to do that. They had two arms and two legs and walked upright and had opposable thumbs; everybody else called them men. Me? I didn’t think two arms and two legs made somebody a man any more than the absence of a carapace and antennae made him not a cockroach.

“Quit calling them ‘roaches,’ okay?” Craig Montero, who had become my coworker, then my friend and finally my attorney, had advised me of this before I ever talked to the press. “No ‘vermin,’ either, or ‘rats’ or ‘snakes’ or anything like that. You’re an innocent homeowner forced to defend his castle and his family. You didn’t want to kill these guys; you had to. You are deeply saddened and traumatized by what these men forced you to do. Your sympathy goes out to their families.”

“I am deeply saddened and traumatized by what these men forced me to do,” I repeated in his office, a carbon copy of my own. “My sympathy goes out to their families.”

“Don’t grin when you say it.”

“Okay.”

“That’s fucked up. It makes you look fucked up.”

“Okay.”

“Heroes don’t gloat.”

“Okay.”

“Dangerous psychopaths gloat. You’re not a dangerous psychopath.”

“Okay,” I said yet again.

And so I called them “men” to the outside world even though I didn’t believe they qualified. They entered my home through an unlocked door in my basement and found me asleep on my man-cave couch in front of the Carolina-Virginia Tech basketball game. They used my own softball bat to crack me over the head in an attempt to kill me, then proceeded upstairs with a little bag of goodies that included handcuffs, duct tape, rope, a knife, pretty much anything that might be useful to you and a buddy if you’re looking to rape a woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter. But, contrary to the greater weight of the evidence—see Nazi Germany vs. Humanity, (1933-1945), The Rwandan Genocide vs. Humanity, (1994)—God existed. He placed His hand between that bat and my skull. I regained consciousness a few moments later, woozy and terrified but otherwise okay. I whipped my AK-47 out of my gun safe—tucked away in my man-cave—and charged up to the ground floor, where I shot them both. They never even found the stairs.

Anyway, I became a killer that night out of necessity, and that sucked because I respected life. A divorce lawyer by trade, I had never intentionally whacked anything higher than a wasp. In my mid-twenties, I accidentally ran over a box turtle on one of the myriad back roads that crisscross southern Alamance County, North Carolina, and the experience left me so riddled with guilt that I actually had to pull over and do some deep breathing to deal with it. I sat in my car on the side of the road and thought about how if I hadn’t been screwing around with my CD player, I’d have seen the turtle and could have avoided it. I felt terrible about it then—it sucks to kill anything, but it really sucks to kill something cute—and I continued to feel bad about it long afterwards. So much so that whenever I see a turtle trying to cross the road now, I pull over and help.

But I never experienced a shred of remorse for shooting the two dildos that broke into my home. You’d think that a civilized man, an educated man, a family man like me would have felt something at having taken human life, no matter the necessity. I’d seen documentaries where veterans of various wars teared up in front of the camera over bayoneting this Nazi or napalming that North Vietnamese, pick your former enemy. These people had trained for it, yet they cried on camera. They needed counseling.

I had to have Craig Montero tell me not to grin.

My brother Bobby had an explanation for this.

“You’re a hard son of a bitch,” he said to me over beers one time in the wake of the shooting. A Marine and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Bobby was a logical choice for me to consult regarding my feelings about taking lives. “I never thought I’d say that, but there you go. You’re a hard son of a bitch.”

I appreciated that, because Bobby was a hard son of a bitch himself. And now, instead of calling me a chairborne commando, a REMF (Rear-Echelon Mother Fucker) or something more prosaic—like pencil-pushing pussy—my brother called me a hard son of a bitch. I liked that.

“And because you’re a hard son of a bitch, you don’t give a rat’s ass about these two guys. And think about it, dog; what were these guys going to do to Allie and Abby?”

Dog, instead of man or dude. Another thing hard sons of bitches called other men.

“Seriously, duct tape and handcuffs? After I found that shit out, I’d have gone back over and killed them again. Fuck them. And fuck anybody who thinks you should feel bad about it—including you. Listen, did you rip yourself up that time you killed the copperhead in the garage?”

There—I had intentionally killed. Five years ago, Abby found a poisonous snake coiled up beside her little pink bicycle in our garage, and I cut its head off with a shovel.

“No,” I admitted.

But at the same time, I didn’t say to Bobby then, I hadn’t felt proud of it, either. There existed now a dark truth I hadn’t related to anybody; when I thought about pulling that trigger I felt not sorrow, remorse or disgust but pride. I sat in court, in my car, on the john and thought, I’m awesome. With the twitching of my trigger finger, I cleansed mankind. I excised two bits of gangrene from the flesh of my species. A mediocre father, husband and lawyer, I finally did something not only extraordinary, not only courageous but good. I made society a better place. Whether that made me a psycho or not, that was how I felt. I wanted a parade.

So when I finally walked into Dr. Robert Koenig’s office for the first time, I actually didn’t go in there to discuss my feelings, to analyze my healing, to share my pain or anything like that; I went to brag. And to maybe figure out why, when I felt nothing but pride over this, it still gave me nightmares.

“So,” said Dr. Koenig, “are you a gun enthusiast.”

Despite the diplomas on the wall that marked him as a graduate of Emory University and the University of Georgia, he asked the question in that instantly recognizable way peculiar to those from Pennsylvania—the up-and-down of the sentence, the absence of the expected interrogatory rise at the end. Echoes, perhaps, of the German immigrants who had settled the area where he grew up. I smiled at the inflection. Allie had talked like that once, as a freshman in college there at the beginning of the years in North Carolina that would gradually eradicate her Yankee accent. When she got drunk or spent too much time around her family, it would come out again. Did you like the pot roast. Did you run into a lot of traffic there on 95.

Are you a gun enthusiast.

I answered, “I am now.”

A battered issue of Southern Rifleman, the monthly gospel of gun nuts everywhere, rested in my hands. The magazine exerted a calming effect on me; consequently, I hadn’t let go of it since coming in. This probably made me look crazy here, which was totally not my desired effect. My dark hair, thinning but still there, poked this way and that in a fashionable mess that required a dab of gel and almost a whole minute of teasing to perfect. The suit I had worn today remained hung on a body from which all unnecessary fat had melted over the preceding months. I had always been handsome—hey, man, I can’t lie—and at thirty-six, the weight loss only enhanced this. I looked good, I thought. Felt good, too. Not at all like a man who should clutch a gun magazine like some kind of redneck security blanket.

I forced myself to lay it in my lap. The coffee table that stood between the Doc and I looked like a beaten refugee from a fraternity house. Scratches, cigarette burns and drink rings marred a cheap veneer surface that ruined the chord of understated luxury prevailing throughout the rest of the office. The suede couch and chair and the mahogany desk could have come from a showroom in New York or London. The conference table looked like Craftique. And among all this, here at my knees sat the furniture droppings of a passing Wal-Mart. I didn’t want my precious magazine—the trophy I had received for my good deeds—on that damn thing.

The separation of hand and Southern Rifleman lasted exactly two seconds, and then I picked it up again. I cleared my throat.

“Umm… I’m not a subscriber. Somebody told me about this, so I went to Barnes & Noble and got one. I thought maybe it’d be a good thing to show you.”

“Can I see it?”

He tacked a question mark to the end of that one. I looked down at my magazine for a moment, then forced myself to hand it over.

“What am I looking for?”

“Turn to the back. There’s this section called Heroes of the Month, where they do these write-ups of everybody who bagged a home invader since the last issue. Back page. Mine’s the first paragraph.”

He opened the magazine. The pages sounded like dry leaves as he turned them. He was a thin man, a marathon runner by appearance, with fingers almost as long and skinny as his legs. He wore jeans and a navy-blue turtleneck sweater. The narrow face and bald head perched atop the shoulders recalled Steve Jobs, the departed icon of Apple fame. He even wore little rimless glasses like Jobs and sported the same carefully-cultivated beard stubble. They could have been twins.

He located the story and adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his prominent nose. I waited as he read. When he finished, he closed the magazine and handed it back to me.

I gripped it in both hands again. Realizing how crazy I looked then, I blushed and forced myself to set it down.

“See, Doc, I’m not just a Hero of the Month,” I said. “I’m a double Hero of the Month. That’s what it says. Listen, before I came in here, had you ever heard of me?”

He nodded.

“Thought so. Everybody in Burlington knows who I am now, because I’m a double Hero of the Month. I’m Kevin Swanson. I’m a bad son of a bitch, I’m a hard son of a bitch, I deserve a frigging medal. I’m on top of the world. My teenage daughter thinks I’m cool again, and my wife respects me as a man again. I have 1500 Facebook friends, up from 95 in January. I can tell you with complete sincerity that my life has never been better. Never. That’s God’s honest truth. Yet here I am in a shrink’s office. Talking to you.”

He regarded me silently, a skinny finger over his skinny lips. He appeared deep in thought, as a psychologist in session should appear—although, I realized, he could have been thinking about anything. An upcoming oil change on the Mercedes, perhaps, or whether he should get kale or spinach to go with the organic free-range chicken tonight. He looked like an intelligent man, an intellectual man, but I learned a long time ago that some people just looked thoughtful.

“Why’s that?” He asked. “Why is the double Hero of the Month in a shrink’s office, as you put it?”

“My wife wants me here,” I answered. “Tom Spicer wants me here. I’m having nightmares, so I’m not sleeping right, so I’m keeping my wife awake and showing my ass at work. I’ve told opposing counsel in at least two different cases to eat shit—not figuratively, I actually told them to eat shit and then I hung up on them—and I said the same thing to a client last week. And you don’t tell clients to eat shit. You say you disagree with their assessment, you can say you’re sorry they feel that way, but you don’t tell them to go eat shit. Especially when you charge what Carwood, Allison charges. Fortunately for me, my client reported me to Tom Spicer. She could have reported me to the Bar.”

“So why do you think the double Hero of the Month experience nightmares and personality issues over an action the rest of the world views as praiseworthy?”

I thought for a moment.

“Stage fright,” I said.

“Stage fright?”

“Stage fright,” I said again. “Tomorrow night, I’m going to be talking about this with somebody else. On the radio.”

3.

Ages before the shooting, I learned that I suffered from Toothpaste Syndrome. I discovered this over the summer between sixth and seventh grades, when Bobby and I enrolled in an aikido class through the parks and recreation department in Catawba County. The teacher, a short, powerfully-built retired Marine named Henry Burton—we called him “Sensei”—taught me about it my first day in the class.

“Toothpaste Syndrome occurs when the shit hits the fan and you forget everything you’ve been taught,” Sensei said. “The squeeze comes on and all your knowledge, all your training, squirts right out the top of your head. Like a tube of toothpaste.”

I remember standing there in slack jawed shock. Not just because an authority figure had said a word like “shit,” but because while Toothpaste Syndrome had afflicted me my entire life, only then did I learn that there existed a name for it. And what a perfect name! What a clever, humorous yet stunningly accurate way to describe what had happened in every crisis situation I had ever experienced! Or at least what I thought of then as a crisis situation. Throughout my life I had suffered from a noticeable inability to rise to the occasion. Fights and snarky remarks from fellow students, white trash or black trash bumping into me at the mall and glaring at me with disrespect instead of apologizing—my brain always responded to an adrenaline dump by shutting down. I could pull my hand off a hot stove but I couldn’t launch a smart comeback, lacking as I did the quick wit that came so easily to everyone else. My zingers typically arrived hours later, on the bus or in bed or in the shower, when the instant danger had subsided and I’d had time to think. I always knew what to do, what to say, hours later. When the heat came on, though, I forgot my lines.

And now Sensei gave me a name for it: Toothpaste Syndrome. I suffered from a syndrome, not a personality defect. Not a character defect. A syndrome. Which, according to Sensei, I could control with ki breathing. This consisted of deep, controlled breaths where you filled your lungs to capacity and released the air in a slow exhalation that left your body relaxed and energized. Concentrate on the air, he said. Focus on air, focus on breath, and as the body relaxes so does the mind. The toothpaste remains in the tube.

Sitting before the microphone on a soundstage twenty-two years later, I tried to engage in ki breathing. As soon as I stepped into the room and saw the lights and microphones and headphones and the coffee cups and the computers, I suddenly understood that in a matter of minutes a powerful transmitter would broadcast my every stutter, stumble and mistake to thousands of listeners. Not just in Alamance County, but as far as the AM waves would reach.

“Ever been on the air before?”

Billy Horton, the host of AM 1110’s Alamance Talks, sat in one of the chairs before a single desktop computer. He looked exactly as Tom Spicer had described him; fat and old. He had a head of messy gray hair shot through with white. His body overflowed the edges of the chair, drooping towards the ground like the wax of a melting candle in the same way as the lower half of his face hung below his chin. Some of his hair had migrated from his head to other places, and remnants of it grew in his ears and his nose. He’s fat and old, Tom had said. And he’s a son of a bitch. If you want to punch him in the face at some point during the program, do it. I’ll post your bail.

During Tom’s unsuccessful run as the Democratic candidate for the state Senate in 2010, Billy had run a segment every weekday evening called Stupid Things Tom Spicer Says, culled from Tom’s statements to the press and the myriad closing arguments he’d made in Superior Court over the years. During the run, Billy came to be known in our office as The Fat Satan. Consequently, when I entered the studio, I walked in expecting horns and a tail, or at least a forked tongue. I found none of that.

“No,” I said. This came out unsteadily, which alarmed me. The program hadn’t even started yet, and I had already mangled the simplest word in the English language. What would happen when I had to say my name?

“It ain’t no big thing,” Billy said with a chuckle. “Most of the time, hardly anybody’s out there. My wife don’t even listen no more.”

Not true in my case. I could count on Allie tuning in, and Abby, too. Abby’s friends and their parents. Everybody at the firm. Every lawyer who knew me. All of my clients, past and present. Every man and woman in broadcast range who had ever worried about a home invasion but read in the newspaper that Kevin Swanson had foiled one. Six months later, the community still basked in the warmth of one of those rare occasions when the good guys had won. And they would all listen tonight.

“We’re on in thirty seconds,” said the engineer, a young intern from one of the Greensboro colleges. Unlike his boss, he was rail-thin and boasted a head of shaggy, Beatle-esque brown hair. Billy had introduced him as Dylan, or maybe William. I hadn’t really been paying attention, so his name had sailed in and out through the same ears as his college.

“Remember what I told you,” said Craig Montero from a seat in the corner. He had insisted on coming to supervise me, he said. To make sure I behaved myself. “Try to imagine what a well-adjusted family man in his mid-thirties would say and channel him. You say anything crazy, I’m cutting you off.”

“Just be yourself and don’t say any cuss words,” Billy added. “You’ll do fine.”

“Back on in ten,” said Dylan or William.

Everyone fell silent. Billy cleared his throat.

“Five… four… three… two… one.”

And I went live.

“Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, you’re listening to Alamance Talks, the voice of conservatism in Alamance County. I am, of course and as always, Billy Horton. I’m in here tonight with a very special person, a man who needs no introduction because every one of us knows him, likes him and wants to be him—a man whose index finger did more for society in five seconds than most men do with both hands their entire lives—Kevin Swanson. Good evening, Kevin.”

I opened my mouth. A tumbleweed fell out, but recognizable English words followed it. “Good evening, Billy.”

“Now, just in case there’s somebody out there who spent the last six months in a coma, Kevin here is a lawyer from Burlington, but in February of this year, Kevin used a privately-owned firearm—an AK-47, am I correct?”

I nodded. Then, remembering nobody could see this on the radio, I said, “Yes.”

I looked to Craig for approval. His features unreadable, he nodded once.

“Kevin used an AK-47, people—a weapon your liberal opposition thinks common folk shouldn’t have—to defend his home against two criminal punks who came over from Durham to make trouble here in Alamance County. Bad move, guys, bad, bad move. Kevin, if you could… tell us what happened.”

I swallowed. Billy looked at me expectantly. Craig looked at me warily. On the wall, the ON AIR sign glowed bright orange as the dead air crackled before my lips.

Ki breath, I remembered.

“Well,” I began in a voice a good register or two higher than normal. “It started in my basement. I fell asleep on the couch watching a Carolina basketball game.”

“Go Tarheels,” Billy interjected.

“Yes,” I said. “Go Heels.”

And I told my story. I told it without freezing up, without shaking, without crying—and without boasting. The whole time, Craig watched me like a parent watching his three-year-old pour milk over cereal, waiting for me to drop the jug and make a huge mess. But I didn’t make a huge mess; I got through it, and when I reached the point in the story where I shot the

(vermin)

(rats)

(snakes)

(roaches)

intruders, I paused.

Shooting human beings, Craig had told me earlier, is supposed to be difficult no matter who they are. I want you to pause a little bit like you’re having trouble with the memory. Sigh. Pretend it bothers you.

“And then I pulled the trigger,” I said.

“And then you pulled the trigger,” Billy echoed.

“Yes. And…”

Another pause. Craig raised his chin as he stared at me.

And then I stood over their bodies and I grinned at them and I pulled the trigger again to make sure they were dead, but I had fired every round in the magazine and so the hammer fell on an empty chamber, which sucked because I’d really just gotten started.

“…and that’s it,” I finished. “That’s where it ends. My wife called the police, they came out, and they took it from there.”

“Wasn’t much to take after you got done with them, though, was there?”

“No,” I said. “There wasn’t.”

“Kevin, I’d like to open the phones to our listeners, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” I said.

“All right, then. Our first caller is… Randy from Burlington. Randy, good evening.”

I actually did mind. I’d feared the call-ins the most; I could prepare myself for an interview with Billy Horton, but I had no idea what any of these callers would say. They could ask me anything. I’d have to think on my feet, never my strong suit. Preparation, strategy, planning, yes, yes and yes, but spontaneity? Decisive reaction? No. And no.

Ki breath. The Mind of No Expectation.

The only people who listen to Billy Horton’s show, Craig had assured me, are right-wingnuts who are probably going to drool when you talk about shooting these two guys. Nobody’s going to ask any hard questions. They’re just going to call in and tell you how awesome you are.

And Randy from Burlington did just that.

“I just want to say that… uhh… good shooting. That’s it, right there, that’s how you do it. Good friggin’ job. You’re our hero, man!”

The next caller wanted to praise me, too. As did the next. And the next. In fact, I didn’t get a single hard question the whole time, right up until Billy clicked the mouse on his computer and said, “Looks like we got time for one more caller. Thomas from Mebane, you’re on.”

A moment of silence. In the corner, Craig frowned. Billy reached for his mouse, but then Thomas from Mebane spoke.

“Good evening, Kevin.”

Devoid of emotion and accent, the voice possessed a flat quality so different from the other callers that every red light in my head suddenly blazed to life and I thought, here it is. Here is where somebody asks me something hard and I screw everything up. Here is where I come out looking stupid.

“Good evening, Thomas,” I replied. “Uh… how are you doing tonight?”

“Great. But I have an observation or two.”

Craig leaned forward in his chair. Billy looked from his computer screen to me to the computer again, then back to me. Dylan or William just blinked.

“You killed two burglars,” said Thomas from Mebane. “Bravo. You must be very proud.”

I cleared my throat to give my mind time to get unstuck. “I don’t know if proud is the right word.”

“Oh, yes it is. Everyone loves you, Kevin. Everyone admires you. So bravo.”

“Thanks,” I said. My throat tightened. Sweat sprang forth from my armpits and collar.

Thomas from Mebane, if that was even his name, hadn’t called to praise me, I realized. He’d called to destroy me on the air. Suddenly, I saw this very clearly.

“It’s incredible, really.”

“What’s incredible?”

“Everything about this little tale of yours.”

Tale. The way he said it, the amused inflection, spiked my heart rate and made my face flush. “What are you getting at, Thomas? Are you saying… this is just a story?”

I hadn’t prepared for this accusation. In my head I’d rehearsed somebody calling in and accusing me of being a bloodthirsty killer, saying I didn’t have to kill them, I could have just wounded them, I should go to jail for murder. I’d rehearsed that. Not somebody calling me a liar.

“I’m saying it’s incredible that you have one solitary weapon, which happens to be an AK-47. Most people who buy assault rifles have dozens of guns; you have one.”

“I inherited it,” I said. “My father died and left it to me. Otherwise, this would be a completely different story.”

He continued as if I hadn’t even spoken. “I also find it incredible that these intruders struck you in the head with a bat and it not only failed to kill you, not only failed to crack your skull but also failed to knock you out for an appreciable length of time.”

My face burned. Stage fright gone now, I felt only anger. I envisioned this man sitting in his house, his apartment, his trailer, whatever hole in the ground he occupied when he wasn’t out torturing small animals, and I saw the upturned corners of his lips. Smirking. Ensconced in comfortable anonymity, seeing if he could make me squirm.

The trigger finger on my right hand twitched. Fuck him.

Craig must have seen these thoughts on my face, because he locked eyes with me and shook his head.

“And then,” continued Thomas from Mebane, “these men dilly-dally on the first floor of your home while you recover from the bat strike, unlock your gun safe, load the rifle and sneak upstairs. Where you find them lined up in your hallway like ducks in a shooting gallery.”

I leaned forward into my microphone. “Are you calling me a liar?”

Craig’s head-shaking intensified.

“I don’t know, Kevin, what do you call a man who fabricates a story like that? Makes it up out of whole cloth?”

Craig leapt up. He had known me ever since both of us had come aboard as rookie associates at Carwood, Allison ten years ago, and he knew what I would say next.

But he’d positioned himself on the other side of the room. Too far away.

“You, Thomas,” I said, “are an asshole.”

Billy’s fat face turned white and he grabbed his microphone. He made a cutting motion to Dylan or William, who didn’t see it because he was busy staring at me.

“And you know what?” I continued, “You’re batshit crazy. How could I make up a story like that?”

“You tell me,” Thomas from Mebane replied, emotionless. “You’re the one who did it. You’re truly a coward, Kevin. You’re a sniveling, worthless coward who…”

“Coward? Why don’t you come on down to my office tomorrow morning and I’ll beat your ass? And hey, what’s your real name? Too pussy to share that, you little bitch?”

Now Billy lunged sideways to push Dylan or William out of the way. The boy hit the floor at the same instant as Craig’s right hand fell on my shoulder, pulling me backwards exactly as his left pushed the microphone away from my face. Billy began furiously fingerstabbing buttons on Dylan or William’s console.

Thomas from Mebane’s voice glistened with amusement at the commotion he’d caused. Classic psychopath. “Oh, that’s not important,” he said. “Why don’t you just call me…”

Pause.

“…the Bald Man,” he finished.

At that moment, Billy found the button that ended the call. He slid back over to his own station to announce a commercial break, ostensibly to give everybody time to get me under control, but he needn’t have bothered. Every joule of anger had drained from my body just as the blood had drained from my face. I found myself sitting in shocked silence as Dylan or William climbed up off the floor and Billy tore off his headphones and Craig was saying something in my ear about what was I thinking, saying ass and shit and pussy on the radio? What was wrong with me?

I didn’t answer him. Three simple words—The Bald Man—and all my hot water turned cold. Because while nobody else could have known it, not even Allie, I’d heard those words before.

4.

I’d like to say that I’d reached this station in life—job at my city’s largest law firm, big house out in the country, BMW, beautiful wife who didn’t have to work for us to live—through nothing but the strength of my own character. But I can’t. I grew up in a house on the golf course of the Rock Barn Country Club in Conover, North Carolina, right outside the larger city of Hickory. My father, a prominent cardiac surgeon, made sure that my family never had to worry about money. The closest my brother Bobby and I ever came to the school of hard knocks was attending public school, which meant that we mixed with the proletariat.

But life can suck in any number of ways. In our case, we never had to worry about subsistence issues only because our father worked his ass off, meaning he stayed gone all the time. He left us in the care of our mother, who had this nasty habit of clocking out every day before lunch. We only saw her in the mornings, a red-eyed, irritable presence that burned the toast, overcooked the eggs, never smiled and occasionally fled into the first-floor powder room to vomit. On days when my father left before breakfast, we had to burn our own toast because she wouldn’t even get out of bed. Every afternoon, I’d find her lying down either in her bedroom or on a couch.

“Your mother’s depressed,” Dad explained. “Leave her be.”

“Our mother’s a sorry drunk,” Bobby explained. “Want to order some pizza?”

We spent our afternoons and evenings watching television, playing Nintendo, eating junk food and occasionally doing homework. When Bobby reached driving age, we’d cruise around Hickory in Mom’s Mercedes with Kate, the girlfriend who would later become his wife, and look for reasons not to go home. A lot of my memories of childhood take place in that Mercedes, or somewhere I went in it, with Bobby and Kate. By virtue of the location of her parents’ single-wide trailer in relation to the Rock Barn Country Club, she and Bobby met in kindergarten. They became such good friends that we actually took her on vacation with us. I remember my mother and father arguing about her once when I was really little, on the way back from one of the rare family dinners out that Kate didn’t attend.

“We’ve got two kids of our own,” Mom protested in response to something Dad said. “Two. Not three.”

“What are we supposed to do? You saw how they live.”

“They’re her parents.”

“They’re sorry drunks,” Dad snapped. “They lay around getting plowed all the time and it’s shameful. You know that? They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Those aren’t parents, those are sorry, worthless sacks of alcoholic trash. I have absolutely no respect for people like that.”

My mother fell silent. The conversation ended there.

One Saturday morning during Bobby’s 12th grade year and my 8th, we went to the flea market at the fairgrounds on Highway 70. This wasn’t special in and of itself; the fairgrounds always hosted a flea market on weekends, and that Saturday wasn’t the first time we’d gone there to kill time. But I always remembered that particular Saturday, because that was the day we went to the palm reader.

The flea market had always reminded me of a scene from the first Star Wars movie, where Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi navigated the hardscrabble streets of Mos Eisely on Tatooine. Closely-packed clumps of Hmong jostled for space with Mexicans, Cambodians, everyone chattering in the indecipherable—to me—tongue of his or her people. We saw white people, but they were different from us—they wore tattered jeans, denim shorts, T-shirts, arms and necks tanned leather-brown by the sun and nicotine. They also seemed to speak a different language, perhaps because they didn’t all have their front teeth. They sold; they bought. They haggled to save a dollar here, a nickel there. They inspired a deep, strong desire to finish high school.

We didn’t go with the expectation of consulting the palm reader. We ended up at a table under an awning on the back lot, rifling through the seller’s offerings with no particular retail goal in mind. The table had grabbed our attention because of the brace of rifles and shotguns standing with a steel cable running through their trigger guards, threaded there to keep anyone from stealing them. Bobby and I picked up and inspected the weapons like we’d been handling them our whole lives—barrel’s in good shape on this one, Bobby commented, to which I responded with a yeah, it is, as if I knew a decent barrel from a crappy one.

The seller also had a box of cassette tapes from bands whose music had reached that difficult age where albums tend to migrate from cars and bedrooms into cardboard bins at flea markets just like this one. Kate busied herself separating out the wheat from the chaff. When she found one she liked, she’d open the case and inspect the tape itself, looking for bends or discoloration, winding the spools with her index finger to see if they actually turned or if one of them would bind up the moment she popped the cassette into the dashboard. If it passed muster, she’d set it aside. Suddenly, she stopped rifling through the tapes and stared at a small placard displayed in a card holder on the table next to her box of treasures.

“Are you a palm reader?” She asked the seller.

The man looked sixties-ish but could have been any age behind his gray beard shot through with flecks of black. He wore a red trucker’s cap advertising some tree removal service out of Conover and a red tee shirt with a pocket on the left breast that read “Marlboro” but held a pack of Kings. Steel wool covered his forearms. He opened his mouth to reveal a set of teeth that appeared relatively intact but bore the telltale stains of too much tobacco and not enough toothpaste.

“Naw,” he said, “That’s my missus. She’s in the trailer.” He pivoted his head a half-turn on his fleshy neck and shouted, “RUBY! YOU GOT CUSTOMERS!”

The awning attached to a large camper trailer itself hitched to a pickup truck that looked big enough to tow the space shuttle. The trailer was obviously old, its beiges, browns and harvest golds worn and pitted. The same held true for the woman who stood now in the doorway, leaning against the metal frame. Ruby was a tiny shred of shoe leather in a blouse and blue jeans, hair graying like her husband’s, cigarette dangling from the fingers of her left hand. Rode hard and put away wet, Dad would have said. I thought it now as Ruby spoke in the sandpaper rasp of the ancient smoker.

“Y’all looking to get your fortunes told?”

“How much?” Kate asked.

“Normally ten,” Ruby said, taking a drag on her cigarette. “But it’s a slow day. I’ll do all three of you for twenty.”

Kate shot a hopeful look at Bobby, who rolled his eyes as he set a battered Enfield rifle back on the display table. I didn’t know why he cared; it wasn’t even his money, cadged as it was from Mom’s purse. But Kate had asked. That meant that she would receive.

“Whatever,” he said.

“Pay up front to Chester there before y’all come in,” said Ruby, turning to go back into the trailer. “Don’t want to get stiffed if y’all don’t like what I tell you.”

“Does that ever happen?” Kate asked as Bobby divested himself of a twenty-dollar bill, passed it to an appreciative Chester and motioned for me to follow them.

“From time to time,” Ruby answered over her shoulder.

The inside of the trailer reeked, of course, of cigarettes. It smelled like every gas station and bowling alley I’d ever been in, an odor so strong that years later, when I got old enough to start going to bars and clubs and other places where large numbers of smokers congregated, I would remember Ruby’s trailer. Smell, Allie once told me, is more closely linked with memory than any other sense. I believed her because of the way every puff of smoke reminded me of that afternoon at the flea market, and the way every one made me shiver.

But that day, the intense aroma of tobacco was nothing more than a stink trapped inside a camper trailer that had probably cost its original owner a great deal of money. Ruby and Chester, I felt, not so much. The interior was as dated as the outside, with a thick shag carpet that had seized and held every unpleasant odor that ever passed over it. I had only the briefest opportunity to observe the paisley upholstery before Ruby drew shut the blackout curtains on the sunny side of the trailer and plunged us into a darkness that she replaced moments later with a sickly light dangling over what passed for a kitchen table. She motioned for us to sit down.

“How’s she going to read our palms if she can’t see them?” Bobby whispered to me.

If Ruby heard him, she gave no indication. She stubbed her cigarette out in a little gold foil ashtray, then took Kate’s hand and flipped it over to expose her palm. “What’s your name, sugar?”

“You can’t tell?” Bobby quipped, prompting an irritated scowl from Kate.

“I’m Kate,” she said, turning back to Ruby.

“Pleasure to meet you, Kate,” Ruby said. “You ever had your fortune told?”

She shook her head.

“Okay, here’s how it works; I’m going to read your palm, but I’m going to feel your energy, too. I studied palm reading with the Gypsies—real, honest-to-God gypsies—but I come by my other talents naturally.”

“Other talents?” Bobby asked. I could hear the raised eyebrow in his voice.

“I’m also a psychic.”

“Oh. I see.”

“No,” Ruby said, “I see.” She looked down at Kate’s palm and said, “Let’s take a look at what you got here, sweetie.”

Kate, she divined, hadn’t had an easy life (true, but highly generalized). But she’d managed to do well for herself within its confines, and her lifeline showed her avoiding the mistakes of her parents (highly generalized, future prediction impossible to disprove at the present time). She stood on the cusp of a major life change (like every other seventeen-year-old girl in America). She may have already met the man she would marry, and she would marry him soon. Not soon as in during the school year, but within a relatively short time after graduation.

Kate smiled. She liked this.

Now Ruby took Bobby’s hand. She grimaced then, like she’d suddenly experienced a bad cramp. She let his upturned hand fall to the table as she made a fist and coughed into it. We listened to her scrawny body struggle to expel the black tar from her lungs, struggle with a force so pronounced it seemed almost cartoonish.

“You okay, ma’am?” Bobby asked.

At last, she spoke again. “Don’t join the Army,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t join the Army,” she said again. “You’ve been thinking about it. Don’t do it. Bad idea. Go to college and get a desk job.”

She meant this as an ominous warning, I saw, an attempt to wipe that wry, this-is-bullshit grin off his face. It failed. Bobby raised one eyebrow and said, “O-kay.”

“I’m serious,” Ruby said. “You’ll die.”

“I don’t want to die, so… okay, no Army.”

The reading proceeded. He would also get married soon, Ruby predicted. He came from privilege, but he’d experienced his share of hardship. He would find peace in marriage, and he hungered for that above all else: peace. Life without worry, without drama, the simple life of a man who works, who pays his bills and who has not the slightest difficulty falling asleep at night. This would provide a welcome change from what he had experienced in the past, because while many words applied to his life, peaceful didn’t number among them. He suffered a great deal of inner turmoil, explosive amounts of it. He sought peace, and he would find it if he made the right choices.

Bobby’s expression didn’t waver for the duration of his reading. As soon as Ruby stopped to draw a breath, he pulled his hand away and dragged me forward, standing up and depositing me in his seat in one graceful motion.

“Read his,” he said. “Can you read hairy palms?”

“Bobby!” Kate admonished.

My face burned, but Bobby just laughed and smacked me on the back right in between my shoulder blades.

“We tried to get a Ouija board to tell us when he was finally going to get laid, but the damn thing clammed up, so now we need a psychic.”

Ruby took my hand. Her palms surprised me with a softness I didn’t expect from that leathery skin, and the impact of expectation against reality momentarily prevented me from speaking.

But before I could say anything, she dropped—no, threw—my hand on the table. Her eyes widened as she stared down at it like it held a fistful of rattlesnakes. I stared down at it, too, but seeing no rattlesnakes, I looked back up.

Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. When she finally spoke, she blurted, “Don’t get married. Live alone always.”

“Why?” I asked, confused.

Ruby turned her head from one side to the other, faded green eyes narrowing as she stared into my face. She looked shocked, bewildered. Scared.

Terrified.

She pushed her chair back and leapt to her feet, shaking her head vehemently. She jammed a hand into her back pocked and came out with a wad of cash. She withdrew a single twenty-dollar bill and threw it on the table in front of me.

“I can’t give you a reading,” she said. “So there’s your money back. Your brother and his girlfriend are on the house.”

“I want you to read his palm,” Bobby complained. “Go on, do him like you did us.”

But she continued shaking her head. She backed away from the little table until the stove stopped her. Unable to retreat further, she held up both hands.

“No,” she said. “This session’s over. Ma’am, those cassettes are on the house, too, y’all just go on now.”

“Man, this is some bullshit,” Bobby said.

“Y’all go on.” She grabbed a pack of cigarettes—Kings, like Chester—and withdrew one. As she tried to light it, I noticed her hands were shaking.

“Let’s go,” Kate said softly. “We got our money back.”

“Go on!” Ruby snapped.

Confused and unsure of what to make of all this, I rose from the table and stumbled towards the door. Kate grabbed Bobby and shoved him after me.

“Man, I can’t believe this…”

Kate cut him off. “Will you please shut up and get out of this lady’s trailer like she asked?”

Chester blinked at us as we descended the metal steps to the ground, but he didn’t say anything about the tapes in Kate’s hands. Maybe he heard, I thought. Then again, maybe he doesn’t need to hear; maybe he’s psychic, too.

I didn’t understand what had happened, and I didn’t get time to think. Kate pushed Bobby away from the table and the trailer, and Bobby pushed me. We made it about ten steps before Ruby threw open the door and called out to me.

“Kevin!”

I stopped and turned. Bobby ran into me, but I didn’t fall. Fat, gray-haired Chester looked from us to Ruby, Ruby to us, back to Ruby.

Her cigarette hand shook like mad. The smoking cherry on the end quivered in the darkness that enveloped the inside of the trailer, but she held onto it. She pointed at me with the index finger of her other hand. This one didn’t shake at all.

“Beware the Bald Man!” Her voice rose in a raspy cry above the shuffle and chatter of the flea market. All over, heads turned. From a tent full of stereo equipment immediately to my right, Terrence Trent D’Arby sang the praises of a wishing well, but Ruby outblasted him. “You steer clear of the Bald Man, Kevin!”

“We’ll do that!” Bobby hollered back. “Thanks for the heads-up!”

We left. And we returned to the business of killing time.

And only later, as I lay awake in my bed that night staring at the model airplanes dangling from my ceiling, did I realize I’d never told Ruby my name.

5.

Out in the gravel parking lot next to the building that housed the radio station, I paced back and forth as Craig leaned against my BMW, head hung low. I had exhibited behavior unbecoming a member of the largest law firm in Burlington—an old law firm, a well-regarded law firm, a law firm whose clients paid it large sums of money at least in part because the words Carwood and Allison, when placed together, evoked images of well-heeled, well-trained attorneys solving complex legal problems with class.

I had gone on the radio and talked like I’d just stumbled out of the trailer park across the road. I had invited someone to come fight me at the office tomorrow.

“I don’t know,” Craig said, raising his head. “Maybe there’s a positive angle to this. You sounded like an asshole; isn’t that supposed to be a good thing for a divorce lawyer?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t think about damage control or public relations or Carwood, Allison at all—I thought only of the Bald Man. But I couldn’t discuss this with him. If my recent behavior left any doubt in his mind that the softball bat to the head had scrambled my brains, talking about the palm reading would erase it.

“What was his problem?” I asked in a mutter. The leather soles of my shoes crunched in the gravel. Despite the coolness of this particular September night, sweat ran in rivulets down my face, my neck, and disappeared into my collar. I loosened my tie. “What does he mean, he’s going to show the world that I’m no hero? That’s a threat!”

Craig raised both palms. “Kevin? Chill.”

“Chill? Whatever! That guy threatened me on the radio!” My hands curled into fists and pounded against my legs. My trigger finger had begun twitching, and while I didn’t know if Craig would see it in the darkened parking lot, I didn’t want to risk it. “I want to know who that son of a bitch is! I want to know where he called from!”

“Kevin…”

“And then I want to march right up to his house or his trailer or his cardboard box or whatever the hell he lives in and tell him say it to my face!”

“Listen.”

I pivoted on my heels and marched back down the length of the BMW, fists clenched, shaking my head.

“There’s obviously something wrong with the guy, okay?” Craig said. “Strike One, he listens to Billy Horton. He sits around on weeknights and listens to AM radio, which tells you he probably doesn’t have a whole lot going on in his life. The other thing to remember is, you are a hero, okay?”

“Whatever,” I mumbled.

“You are. You really are. Everybody in Alamance County looks up to you. You faced their worst nightmare and you came out on top. So they admire you, they praise you, they put articles in the newspaper about you… and here’s this psychopath collecting disability in his rented trailer. When he’s not watching daytime TV, he fantasizes about doing something remarkable, being somebody special. Then Kevin Swanson hijacks his fantasy. So he gets pissed and he says, I’m going to take this guy down a peg. And that’s exactly what he does.”

Craig paused.

“He was screwing with you,” he said. “That’s the last you’re going to hear from him.”

“How do you know that?”

“I spend most of my time in District Court,” he answered. “I know all about crazies. I’m like the Jane Goodall of wackjobs.”

He picked himself up off the car.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “Let’s get you back before Allie sends a search party after your ass.”

I lived off Highway 62 in Burlington. Way off Highway 62. My house, old and stately and far larger than I needed, sat nestled among the rise and fall of cleared land that had once held tobacco, cotton, corn and wheat. Now it just held grass that a man with a Bushhog and a hay rake cut for me every month. A dirt road shooting off the highway curled into thick woods that screened the house from 62 even in the wintertime, when the leaves fell to the ground and the house concealed itself behind denuded branches and the topography of the land.

This privacy, this sense of removal from the rest of the world, had drawn us here when we went looking for a bigger house after Dad’s estate settled. With all our money then, we could have bought a place at the country club, but then we’d have had to look at our neighbors every time we stepped onto our front porch. Allie didn’t want that. She had grown up in the country in Pennsylvania, had enjoyed the privacy and the peace and the nature there and wanted to give Abby the same thing. In the age of automobiles, a person could mitigate the seclusion with a ten-minute drive up the road to Burlington. “You can always seek out people when you get lonely,” she had said. “You can’t make them go away when you get tired of them.” Out here, privacy abounded. Set back as we were from the highway and surrounded by woods, I could have walked out on my porch and drank my coffee naked and no one would have seen me. In the evenings, I could have stood in the driveway and screamed my frustration at the world and no one would have heard me. Good money bought a man square footage, acreage and freedom from the prying eyes of his neighbors.

But there existed a flip side to this coin, and I noticed it the day we moved in. A bottle of Heineken in one hand, the other arm wrapped around Allie’s waist, I stood on the porch and stared out at my land, my estate. “We’re isolated now,” I said then. “Do you realize that? We’re going to have a devil of a time getting pizza delivered out here.”

“I guess we’ll have to eat healthier,” she replied before going back inside to resume unpacking. “Got plenty of land now. Maybe we can grow our own vegetables.”

Plenty of land, screened from the highway. At least twenty acres between any part of my house and the nearest property line. At least forty acres between the nearest property line and the next house. I had seen this coming even then. I had understood that if the pizza guy couldn’t find us, neither could a police car or ambulance. My newfound seclusion from society’s problems came at the price of seclusion from its security. I had calculated how long it could take a sheriff’s car to respond if I called 911 after hearing a suspicious noise in the night and I thought of the rifle then, which I kept locked by itself in a gun cabinet in the basement. The circumstances under which I had come to own the AK-47 weren’t the typical ones surrounding a man obtaining his first gun, but standing on my new porch—new to me, anyway—I understood that on some level, I must have somehow known I would end up here. I must have known I would need it.

Pinnix and Ramseur probably slapped each other high-fives when they saw where we lived. They would have seen the physical layout of our property and realized that they could have raped my wife and our daughter right there in the front yard and no one would have disturbed them. They had seen this, I felt sure, and experienced a rush of delight at finding such desirable prey this far removed from the herd’s protection. These people are vulnerable, they said. We can do anything we want to them. We can take our time.

And they were right about my family’s tactical position. When Allie finally called 911 that night, the Sheriff’s Department took more than twenty minutes to get there. Allie remained upstairs, clutching a frightened and bewildered Abby, while I sat on the bottom step with the rifle across my lap and looked down at the bleeding bodies, and I thought, thank you, God. With every minute that passed without the appearance of a Sheriff’s car, my grip on the weapon tightened. In the age of the telephone, the automobile and the Internet, in an age where you could watch movies and attend videoconferences from a mobile phone, our survival had boiled down to luck and a gun I never would have bought on my own. I felt the seconds ticking away and it struck me that had I called the police from the basement instead of charging upstairs to engage the enemy, these two men would have been upstairs with Allie and Abby. Because of our isolation.

I understood that then, just like I understood it now. If this Bald Man decided to make trouble, I still had the isolation problem.

Craig had parked his car in my yard before riding to the radio station with me. Usually talkative, he fell silent as I turned off 62 and began the leisurely crawl up the dirt road to my house. Although he didn’t share them, I read his thoughts. How the hell can you guys stay out here after what happened?

“B.F.E.,” I said as we emerged from the woods and the headlights splashed across the covered front porch of my house.

“Say what?”

“Butt-fuckin’ Egypt,” I explained with a partial smile. “My brother Bobby used that phrase to describe this place the first time he saw it. I said, how do you like my new house, and he said, you live out in butt-fuckin’ Egypt. So when we called 911 that night and they asked us where we were, we said, B.F.E., N.C.”

I laughed. Craig did not. When we pulled into my garage and said our goodbyes, he stopped beneath the orange glow of the light over the driveway and turned to face me. I thought for sure he would ask if I’d ever considered selling this place and moving back into town, but he didn’t.

“You did get really, really lucky,” he remarked.

“I know.”

He paused, lips pursed. He had another question loaded but seemed like he didn’t know how to ask it. Didn’t know if this new, volatile Kevin would unload on him the way I had unloaded on the Bald Man on the radio. So, very carefully, he asked, “You’re a Democrat, right?”

I stepped forward and rested against the trunk lid of the BMW. I folded my arms. “Yeah.”

“You voted for Barack Obama. You voted for John Kerry, you voted for Al Gore.”

“True, true and true.”

“You don’t hunt deer, squirrel or even housefly. You don’t hike, kayak, any of that shit. You’re not a sportsman.”

“I’m not.”

He cocked his head to one side, chewing on the ultimate question.

“So… why do you have an AK-47? I mean, that is a whole lot of gun, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I admitted.

He waited for further explanation.

“I was waiting for the race war,” I finally said. “So when I saw two black guys in my house, I said holy shit, Helter Skelter’s coming down. Yee-haw.”

“Come on, man. For real.”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “And I’ll tell you sometime. Just not tonight. And not before you buy me at least three beers.”

Sometimes, Allie waited for me on one of the barstools arranged around the island, her most recent find from the library open on the table before her. Other times, she lay on the couch in the living room, sleeping, the book resting on her chest. Tonight, I found her in neither. She had left the stove light on, though, and its sickly glow rolled across the granite countertops and disappeared into the floor. She had done this so that I wouldn’t have to fumble around in the dark for a light switch.

I shut the door to the garage and stood there, listening to the hum of the refrigerator compressor and the soft whoosh from the vents as the thermostat clicked and the air conditioning kicked on.

They’re dead. They’re lying upstairs in the beds where they were raped and strangled and I’m going to find them like that, used and discarded like candy wrappers and

“Allie!” I yelled. “Abby!”

“Upstairs,” came my wife’s distant reply. “Abby’s doing her homework!”

I rubbed my eyes, shaking my head. I trudged over to the refrigerator and grabbed a Heineken, setting my battered Southern Rifleman on the counter next to the bread box. Taking a long pull, I closed my eyes and savored the beer. When I raised my eyelids again, I found myself staring at the two doors set side-by-side into the wall before it opened into the dining room. The one on the right led to the pantry. The one on the left led to the basement.

I stood with my back to the sink and fridge, island and stools at two o’clock, straight shot down the hallway into the foyer. Dark. Same position, same lighting conditions as when I’d shot Pinnix and Ramseur.

The hallway was clean now. The cleaning company had mopped and polished the floor, scrubbed and disinfected the framed pictures and carried away their rags in buckets of pink water. My handyman had patched the bullet holes in the wall with drywall compound, sanded them smooth and then painted them over. Almost like it never happened at all.

I raised my arms as if holding an invisible rifle. I pressed my trigger finger against the Heineken bottle.

“Bang,” I said out loud. Then I moved my imaginary sight just slightly to the right and said it again.

“Bang.”

By the time I finished checking all the doors and windows on the basement and ground floor levels, I had finished the beer. I grabbed another and headed upstairs. I checked the windows in the study and guest bedroom, then stuck my head into Abby’s room. She sat cross-legged on her bed in pajamas, her long brown hair still wet from her shower. A book lay open between her knees. She looked up.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hey. How was school today?”

“Good.”

“What’d you learn?”

“Nothing.”

I looked at her window. The latch pointed to the left, which meant it was locked. “Nothing?”

“Not a thing.”

I looked at the book. “What’s that?”

“Civics. We’re reading about the second Iraq war.”

“Your uncle Bobby was a part of that. You should get him to talk to you about it sometime.”

“Okay.”

She didn’t say anything about the radio show, so I didn’t, either. Maybe she hadn’t tuned in. Sensing that my presence was unnecessary, I withdrew my head and continued into the master bedroom. Allie looked up at me and smiled. “How’s she doing in there?”

“I’m concerned. She spent all day at school and didn’t learn anything. I’m trying to figure out whether it’s the public school system or you drinking during pregnancy.”

“Stop it.”

Off with the suit, on with the battered Carolina T-shirt. I checked the windows remaining unaccounted for—master bedroom, master bathroom—and hopped into bed. She put her book aside and took off her glasses. Her walnut-colored hair framed a face that had outrun the aging process, like a precious doll someone had placed in a velvet-lined box and only took out to show very special people. This is a masterpiece, the doll’s keeper would say. Not owner, but keeper; you didn’t own beauty like this. See the detail of the cheekbones and chin? The eyes? You won’t find work better than this anywhere.

Of course Pinnix and Ramseur had followed her all the way from Durham. Once a man laid eyes on a woman this beautiful it became very, very hard to tear them away. Expose her to the wrong sort of man, and…

“Are you okay?” She asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“I was listening. I heard.”

“Did Abby?”

Allie sighed and shook her head. “No, thankfully. When you went on the air, she was up here screwing around on Facebook. She forgot all about it.”

She had forgotten about it because she had other things going on in her life, important things like boys and the constantly shifting tectonic plates of friendship that comprised the middle school social structure. She could do this because on that night back in February, she saw nothing. She had awakened to the sound of gunfire, but then her mother had appeared in her room, telling her not to be afraid, everything was okay. She hadn’t seen the bodies or the blood, because after the deputies left, I’d concealed the bloody mess with garbage bags so that she wouldn’t see a single drop of it. The mindless terror of that night had missed her; while she had stood closer to ground zero than most people, the incident had, in the end, happened to someone else. Consequently, she forgot about it from time to time. It didn’t rule her life like it ruled mine.

“Thank God for small miracles,” I muttered.

“Who was he,” she asked, dropping the question mark off the end like Dr. Koenig.

“Who?”

“That crazy caller.”

I shrugged and folded my hands on top of my head as I lay on my back. I had read once about sleeping positions and their correlation with personality; lying on one’s back supposedly demonstrates an inner confidence. Hands folded atop or behind the head indicates a cerebral quality that goes along with it. A confident and intelligent man—dare I say hero—would lay like this. I intended to fall asleep in this position. I possessed that inner confidence. Two men had tried to kill me and I’d killed them instead.

As I would kill the Bald Man if he tried anything.

“Some nutjob,” I said. I toyed with the idea of telling her about Ruby the Redneck Fortune Teller but decided against it for the time being. Allie held a college degree, but she still carried around elements of the superstition that her Germanic tribesman ancestors had passed down through the centuries. She would create a connection there that didn’t actually exist, and then she would get scared, because Ruby had said to beware the Bald Man. “Dumbass sitting around in his trailer with nothing better to do than call in to AM radio shows. He’s a nobody. Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re not worried?”

“No,” I lied. “Not one little bit.”

6.

I didn’t fault Craig Montero for asking me why I had an AK-47; I had never told him about it before. Actually, I hadn’t told anyone. Although it was only semiautomatic and therefore perfectly legal for me to own, I considered it one of my dark secrets, evidence of a side of my personality that I didn’t want the outside world knowing about. People would make their jokes about Kevin Swanson ranching up down in the country and getting paranoid just like all the other rednecks out there, but that wasn’t really it. I kept it quiet because it said things about the inner workings of my mind—specifically, that I, Kevin Swanson, attorney-at-law, had considered and accepted the idea of possibly having to take a human life one day. Had I wanted to hunt—which I didn’t—I’d have bought a deer rifle or a shotgun. Had I just wanted to target shoot, I’d have bought a .22 rifle, maybe a pistol. But I had an AK-47, the Kalashnikov so beloved of terrorists and third world armies. This said things about me that I didn’t want anyone hearing.

I also didn’t want to explain how I came to own it. The short answer: my dad left it to me. Like most short answers, though, this one is grossly inadequate.

My father died three years ago, when I was thirty-three and he seventy-five. The year before that, he suffered a series of small strokes that profoundly altered his personality and rendered him unable to continue living alone in the house at Rock Barn. While Bobby and I could occasionally forget that our father was old, the strokes reminded us. Even doctors have health problems; even nonsmokers and marathon runners begin to break down. For my father, it happened at seventy-four, when the hard drive in his head started to go bad.

Although Allie and I lived closer to Hickory than Kate and Bobby, I didn’t get out there very much. I could blame Carwood, Allison and its needy clients, but truth be told, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see him struggle for the names of everyday objects; I didn’t want to hear him complain about my mother like she was still alive and lying drunk on the couch in the living room. So I turtled up. I went to see him maybe once every month or two, ignoring the rapidly approaching time when I couldn’t see him at all.

Yes, I am ashamed of myself.

Kate and Bobby, on the other hand, traveled there every weekend. When Bobby deployed to Iraq, Kate quit her job in Jacksonville and actually moved in at Rock Barn. She called us daily with updates on Dad’s status, for which I was profoundly grateful because looking back on it, I don’t think I would have called on my own.

Shortly after he returned from the hospital after the last of the smaller strokes, Kate called to say that he had begun seeing things. This occurred mainly near the end of the day, when the sun grew low in the sky and lengthening shadows combined with a tired and damaged brain to create an environment ripe for hallucinations.

“There are people in the yard,” he told her. “Back and front. We have to do something about this.”

“They’re looking for their golf balls, Daddy,” she replied. By this point, he had forgotten that Kate wasn’t actually his daughter. But, honestly, so had the rest of us.

“That’s what happens when you live on a golf course.”

“No,” he insisted. “Not golfers. Not those kind of people. Other people.”

“What kind of people?”

“Others,” he said, face scrunched with worry. “And they want us.”

They had this exchange dozens of times, my father insisting that he saw people in his yard—which irritated him, because he spent a great deal of money on landscaping—and Kate doing her best to assure him that no, he didn’t. When she asked him what these others looked like, his lips would tighten into a nearly invisible line and he would shake his head and he would stand beside whatever window he’d spied them from, maintaining a watch.

These others appeared with greater frequency as time went on. When they began showing up at night, my father would shuffle into Kate’s room and wake her up.

“They’re trying to get in,” he hissed. “We have to call the police!”

“There’s nobody out there,” she replied. “Just go back to bed and try to relax.”

God bless her, but you can’t say go back to bed and try to relax to a man convinced that shadowy assailants are trying to break into his house. Eventually, he grew so frustrated with Kate’s continued lack of interest in their mutual safety that he called the police himself. After he pulled this a few times, she hid the phone and told us that we needed to consider putting him in a rest home, a request I denied for weeks until I finally relented and made the journey out to Conover to broach the subject with him. As I expected, that discussion didn’t go well. It ended with me getting up from the living room couch and storming out the door, hunching my shoulders to protect my neck from the arrows of ugliness he shot at me. I remember getting into my car and thinking about Abby, that sweet little face that recalled my mother and my wife at the same time, and I thought, I’m never going to do this to her. I’ll kill myself first.

I didn’t come back for two months. And when I did, I only came because I had to. After my father’s war with the people outside his house reached a boiling point.

In addition to milling about in the yard and trampling his flowers, these other people also occupied the trees and peered into the upstairs windows in an effort to pin down his movements. They hid in the bushes and watched him through the downstairs windows. Eventually, they attempted to remove the window screens, a difficult task for them because their hands weren’t like ours.

“They’re claws,” he said later. “Best way to describe ‘em. Claws, talons. Made for tearing flesh, not opening windows. That’s why we have to lock all the windows—sooner or later they’re going to figure out they can just slash through the screens!”

I can imagine how this terrified him—seeing these people, if you could call them that, feeling that them watching him and wondering what they would do when they finally figured out how to get inside the house. I can also imagine how it must have frustrated him when nobody believed him.

So I can understand why he did what he did next.

In the wee hours of the morning approximately four months before he died, the phone rang. I woke up to the shrill electronic chirp and knew it was Kate, knew she had bad news, and so I pretended to still be asleep until Allie reached across my body and picked it up.

“Hello?”

A moment of silence. Then: “You’re… no. Oh my God. Kevin? Kevin, wake up!”

It’s the Big One, I thought, sleep cracking away from my brain like a disintegrating glacier sliding into the ocean. He’s dead. Or on life support in the hospital.

She shoved the phone, which I totally didn’t want, into my hand. “Hello?”

“I had to call the sheriffs on your dad,” Kate said in a ragged voice. “They’re hauling him down to the hospital on an involuntary commitment.”

“What happened?”

“He lost it,” she said.

She had awoken to a series of explosions detonating in quick succession, a sound like fireworks going off inside the house. The sound came from downstairs, and so she leapt from her bed and rushed to the stairwell, halting at the top when she saw the flashes like lightning strikes and heard the crash of breaking glass and understood that my father had a gun.

“Not just a gun,” she explained, “an assault rifle. He had a fucking assault rifle, Kevin, and he was shooting at these imaginary people in the yard.”

According to the Sheriff’s Department, he fired sixty rounds in all, a total of two full magazines. He blew out every window on the ground floor. Once the windows were gone, his bullets sailed unimpeded through the air and crossed property lines to puncture tires, punch neat little holes in garage doors and shatter even more windows on neighbors’ houses. By the grace of God, he fired on a flat trajectory and kept the damage down to ground-level; had he let the barrel get away from him and fired high, he could have shot through bedroom windows and killed the people sleeping there. When the Sheriff’s Department arrived, they found a first floor littered with shell casings, an assault rifle leaning against the fireplace in the living room and a confused old man wandering around trying to remember where he’d squirreled away the rest of his ammunition.

“Where in the hell did he get an assault rifle?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Who sold him that? I want to know who thought it was okay to sell a man of obviously diminished capacity any sort of firearm whatsoever…”

“Kevin, I don’t know!”

Bobby was in Iraq, thousands of miles away from this mess. I wanted to turtle up in the worst way—I did not want to deal with this, I wasn’t equipped for it—but I understood that I wouldn’t get away with that this time. So I dressed, packed a few things and drove the two hours to Conover. I managed to stay awake and avoid running my car into a guardrail on I-40 with the assistance of coffee, bewilderment and a significant dose of worry over the court appearances and appointments I would have to postpone tomorrow in order to take care of this. Because although my father had just blown out his windows and nearly killed a bunch of his neighbors with an assault rifle nobody knew he had, things like court appearances and clients bearing billable hours still seemed important to me and worth freaking out about.

Yes. I was and am a self-absorbed prick.

I met up with Kate in the emergency room of Catawba Valley Medical Center in Hickory. Her hair in a messy blond ponytail poking slightly off-center from the back of her head, she wore blue jeans and one of Bobby’s old T-shirts. Dark circles under her eyes and a drawn quality to her face made me stop and wonder where she had picked up the extra twenty years.

“You talk to Bobby?” I asked as we embraced.

“I called the base. They’re going to try to reach him, but he’s probably in a tent somewhere, so it might be a while. Right now, we’re it.”

“You okay?”

She drew in a long, deep breath. Ki breath, I recognized; Kate possessed this technique, too, because she had taken aikido with Bobby and me. She shook a little bit as she let it out, and I saw on her face the stretched seams that explosive panic had left behind.

“I’m fine. Him, not so much.”

“What the hell happened?”

“The people tried to get in,” she said. “Apparently, he’s been going on patrol every night for weeks, walking around down there with this gun and… I don’t know… staring down these things he’s been seeing. He said they tried to get in. So he stopped them.”

“And all this time, you never knew about the gun?”

She gave her shoulders a tired lift. “I don’t search for contraband, Kevin. Maybe he’s had it for years, who knows? I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing right now.”

“I’m just kind of shocked here, because he’s never said a damn thing about guns my whole life, he doesn’t hunt—hell, he doesn’t even fish—and hey, whoa, here’s a big, fat old gun that carries thirty rounds to a clip and he has one. It just doesn’t add up.”

“He’s got dementia,” she said softly. “Nothing adds up.”

We stood in the waiting room. On a flat-screen television on the wall above our heads, CNN or Fox News or MSNBC or some other 24-hour news channel ran continuous coverage of an airline crash in Europe. Air France, it said. Twisted, smoking wreckage, foreign-looking ambulances swallowing men and women on stretchers, police in odd uniforms holding back the crowds. The death toll stood at three hundred, with more to come because the plane had plowed into an apartment complex on the outskirts of Calais and they hadn’t sifted through all the rubble just yet. An industry spokeswoman called it the worst airline disaster in European history and the largest single-incident loss of civilian life on the continent since the Second World War. I blinked at this calamity on the other side of the world and looked back at Kate.

“Are they going to let me see him?” I asked.

“He’s medicated,” she said.

“I want to see him.”

They had dosed him with Thorazine or whatever they gave crazy people and handcuffed him to a bed in a tiny, glass-fronted room that reminded me of a reptile cage at the zoo in Asheboro. His eyes were closed, his mouth open to the acoustic tile ceiling. His white hair poked out from his scalp in an unruly mess. Pink stains—ketchup or strawberry jam, I couldn’t tell which—marred the chest of the LL Bean pajamas Allie had picked out for him the Father’s Day before. His wrinkled face bore the stubble of a man who needed to shave. Dr. Ernest Swanson had performed surgeries at this hospital—he had actually performed the first heart surgery at Catawba Valley after it opened—and this is where he ended up. Handcuffed to a bed in the ER, with food stains on his jammies.

I should have broken down in tears. But instead, I found myself angry. Irritation at the inconvenience he’d caused me back at work didn’t figure into it; I looked at him cuffed to the bed, and I thought, how could you let it get to this? Obviously, he could have done something to prevent it. This had to be his fault somehow. There had to have been steps he could have taken to prevent himself from descending into this, and yet clearly, he’d screwed up.

He opened his eyes, turned his head to stare at me, then closed them again. For a moment, I thought he didn’t recognize me. But then he said, “Hello, Kevin.”

“You okay?” I asked.

He tried to raise his hands, but the handcuffs stopped them at hip level. “My nose itches.”

Kate reached forward and scratched it for him. He sighed with relief.

“God damn,” he muttered.

“You want to tell us where you got that gun?” I asked.

Kate shot me a look. My father shrugged.

“Well, I guess I got it at a gun store, Einstein. By the way, nice to see you, too. You’ve put on weight.”

I stood beside the bed with my arms crossed over my chest, staring down. Kate stood on the other side, holding one handcuffed hand.

“You could have killed somebody,” I said.

He sighed at this and looked away from me. He shook his head. “I know,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Kevin, be nice,” Kate admonished me.

“It’s okay,” Dad said with another sigh. “Your old man gets you out of bed in the middle of the night to come visit him at the loony bin, it’s irritating, I get it. You’ve got things to see, people to do. Crazy old relatives can be inconvenient.”

I pushed aside the guilt trip. “You know, I don’t think inconvenient is the word here. I think ‘miraculous’ is a better term—I think it’s a miracle that you didn’t kill one of the neighbors. Or Kate.”

He closed his eyes and appeared to engage his own ki breath, even though I knew he had never set foot in an aikido dojo or any other kind of martial arts establishment. Bobby had invited him to come with us, I remembered. But he didn’t have the time. As a surgeon, he couldn’t risk the injury to his fingers and hands that would surely result from hopping around a room in white pajamas.

“Hindsight’s 20/20,” he said, shrugging.

“You understand that maybe you’re not firing on all eight cylinders now?” I asked. “I mean, do you realize that you were shooting at people who weren’t really there? Do you understand what that means?”

“It means I can’t live on my own anymore,” he said softly. “It means you all are going to put me in a home.”

“Are you going to fight us? I mean, you don’t exactly leave us much choice, do you? Pulling stunts like that?”

“I’m crazy,” he said, eyes closed, not looking at me. “I know. Okay? And I screwed up, I realize that. So get off it, okay?”

“I want to know if you really get that or if you’re just saying it so we’ll let our guard down and you can get out there and do it again.”

“Kevin…” Kate groaned.

“Didn’t we have a conversation about this here recently?” I continued, speaking to my father. “Do you remember telling me to kiss your ass, you weren’t going anywhere? You remember calling me a greedy son of a bitch who just wanted to get his hands on your house?”

“Not really. But if I said that, I apologize.”

“So you get it now? You understand that there is no way in Hell you can be allowed to stay out in the world when you pull crap like that?”

He nodded.

“Really? You get that there was nobody there?”

“Completely.” He turned his head to Kate’s side of the bed. Her tired, drawn expression softened.

“Sugar,” he said, “you mind letting me talk to him alone for a minute?”

“As long as you don’t chew him up too badly,” she replied. She looked at me as she said it, and I couldn’t figure out if she meant that for me or for him. But either way, she gave his hand one more squeeze and retreated behind the curtain. I felt the air pressure change as the door to my father’s glass cage opened and closed. No sooner had this happened than his act fell away and his expression changed entirely.

“Listen,” he said firmly.

Taken aback by the sudden shift, I blinked.

“I know what I saw,” he said in a voice as hard as his face. “I’m not crazy. Those people were out there. They figured out how to get the goddamned screens off and they were on their way in. I did what I had to do.”

I swallowed. “Dad…”

“Don’t ‘Dad’ me, just listen!”

I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, too. He looked briefly over my shoulder and then back at me.

“I haven’t told her what they look like,” he said with quiet urgency, “because I don’t want to scare her. I haven’t told her the whole story, either. And I haven’t made up my mind yet whether I’m going to tell you. But I need you to promise me that you’re not going to let her go back to that house. Not to stay by herself.”

“Just in case those things that were out to get you come back?”

“No,” he said. “Those things that were out to get her.”

My insides got cold. Silly, because my father was just talking crazily and I should have remembered that, but I felt cold anyway.

He wetted his lips with a tongue that made a brief appearance and withdrew back inside his pinched mouth.

“They’re… not from here,” he continued. “They’re from somewhere else. And they want to take her back with them. I bagged a few of them, but there’s more out there, so I want you to take her back with you. Keep her until Bobby gets back.”

I had no problem with this part of it. Although Allie and I wouldn’t move out to the country for another year at that point, our old house in Burlington had more than enough space to move another adult in with us, especially on a temporary basis. And Allie and Kate got along better than sisters.

“So here’s a deal for you,” he said. “I’ll go into a home without a fuss. But you got to take Kate.”

“Deal.”

“And you got to take the gun.”

Now I scowled. “Excuse me?”

“Go to the Sheriff’s Department and pick it up. Take it home with you. Learn how to use it.”

“I don’t need an assault rifle.”

“Yes you do, for when they come after you. Don’t be a pussy, Kevin. Take the goddamned rifle, learn how to use it and defend your family with it.”

“Can you at least tell me who these guys are?”

My father pursed his lips.

“They’re evil. If you don’t have the gun, they’re going to get Kate. And then they’re going to get you.”

7.

After a quick check of my criminal background, the Sheriff’s Department in Catawba County released the rifle to me upon my promise to never, never ever let my father have it back. Before retrieving it, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a case for it, because it seemed strange to throw a rifle in the trunk of my car and just carry it home that way like it was nothing, like my dad had given me his electric hedge trimmers or his toaster instead of a lethal weapon. I put the key for the lock on the chain with my car keys. Effectively, I announced to myself my intentions of not only taking the gun, but keeping it.

When I carried the rifle out of the Law Enforcement Center—empty, of course, bolt open, the two spent box magazines rattling in each of my side pockets—I opened the trunk and laid it gently atop the egg-carton foam that lined the case. Then I stepped back and stared at the rifle in the light of the morning sun. The matte finish absorbed the light, creating something of a black hole right there in the trunk of my car.

I am a gun owner, I thought.

And not just any gun, either. Inside the LEC, I’d mentioned to the deputy that the weapon looked familiar, and he said I’d probably seen it in the movies. It was a Kalashnikov AK-47, he told me, Russian manufacture, which made it more valuable. That’s a bad-ass piece of hardware, buddy. Staring down at it, I reflected that it was indeed bad-ass, but also wholly unnecessary. Not just to me, but to anyone; I’d long felt that the government needed to ban these things. I voted for people who wanted to eliminate weapons like this from American households. Yet now I not only had an assault rifle in my trunk, but I’d bought a case and lock for it. Evidently, I planned on keeping it, which made no sense because I was not and had never been an AK-47 kind of guy. I stared down at the weapon and I thought to myself, why are you doing this?

And the answer came: I don’t know.

No, I didn’t know. At the time, I would have said—as I said to Allie—that I wanted to humor my ailing father and that I wanted to hold onto it until Bobby got back from Iraq. But I never turned it over to Bobby, and after my father died, I didn’t sell it, pawn it or do any of those other things people might do with unwanted property. By this point, I had bought a safe for it, and I had bought ammunition. Publicly, I continued to vote Democratic and joke about right-wing lunatics, all the while saying nothing about the little secret in my basement. On some level, I believed my father’s warnings. Evil existed. It had claws. And someday, it would try to get me.

He’d been right.

And the Bald Man, whoever the hell he was, had been right, too. That I just happened to have an AK-47 down in my basement seemed like an incredible coincidence. Had I seen it in a movie, I’d have said yeah, right, because it didn’t seem believable. Guys like me normally didn’t even own guns, let alone Soviet military hardware. No one understood that better than I. When you added all the truths of my life and personality, the math said that I shouldn’t have had a firearm the night those two yahoos attacked my home.

The implications of this truth haunted me as I sat on the couch in Dr. Koenig’s office, pondering what would have happened had I refused the gun. Pinnix and Ramseur would have gotten upstairs.

Rape.

Murder.

I shivered.

“Did the caller scare you?” Dr. Koenig asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

I had told him about the radio show and the Bald Man. Now I told him about the rifle, how I’d come to own it and how such a thin little thing had made a difference between life and death. My mind kept returning to this—these, actually, because so many thin little things had determined the outcome of that night. Remove any one of them…

“I think what’s happening in my nightmares,” I said, “is I’m re-living the experience. I’m trying to assure myself that I would have prevailed no matter what, so my brain’s in there running these little what-if productions and trying to work out ways I could still come out on top. During the day, I think about it all the time because my brain is training for the next time it happens.”

Dr. Koenig shifted in his seat. The sun had warmed his office to the point where he’d found it necessary to roll up his shirtsleeves and loosen his tie. Fashionably rumpled; Steve Jobs would have approved. He looked up at me and canted his head to one side, his mouth an unreadable line. I had come to understand that this was his way of telling me to elaborate, because I had said something that interested him.

“And I feel like it is going to happen again,” I said. “Or it could.”

“Because of the caller,” Dr. Koenig said. “The one who calls himself the Bald Man.”

“Yes.”

I wanted to tell him about what Ruby had said at the flea market back in 1989. But how do you discuss such things by the light of day? I had the strong suspicion that if I started talking about redneck psychics and what they may or may not have foretold, Dr. Koenig would have called the men in white coats to come and take me away.

“You’re afraid of him,” he observed.

I nodded. “Crazy people are scary.”

“Why do you think he refers to himself as the Bald Man?”

Because 23 years ago, a old psychic who looked like a strip of beef jerky threw me out of her trailer right before telling me to look out for him. “I don’t know, maybe because he’s bald. You’re bald, by the way.”

“I don’t listen to Billy Horton.”

“Didn’t figure you did.”

I rubbed my forehead, looking down. The coffee table looked back up at me with its crappy veneer trying and failing to conceal that fiberboard core. I wondered what the Chinese who manufactured garbage like this said when they packed it into boxes and sent it off to the discount stores. The Americans are a shallow people, they probably said. Look at what they want, look at what they buy. It’s not wood, they know it’s not wood and yet they don’t care. It doesn’t matter to them that it’s really only sawdust and glue sandwiched between sheets of photo-etched plastic. It’s cheap. That’s all they want.

“Do you think you’ve encountered this man before?”

I looked up. “No. I know a lot of bald guys, but none of them would call me out on the damn radio. You want to know what I really think? I think I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“What did these guys look like, Pinnix and Ramseur, the men who broke into your house?”

I blinked. I looked towards the window, then down at my issue of Southern Rifleman. “Um… they were black—African American, I mean.”

“Tall, short, fat, skinny? Thick lips, thin lips, big noses, small noses, scars, facial hair, who are we talking about, here? If you hadn’t shot them, if they’d run off into the woods, what would you have told the police to differentiate them from any other black guys?”

No one had ever asked me that before. What did they look like? The police hadn’t asked, because they’d seen the bodies. The reporters hadn’t asked, Allie and Abby hadn’t asked, Craig Montero hadn’t asked, Tom Spicer hadn’t asked. So I hadn’t considered it. As many times as I’d re-lived that shooting in my mind, I had never examined their faces. I hadn’t needed to.

But now Dr. Koenig wanted me to describe them and I drew a blank.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t see their faces. I’m sitting here trying to remember and I just… can’t. I can see bodies lying in the hallway, I can see myself shooting at them, but no faces. What do you think that means?”

He recrossed his legs.

“You tell me.”

I looked at the window. Outside, the sun shone down on a concrete bench, the kind you see in graveyards with nobody sitting on them. The bench stood between two adolescent trees. Dogwoods, I thought. Or Eastern redbud. Without flowers, I couldn’t tell which.

“Why don’t we do a little exercise?” Dr. Koenig asked.

“What kind of exercise?”

“Why don’t you tell me what you do remember?”

And so I did.

“I was down in the basement,” I began, “watching the Carolina-Virginia Tech basketball game.”

8.

Get up.

When I first regained consciousness, I perceived only pain. Fresh agony detonated in my head with each heartbeat. Lightning bolts flashed across my skull, only unlike real lightning, these struck in the same place every time. When they did, the colors on the backs of my eyelids pulsed and changed.

My first thought, in my own voice: I’m blind.

The second, delivered in Bobby’s: get up.

I can’t, I thought. I’m blind.

Open your eyes and get the fuck up. There’s no time.

To my surprise, I could see. I lay on my side, wedged in between my coffee table and the beige sectional that once dominated the living room of the first apartment that Allie and I lived in after we got married. Too large for the apartment, it fit just fine in my man-cave, down here with the flat screen television and all my other fantasy furnishings. I felt the hard footrest, retracted inside the frame, pressing against my skin through my Carolina tee shirt. My ass felt it through my jogging pants.

Despite what it had witnessed, the television kept playing.

“SCORE! Another three-pointer by Harrison Barnes, the freshman from Ames, Iowa!”

The game. The one I was watching right before…

The ceiling creaked above my head with the pressure of feet on the floor upstairs. I blinked at the acoustic tile I had paid a man to install last year in order to hide the unsightly ductwork and utility lines. The speckled pattern came into focus as my brain continued reassembling itself.

There are men in my house, I thought.

Oh, yeah, Bobby said through the thunder in my skull. Dangerous ones. Move your ass, Swanson.

I blinked, closed my eyes and felt my skull. Right there at the back, where my father used to slap me for one insolent comment or another, a baseball-sized lump rose from bone and skin. It screamed when I touched it, a shout so powerful that it stole my breath and dropped my jaw in search for more air. When I opened my eyes again, they fixated on the foot of the stairs, where someone had haphazardly dropped the aluminum softball bat that had smashed into my skull. It didn’t belong there; it belonged in the back, with the pool table, resting against the wall by the short staircase that led up to the backyard, where I’d leaned it after my last softball game a year, year and a half ago. They’d cracked me over the head with it. They’d left me for dead.

But you’re not dead. Game on, motherfucker, you need to move your ass right now.

I forgot the door, I thought. I didn’t lock the…

Fuck the door; doesn’t matter now how they got in. It only matters how they get out.

I got up, staggered three steps, and collapsed on the far end of the sectional. My balance. They’d knocked the balance clean out of my ears.

I said get up, you sorry sack of shit, get the fuck up and handle this!

So I got up again. On the wall, the 2010-2011 University of North Carolina men’s basketball squad stared at me in their coats and ties above a calendar showing the month of February. Smiling, happy, excited. They’d had a full view of the back door but hadn’t said a word to me. My eyes zeroed in on Harrison Barnes, he of the recent three-pointer.

Why didn’t you warn me?

Barnes didn’t answer.

I almost touched my head again but caught myself. My stomach balled up around the beer and summer sausage I’d been eating when I turned around and saw the two men I didn’t know standing right behind my goddamned sofa in the moment before the one on the left swung the bat.

The police. I have to call the police.

My heart pumped white-hot adrenaline into my legs. They quivered and almost dumped me again, but they held. Instinctively, I looked down at the coffee table in search of my phone. I didn’t find it there, or on the entertainment center, either, or on the pool table or the bar or any of the other places I usually chucked it without giving the first thought to the possibility that it might become vital to my survival. I’d left it…

Upstairs on the kitchen counter, in its charger. Up there with them.

You’re on your own, Devil Dog, Bobby said. You’ll have time to dial the 9 and maybe a 1 before they realize you’re not dead yet and they come to finish the job. It’s all you, Swanson.

“And it’s a foul by Virginia Tech! Tyler Zeller goes to the line!”

On the wall, the junior from Washington, Indiana took to the free throw line in the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill. His stadium. His court. His home.

I took to the line. I rounded the edge of the sectional and headed for the bar, where the gun safe stood beside the glass-fronted liquor cabinet.

Move your ass, Bobby hissed again. Move it fast. You don’t have much time.

I blinked at the combination dial on the safe’s narrow rectangular door. The combination itself leapt to the front of my mind easily enough-05-24-77, Allie’s date of birth—but the numbers themselves presented a challenge. The dial divided in two, three, two before my eyes, their focusing mechanisms knocked loose by the impact of bat on bone.

Hurry!

I reached for the dial. My hand held it still. “I’m trying,” I whispered aloud.

Try harder. Maybe they’ll look around your living room for a few minutes or poke around in the office, sack your drawers and grab the laptop. But then they’ll go upstairs. And they’ll look in the bedrooms.

Zero. Five. Two.

These motherfuckers have overrun your perimeter. What do you think’s going to happen when they find your wife sleeping in her underwear?

Four. Seven.

MOVE YOUR ASS!

“I am!” I whimpered now, tears streaming down my cheeks as my trembling hands worked the dial. On the final seven, the tumblers clicked and I twisted the handle, pulling open the fireproof door. On the top shelf, my and Allie’s life insurance papers shared a file folder with our wills. Documentation of Abby’s college fund, the deed to our house. Account numbers, passwords, the entirety of our financial lives on paper. Two boxes of Russian surplus 7.62mm cartridges. Standing on its stock against the green velvet interior, the Kalashnikov.

Come on! Man up!

I took the thirty-round banana clip from its resting place beside the box of bullets. The cartridges, copper-coated stingers crimped into the rocket of the brass casing, gleamed in the dim light over the bar. The magazine contained ten rounds; Bobby had said to always keep a loaded magazine, always, because you won’t have time to prepare one when the shit hits the fan. Load ten so you don’t stress the spring. Change to a different magazine every month, two months. Leave any magazine loaded too long, the spring will weaken and your weapon will jam.

I hadn’t changed the magazine in two years.

Too late now. Lock and load!

I tapped the magazine on my thigh to align the rounds, as Bobby had shown me. Holding the rifle by the pistol grip, I slipped the mag home just fore of the trigger guard, feeling it slide into place. I pulled the charging handle and released it. It slammed forward with a metallic click, pulling a round from the magazine and seating it in the firing chamber.

“Locked and loaded,” I whispered.

Safety off.

My right thumb reached up and flicked the switch.

Game on, bitch.

“Game on,” I repeated.

The door stood partially open at the top of the stairs. They hadn’t thought enough of me to even close the door on my body. The light over the stove peeked through the foot-wide space as I mounted the stairs and began my slow climb. I kept the AK-47 trained on that light. The wooden stock rested in the pocket of my shoulder, my trigger finger extended and ready beside the trigger guard No prisoners, Bobby said.

“No prisoners,” I murmured.

My stairs were wood, plain pine board, but I had paid to carpet them in the basement renovation. The carpet and the pad beneath it muted the creaks from the wood as I moved my weight over it. The men would not hear me. They couldn’t have heard me, not over the creaking of the floorboards. Not over their furtive whispers, which grew in volume as I neared the top of the staircase.

“Sure he’s dead?”

“I split his fuckin’ head. ‘Course he’s dead!”

“Go down and check.”

“I ain’t checkin’ shit!”

Only dimly conscious now of the pounding in my head, I pushed the door open with the rifle’s barrel. The door creaked softly on its unoiled hinges. I stopped.

Home Invading Bastard Number One: “You hear that?”

Home Invading Bastard Number Two: “Hear what?”

Home Invading Bastard Number One: “Door.”

Home Invading Bastard Two: “I ain’t heard a damn thing.”

I couldn’t shoulder through such a narrow space. I’d have to push the door open at least another foot, foot and a half. When I did that, the hinges would scream. Their voices put them in the hallway that shot off the kitchen and led into the living room. They stood right beside me; just inches of studs and drywall separated my right ear from their knees.

There they are, man, Bobby said. You need to bust up in there like Jackie Chan, homeslice. Don’t give them time to react.

I won’t, I thought.

Don’t hesitate.

I won’t, I said again.

Engage the enemy with extreme prejudice.

I will. And at that, I charged the door.

The door hinges screeched as I hit the wood. I covered the last three steps in a single leap that launched me into the kitchen. The AK-47 held out before me commando-style, I rocketed past the breakfast nook and collided with the edge of the counter. I spun on my feet, running backwards now. I stopped when my ass slammed up against the kitchen sink.

There. In the hallway. Two men dressed in dirty winter coats and black jeans, one carrying a bag. Skull caps. One right behind the other.

Blurry faces.

“Fuck,” said the first one.

Game on, bitch!

I pulled the trigger. Then I pulled it again.

The AK-47 barked, and in the muzzle flash I caught sight of the blur that constituted the man’s face. Although I couldn’t make out his features, I knew in my heart they showed shock, surprise, fear and astonishment. Something in the darkest part of my soul sang with glee. His body jerked like a paper target as bullets tore into his chest. Two to the chest, one to the head, the Mozambique drill that Bobby had shown me, because the recoil will automatically align the barrel with the enemy’s face after round two and…

My trigger finger curled again, quick but controlled. The man dropped.

Shell casings ejected from the semiautomatic action and pinged off of the Wolfgang Puck cookware Allie had hung from the ceiling rack. Ping ping ping, like a demon playing the triangle. The first man dropped, but his partner staggered backwards, blood and brains on his chest. I charged forward, bringing the barrel down for another Mozambique drill, two to the chest, one to the head. Lightning flashed in the kitchen and sent shell casings skittering across the travertine floor. Two to the chest, one to the head. The last bullet struck him between the eyes—pure luck, because my aim sucked even under the best conditions—and his head jerked backwards, the cap flying off just before the backside of his skull disappeared in a shower of bone and brain that splattered the portrait of Allie and I on our wedding day. The body fell.

Acrid gun smoke permeated the kitchen. It smelled nothing like the smoke of Allie’s candles, firewood in the wintertime or cigars on Bobby and Kate’s back porch. Sharp, ammoniac, chemical smoke stung my nose and sinuses and made them ring like my ears. I thought I heard yelling somewhere far off, but I couldn’t identify the voice because the gunfire had momentarily deafened me. I heard now only that ringing in my ears and popular song from the radio in my law school days.

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

Drowning Pool, I remembered, a song called, appropriately, “Bodies.” That lead singer had died. Drug overdose, car accident, plane crash. Something rock-worthy.

Ears clearing slightly, I identified Allie screaming upstairs. “Kevin? Kevin?”

“I’m okay!” I shouted, advancing into the hallway. “Stay where you are! Call 911!”

“Oh my God, what happened?”

“Get Abby!” I yelled. “Don’t let her come down!”

The danger, I knew from the silence and utter lack of motion, had passed. Still, I didn’t want my daughter seeing this mess. I looked at the wall. My lovely wife, her strapless wedding gown displaying the tanned shoulders of a movie star, smiled at me from the last decade. She held a bouquet of flowers in that picture, but I couldn’t see them now because a piece of somebody’s skull was sliding down the glass on a snail trail of blood.

I felt strangely detached. Shock, perhaps; a surreal quality to my surroundings made it difficult to fully process things like the red goo all over Allie’s wedding portrait. I saw it, but my brain didn’t fully implement its presence. I had two dead guys in my hallway, blood everywhere and pieces of their heads all over my family’s pictures, but this didn’t bug me at all.

I stepped into the hallway and looked down. The complete lack of give-a-shit I felt in the kitchen changed not one whit with a closer look. The second body, the one whose head had so spectacularly disintegrated, stared up at the ceiling. With the back of his skull gone, the front had lost the structural support it needed to keep his face lined up, and it had flattened. It looked not like a human face now, but rather a mask—stretched, rubbery features, sightless eyes painted into the sockets. And it was a mask, really. A demon had put it on just before breaking into my house.

I looked down at the dead man and his partner, both of them unrecognizable as human beings.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” I asked.

The body didn’t answer, but I felt like turning the rifle upside down and smashing the butt into the rubber mask anyway. I wanted him to be alive, if only so I could kill him again.

Good job, Bobby said. For real, that was some serious class-A work. You’re a hard son of a bitch, Swanson.

I smiled. I didn’t know what I looked like, but I knew this would horrify my wife and child in a way a couple of dead bodies could never do.

“Good to go,” I croaked.

9.

I told Dr. Koenig everything. Including how I felt about it.

He said nothing for a very long time. His sharp features remained blank, the workings of the mind behind it veiled and undetectable. When I finished, he just adjusted his glasses, rested his face on his open palm and stared.

When he finally spoke again, he said, “That is an incredible story. I’m sure I said that before, but I have to say it again; it’s absolutely incredible. On a number of levels.”

“It is. That’s why it’s news. You don’t get a writeup in Southern Rifleman for buttering your toast.”

“You stood over the bodies and looked straight down and you still don’t remember their faces.”

“There’s nothing to remember. I mean… have you ever seen a face with no bone behind it? It’s skin. That’s all it is, skin—that’s why I remember a couple of Halloween masks, because that’s all I saw. My bullets took off the backs of their skulls. Their own mothers wouldn’t have recognized them. So if you’re going to run down a theory like I can’t remember their faces because I don’t want to confront my feelings over having taken two human lives, you’re not going to get anywhere. I can remember their faces because by the time I got a good look, they didn’t have any faces for me to remember. And I think I have a bigger problem than that.”

“Which is?”

I leaned forward. I had curled my issue of Southern Rifleman into a tube, and now I let it unroll into a halfpipe. I set it down on the frat-boy coffee table.

“It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “What happened. I’m not sorry at all. Actually, when I get anxious or worried or upset or anything—like when I think about this Bald Man maybe showing up at my office one day to confront me—I think about those two dirtbags hitting the floor, and I’m like, I did that. And I feel proud. What do you call a guy who not only feels no remorse, no revulsion, no anything over killing somebody but rather revels in it?”

“Psychopath,” he replied.

“Exactly. I think some of my issues relate back to that. On a significant level, I’m worried that I might be a psychopath.”

I sat back.

“I’m a lawyer,” I continued. “My daddy was a doctor. I went to college, I went to grad school. I wear a suit and tie to work every day. I stop for red lights. I’ve been with the same woman since I was eighteen years old and I don’t beat my kid. Up until now, I’ve always thought, Kevin, you’re all right. Nobody’s perfect, but you’re okay. Maybe you haven’t achieved anything great, maybe you haven’t dedicated your life to serving your country like your brother, but you’re still a good person. You can be proud of that.”

I shook my head.

“And then this thing happens. It’s like a load of dynamite exploded and blew off the north face of my soul and now I really see what’s in there. I can kill people and not give a rat’s ass. Hell, I get off on it. Doesn’t that make me a bad person?”

“Psychopaths don’t worry about being psychopaths.”

“Then what’s the next disorder on the spectrum?”

Dr. Koenig looked down at his notes. Trying to decide, probably, what kind of –opath I was if I didn’t quite fit the psychopath mold. Because something was obviously wrong with me.

But as I thought about that, I found the idea more than a little thrilling. I thought about the Bald Man threatening me, and the slightest of smiles crept towards the corners of my lips. Motherfucker, I said into the ether, willing the message into the brain of this faceless caller. You better watch your ass. You don’t know who you’re fucking with.

Dr. Koenig cleared his throat. “Thinking back to what your troublesome caller said, does the timing of this bother you at all?”

I scowled. “Timing?”

“You got hit on the head.”

“Yes.”

“With a softball bat.”

“Yes.”

“These men—Pinnix and Ramseur—singled your family out because they were attracted to your wife and perhaps your teenage daughter, too. Hell-bent on rape, correct?”

“Correct.”

“So why do you think they screwed around in your hallway for such a long time?”

I sat up, eyes narrowing. I felt defensive then, just like I’d felt when the Bald Man called in to the Billy Horton Show. I also felt a bolt of anger, because I was paying this guy. And he wanted to question my version of events like some dickweed lawyer doing a cross-examination? Hell, no.

“What are you implying?” I asked.

“I’m not implying anything. I’m asking an honest question. If they wanted to rape your wife and daughter, and if you consider that everybody knows that bedrooms tend to be on the second floor of two-story houses, why do you think they hung out in the hallway long enough for you to get yourself together?”

I stared at him. The temperature in his office dropped ten degrees.

“Are you asking if maybe…”

He stared back at me, face expressionless.

“…I got them on their way down?”

His nostrils flared slightly with each breath. He said nothing.

“You think I was laying down there unconscious while they… and then I just caught them on the back end? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“I don’t know, Kevin,” he said softly. “But I think I’d like to talk to your wife.”

10.

My therapist wanted me to bring Allie in so that we could seriously discuss the possibility that she’d been plugged by two different guys in her own bed and didn’t remember it. Like she would come in and we would all talk about this and she would say, wow, you know, that totally slipped my mind.

“That’s bullshit,” Bobby said on the phone that afternoon. He spoke to me from his house in Jacksonville, three hours away. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

“I know,” I said. I sat in my office chair, sweat forming between my ass cheeks and the fabric of my polyester blend pants. Five o’clock had come and gone, but Carwood, Allison wasn’t a go-home-at-a-reasonable-time kind of outfit on the best of days. “But he just kind of came out of nowhere with it. And I didn’t know what to say because I had never considered it.”

“How is that even possible? Do you honestly think it could have gone down that way? Seriously?”

I paused.

“Well?” He demanded.

“No,” I said.

“Right. You’d know if something was wrong, you bet your ass you’d know. Think about it; does she act any different when you’re having sex? Does she get all weird? Stiffen up? Cry?”

The same sun that had shown through Dr. Koenig’s picture window tapped at the drawn blinds in my office. I sat with the door closed, safely ensconced in familiar surroundings. Outside the mindfuck world of the shrink’s lair, the idea did seem absurd—while it remained theoretically possible that I’d lain knocked out longer than I’d suspected, neither my wife nor my daughter had shown me any indication of trauma over the past six months. I had the mental problems, not them. And while mine and Allie’s sex life had changed, it had changed in a positive way. A very positive way.

“No, none of that.”

“Right. Exactly. Because that shit didn’t happen. You know what? Ask her. Ask both of them. Say, did either one of you get nailed by one or both of those shitbags I popped in the hallway? Allie? Abby? No? Okay, case closed. They’ll probably laugh at you.”

“They probably will,” I agreed.

“Put this behind you and get your eyes back on the prize. I want to know who this crazy man that called into the radio station is. That could be a dangerous son of a bitch. That’s what you need to be worrying about, not this psychobabble.”

“I know, right?”

“Do some of your lawyer-ninja moves to get your hands on the phone records for that place. Trace the phone number to an address, then go over there and say motherfucker, you want to talk that shit to my face?”

He laughed.

“Tell you what, man, you find him for me, I’ll pack three Haji-killing Marines into the car and we’ll ride on up there to his house.”

Despite the stack of pink message slips by my phone and the even larger stack of neglected files towering beside it, I laughed, too. I felt glad I’d called Bobby. He had a way of putting things in perspective for me.

“In all seriousness, now; concentrate on pinning down this asshole. Good to go?”

The blinds seemed to glow with the sun.

“Good to go,” I repeated.

My sex life had indeed changed in the wake of the shooting. Not that I’d had it bad before, not exactly. Just kind of… routine. After eighteen years, I’d learned to read the cues as to when Allie felt like doing it and when she didn’t. If one of these occasions happened to coincide with a moment where Abby wasn’t up and about and I wasn’t dog-tired from shoveling divorce cases around my office all day, we experienced a few moments of fireworks and then either fell asleep or turned on the TV. I didn’t complain about this; it did the job. Dammit, Jim, I’m a man, not a rabbit.

But my first day back at work after shooting Pinnix and Ramseur, I arrived home to the glow of the kitchen light. In the hallway by the stairs, a single lamp in the office threw a puddle of light into the foyer. When I entered the kitchen, I looked down the hallway and saw Allie standing in it, smiling.

“Rough day?” She asked.

“Very,” I said, reaching into the fridge for a Heineken. I popped the top with the bottle opener on my keychain and took a long drink. “Glad it’s over.”

She padded into the kitchen and stood by the empty stool at the island where Abby typically wolfed down breakfast. The red satin pajama bottoms I’d bought her for Christmas two years ago clung to the gentle swell of her hips below the Victoria’s Secret tank top that was just a size too small. An outfit which she hadn’t worn much before I killed somebody. Let’s be honest, she’d said the night after that Christmas, looking down at her breasts pushing against the white fabric of the shirt. You didn’t buy this for me, you bought it for you. She’d humored me and wore it that night, then out came the baggy sweatsuit and all its sexless siblings again.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too,” I replied, setting the bottle down and opening my arms. She folded herself into me and for a moment, neither one of us said anything. This, right here, was another thing. I missed you. No icy wind of disapproval borne on baleful stares, no guilt trips, no outright aggression over my failure to come home within shouting distance of five o’clock. Victoria’s Secret and I missed you.

I buried my face in her hair and raised my eyes to look down the hallway.

Let the bodies hit the floor

Let the bodies hit the floor

“Everything okay?” She asked my chest.

“Same as always,” I said.

“Sure?”

“Right now, I feel great.” I dropped my hands to the small of her back, toned and hard from the hours she spent teaching aerobics every week. I relaxed instantly.

“Are you tired?” She murmured.

“A little. Why?”

She reached behind her and moved my hands from her waist to her bottom. I realized then that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

My heart began to pound.

“Because I missed you,” she said, unbuttoning my pants and unzipping my fly.

We did it on the kitchen table, short, intense and explosive. I didn’t last long. That was okay, though, because she didn’t last long, either. When we finished, I took her hand and led her down into the basement, where we each had a glass of red wine at the bar and did it again—slower this time—on the pool table. She didn’t wince, stiffen up, cry, anything you’d expect the survivor of a brutal rape to do the first time she has consensual sex after being forced.

And this made perfect sense to me, because she hadn’t been forced. Pinnix and Ramseur saw her walking with my daughter at the mall and had devised a plan to do that—to force her—but they’d never got the chance. Because I stopped them.

But Allie was only one of two women who lived in my house. So the next evening, I decided to broach the subject with Abby.

Abby had a soccer game that night, and I took her by myself. Allie had a meeting at the Arts Council, so she couldn’t make it. Normally, this would have meant a phone call to another parent and a little shuck-and-jive routine to get somebody else to take her. Post-shooting, however, I could just get up and walk out the door at a normal time and no one would say anything to me about it. Other attorneys would look at me as I walked past their doors on the way out but they’d quickly look away. Only Craig Montero had the balls to speak to me when I left at five-thirty.

“Run, Forrest, run!” He said.

I could count the number of times I’d taken Abby anywhere by myself on one hand, a natural outgrowth of having a lucrative but demanding job and a wife who didn’t work. And as this life went on, my little pink toddler with her outstretched arms had increased in size to where she stood nearly as tall as her mother. Something had happened to her eyes and ears along the way, and she didn’t see or hear me anymore. As the rest of her form developed, her hands had grown a mobile phone that she used to constantly text-message other afflicted children and update her Facebook status. Her ability to communicate in the English language had deteriorated to the point where she could only express herself with her thumbs.

So after the game, I took her to McDonald’s. There, I made the mistake of letting her stand in line with me while I ordered the food.

“You’re Kevin Swanson, aren’t you?”

The girl behind the register looked no older than Abby, although by law she had to be at least sixteen. Large, blue eyes blinked at me from beneath her Golden Arches cap.

“Uhh… yeah.” My left hand held my wallet, my right the credit card I had removed to pay the total. I felt suddenly conscious of Abby’s observant presence beside me.

“Dude, you’re the man. And I mean it, you are the man.”

The manager stopped behind her, looking from my face to the order screen. He wore the shirt and tie that identified him as a person of authority even though his face identified him as someone who couldn’t legally buy a beer. His name tag identified him as RODNEY. He wore a headset and he adjusted the volume on it as he shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “This guy’s not paying.”

The girl looked over her shoulder at Rodney when he spoke. I just blinked. “Umm… it’s okay, I can pay cash if…”

Rodney shook his head emphatically. “No way. Your food’s free tonight.” He tapped a pimply-faced boy, who had been preoccupied with making a fudge sundae, on the shoulder. “Steve, check it out. We’ve got Kevin Swanson up in here.”

Not just here; up in here. The distinction wasn’t lost on Steve, who nearly leapt over the counter to shake my hand. “Kevin Swanson? Holy shit!”

I leaned forward and accepted the proffered hand. Abby, her hair pulled back and her uniform shirt streaked with field dirt, watched silently.

“For real,” Rodney said, crossing his arms over his skinny chest. “Your money’s no good here. Dumb bastards all over the country are gonna have to think again before they go busting up in somebody’s house. You told those assholes.”

“Blew them away,” Steve added.

“It’s too bad you had to waste bullets,” the little blue-eyed angel behind the register offered. “You should have just stabbed their sorry asses and let them die slowly.”

“Bullet’s better than they deserved,” Steve agreed.

Rodney shook his head again and gestured at the tray of food beside the register. “For real, eat up, and if you want more, come and get it. You’re an American hero, dude. You can take that to the bank!”

My face burned. Abby glanced down at her phone—she had put it away for the game, so maybe it wasn’t actually part of her body, like I’d thought—but I sensed she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking at me. But I didn’t know what to say, and so I just said, “Uh… thanks.”

“Sorry to cuss in front of your kid, man,” Rodney said, “but, we… uh… got robbed here last month. Couple of ‘hood rats with sawed-off shotguns. We’re still on edge, you know?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “I know.”

I half feared that Rodney and the rest of his merry but vulgar crew would follow us to our table, but another group of customers walked in and this distracted them long enough for me to grab my tray, grab Abby and retreat to a table at the back of the restaurant. I watched her unwrap her grilled chicken sandwich and take a bite without saying a single word.

“Abby,” I said quietly.

She looked up. Although still a child at thirteen, her face already foretold the woman she would become. She’d inherited Allie’s rich brown hair along with the delicate structure of her mouth and cheeks.

“You’re famous,” she said with a wry smile.

I opened the cardstock box in which my McRib sandwich had come. I didn’t feel hungry anymore, but I understood that at this time of day, I was supposed to eat.

“I never wanted to be famous,” I replied. “Just rich.”

“Seriously! You’re, like, a celebrity! The guys at school have put together an Abby’s Dad Is Awesome page on Facebook. Know who the profile picture is?”

“Who?”

“Dirty Harry.” She talked in between bites. To emphasize the Dirty Harry point, she made a gun with her right thumb and index finger and pointed it at me with a Clint Eastwood grimace. Then it disappeared, and she transformed into a thirteen-year-old girl again. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“Oh. Yeah.” I took a bite. I loved McRib. Allie refused to eat it, claiming that while she didn’t know for sure what they put in it. Personally, I didn’t care. It looked like a rib, it dripped with tangy barbecue sauce and it tasted good. Don’t ask questions; just enjoy.

Barbecue sauce dribbling on my fingers, I set the sandwich down and wiped my hands on a napkin.

“So,” I said. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About what I did.”

She put her sandwich down on the wrapper before her. In the space of just a few moments, she’d almost finished it. She cocked her head to one side, looking away and thinking. Like the hair and face, this gesture very much echoed Allie. “I guess…” she started, then paused. She pursed her lips, her brow wrinkling.

I waited.

“I guess it is what it is,” she said. “I mean, what else are you going to do when two guys break into your house? You do what you have to do to survive. When thugs get all up in your house, you either call 911 or you blow them away.”

She shrugged and appeared to think some more.

“I don’t know, I guess I do think it’s kind of cool. You have this boring job, you go to work in a suit every day, but now you’re, like, an action hero.”

From its position in the box, the McRib called to me. Eat me, it said, bleeding barbecue sauce. Eat me now.

“Death is not cool,” I admonished. “No matter who it is that dies.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Human life is precious,” I said. “All of it.”

“I know, Daddy, chill.”

“I’m not happy about what I did,” I continued. I lied, but if she knew how I really felt, she wouldn’t call me “action hero” anymore. She’d realize that her dad was a psychopath, and so I said the things I had to say, because I so badly needed to hide the ugly truth. “I’m not proud of it. I didn’t even want to do it. In fact, if you and your mother hadn’t been home, I’d have gone out through the basement door and run off, because the only reason I did what I did, and I mean the only reason, is to protect you. They could have taken everything else—the TVs, the computer, the jewelry, everything down to the curtains. I’d have let them.”

She blinked at me. I suddenly felt myself laying it on too thick, preaching now instead of just talking, my tongue dripping not barbecue sauce but bullshit. And the look in her eyes—they were green, like my mother’s—made me realize that I was preaching to myself. She wasn’t listening to me; she was observing me.

But I couldn’t stop. “Those guys will never learn from their mistakes, Abby. Not now, not ever. Whatever they could have become, we’ll never know, because they’re dead. We’ll never get a chance to win them back. And I think it’s sick to celebrate that.”

“And I think that’s a bunch of nonsense,” she said.

My eyes widened. My spine straightened and I drew back, as if she’d just reached across the table and slapped me.

“They were going to rape me, Daddy.” Her voice remained level, but cool. “You shot them, though, so they didn’t. You can say all you want, but to me, I think that’s pretty awesome.”

“Do you know what ‘rape’ means?” I asked. My face felt numb.

“It’s when a guy holds you down and sticks his thing in you even though you don’t want him to.”

They got her. They weren’t after Allie at all; they were after her. They went straight into her bedroom while I laid on the floor drooling in the basement.

“Who told you about that?”

“Come on, Dad, I’m thirteen. By the way, they were going to rape Mom, too. Why else would they have come in when we were home? If all they wanted was TVs and computers and whatever, they’d have been better off waiting until everybody left in the morning. The cops even said that.”

Abby folded her arms. She looked away at something I couldn’t see—an idea, maybe, a feeling—and her eyes narrowed.

“So I guess I don’t really understand why you feel so bad about it,” she said. “They were going to rape me, they were going to rape Mom, so why would you ever feel guilty about shooting guys like that? I don’t get it.”

Are you a pussy, Daddy? She hadn’t asked that, but I heard it dancing around in her words. Are you?

Hell, no, I thought.

Then what are you?

I’m one hard son of a bitch.

“What?”

I blinked. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Your lips were moving. Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am.”

“Then why were your lips moving?” She demanded.

“They’re not.”

“Yes they are.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. Do you feel like I’m sorry about it?”

“It seems like it,” she replied. The chicken sandwich had vanished. During this discussion of things like rape and killing, she’d eaten the sandwich anyway. The subject matter made that small an impact on her. Suddenly, I envied her very much.

“God will forgive you,” she said. “But you know what? I think if you’d let those guys hurt me and mom even though you had a gun and could have stopped it, He wouldn’t forgive you. I think that would have made Him mad. I think that would have made Him really mad.”

My mouth. I couldn’t eat anymore, McRib or not. “I think you’re right,” I said hollowly.

She gestured at my sandwich. “But He’s not mad. And now you get free food at McDonald’s. Which is cool, because you deserve it.”

I swallowed. A ki breath filled my chest. I didn’t want to ask this next question, but I had to. “What do you remember?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About that night.”

She shrugged and stole one of my French fries. I watched every movement of her face, searching for some sign of the truth.

“A bunch of firecrackers going off, then a bunch of screaming. Mom hauling me out of bed, and I’m still half asleep. I’m all like, what’s going on here, and Mom’s dragging me into the bedroom and calling the police. Aside from that, not much. Why?”

“What happened before that?” I asked.

“Uh… nothing. I was sleeping.”

“The whole time?”

“The whole time. What is this?”

I folded my arms. Ki breath. Time to ask point-blank: “There’s a theory,” I said, “advanced by my therapist. You knew I was going to counseling, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“My therapist is wondering if maybe I didn’t encounter these two men on their way out of the house instead of on their way in.”

Her face screwed up with the effort of trying to catch my drift, but then she got it and her eyes widened.

“That’s crazy!”

“Did something happen to you that night that you’re afraid to talk about?”

“No!” She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, no! Eeew, Dad, that’s disgusting! No, nobody ever… yuck! Gross! Absolutely not. I’d have screamed and screamed and screamed. They’d have had to kill me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“You know you can tell me and your mom anything, right? Anything at all? No matter what?”

She rolled her eyes again. “Yes, Dad, I know. Tell you what, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll swear on a Bible that those guys didn’t rape me.” Her eyes came back to center and fixed on me. “And you know why they didn’t rape me? Because you shot them dead.”

She reached out and stole another French fry. To Hell with Pinnix, to Hell with Ramseur, she was hungry.

“And now you have a Facebook fan page.” She smiled and added, “Tell your shrink he’s stupid.”

Her words made me feel better. Her smile made me feel better. I’d watched her reaction to Dr. Koenig’s suggestion and saw nothing hiding underneath it. I looked at the healthy glow on her face—a combination of winning her soccer game, seeing her father worshipped like a god and then getting to tell that same god he was being silly—and I thought, nope. Didn’t happen.

It didn’t happen because I’d been ready. And I’d shot those two pieces of shit like a pair of landfill rats. Whatever remained of Pinnix and Ramseur lay now in a pauper’s grave in Burlington or Durham or wherever the coroner had sent the carcasses. And I sat in McDonald’s, eating free food with my daughter.

And suddenly, I felt hungry again.

“When you’re done,” Abby said, “go up there and see if you can score us some free ice cream.”

11.

That evening, I got on the internet and did a search on how to tell if your kid had been sexually abused. Her eating habits hadn’t changed, her grades hadn’t fallen, she hadn’t started sleeping more or sleeping less, she hadn’t suddenly become any more sullen or cantankerous than usual—nothing to indicate she’d suffered any sort of trauma. As far as I knew, she hadn’t suddenly become sexually promiscuous, either. I finished my web investigation satisfied that as to my daughter, at least, Dr. Koenig was barking up the wrong tree.

But my wife had changed—she’d gotten interested in having sex with me again—and so before bed that night, I asked her.

“Let’s say that I got knocked out longer than I think I did and when I shot those guys, they’d already come up here and… you know. Would you tell me?”

She set down her book, a library hardback with a blurry picture of a girl riding a bicycle down a country road on the cover. She removed her reading glasses and put them on top of it. “Of course I would. Where did this come from?”

“Dr. Koenig,” I said. “He remarked that the timing seems a little messed up with the shooting—he doesn’t think I could get hit, recover and get the gun in time to intercept Pinnix and Ramseur on their way upstairs. So he asked if there was a possibility that maybe I got them on their way down instead of up. Which would mean…”

“I see.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about it, because it didn’t happen. Okay?”

I rolled over on my back and stared up at the ceiling.

“Are you worried?” She asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s just… that caller said a bunch of bullshit, and he rattled my cage. But then my therapist goes and brings up some of the same things, like the asshole might have been right or something, and so that really rattled my cage. Because it’s a good question. When you have so many coincidences and the outcome could change with any one, you do wonder. Sometimes.”

She picked up her book and glasses and placed them on the nightstand. Then she rolled over and propped herself up beside me, her brown hair spilling down over the hand on which she rested her head. I thought then that with a woman so beautiful, it was a miracle she didn’t have crazies following her home every week.

“You know what I think?”

“What’s that?”

“I think that you’re nervous about this whole thing and your therapist threw that out there to make you confront the idea. Bring it up, make you face it, let you put it away. It’s actually a pretty good tactic, I’d say. Do you feel any better after asking me about it?”

“Yes.”

There came a silence then, my mind working through what she’d just said and trying to decide whether or not to tell her that Dr. Koenig wanted her to come to treatment with me. I had agonized over that, because I didn’t want her there. I wouldn’t do that, man, Bobby had said when I asked him about it. You’re supposed to be her hero, which means you’re supposed to be strong. Not breaking down and crying in a shrink’s office. I agreed. My wife now understood better than most women the importance of a strong mate. Sniveling, crying sissies have ways of getting people killed.

“What are you thinking?” She asked.

“I’m just thinking that you’re right,” I replied.

She smiled and turned off the light. “You should be getting used to that by now.”

At our next session, Dr. Koenig was running behind and so I had to cool my heels without him for several minutes. When he came in, he found me standing at the window looking out over that little courtyard, my hands behind my back. Today, an old woman sat on the bench eating popcorn from a small red-and-white striped bag. White-haired and hunchbacked, the she chewed with the slow deliberation of one with few teeth and nothing but time—although, from the looks of her, she didn’t have much of either. A stainless steel walker frame stood parked beside the bench. Her eyes stared into space.

Alzheimer’s, I thought. Dr. Koenig’s office occupied the first floor of a large building; she was probably an outpatient in somebody’s eldercare practice. Right now, a man or woman in his or her fifties or sixties was watching her from another office window I couldn’t see, talking with an entirely different doctor from mine about Mother’s options.

“Who’s that lady out there?” I asked.

“I have no idea.”

He joined me at the window. He had eschewed the informal attire this morning, and now his skinny neck poked out of a white collared shirt, the inverted noose of a necktie falling down towards his beltline. He had important obligations today, people to do, things to see. Drive over to the university in Chapel Hill, maybe, give a lecture to the next generation of psychotherapists so that they could adequately counsel the next generation of neurotic lawyers. Dr. Koenig had a life. When I wasn’t in his office, he probably didn’t even think about me. He ran marathons. He made organic salads.

“She’s got Alzheimer’s,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” I replied. “It’s a guess. More than a third of the population has dementia by her age. Maybe it’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s something. Pick’s disease, Lewy Body disease, vascular dementia, could be anything, I guess. Look at her. Did I ever tell you I have a little experience in the mental health field?”

“You didn’t.”

“I do. When I first started at Carwood Allison, they really hadn’t figured out what to do with me yet, so they had me running around doing all this random shit for this partner or that. I used to tell people at the courthouse I was like a hooker, only I had seven pimps. One of the things they had me do was Guardian Ad Litem work, where you get appointed by the Clerk of Court to represent the respondent in an incompetency proceeding. You know, make sure nobody’s trying to take advantage of them or anything, look out for their best interests.”

The old woman chewed her popcorn. A pigeon lit on the sidewalk at her feet and she stared at it for several seconds before tossing it one white piece. The bird gobbled it whole.

“I get appointed to represent these people, and ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re out to lunch. They have no idea what’s going on.”

I paused, watching her and thinking.

“Once upon a time, I felt sorry for them,” I remarked.

“And now?”

“Now I’m jealous.”

I turned away from the window and walked to the suede sofa where I’d unburdened myself and gotten nowhere. Dr. Koenig took his customary seat. He reached into his briefcase and out came that legal pad, the one where he scribbled notes that he wouldn’t share with me, notes that ostensibly helped him reach a care plan that he wouldn’t share with me, either. I’d grown tired of not sleeping, but I’d grown tired of this, too, this talking. I was sick of talking.

I was sick of everything.

“You’re jealous of Alzheimer’s patients?”

I sighed and shook my head. You couldn’t say anything around a shrink. They’d take it and twist it, and before you knew it, they’d have you strapped into a straitjacket. “It’s just an expression.”

He looked down at his pad again. There came a long pause, as if he had to think hard about how to approach a difficult task.

Then he asked, “Have you talked to Allie about coming in to speak with me?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“A number of reasons. Main one being, I disagree with your little theory.”

“My ‘little’ theory?”

“That I could have laid unconscious for longer than I think—that Pinnix and Ramseur had their way with my wife, my daughter or both and I nailed them on their way out. I mean, don’t get me wrong; it’s an interesting point. And a valid one—the timing is one of the miracles that night. But I talked to them about it. Allie and Abby. It didn’t happen.”

“Do you think that if someone’s willing to go to the lengths necessary to block something out that they’re just going to tell you yes, this terrible thing actually did happen to me?”

I chuckled and shook my head. “No, Doc, I don’t. But I do think that there’d be some kind of cue when you confronted them about it. If a woman gets held down and raped in her own bed, aside from the obvious physical evidence that would exist immediately after the act, there would be… this thing in her mind that she’d have to cover up. I think that if Allie or Abby had been attacked that night in any way, I’d have seen it. The coverup, I mean.”

He studied me in silence, digesting what I’d said. He made a note on his pad and remarked, “Some people are very good liars.”

“Abby’s never been a very good liar. And Allie, well—I’ve known her for eighteen years. I’ve got eighteen years of baseline behavior, and I’m telling you, the only thing that’s changed is she’s into sex again.”

Another glance down at the pad. Due to the angle, I couldn’t see what he’d been writing on it and it occurred to me that it could be anything. I wondered if Dr. Koenig was doodling.

“So you don’t believe there’s a possibility that something else happened there that you’re just not aware of,” he said.

“No,” I replied. “I’ve considered it, I’ve given it a lot of thought and since I see absolutely no evidence to support it, I’m going to go ahead and discard it as a workable theory.”

“Fine. But why haven’t you brought your wife in to see me? I told you I wanted to meet her. She’s not here.”

“She’s not here because I didn’t bring her. I didn’t mention it to her.”

“Why?”

I shrugged and took a deep breath. Not a ki breath—this was just your ordinary, everyday sigh.

“This is kind of a… I don’t know… a weird process. Psychotherapy, I mean. Me coming in here, baring my soul to you. I’m supposed to confess and confront my insecurities. Lay out my fears. I will never look less like a hero than I do in here with you. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to avoid looking like a pussy in front of my wife. Bobby agrees with me.”

That seemed to catch his attention. “You consulted with Bobby about this.”

“I did.” I gave a half-smile. Outside, the old woman had disappeared. All traces of human misery and tragic endings had vanished, leaving behind only the concrete bench and the full, green trees. “Women, he pointed out, want a strong man. Especially women who came within inches of getting raped and probably killed—they don’t want to see you in a shrink’s office, crying about your feelings. They may act all supportive, but what they really want is for you to handle it and go on.”

“This is Bobby’s opinion.”

“It’s mine, too. I’m going to tell you something else; Bobby thinks that what I need to do is go ahead and find this Bald Man who called into the radio show and get in his face. I tend to agree with him there, too, by the way.”

“I see.”

“See what? What is there to see?”

“Bobby,” he said. “He was in your head that night, you said. Coaching you on.”

“He was.” Forearms resting on my knees, I laced my hands. Thinking about Bobby’s running commentary that night made my trigger finger start to twitch.

“Bobby’s your big brother. And he’s a Marine. You look up to him.”

“I do. I actually don’t think I’d have made it that night without him.”

Dr. Koenig nodded again, like all of this confirmed another theory he’d hatched beneath that shiny dome of a scalp. He tapped his pen on his pad and the notes I couldn’t see. I let him think through whatever he had to think through.

Then he said, “I think we need to talk about Bobby.”

12.

I can understand why Dr. Koenig wanted to know more about my brother. What better way to map someone’s internal programming than to examine the people he admired? A man’s heroes offer you a glimpse of that which sets him apart from the frogs and mosquitoes in his backyard. They show you not only who he is, but who he wants to be. Who, given the right circumstances, he may just become.

Bobby hit every life obstacle before I did, so our childhood was a story of him confronting demons, breaking their limbs and tossing them aside while I followed behind and gave their prone bodies a kick or two before moving on. He installed my values. With my father gone all the time and my mother drunk all the time, where else would I get them but television and Bobby? Being older, he also stood taller and ran faster. He snagged a beautiful girlfriend who turned into a beautiful wife, he joined the Marine Corps and he took up arms for his country even though wealthy parents would have paid his way into any lucrative, cushy career he chose. How could I not look up to this guy?

But external indicia of superhumanity win only so much admiration. And growing up in a big house on a golf course limit a boy’s opportunities to show inner strength and determination. Other than my mom lying around drunk, Bobby didn’t have a whole lot of adversity to confront. So while I always looked up to him, I didn’t really begin to appreciate him as a hard son of a bitch until we both reached adulthood. And although I understood that he possessed a certain bad-assedness just by virtue of joining the Marines, I didn’t realize how deep that ran before he got mugged.

We’d grabbed a booth in the corner at Raw Bar in Wrightsville Beach in the last days of July, 2002 after I had just finished taking the bar exam in Raleigh. Bobby’s treat: beer, which I needed then, badly. There came a pause after the second or third pitcher when the conversation lulled, and we both fell silent amidst the cacophony of clinking glasses, laughing drunks and blasting rock n’roll. His eyes drifted over the stumbling college kids and sandblown beach bums, and then he said, “Did I mention I got mugged last night?”

My eyes widened. “Uh, no.”

A proud smile. “You want to hear about it?”

Proud? Proud of getting mugged? Why would anyone smile proudly after announcing they got mugged last night? “You’re damn right I want to hear about it!”

On the table, a half-empty pitcher of Budweiser stood beside a fully empty sibling. I leaned forward to hear better over the Linkin Park piece playing on the jukebox. Bobby’s face glowed red from his time in the sun.

“So I’m tired,” he said, still grinning, “been running around in the woods all day, sweating my balls off. Not getting enough to drink, water discipline. Finish up the march, and I’m like, take me to the river. I’m gonna stick my head in and suck it dry.”

He paused to stare at the bouncer who had just walked by, slowing as he eyeballed us with absolutely no attempt to conceal it. Bobby wore a golf shirt neatly tucked into his khakis, but his haircut screamed “jarhead.” I, fresh off the barber’s chair only yesterday, realized that I’d cut my own hair so short that I probably looked like a Marine, too. One bouncer had probably said to another, there’s two Marines in here. Keep an eye on them, lest they raise Hell.

The bouncer thought I was a Marine just like Bobby. This idea, as much as the titanic amount of beer I had consumed in a relatively short period of time, brought an excited flush to my face. I stared back at the bouncer and thought, what are you looking at, asshole?

The bouncer moved on.

“What’s his problem?” I muttered.

“I know, right?” Bobby snorted. “Punkass. Anyway, where was I?”

“You were going to stick your head in the river and suck it dry.”

“Right. Okay, so I pound all this water, then I get me a Gatorade for the ride home to Wilmington. I don’t even hit the back gate before my dick’s, like, Bobby, I gotta piss. I say, hold it. Dick says, okay, Bobby, I’ll hold it, but you have to move that ass. So I get through the back gate, and I’m on Highway 172, and my dick pipes up again. Bobby, he says, find a gas station or something. And I’m like, goddamn, we’re on 172, there’s nothing out here. Dick says, look, man, you skipped your salt tablet, I’ve got no sodium backing me up, you need to find a gas station or someplace where I can let go of all this water. I say, chill. I figure I can make it to Holly Ridge. My eyeballs will be floating by that point, but I’ll make it.

“So anyway, by the time I hit Highway 17, not only are my eyeballs floating, but it’s leaking out my ears. I’m sweating piss. My dick says, change of plans, here, Devil Dog, pull over. I’m like, you can’t be serious, someone could see me, and my dick replies, find cover. You got thirty seconds, then you’re wetting your pants. Seriously, man, I have never had to take a leak so bad in my life. And there’s nowhere for me to go. I’m in BFE.”

Bobby chuckled, shaking his head.

“But I have to do something, you know? So there’s this abandoned gas station there on the right not long after you turn onto 17 South. It’s pretty dark by now, not as dark as I’d have liked, but this place is abandoned and has no lights. Windows and doors all boarded up, gas pumps gone, weeds as tall as you are shooting up through cracks in the concrete. There’s an old algae-covered boat on a trailer that’s been parked there ever since I got stationed at Lejeune, next to a broken-down old Buick packed to the gills with some redneck hoarder’s shit. Other than that, nothing, nobody. So I pull the Mustang right up alongside and hop out. I waddle around behind the building. I whip out my dick. I start to piss all over this wall.”

The lead singer from Linkin Park had tried so hard and come so far, but in the end, it didn’t even matter. I could have cared less; I listened with rapt attention.

“And I mean piss. It’s the deluge, man, it’s like, yo, Noah, hurry up and get the zebras on the Ark, you know what I’m saying? I piss, I piss and I piss some more. And as I’m pissing, I hear this engine approaching.”

He poured himself another beer. His powerful forearm flexed as he filled his glass. His hands shook not at all.

“I hear brakes, I hear the rpms drop, and I’m like shit, somebody’s stopping. Sheriffs? Highway Patrol? Some shitbag that wants to jack my rims and my radio? I finish up as fast as I can, shake it off, zip it up. Trot around the building. I see the car, and I’m like, awww, fuck.

“It ain’t the sheriffs. It ain’t Highway Patrol. It’s one of those mid-eighties Cadillacs with the tinted windows and those stupid wheels with the thin tires and humungous shiny rims. Gangsta-mobile, you know what I’m saying?”

I nodded.

“Guys that drive cars like that? They don’t stop to help motorists. They don’t stop to help anybody. So I double-time back to the Mustang just as the Caddy comes to a stop behind me. Passenger door opens, this guy gets out and says hey, stickman, where you going? I ignore him and jump in the car. I crank the motor. But my starter’s beginning to wear out, right, so it doesn’t catch until Homeboy shows up at my open window and sticks a gun in my face. He says, ‘Break yourself, motherfucker!’

“I’m like, ‘Easy, buddy.’ He waggles the gun and hollers, ‘I ain’t your buddy, cracker, break yourself! Cash, checks, credit cards!’ Then he adds, ‘And cigarettes!’”

“And you can tell, now, that this guy is on something. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s got that gun right there against my head, maybe two inches from my temple, he has actually stuck his hand and gun inside my car. One twitch of that finger, and I’m dead. No more Bobby Swanson.

“Homeboy screams, ‘Wallet, motherfucker!’

“I’ve got my hands in the air, you know, palms open, one on either side of my head. I’m like, ‘Easy, man, I’ll get you my wallet, okay? It’s under my seat. I’m gonna drop my right hand and reach under there to get it. You cool?’

“Homeboy’s shaking. He’s like, ‘Get that fuckin’ wallet, bitch!’

“So real slowly, I reach down under the seat. I don’t have any wallet under my seat, now. That shit was in my right hip pocket. What I’ve got under my seat is my Glock. I grab it, then I shoot my left hand out and pin Homeboy’s gun hand to the steering wheel. Then I pop out the Glock, and BAM! BAM! BAM!”

He turned to one side to show me how he did it. Holding an imaginary gun in his right hand, he twitched his trigger finger three times.

“Homeboy lets go of his gun and falls backwards onto the highway. I crank the Mustang and peel a wheel. Whip around in a circle. Meanwhile, Homeboy’s shitbag friends saw the flashes and they’re getting out of the Cadillac. So I unload as I drive by. BAM BAM BAM! BAM BAM BAM! BAM BAM BAM!”

His trigger finger contracted repeatedly, the hand moving from side to side to show the shot pattern.

“These shitbags are diving for cover, hitting the deck, diving back into the Caddy; there’s one there in the back seat, waving his arms around like he’s in church and just got the Holy Spirit. I knew I couldn’t get away with actually bagging any of these guys, but I wanted to keep their heads down, you know what I’m saying? I shot the rest of the magazine over their heads. Then I hauled ass up 17 to Jacksonville and called 911 from the nearest pay phone.”

“What happened with the guy? The one you shot?”

“No idea. Cops found the blood on the road, but no car. But listen, there’s a point to this.”

He leaned forward.

“I could have given the guy my wallet, okay? Maybe he wouldn’t have shot me. Maybe everything would have been okay. But maybe not, because this world is full of shitbags. A man that’s asshole enough to rob another man on the side of the road would do about anything.”

His eyes burned with intensity.

“It’s a fucked-up world out there,” he said. “Nice guys don’t finish last; they don’t finish at all. You remember that shit.”

I frowned. “Why are you saying that?”

“Fuck why,” he said. “Just remember it. Don’t ever forget how many fucked-up people exist in this world. They outnumber us. We have to stay frosty. You know what I’m saying?”

My head bobbed like one of those stupid plastic dolls you see on people’s desks sometimes. Bobbleheads; empty lumps of plastic.

“It’s important for you to hear this,” he said. He took a long drink of beer and set the glass down on the table with a solid thwack. Not hard enough to slosh the remaining beer out of the glass, but close. “And it’s important for you to understand that. How fucked up this world and everybody in it actually is. Because I know how you think.”

That conversation played again in my head now, ten years later. The lights in Abby’s bedroom and the master glowed on my approach up the winding driveway from 62 South, the tires of the BMW crunching over the dry shreds of autumn color that had fallen and obscured the driveway. Home late yet again—but I hadn’t missed my girls. I could still say goodnight.

In the garage, I cut off the ignition and got out. We had enjoyed unseasonably warm weather for early October, but the temperature had dropped with the onset of night and my breath came in puffs of steam that vanished in the air as quickly as they materialized. The driver’s door closed with a solid thunk followed only by the ticking sounds of the cooling engine. The exterior lights, streaming in through the Plexiglass windows on the garage door, cast a shadow of my bust over the passenger side fender of Allie’s Explorer and the wall over my tool bench.

Because I know you, Bobby had said to me. And I know how you think.

Of course he did. He knew a pussy when he saw one. None of my degrees or Dean’s List awards or job offers changed the fact that had that been me on the side of the road back in 2002, I’d have given the man my wallet. And my keys, and my shoes and anything else he wanted. Because while I’d thought of myself then—all the way up until February of this year, actually—as an optimist, in the modern world “optimist” translated into “pussy.”

With the bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth and his team down by three, Bobby had stepped up to the plate and took a swing. And it had been a good one. That night in 2002, I came to understand that Bobby was a hard son of a bitch because he’d always been a hard son of a bitch—something inside of him allowed his mind to work the right way in the right situation. I never stopped admiring him for it, because I so wasn’t like that.

But maybe at least a little bad-assedness is genetic. When my own bases were loaded, I had him as my batting coach. And what happened?

“I knocked that ball out of the park,” I muttered into the cold air as I made my way to the door that opened to the little mudroom off the kitchen. “Home fucking run.”

How’s that for a pussy?

I stood in the silence of my kitchen and stared down the hallway where I had shot the two men. I had done this without hesitation. That same inner power that had guided Bobby’s decisive actions ten years ago had guided mine eight months ago. When you looked underneath the suit and the layer of comfortable fat, you found a cold, hard son of a bitch under there. A man who didn’t give a rat’s ass.

I thought about getting a beer, but that would just make me have to pee twenty times during the night, so I went upstairs. I changed clothes. I made passionate love to my beautiful wife and I fell asleep with absolutely no trouble at all.

And just before I drifted off, it occurred to me that I had appeared on the Billy Horton show exactly a month ago. A whole month, and I hadn’t heard from the Bald Man.

But, of course, nothing good lasts forever.

13.

I awoke to a ringing telephone. My hand shot out and grabbed the land line receiver on my nightstand, but the ringing continued and I realized it came from my cell, sitting atop my dresser.

“Make it stop,” Allie groaned, kicking me weakly.

Grumbling, I swung my legs out and stood up. I staggered over to the dresser and snatched the phone. “Hello?”

Nothing on the other end but the distant hum of what sounded like a car engine and a radio—the tinny music sounded familiar, but it sounded so far off I couldn’t identify the tune or the artist. Above all this, the sound of somebody breathing into the phone. Not the heavy, sexual breathing of a prank caller, but the easy respiration of someone who simply doesn’t want to talk.

“Hello?” I said louder.

Still no answer. I moved to hang up, but then the caller spoke.

“Forget about me?”

That voice; I knew the voice. I’d heard it before.

The caller. The Bald Man.

“Who is this?” I asked. Across the room, Allie sat up.

“You did forget me. I leave you alone for a couple of weeks and you forget all about me.”

My head swam for a moment, and when it stopped, I found my entire bedroom draped in red. I wanted to do the right thing, say the right thing, but Toothpaste Syndrome kicked in and cut both my IQ and vocabulary in half. “Answer me, asshole! Who are you? What’s wrong with you? Why are you making prank calls at three in the goddamned morning? What kind of loser does that?”

“What kind of loser lies to the world?”

Alarmed, Allie asked, “Who is it?”

I waved my hand to bat her question away. My irritation had stoked now into full-blown fury. Lights flashed all over the control panel in my head, the needles of every gauge jammed hard into the red zone. “You’re crazy!”

“Ooh,” he said in mock terror. “I’d better be careful. I wouldn’t want the Hero of the Month to hose me down with his assault rifle.”

“I don’t need a gun to take your chickenshit ass down.”

“Mmm. Big talk from the world’s biggest coward.”

“So says the little bitch on the phone who talks mad shit but won’t tell me who he is and blocks his number!”

“Kevin?” Allie wrapped her arms around her knees. “Who are you talking to?”

“You know what I think?” I continued. “I think you are bald. You’re in your early forties, and you’ve got kind of a beer gut. Even if you don’t drink beer.”

I had his attention. The Bald Man didn’t speak.

The thrill of seizing control shot through the muscles in my core and almost made me shake. When I got done shining the spotlight on his soul, he would probably hang up and kill himself. Good riddance.

“Doughy, fleshy, lower-class features. You’re ugly. And you’re single. You don’t do anything particularly well and you never have. You’re disabled or laid off from some low-end, dead-end kind of job. You may or may not be looking for another one, but you’re a loser, and it’s tough for losers in this economy. So you spend your days on your ass. In either an old single-wide trailer where you’re constantly late on the rent or a one-bedroom apartment with the Burlington Housing Authority. You watch action movies and you play role-playing games with other losers over the internet. And you’re pissed at me because you want to be me, but you know what? You can’t be me. Because you’re a loser.”

Silence from the other end. That was good, but honestly, I wanted to hear the secondary explosions from my torpedo strike. But when the Bald Man spoke again, he spoke in the same amused tone he had used earlier. And I realized that I’d hit nothing.

“You really have no idea, do you?”

“You blocked your number and you won’t tell me your name. No, motherfucker, I don’t.”

“You are the loser, Kevin. You are the little bitch. Not me. You’re the Bitch of the World. You don’t know who I am. But I’m going to show you what you are. I’m going to show everyone what you are. And when you find out…”

He laughed.

“Oh my God, Kevin, it’s going to be precious. Just wait. Watch and see what’s going to happen. Watch and see.”

“Game on, bitch! Bring it!”

“I will.”

And with that, he hung up.

“Answer me, Kevin! Who was that?”

I set the phone back down on the bureau. I picked it back up again and cut it off.

With my wife’s eyes upon me, I felt just a little embarrassed. The specifics of what I’d just said escaped me at the moment, because one of the features of toothpaste syndrome is that you can’t remember everything you did or said, but you can remember enough to understand that you came off as a royal dumbass. In my case, I’d let the enemy reduce me to a pile of barking, cursing carbon-based garbage. The only saving grace was that tonight, this hadn’t happened on the radio.

I’d been angry, but my anger faded. Embarrassment stepped forward to take its place, but even that didn’t hang around for long. Another emotion shouldered its way in, and I recognized this one right away: fear.

“Kevin? Are you going to answer me?”

I rested both hands on the bureau and hung my head.

“I think I just challenged a crazy man to a fight,” I said.

14.

“His voice sounds familiar,” I said, “but I couldn’t place it to save my life. I don’t know who it is. But I feel like I should.”

Today, Dr. Koenig wore a charcoal gray suit over a pure white shirt and a dark, subdued tie. He wore black dress socks and black leather loafers which he’d obviously worn many times before but which he kept polished to a healthy shine. He would be giving a talk today, I theorized, a presentation to psych students at either UNC or Duke. Then he would go home and eat kale.

He started out poking around the Bobby issue, but the phone call last night had piqued his interest and led him away from that. Now he nodded as if I’d just said something he understood very well and tapped his pen on his notepad. “Why’s that? Why do you feel like you should know who it is?”

I held my Southern Rifleman in a pair of sweaty hands. I rolled it into a tube, unrolled it. Abby had had a pacifier as a baby; her father had a gun magazine as an adult. “For starters,” I said, “he had my cell number. I give that out to almost no one. A couple attorneys and judges have it, and that’s it. So he either knows me or knows somebody who knows me. Either way, I feel like I’ve talked to him before.”

“Can you describe the voice for me?”

I closed my eyes and searched my auditory memory.

“Smooth,” I said. “No rasp, no roughness, like he hasn’t done a lot of smoking or screaming. Makes him sound younger than he probably is. It’s higher in the register, not like a squeak, not soprano but not baritone, either.”

“Tenor,” Dr. Koenig offered.

“Yes,” I said, “tenor. Accent-wise, he’s definitely Southern. Not cornpone trailer-park Southern, but maybe like he was raised here by parents from another part of the country. I say he’s white trash, but between you and me, that’s not how he sounds.”

“How does he sound?”

“Crazy. There’s something wrong with him.”

I swallowed.

“That’s what gets me. You can feel this weird energy when he’s talking. His ki smells bad. Rotten, spoiled, gone over. And that’s what has me scared. Him being a mental case. You never know what those people are going to do.”

“He scares you, but he also makes you angry.”

I nodded slowly. “Very.”

“How angry? Angry enough to kill?”

“Definitely.” I took a ki breath and stared through the picture window. The temperature had begun to fall outside, but the sun glowed so brightly that this office could have stood right in the center of it. I almost couldn’t see the bench or the trees. “And that scares me. Everything gets easier when you do it once, Doc, everything. There’s a certain inertia in all of us that keeps us from trying new things, and once you overcome it, the task gets easier. I’ve broken the seal. So now, I get mad and I’m like, I could kill this son of a bitch. That scares me.”

No immediate answer. Although I couldn’t see what he’d written on his pad, at this point it had to be something like patient has become homicidal. Patient is eager to kill again. Hospitalize or not?

“Why do you think he causes these strong feelings?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

Craig Montero said he’d get with his friends in the Burlington Police Department and track down the source of the call to my cell phone. I figured I’d get a name and address and take a warrant for harassing telephone calls. I’d also seek a restraining order. I would do this because this is the course of action I prescribed to my own clients. Did he hit you? Take a warrant. Threaten you? Take a warrant. Then seek a restraining order. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

I believed this would work because ninety-nine times out of one hundred, it did work. Once I figured out who he was, the law would take care of him for me—as long as I practiced the same self-advocacy that I preached to my clients. I knew this. I knew how the system worked. I knew every gear, every spring, every creak and crack. I knew how to handle the Bald Man.

I didn’t know shit. I learned this out in the parking lot at Carwood, Allison at about seven P.M. I have never so badly underestimated someone in my entire life.

Our building shared a parking lot with a dental practice in the office building across the way. Bright lights lit the lot with the intensity of a mid-day sun, but trimmed hedges almost as tall as me lined every side not occupied by a building, blocking any view of the parking area from passing police cars on Church Street. I exited and locked the building and gave the parking lot the same visual once-over I had given it every evening for the past ten years. Then I mentally checked out, ambling over to my BMW on autopilot as I mulled over my completely useless session with Dr. Koenig. Had I paid more attention to my physical surroundings, I would have seen the man in the bushes. But I didn’t. And because of this, he materialized out of nowhere.

“Hey, you! Hey!”

Keys in hand, I froze. I turned to see a young man approaching me with his hands shoved in the front pockets of a gray hooded sweatshirt. He’d already covered half the empty parking lot by the time I saw him. Instantly, toothpaste syndrome kicked in and my brain jammed between hurriedly jumping in the BMW and questioning whether it was wise to turn my back on this guy. And did I need to do that, anyway? Did this man necessarily constitute a threat or did he just want to ask for a cigarette? Was I being paranoid?

I asked so many questions that I forgot the critical one: Where did he come from? I forgot this question right up until the point where I couldn’t turn around anymore, because he had closed to within hailing distance, then within speaking distance, and by that point he had withdrawn his right hand from the sweatshirt pocket and I saw the knife.

I didn’t hunt, but I knew a hunting knife when I saw one. Long, sharp, shiny. Perfect for gutting deer and wild boar.

“Wallet, watch, cell phone! Break yourself, motherfucker!”

The blade caught the sodium glow of the streetlights and reflected it into my eyes in a cruel wink. The man holding it, I saw, hadn’t shaved in several days nor brushed his teeth in several months or even years—his mouth was a fetid cave where lonely, uneven teeth jutted up and down from his gums like rotten stalactites. The face around it might have been young once, but the skin was splotched and drawn beneath the beard stubble.

“I’ll cut your ass!”

His eyes twitched and darted. His pupils fully dilated, they looked like lumps of coal set into his emaciated face. I thought, high as a kite.

Hands held up in front of me, I backed up until I struck the driver’s door of my BMW and could back up no more. He stepped closer, moving the knife back and forth in a motion like the mesmerized sway of a cobra. He clutched the knife in his right hand while his left contracted into a claw down at the waistline of his jeans. It shook.

“I’ll cut your ass, bitch!” He growled. “I’ll spill your guts all over this fuckin’ parking lot, punkass motherfucker! Don’t fuck with me!”

“I’m not fucking with you,” I assured him in a voice that shook like his hands. I heard the warble in it and a small part of me thought, Hero of the Month. Right.

Right behind that, the Bald Man: Not so big and bad without a gun, are you?

“Then do it! Come on! Cell phone! Wallet! Watch!”

Off came the watch. Allie had given it to me for our fifth anniversary, but I slid it off my wrist like some cheap plastic crap from a fast food kid’s meal and handed it over to the tweaking meth addict sticking me up in the parking lot of my office. His left hand darted out and snatched the watch, dropped it into the pocket of his jeans. My smartphone—address book, phone numbers, emails, calendar—followed it a moment later.

“Good. Good. Now gimme your wallet.”

I swallowed a tumbleweed.

“It’s in my right front pocket, okay?” I said.

“Get it, motherfucker!”

“All right. Just be cool, man.”

“Don’t tell me to be cool, bitch!” His voice climbed, agitated. Although it seemed impossible, my pulse raced even faster “Just gimme your fuckin’ money!”

And with my right hand, I reached inside the left front pocket of my suit pants and closed my fingers around my wallet. Ten years ago, Bobby had reached under his seat and came out with a Glock, but I had no Glock. I had a wallet and some ill-conceived delusions about being someone other people could look up to. I began to withdraw the wallet from my pocket and as I pulled it free, I heard Bobby.

Driver’s license, he thought. Don’t give him your driver’s license.

Why?

Because it’s got your address on it.

“That’s it. Gimme that shit!”

Right. Because if he got my address, he might someday decide to come to my house. Where Allie and Abby lived.

I opened the wallet. The man shook his head. “No. Whole thing!”

“L… let me get my driver’s license,” I said. I stumbled on the first word and hated my tongue for it. “I n… need it to get around.”

“Fuck that shit!”

The knife darted forward. With a quick, vicious chop he brought the handle down on the hand that held the wallet, striking it momentarily numb. My wallet fell to the asphalt. Credit cards, driver’s license, cash, store discount cards, picture of my wife and kid, my whole damn life spilled at this guy’s feet.

“Pick it up,” he ordered.

I didn’t move.

“Pick it up!” Roaring now, almost screaming.

And still, I didn’t move. Not because I didn’t want to; I just couldn’t. The whole scene—those nasty teeth, that drawn and puckered face, the knife, the electric lights—shimmered like a desert mirage there before the Carwood, Allison building. A wrinkle passed over my field of vision like someone had grabbed one end of it and flicked his wrist, like snapping a beach towel.

“I said, pick it the fuck up!”

I recognized it right away: I was about to lose it. Just like I had on the radio, and just like I had on the phone the night before.

I looked him right in the eye and said, “Fuck you.”

“What? What did you just say to me?”

I didn’t see the knife now, or I didn’t conceive of it. I knew it was there—I just didn’t care.

“I said ‘fuck you,’” I replied through gritted teeth. The man’s image shrank as my eyes narrowed. “You pick it up, you lazy sack of shit. You want my wallet? Bend your sorry ass over and pick it up your damn self!”

Now the knife hand began to shake.

“Motherfucker, I will cut you!”

“Bring it,” I hissed. “Game on, bitch!”

And he brought it. He lunged forward with his feet as he drove the tip of the knife straight at my chest, but an amazing thing happened then; my left foot shot out at a 45 degree angle and brought the rest of my body with it. The knife found only empty air, because I stood beside him now, my arms moving in a fluid circle that came down one behind his head and one on his outstretched and overextended knife-arm.

I hadn’t set foot in an aikido dojo since high school, but it all came back to me then. My right foot slid behind my left, my hips pivoted and my adversary found himself caught in the whirling dervish my body had become. I spun him once, twice, then stepped back and felt the bones crack in his hand as I folded it over and released the knife into my own.

He fell back against the BMW, bounced off it, stunned. I could have let it go at that—I had disarmed him, I had the knife now—but Bobby was in my head then. And Bobby said:

Handle it.

I darted forward and pinned his body against my car. And I jammed the blade as far as it would go under his right rib cage. Right into his heart.

His eyes widened and his mouth opened.

“Think you’re going to rip me off?” I hissed. “How do you like this? Huh? This how you thought it would go down?”

My face was six inches from his. I could smell tobacco and beer blending with the stench of rotting teeth and gums. Something wet and warm flowed down over my right hand, but I didn’t look at this. I looked at the man. I looked at his face. I looked for recognition of his position, the mistake he had made in attacking me and the understanding that he had accosted the wrong man.

But I found none of this. His face was slack, expressionless. I looked at those dilated pupils and a crazy thought danced across my mind, hooting and hollering and waving its arms as it barked at the moon:

He has no brain. He has no soul.

I swallowed. My jaw shook as I parted my lips to whisper, “Who sent you?”

He opened his mouth. Blood gushed forth, but he managed to say, “The Bald Man.”

And he dropped.

I didn’t even try to catch him. I let the body fall with the knife still buried beneath the rib cage. His blood glistened on my hand and ran from the wound in his chest in a dark, sticky river that soon enveloped my Mastercard, my Visa, my Alamance County Public Library card. His eyes stared sightlessly at my shoes. He didn’t move.

And I stared right back at him, unable to speak. I had killed again, but this wasn’t what gave me pause.

Did he just say the Bald Man? I thought. Did he really say that?

Blood dripped from my hand and splattered on my pants, my shoes, the asphalt. I looked all around me. The Carwood, Allison building, the only witness to my third killing this year, regarded me with dark, silent windows.

“What’s going on?” I asked aloud.

The meth addict—or whatever he was—I’d just stabbed through the heart didn’t answer me. A dark stain blossomed across the front of his jeans from where he’d wet himself when his brain had let go of his involuntary muscle control functions. When I knelt down beside him, my nose detected the stench of his feces mixed in with the coppery-sweet odor of his blood. I breathed in through my mouth and held my lungs still as I reached into his front pocket and fished out my watch and smartphone.

Bewildered and even more terrified now than when I’d seen the knife for the first time, I dialed the police.

15.

“He mentioned the Bald Man?” Dr. Koenig asked.

Outside, the dogwood trees flanking the concrete bench had largely shed their leaves. The weather had turned colder as we slid into that time of year when a body feels the first chills borne on the winds of autumn and understands that the temperature will continue falling, and falling and falling.

“He did,” I said with a sigh. I felt exhausted from too little sleep but wired at the same time—the lingering effects of this morning’s massive infusion of coffee and the adrenaline rush of the evening before.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed them underneath his glasses. He too looked tired and I wondered then what challenges he himself faced on a daily basis. I wanted to know more about his life outside of his office and my problems, but to date my attempts to uncover facts about his personal life had met with deft changes of subject and therapeutically appropriate reminders that we needed to focus on my case and avoid the small talk. Which, he noted, Southerners have a hard time doing.

“So…” he trailed off as he finished rubbing his eyes and had to readjust his glasses. “You killed this guy. Without a gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He had a knife. You took it away from him?”

“I did,” I said.

“Tell me again how you did this. No; show me.”

So I recreated the scene right there in his office. I showed him how I had stood with my hands up, pantomimed the robber’s own body movements. When it ended, I realized that my face and whole body had grown pleasantly warm. I was smiling.

“That’s amazing,” he said.

“It is,” I agreed.

“How long has it been since you’ve attended an aikido class?

Now I rubbed my own eyes, and I sat down. “About twenty years.”

“Two decades. And yet you remembered that move. That’s incredible.”

True. Toothpaste syndrome vanished and everything I knew deployed exactly where it needed to. “It is,” I admitted.

“You’re a hero again.”

“Yep.”

But I didn’t feel like one. Instead, I felt scared. The mugger had said “Bald Man.” I knew this to a moral certainty. But why?

He’s not a man, a voice inside me said. Not Bobby or Kate or Allie or any of the other people who habitually talked to me in my head—it wasn’t even me. I didn’t know who it was. He’s so much more than that.

I cleared my throat.

“When the Burlington Police got there,” I said, “Both of the responding officers knew who I was. One of them told me I’d done a good job. The other one whistled and said, you’re one hard son of a bitch, Mr. Swanson. Then a detective sergeant arrived and ‘investigated.’”

I raised my fingers and put quotation marks in the air around that last word.

“I say it that way because his ‘investigation’ consisted of him telling me what happened, closing his notebook and offering to buy me a beer. I’m not kidding. He said, so this guy tried to mug you, and I said yes, Sergeant. Then he said, then he attacked you with the knife when you didn’t comply fast enough, and I said, yeah, you know, basically that’s what he did. So, he concluded, you had to wrestle the knife away from him and defend yourself. You had no choice. I said, you’re right, I didn’t. He didn’t ask me a single question, Doc. He told me what happened and I agreed with him.”

“Did you want him to take you downtown? Book you for murder?”

“Not at all,” I said with a shake of my head. “And I’m not a criminal lawyer, so what do I know, maybe they do that all the time. But it was….”

I hunted for the right word. When the detective arrived, I’d been standing there over the body with the two uniformed patrol officers—who had done absolutely nothing to secure the crime scene. They’d let me stand there, leaning against the BMW, while they asked me questions not about the dead guy at my feet, but Pinnix and Ramseur.

I swallowed again. I rolled up my magazine and tapped it on the table. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that maybe… something’s going on here that I don’t understand.”

“Were there reporters?” He asked.

“What?”

“Reporters. Did the media come to your office? Has anyone asked for your statement?”

“Oh, yeah. WXII met me in the parking lot when I showed up for work this morning and shoved a microphone in my face as soon as I got out of my car. I can’t remember the reporter’s name… you watch the news? Ever seen that hot brunette?”

“I have.”

“It was her. She asked me for a comment, and I told her that it was a tragic event, that I was shaken but otherwise okay and that my heart went out to the families of the deceased. I’ve been told that I’m going to be on the six o’clock news. I’ve been talking to reporters all day, Doc. Except for my wife, my kid and my secretary, you’re the only human being I’ve spoken to today who isn’t going to print something I said.”

“So you’re going to be a celebrity again,” he observed.

I sighed. “I guess so.”

He stared at me.

“Does any of this strike you as odd?” He asked.

“Absolutely.”

He moved his stare from my face to his notepad. I watched his lined features, his manicured goatee, and tried unsuccessfully to read his thoughts.

Finally, he capped his pen and clipped it to his notepad, which he slipped into his leather briefcase. “Do something for me,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Our next session, bring Allie. I still need to talk to her. Can you do that?”

I looked at the window and inhaled a deep ki breath.

“Can you do that?” He repeated.

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

16.

Getting mugged in the same year that you suffer a home invasion stretches the imagination almost to the breaking point. Lightning, we’re taught from an early age, doesn’t strike twice in the same place. There’s this cosmic bad luck budget and we’re only allotted so much of it in any given time span. Think about it: how many people in their twenties and thirties lose both their parents close together? Not many. It happens, but when it does even people who don’t know you pinch their faces and purse their lips and breathe through their noses and say something like, My God, that’s terrible. Because you’re only supposed to suffer so much suckness. We have faith in the ability of statistics to protect us from receiving more than our fair share of tragedy. He Who Shovels the Shit will only pile so much on you, because, as we know, his wagon has to serve everyone.

I say “we,” but that’s a crock because I don’t actually believe that. I know it to be untrue and I didn’t need to get mugged to understand it. I’ve understood it ever since the day, back when I was a kid, when I met a woman named Angela.

I don’t remember her last name, nor the precise time we met. October, November, something a like that. The leaves had largely vanished from the trees that lined the back roads of Catawba County, a few brown hangers-on dangling from skeletal branches in stubborn refusal to surrender to the oncoming winter. A night wind blowing down from the mountains to the west ruffled these and sent the occasional victim fluttering in the air over the highway, spinning and twirling and dancing before coming to rest on a blacktop that blended seamlessly with the sky. The three of us—Bobby and Kate in the front, I in the back—sat comfortably ensconced in the warmth of my mother’s Mercedes. Driving around, burning up gasoline, trying to postpone the moment when we couldn’t avoid going home any longer.

We found her wandering on Sigmon Dairy Road outside of Maiden. Not on it, not exactly; she actually sat on the shoulder, legs crossed Indian-style. Bobby fiddling with the tape deck, we almost hit her. Earlier in the week, he had picked up a tape by this new band called “Pearl Jam.” He was half-driving, half-rewinding to listen to the first song again, when Kate suddenly screamed, “STOP!”

He slammed his foot to the floor. A machine-gun opened fire somewhere as the antilock brakes deployed, snatching the Mercedes to a chattering and shuddering halt as inertia threw me forward and then jerked me violently backwards just as fast. Had we not just stopped at a gas station ten minutes before, I may have wet myself. Instead, I just said with my eighth-grade eloquence, “What the fuck?”

“You almost hit her,” said Kate.

“Almost hit who?” I demanded.

“Her,” said Bobby.

I followed the invisible beam shining from Bobby’s extended index finger. When he’d slammed on the brakes, he guided the Mercedes partially onto the shoulder and now the headlamps shone in a crazy oblique direction across the pavement and into the barely restrained wilderness that abutted the shoulder. There, on the outskirts of the light, sat the woman.

Long brown hair hung in strings over the shoulders of a pink bathrobe. She sat hunched forward, eyes open but seemingly unaware of our presence. She didn’t move, not even when Bobby moved the car fully onto the shoulder and brought the front bumper to within mere feet of where she sat. In the electric glow of the headlamps, her eyes looked solid black.

“What’s wrong with her?” Kate asked.

“I don’t know,” Bobby said, “but I’m about to find out.”

He unbuckled his safety belt, opened the driver’s door and got out. I swallowed then, my pulse quickening just a little because the woman not only didn’t look at us, but she didn’t even blink, and I thought, who doesn’t blink? My gut flooded with something cold and black, and I wanted to reach forward and grab Bobby back into the car. Leave her alone, I wanted to say. Something’s wrong with her. Something is very, very, very wrong.

“Be careful,” Kate cautioned. It came out as a whisper.

Bobby didn’t hear her. By the time she said it, he’d already made it out of the car and around the front bumper. He knelt beside the woman, said something we couldn’t hear. When they both stood, her bathrobe fell open to reveal a pair of pink sweatpants and a matching T-shirt that read, What Would Jesus Do?

Bobby walked her to the other side of the car and put her in the back with me. She moved under her own power, compliantly obeying his instructions as he told her to get in and watch your head and buckle your safety belt. But she didn’t look at me.

Kate turned and stared from me to the woman, from the woman to me.

“Uh… hi,” Kate said.

The woman didn’t answer. Bobby closed the door and made his way back around to the driver’s side, where he got in and buckled up again. He placed both hands on the wheel and looked in the rearview mirror.

“This is Angela,” he said. “And she needs a ride to the hospital.”

Angela spoke.

“There’s been an accident,” she said in a monotone. “With David. And Johnny.”

“Who are David and Johnny?” I asked.

“Husband and son,” Bobby replied, shifting into drive and pulling back onto the road. He found a driveway and used it to reverse directions, taking us back towards Hickory. “Car wreck.”

“Are they okay?” Kate asked.

“I need to go to the hospital right away,” Angela repeated. “Because there’s been an accident.”

They probably weren’t okay. You didn’t wander out onto the highway when the hospital called to say your husband and your kid have a nasty case of whiplash. Her shuffling walk, her catatonia, that could only follow an earthquake or the detonation of a nuclear bomb inside the brain case.

“Oh. Oh my God.” Kate turned around in her seat to face us. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

“There’s been an accident,” Angela repeated.

“Pray,” Kate urged. “That’s what you need to do right now. You pray, and we’ll get you to your family.”

“I’m needed at the hospital right away,” Angela said.

“And we’ll get you there. Bobby, can you move it little faster?”

“Christ on a stick, what do you think I’m doing?”

“I don’t know, Bobby, what are you doing, move it!”

When we reached the emergency room at Catawba Memorial, Kate hopped out to open the door for her. I hopped out, too, because if I remained in the backseat Kate would ask me to reach over and unbuckle the woman and if I did that our skin might touch. I hung back, not touching, not helping, remaining as far away from her as I could. Bobby and Kate each took a side and guided her into the building, but I hung back. I didn’t want to touch her, because bad luck—really bad luck, like this kind—is contagious. I could smell it on her. She was cursed.

And I was right. Inside, we learned that David and Johnny had lost their lives to a drunk driver on Highway 321 two hours ago. The year before, the nurse said, she’d been in here another time. When her daughter and her other son had died in the same kind of accident.

One husband, three kids, two car wrecks. Everybody dead.

Up at the admissions desk, both of Kate’s hands flew up to her mouth. Bobby just stared at the nurse—he didn’t say anything. I turned to look at Angela, whom they’d planted in a seat beneath a television bolted to the ceiling. Above her head, a rerun of Growing Pains did its best to ease the suffering of the patients waiting in slumped agony for a chance to see a doctor. She stared at the black windows until she noticed me looking at her, and we locked eyes.

“I need you to fill out some paperwork,” the nurse said.

“But we don’t know her,” Bobby protested. “I just found her sitting on her behind out in the middle of nowhere…”

“We’re a little shorthanded tonight, do you think you could help us out a little?”

“I don’t mind helping you out, I’m just saying that I just turned eighteen, like, last week and I don’t even know who this lady is…”

I walked over to Angela, leaving the conversation behind me. She didn’t look away as I approached and sat down in a chair just outside of touching distance.

“God hates me,” she said. “He wants to see me burn.”

How do you argue with that? I didn’t want to get too close to her, but I did want to comfort her, ease her suffering if at all possible. But what do you say? Cheer up? Uh, no. Everything’s going to be okay? Bullshit. Everything would not be okay. Not for her.

“It’s not true what they say,” she told me. She leaned forward and spoke in an almost conspiratorial tone, like she wanted no one but me to hear her. “They tell you He loves everybody, but he doesn’t. They say He punishes the sinners, but that’s not true either.”

“Don’t say that.”

“There’s no one protecting you,” she said. Now she was smiling—or grinning, or grimacing, something that involved an upturn of the corners of the mouth but played something black and out of tune on my ribs because why would anybody do anything but scream at a time like this? “There’s not. You can pray to the empty heavens all day long, but there’s no one listening. You can be a good boy, but that won’t protect you because He doesn’t care. He’ll let your guts spill out all over this floor. He’ll cut you. And when you think you can’t bleed anymore?”

She raised her chin and regarded me the way teachers habitually did when they stood on the verge of an important revelation about history, literature or algebra.

“He’ll cut you again. Because you can always bleed more. And He likes that.”

“Who likes that?” I whispered.

That crazy, hellborn smile. She raised her index finger, but whether she meant to emphasize her point or to direct my attention heavenwards, I didn’t know.

“Him,” she hissed.

Ten feet away, my brother and Kate tried to complete hospital admissions sheets for a woman they didn’t know. Angela stared at me, watching me digest what she just said. I sensed her waiting for a response, I really didn’t know what to say. Had I been a more enthusiastic disciple of Christ, I would have been better practiced in the logical jiu jitsu employed by the faithful when confronted with things like nuclear weapons, the Holocaust and families dying in car accidents. Maybe I could have provided her with some small measure of comfort in that moment. But, lacking any better ideas, I allowed my lower jaw, that thing dangling from the bottom of my empty skull, to open and I said, “Shit happens.”

As soon as I said it, my face reddened and my skin burned with shame. But her eyebrows rose like I’d just said something incredibly profound and revelatory. She nodded three times, her eyeballs remaining fixed on mine as her head rotated around them.

“Yes,” she said. “And then it happens again.”

I don’t know what became of Angela. After we left her at the hospital, we didn’t speak of her for many months, hoping, maybe, that if we didn’t talk about it we could forget whatever lessons we’d learned that night. It didn’t work—not for me, anyway. I thought about her again and again over the years. And I thought about her yet again on my way out of Dr. Koenig’s office that afternoon, after again agreeing to bring Allie to one of our sessions.

I climbed into the BMW and shut the door, banishing all noise from the outside. Shit happens, I thought. And then it happens again.

It did. But the likelihood that I would have to go all Chuck Norris not just once but twice in a lifetime—let alone a single year—was so miniscule as to be…

“Almost impossible,” I said to the steering wheel.

I looked out the windshield. I’d parked in front of an evergreen hedge that separated Dr. Koenig’s parking lot from the one next door, and this was littered with the castaway leaves from the trees that shaded the lot in the summertime, littered it in the fall. Another leaf fell then and landed on the hood of my car. After several more moments of staring through my windshield, I started the car and pulled away.

17.

Coincidence: a man, a liberal man, a lifelong Democrat, receives an assault rifle as a gift from his mentally incompetent father, learns to use it from his Marine brother and for some reason not only still has it when two yahoos break into his house, but has it in a gun safe in his basement. Where, incidentally, said yahoos leave him for dead.

Coincidence: a fortune teller warns the man, then a boy, about a figure she calls the Bald Man. Two decades later, a prankster who calls himself the Bald Man begins harassing the man by telephone. Two weeks after that, an armed assailant says Bald Man as he dies with his own knife sticking out of his chest.

I was beginning to doubt the outer edges of my reality. But if I had a spooked feeling before I sat down with Craig Montero that afternoon, I had it twice as bad afterwards.

“The cops have an ID on that shitbird who tried to rob me last night?” I asked as Craig entered my office.

He stared at me with pursed lips, appeared to think for a moment, then shut the door. He lowered himself into one of my two client chairs and touched his fingertips together pensively.

“Well?” I asked.

“He’s a John Doe,” he said at last.

“What?”

Craig shook his head. “He had nothing on him. They ran his prints, but they didn’t get a hit. Guy’s never been arrested before, apparently. They’ve passed his photo around to the uniformed patrol and vice officers, but nobody recognizes him.”

He studied my face for a moment.

“What’s up?” He asked.

I shook my head to clear it, if only temporarily, of silly ideas. I cleared my throat and moved papers from one end of my desk to another.

“Nothing,” I said. “But isn’t it a little… I don’t know… strange? I mean, he tried to stab me. And he’s never pulled anything before?”

“It’s not that strange,” Craig said. “Maybe he was just good at not getting caught. If you don’t get in trouble, the cops probably won’t know who you are. That’s generally a good thing. A bit of a pain in the ass for somebody trying to identify you, but still a plus in the grand scheme of things.”

“How can you degenerate to the point where you’re robbing random people in parking lots and not have a police record?”

“Beats me. Could be he’s on the radar somewhere else. They’re passing his picture around to every police department in the state. ‘Do You Know This Shitbag? Call Burlington P.D.’ That kind of thing. Oh, and all major stations are going to put out his description and ask for information. They’ll probably figure it out by the end of the week.”

Or maybe not, I thought. Maybe they won’t ever figure it out, because the man I stabbed last night isn’t a man at all, but a creature fabricated from dirt and air. Molded from clay by the hands of a faceless demon who kissed him and gave him life and sent him out into the world. Suddenly, I pictured a room with heavy curtains of dark red fabric that gave off its own peculiar light; a head, bald but misshapen, bent over the creature laying on its back on a table like Frankenstein’s monster. I heard a hiss, the passage of breath from one body to another, and a voice that sounded exactly like the one on my telephone.

Go, it said. Find him. Show him who he is.

I shuddered.

“Craig,” I asked, looking out the window at the parking lot where I had stabbed someone—or something—to death last night. “Did you ever find anything out about Pinnix and Ramseur?”

He smiled uncomfortably and shifted in his seat. “Well… kind of. That’s weird, too.”

“How so?”

He bit his lower lip and took a deep breath. He pulled a thin manila folder from the files he had carried in, leaned forward and placed it on my desk.

“Nobody knows who they are, either,” he said. “That’s your police file.”

“It’s thin.”

“That’s because there are no mysteries and you’re the only witness,” he said. His shoulders slumped, he spoke somberly, like he was sad about something. “And I had to move heaven and high water to get that, so don’t knock it.”

I could tell he wanted to see me read it, so I sat back in my chair and opened the folder. The first few pages contained a police report listing the names and addresses of everyone involved. The first responding deputy’s narrative; the detective’s narrative. Neither contained anything I didn’t already know. But my eyes hovered for several moments on one particular statement the deputy made.

Mr. Swanson allowed me into the residence, whereupon I observed the bodies of two males lying in the hallway.

My statement; Allie’s statement; Abby’s statement. The detective’s summation of the evidence. A memorandum from the District Attorney’s Office concurring with the detective’s opinion that I had acted in defense of home, self and immediate family and shouldn’t be prosecuted for murder. My criminal background history, blank except for the single speeding ticket I incurred my sophomore year at Carolina.

The criminal backgrounds of both Pinnix and Ramseur: blank.

I frowned. I flipped from Pinnix to Ramseur, Ramseur to Pinnix. The implications of what I was seeing loomed above me like an approaching iceberg. My throat began to tighten in fear. “What the fuck is this?”

“What the fuck is what?”

“This!” I poked my finger at Pinnix’s empty criminal background history. “Their records! They’re squeaky clean! These guys broke into my fucking house with a knife and handcuffs and I’ve got a longer rap sheet than they do! Craig, they’re thirty and thirty-one years old! Thirty and thirty-one years without so much as a parking ticket and the first crime they decide to pull off is a B&E and rape-murder? How does something like that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

I flipped past the records and saw photographs. The first one showed a reprint of my driver’s license, but in the next picture my haggard face stared back at me from its position above the collar of the tee shirt I’d worn the night of the shooting. Another shot showed my hands, another the bloody back of my head. The AK-47 leaning against the wall in the foyer. Various shots of the hallway and the bodies lying there.

Pinnix and Ramseur. Their faces bloody and shattered, their features unrecognizable. Their DMV records offered no pictures of what they looked like before I got a hold of them, because they’d never bothered getting driver’s licenses in North Carolina or anywhere else. I flipped through the rest of the photos—shell casings on the floor, various shots of my basement man-cave, two cards to a video store in Durham—and shut the file.

“There’s not a single picture of what these guys looked like before,” I said. “Not so much as a yearbook photo. No records, no pictures. Is this the real file? Did somebody monkey with this before they gave it to you?”

“It’s all there,” he said.

I rocked in my seat. I bit my lower lip. I said, “It’s like they just walked in out of nowhere. It’s like they didn’t even exist before that night. How can not one but two guys like this make it into their thirties without getting pinched for anything? Without a driver’s license?”

Something else occurred to me, and I froze. When my gears unstuck, I snatched the file off my desk and flipped through it frantically.

“Where’s the car?” I asked.

“What car?”

“Exactly! What car? My house is way out in bumfuck, but when you read through this thing it’s like they want you to believe they fucking walked there. Why is there no information about the car in here?”

Craig shook his head again. He didn’t have any answers for me. Because there weren’t any.

“If you take this at face value,” I said, “then these two guys appeared out of nowhere.”

Like ghosts, I thought. Or demons.

Or creatures conjured from dust and dirt.

“I agree,” he said, “that there are a couple things that bother me about all this.”

He reached forward and tapped the top corner of the file. “Know what else is missing?”

“What’s that?”

“Go through that file and tell me how the cops figured out their names.”

I flipped through the pitifully small collection of papers. I focused on the photocopies of the membership cards to Ryan’s News and Video. “Video store cards, I guess.”

“Negative. That’s an adult video store, a porn store. They don’t use names or credit cards. You get a membership number and post a fifty-dollar deposit; you fail to return a video, they keep your fifty bucks and you keep the video. They have no record of names. They don’t know who their customers are. So the question is, how do the police know?”

“How do they?” I asked.

“I don’t know. And they don’t know, either. I’ve talked to every cop in Burlington and nobody can answer that question for me. Everybody thinks somebody else told them, and you go talk to that somebody else and they’re like no, Joe told me. You talk to Joe, and Joe says Steve told me. But Steve’s the one who told you to go talk to Joe in the first place. It’s all fucked up.”

He chuckled then at something in his head and shifted uncomfortably in the chair. He touched a finger to his lips, supporting his chin in the can opener created by his thumb and index finger. His dark brow wrinkled.

“I say these things to you,” he said. “just as I said them to the police. I asked them about this, and they all get the same weird smile on their faces. I ask, who are these guys, and they say, these guys? They’re dead, that’s who they are. I say no, who are they, and the cop’ll say, who cares? Old Kevin Swanson took care of that problem for us. They smile and they change the subject. It’s like…”

He trailed off, shaking his head. But I finished for him.

“Some kind of Jedi mind trick,” I said. “Like they’ve all been brainwashed. Questions they should be asking… they’re not.”

“Precisely.”

I closed the file folder and set it down atop the mess on my desk. I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes. What is going on, I asked the backs of my eyelids. They didn’t answer me, so I opened them again and looked at Craig.

“Why is nobody concerned about this?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. But, you know, when you sit here and think about it… really, who does care? These guys got what they deserved. Who cares where they came from? Who cares who they were?”

I pursed my lips, staring down at the manila folder.

“I do,” I said.

18.

The rising body count didn’t bother Allie. We made love that night, but of course I couldn’t come. After twenty minutes, Allie asked me, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I gasped, sweat dribbling down my face.

“It’s staring to hurt.”

Crazily enough, it started hurting me, too. My hip muscles rumbled with sedition. On the verge of revolt, they threatened to cramp up on me at any second. But I wouldn’t give up. I’d never given up before, and I wouldn’t give up now. What did some of those posters say?

Determination. Perseverance.

I began flipping through the Rolodex of pornographic images in my brain. I found the one from our first night in this house, down in the kitchen amidst the boxes and newspapers and dishes that hadn’t found their home yet—gourmet kitchens, I discovered that night, were like Spanish Fly for upper-class white women. I envisioned Allie bent over the kitchen table, her hair falling in a golden brown waterfall over her shoulders, her pajama bottoms puddled around her ankles and…

She put her lips up to my ear and whispered, “Come on.”

…the Rolodex began to flip on its own. It buzzed like a playing card in the spokes of my bicycle when I was a little boy, and when it stopped flipping it came to rest on an entirely different image. Pinnix. Or Ramseur.

Or a bald man. I really couldn’t tell.

Rough hands on her hips, hairy legs slapping against the backs of her thighs. Her gasps of pain. The pool table, not the kitchen table, and a belt buckle rattled on the basement’s cement floor, metal scraping the concrete as the table itself groaned in rhythm with every violent thrust.

A face. Smiling, laughing, because this was funny to him.

Right then, I knew: this was one of my nightmares.

Say it, you bitch.

And she did, only her voice shook and broke.

Fuck me harder, she whimpered.

My legs seized up and my erection vanished. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

“Kevin? Are you okay? Kevin!”

I was most certainly not okay. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever being this not okay in my life. I rolled off abruptly and lay beside her, gasping for air. “I’m fine.”

“Are you having chest pains?”

Where in the hell had that image come from?

“No chest pains,” I said, laying my forearm across my eyes. “I just… I don’t know. I think all this shit’s been getting to me.”

The furnace kicked on and added its low hum to the whoosh of the ceiling fan. Somewhere down the hall, the pressure change forced a door closed and pulled another one open. I wiped sweat from my face and rolled over on my side to look at her. Large brown eyes blinked at me in the dark. A blue satin sheet followed the rise of her body as it crested at her hip and plunged into the trough of her waist.

“I thought you girls liked a guy who could go forever,” I said.

“Oh, that’s great in theory.” She sat up and hunted on the floor for her underwear. When she couldn’t find it, she rose and walked naked to the bureau, where she fished out a pair of bikini underpants and slipped them on. I stared at her from the bed, taking in every flex of smooth muscle. Only the Caesarean scar on her flat belly anchored her image in reality. “Not so great in execution. Like many things.”

She climbed back into bed and wrapped her arms around me, burying her face in my chest. I buried mine in turn in her hair. I took long ki breaths in which I inhaled deep lungfuls of her scent and tried to forget those claws digging into her hips.

The enemy overran my perimeter, I thought, and he’s still here.

No, he’s not, Bobby replied. That’s just your fucked-up mind playing sick tricks on you.

“What are you thinking about?”

I didn’t answer her for a long time.

“I think I remember one of the dreams,” I said finally. “One of the bad ones.”

“Want to talk about it?”

I pondered that. Then I said, “Not particularly. It involves you… and another man.”

I paused. She said nothing.

“You weren’t exactly a willing participant,” I added. “That’s what I’m carrying away from it, anyway. When you started talking dirty to me there, it was like a switch flipped and suddenly, there it is.”

I sat up, shaking my head and holding it in my hands.

Be a man, Bobby admonished, and handle your own shit.

Handle my own shit. Yeah. I’d been doing a great job of that.

“I talked to Craig today,” I said, changing the subject. “About the mugger. And Pinnix and Ramseur.”

She waited.

“Nobody knows who they are,” I said. “Three guys, no positive ID. After talking to Craig, I’m not even sure the first two were named Pinnix and Ramseur at all. According to him, nobody knows where those names came from.”

Ki breath.

“The guy on the phone,” I said, “the one I call the Bald Man, he threatened me. That guy I stabbed said his name, he said Bald Man right before he died. I’ve got this idea that… I don’t know… maybe the Bald Man made him.”

“Made him?” She asked. “Like a golem?”

“What’s a golem?”

“An old, old Jewish folk tale,” she answered, rolling away from me and propping herself up on one elbow. “A creature made from mud, or dust, or dirt, or whatever. It’s supposed to be a man, but it isn’t a man because God didn’t make it—someone trying to be like God made it, so of course it falls short. Men create golems to do their bidding. Sometimes they’re bad.”

That picture of the Bald Man in his dark room again. Conjuring. Creating. Making.

My mouth went dry. Golems; holy shit, that was it. Motherfucker was sending golems after me. The idea clicked so loudly that I almost jumped.

“Pinnix and Ramseur and this asshole who tried to mug me are… golems.”

“Probably not. Golems can’t talk.”

She paused, studying me.

“You know I’m kidding, right?”

I didn’t answer.

“The mugging was a coincidence,” she said. “The fact that nobody knows who these guys are means nothing, because when you exist on the periphery of society not only does nobody know who you are, but nobody cares who you are. And as for this little vision of yours, these dreams, they’re nothing more than a product of the anxiety you’re feeling over your perceived inability to protect me from harm. It’s completely natural.”

I remained silent, thinking.

“Your brain,” she continued, “understands now that the world isn’t as safe as you thought it was. So, it says, I have to train. Practice. When you dream, it’s actually practicing the skills necessary to get you out of those situations. So that if they ever happen again, it can react automatically.”

“You think so?”

“I do. I’m just surprised your therapist hasn’t brought this up with you. Any psych undergrad knows these things. Please tell me you’re not going to walk around thinking you were attacked by a couple of Jewish fairy tales; I don’t want to have you committed.”

I laid back down and covered my face with my hands. I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.

“You know what I’m starting to think?” She asked, laying back down.

“What’s that?”

“Maybe this Dr. Koenig isn’t such a great therapist after all.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m starting to wonder that myself.”

19.

I had come to doubt Dr. Koenig’s effectiveness as a therapist. But I kept my next appointment.

“I really dig this time of year,” I told him. “You can’t go to the beach or anything, but I think I like it even more than summertime.”

Thanksgiving had yet to arrive—the turkeys had begun stuffing the freezers at every grocery store, but no one had bought one. Although it was still only mid-November, the air had turned cold this morning with an abrupt snap that I almost heard as I lay awake staring at the ceiling, eyes bleary from too little sleep. Sleep deprivation notwithstanding—along with the very real possibility that a supernatural being with the ability to create bat and knife-wielding golems was after me—I felt a familiar tickle of enthusiasm and pleasure at the apple cider chill I smelled when I first stepped outside.

“Why’s that?” Dr. Koenig asked, sitting down in his leather chair and removing pad and pen from his Italian leather briefcase.

The cover of Southern Rifleman was coming loose—I’d need to tape it up when I left here so that it didn’t disintegrate. I had developed a habit of slipping a hand into my own briefcase and fondling it as I waited in court or talked on the phone or completed any number of other tasks that comprised my day. I gently laid it on the coffee table that had no business in an atmosphere of sophistication and luxury—and laced my fingers between my knees.

“Allie and I started dating in September of 1994,” I said, “pretty close to the beginning of our freshman year. But it took a few weeks for her to really fall for me the way I fell for her, so I spent all of September and most of October staring at the underside of my roommate’s bunk and wondering how long it was going to be before she dropped me.”

“I thought it was love at first sight.”

I straightened up. “For me, yeah. Of course. But for the first couple of weeks, it was kind of touch-and-go on my end. I didn’t know what I was doing—I’d never had a girlfriend before. So I felt pretty sure I’d screw it up. Throughout September and into October, anyway.”

“What happened in October?”

“She just warmed up to me,” I said. “Suddenly it wasn’t just me calling her anymore, or me sending her letters to her campus mail box or me coming up with things for us to do together. She started to… participate. And that happened about this time of year.”

I looked out the picture window at the bare dogwood trees flanking the bench. I stretched. Dr. Koenig stared down at his notepad, decorated with scribblings from our last session.

“Speaking of Allie,” he said.

I tensed.

“Where is she?”

I sighed. “She didn’t want to come.”

“Why not?”

“Burlington Women’s Club is serving dinner to the homeless at Loaves and Fishes tonight. She’s helping set up. You know, peel potatoes, boil potatoes, boil pasta. Chop up cabbage. I asked her to come meet with you and she said she’s too busy. She asked me to help her feed the homeless and I said I’m too busy. Guess we’re even.”

Bullshit. Allie would indeed help out at Loaves and Fishes this evening, but not until four this afternoon. I simply hadn’t asked her. The idea of seeing her in here with Dr. Koenig bothered me, and it wasn’t just a reluctance to show her too much of my vulnerability. Things, I had realized, were getting worse for me, not better. I didn’t want him getting under her hood, too; he hadn’t helped me worth a dime.

Yet here you are, Bobby observed.

Because I’m a narcissistic prick, I replied, and all we do in here is talk about me.

“I find your fixation on getting my wife in here a little misplaced,” I said. “There’s a lot going on with me that I think we need to focus on. Especially now.”

“Such as?”

“Pinnix and Ramseur. And that guy I whacked the other day, the one who tried to mug me.”

“Yes. When you suddenly transformed into Kevin the Ninja Lawyer.”

“Right. Notice I don’t know his name.”

Dr. Koenig nodded once.

“I don’t know his name because the police don’t know his name. No record, nobody recognizes the guy. I can understand that, now, but you know what else? Nobody knows who Pinnix and Ramseur are, either. We’ve got these names for them, but nobody in the police department could tell Craig exactly how they figured out those names. Because the only ID either one of them carried were membership cards to some adult video store in Durham. And those cards have only numbers, no names.”

I leaned forward.

“So help me out here, Doc. How did the cops ID them? Where did those names come from?”

“Fingerprints. The state’s DNA database.”

“Negative and double-negative,” I said, shaking my head. “No entries for either man on either the fingerprint or DNA database. These guys busted into my house, tried to kill me, had it in their heads to rape my family, but they’d never been arrested. They’d never set foot in a jail or anywhere else they could have been fingerprinted. Isn’t that strange?”

“It is,” he agreed. His face remained impassive, unintrigued. I wondered if he, too, might be a golem.

“So I’ve got this crazy idea,” I said.

I licked my lips. This was harder than it sounds, with my tongue all dry and tacky.

“You ever heard of a golem?”

He blinked at me.

“I have.” His gaze felt, his voice sounded, as flat as old Coke.

I took a deep breath.

“This is just an idea, now,” I said, “just me thinking out loud. But what if… what if these guys were sent?”

“Sent by who? By someone out to get you?”

“Yes.”

“Who would that be?”

“I don’t know, but he calls himself the Bald Man.”

He looked down at the paper, scribbled. His lips pursed, and his goatee twitched. I noticed that his beard stubble continued only to a point on his cheeks where it suddenly disappeared, giving way there to older but smooth-shaven skin. He had shaved his beard stubble to accentuate the angles of his face, making him look thinner than he perhaps was. Even kale-eating psychotherapists, I observed, aren’t above a touch of baloney.

“Why would the Bald Man be out to get you? Why would anyone want to send golems after you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of Angela then, her catatonic voice, her stumbling walk. “Why do bad things happen to anybody? How does God pick the ones who make the rest of us feel lucky and flock to Him for protection? Can’t say I understand how that works. Just that I’m blessed.”

“You’re blessed.”

I nodded. “Oh, yeah. On so many levels. All you have to do is look at what happened in my house last February and you’re like, somebody upstairs loves this asshole. And He took care of me again just this past Tuesday. Think about it: how many chairborne commando lilly-white lawyers stab muggers? How often does the mouse eat the cat? That’s God, man. Looking out for me.”

I’d been smiling, but it faded now.

“And I just wonder if maybe the Bald Man knows that. And maybe this whole thing is bigger than any of us really understand. Maybe I’m caught in a grudge match between this guy, this thing, whatever you want to call him, and a much higher power.”

“You’re Job,” he said. “From the Bible.”

I stared at him.

“No,” I said, after some thought. “Job got ass-fucked. I got a writeup in Southern Rifleman.”

He pursed his lips again. Another glance down at that notepad.

“What’re you thinking?” I asked.

“I think we need to go back to February,” he answered. “And discuss this whack to your head.”

20.

Once again, I left my therapist’s office feeling decidedly worse than I had when I walked in. Fortunately, I had some gears I could shift.

An hour before I met with Dr. Koenig, the Clerk of Court appointed me as guardian ad litem to an incompetency proceeding involving the Department of Social Services and a young man named Brandon Cross. With an interim hearing only two days away, I had to visit him as soon as possible to advise him of his rights. I had decided that I would do this after seeing Dr. Koenig this afternoon, partly for efficiency’s sake—my shrink’s office stood at the halfway point between my office and Brandon’s facility—and partly because I needed to see someone more miserable than Yours Truly.

Because Brandon Cross was worse off than me. Much, much worse off. He showed me what crazy meant, assuring me that I had a ways to go before I ever caught up with him.

Brandon ended up in a lockdown unit at Magnolia Plantation in northeast Burlington. While the name of this place evoked images of Tara from Gone with the Wind, the reality consisted of something entirely different. Magnolia Plantation was an ugly girl with a pretty name, a squat, flat-roofed facility of mildewy brick that looked suspiciously like a converted elementary school. Four long halls shot out of a central hub that had probably once housed a library, gymnasium or cafeteria but now contained the administrative and physical therapy offices. Down the corridors, the patients lived two to a room in pods that someone had carved from old classrooms. Industrial tile floors and cinderblock walls amplified every hoot, holler and footfall to create a discordant sonic background that made me wonder how any of these guys slept.

And the smell. I couldn’t figure out which of Magnolia Plantation’s features sucked the worst; the drab walls and floors, the Department of Corrections-esque soundtrack or the assaultive bleached air that tried and failed to cover the scents of mildew, body odor and urine. If insanity had its own scent, this was it: poor moisture controls, armpits, feet and pee sandwiched in between Clorox and Pine-Sol. Bon appetit.

I introduced myself to the duty nurse as Brandon Cross’s court-appointed attorney and she directed me to Room 408. She buzzed me into the men’s lockdown wing, where psychiatric patients of all ages wandered a Linoleum hallway. In the second pod on the right, I found my client.

I’d read the petition and the DSS attorney’s packet of medical records out in the parking lot. Respondent is a 24-year-old male with a history of severe physical and sexual abuse that led to his foster placement at age 12, I read. Respondent suffers moderate mental retardation and disappeared from his Alamance County foster placement at age 17. On Friday, October 25, Respondent was found wandering the highway north of Glen Raven poorly nourished, in a confused and disoriented state, wearing clothes not appropriate for the weather. Respondent suffers from memory loss and severe delusions.

But the next sentence really raised my eyebrows.

Respondent believes he is a Navy fighter pilot.

I found two young men—Maverick and Goose from Top Gun, I guess—in Room 408 at Magnolia Plantation. I knocked on the door frame and stood there for a moment trying to figure out which one of the guys sitting Indian-style on their beds and watching Dr. Oz was Brandon Cross. Neither one of them looked at me. I waited a minute, then asked them.

Without even taking his eyes off the television for one second, the man closest to the window raised his right arm and hand straight out from his body and pointed his index finger at the other man. Who, unaware that his roommate had dimed him out, continued to ignore me.

“Thanks,” I said. I approached Brandon Cross. “Brandon?”

No response. Dr. Oz must have been on fire this afternoon.

“Mr. Cross? Brandon Cross?”

Still no response. He blinked when I talked, though, which suggested that he at least perceived my presence but chose to ignore it. Probably because he was a fighter pilot, a Navy officer, and I wasn’t addressing him correctly. I stared at his profile, pawing through the shallow understanding of Navy ranks I’d gained through reading Tom Clancy novels until I found a word that might fit. “Ensign?”

Now he looked at me. “Lieutenant Junior Grade,” he said.

He pronounced it wootenant juniuh gwade, unable to pronounce the “r” or “l” sounds. “I’m Kevin Swanson,” I said. “I’m your court-appointed attorney in the incompetency proceeding filed against you by Alamance County. You mind talking to me a bit?”

That was a lot of information for a patient in a lockdown unit to process at once. He blinked at me for a moment, and I thought, out to lunch. His head looked impossibly narrow, like he’d spent his formative years squished between two bricks. This promised a very quick, very simple and very shallow interview; if I didn’t want to go back to my office this afternoon, I’d have to find another excuse. Because an in-depth meeting with a respondent like Brandon Cross wasn’t going to happen. Mentally, I started formulating my very quick, very simple and very shallow report to the Court.

And then he asked, “Go somewhere else?” Go somewhewh ewse? He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at his roommate. “Nosy.”

“Uh… sure. Is there somewhere we can sit?” I remembered who he thought he was and added, “Sir?”

Wownge, he said and slid himself off the bed. Walking with a pronounced limp, he led me down the hall to a little room decorated with motivational posters, a ficus tree and what looked like dorm furniture or decades-old leftovers from the principal’s office back when this place used to be a school. Bright sun streamed in through the window, but the lounge was bereft of patients. Probably because it didn’t have a television.

Still limping, Brandon dragged a chair up to the coffee table—not as cheap or scarred as the one in Dr. Koenig’s office but pretty bad in its own right—and motioned for me to sit down. He took the couch.

I showed him my copy of the petition and notice of hearing. “Seen these before? Sheriff’s deputies bring them to you?”

He nodded.

“So you know what this is about?”

He shook his head and told me that he couldn’t wead.

“How does a man get through Officer’s Candidate School and learn to land an F-14 on an aircraft carrier if he can’t read?”

“F-18. F-14 decommissioned.”

“My bad. How’d you get to be a fighter pilot if you can’t read?”

He snorted and shook his head again, a sullen gesture that said man, this is some bullshit, having to explain this again. He looked out the window, deep in thought. He took a breath, opening his mouth like he was about to say something, then thought again and closed it. His brow furrowed.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This hard,” he replied. Dis hahd. “I a… retard.”

“Take all the time you need.”

“I retard,” he repeated. “Retarded. Can’t think right. Can’t read.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Just tell me how a man gets to fly fighter planes when he can’t read.”

He looked over my shoulder, and I turned to see a hunched-over old man hobbling past the lounge. Brandon waited for him to shuffle away, then leaned forward and hissed, “Not fighter pilot.”

“Really?” I said it like this was a surprise.

“Here,” he continued, “Retarded. Can’t read. Can’t think. Cloudy.” Cwowdy.

“What do you mean by ‘here?’”

He pointed at the coffee table. Then he pointed everywhere. “Here,” he said. “Here, here, here! Retarded!”

“You mean… when you’re in this place, you’re retarded?”

“This world.”

“When you’re in this world, you’re retarded.”

He nodded emphatically, smiling now, pleased that I understood.

“But you’re not retarded… in another world?”

He drew his lips into a tight grin and shook his head.

“In another world, you’re a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy and you fly F-18s.”

At this point, I felt like I had all the information I needed to make a recommendation to the court. I didn’t need to sit here on the state’s dime talking to a guy so obviously incompetent to handle his own affairs that I could have figured it out if he spoke only Chinese. Professional pride, though—and a desire to not return to the office any sooner than necessary—kept me in my seat. Brandon Cross may have been a mental incompetent, but the nurses and orderlies weren’t. When they saw his lawyer jetting out the door five minutes after he signed in, they’d say, that’s a court-appointed piece of shit right there. Didn’t hardly spend any time at all with the man.

“Why don’t you tell me how that works?” I asked. “Living in two worlds, I mean. Do you just jump back and forth between realities whenever you feel like it, or is it more of a surprise, like you’re sitting on the john on an aircraft carrier one minute and suddenly whoa, you’re in a mental hospital?”

He shook his head energetically. The grin had disappeared.

“No? No what? No, you can’t control it, or no, it isn’t a surprise?”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Behind him, clouds obscured the sun on their way across the sky and the window turned from yellow to gray.

“No two realities,” he said, pronouncing it weeawitties.

He opened his eyes.

“That real,” he said. “This a nightmare. And I stuck.”

21.

Brandon’s DSS file waited in my email inbox when I got back to the office. They’d pulled him out of his mother’s home at age twelve, when her boyfriend had taken a shine to him. His special education teacher noticed him walking funny at school one morning and when she asked him why, he said that when he walked like that, his butt didn’t hurt as bad. Mama and Boyfriend went to jail, Brandon went into the foster care system. He spent the next five years shuffling from placement to placement until he ran away at seventeen. Nobody saw him again until they found him on the highway up there in Glen Raven.

For the first time in forever, I went more than five minutes without wallowing in my problems. I felt pretty good until I looked on my things-to-do list and saw the notation:

Find neurologist

Right. Because a baseball bat had connected squarely with my skull. Shortly thereafter, I’d popped back up and shot the batter. Yet another miracle. Or not. Neither I—nor Dr. Koenig, for that matter, being a psychologist—knew diddly squat about head injuries. Was that particular aspect of the shooting so miraculous? I didn’t know. But, I’d been thinking, a neurologist probably would.

My father still had a few colleagues practicing at Catawba Memorial, and I decided I would seek advice from one of them. I buzzed Kristin, my secretary, to have her go online and find me somebody, but when the intercom returned only dead air, I looked at the clock and realized it was six P.M. and everybody but the lawyers had left. I could go online myself—maybe I couldn’t type very well, but I could surf the web with the best of the best—but nobody’s office would be answering phones at this hour. So I wouldn’t get this question answered tonight.

I set the receiver back in its cradle and sat back in my chair. On my desk, the folder Craig had brought me from the Burlington Police Department sat beside a stack of credit card statements received from opposing counsel in one of the dozens of marital Vietnams in which I stayed involved all the time. I picked up the folder, opened it. I flipped slowly through the useless sheets of paper until I came to the photocopy of the first video store card.

Ryan’s News and Video. It made sense that Pinnix and Ramseur would not only frequent a pornographic video store, but hold membership cards. They had probably been going there for years, seeking porn that got sicker and sicker as time went on and they became harder and harder to impress. At some point, watching actresses cry out in fake pain during fake rapes didn’t cut it for them anymore. And they’d taken things to the next level.

Note to self, I thought. Check and see if golems like porn.

Given what they’d tried to do, they probably liked it a lot. Which meant that they probably stopped by Ryan’s News and Video frequently. Which in turn meant that the clerk there could probably tell me something about them if I caught him at the right time. I could put my Alamance County Courthouse ID around my neck to make me look official, make him think he had to answer my questions. If he wanted to get cute, if he wanted to pull customer privacy on me, I could threaten to subpoena him to a deposition. Tell him I could make him produce all his business records, all his security tapes, everything. I couldn’t do this—not without filing a bona fide lawsuit first—but he didn’t know that. He would understand, though, that his business depended largely upon discretion. And that if I shined the light on his little store, the cockroaches would stop coming.

The sun was on its way down by the time I stepped out of the building and into the parking lot, but it had dropped entirely by the time I merged onto the Durham Freeway from the interstate. Electric light and the headlamps of a thousand cars beat the night back to the edges of the highway, where it pressed against the guardrails in an effort to collapse the whole works. When I got off the freeway, it suddenly hit me that Ryan’s News and Video probably didn’t rent commercial space in the best part of Durham, and I was going there at night. Evidently, since Pinnix and Ramseur screwed up their chance to kill me, I wanted to give their neighbors a crack at it, too.

This is some stupid shit, Swanson, Bobby warned me. You need to turn your ass around.

“Fuck it,” I growled. I turned onto Holloway Street and followed the directions as the robotic voice of my GPS delivered them. I arrived at the Water Street address on the photocopied card and stopped.

Ryan’s News and Video looked exactly as I’d pictured it: an adult bookstore set up in an old gas station. The owner had painted over the windows and bricked in the service door. A single island standing before the building hadn’t sheltered gas pumps in many years, but the overhead lights still worked and these threw a sickly yellow light over the storefront. It provided enough illumination by which to see and avoid tripping over the many places where the ancient asphalt had buckled, but not so much that the casual observer could ascertain one’s identity. Five or six cars and pickup trucks stood parked outside, all but one—probably the clerk’s car—backed into their spaces. Despite the poverty of the surrounding area, none of the vehicles looked more than five years old, and when I backed the BMW into the last remaining space, it didn’t look out of place. The business attracted a certain clientele from outside the neighborhood.

“Here we go,” I muttered to no one. I got out. The headlights blinked and the horn hiccupped, the locks clicked shut and I walked into the store.

If I expected the inside to dovetail with the seedy exterior, a shock awaited me upon entry. Bright fluorescents lit row after row of neatly arranged erotica, a surprisingly professional cornucopia of pornographic videos, magazines and adult toys. The linoleum tile floor showed signs of age but also glowed from the recent attention of a mop. I had anticipated the scent of cigarettes and old motor oil but my nose detected neither of these; a man could have spent hours in here and walked out with no telltale smells clinging to his clothes, nothing to raise concern in the sensitive olfactory receptors of a wife or girlfriend. What sounded like the Top 40 station out of Raleigh drifted from speakers set into the acoustic tile overhead. It could have been any Blockbuster Video store in the country.

But for the inventory. When the door closed behind me, I found myself looking at a stack of small boxes with a photo of a strange lump of plastic and a young blond woman licking cherry red lips.

LARA LOVITT FUCKABLE VAGINA, the box proclaimed. The lip licker, I presumed, being Lara. REALISTIC FEEL! E-Z CLEANING!

“Welcome to Ryan’s,” called a young man seated behind a cash register on the far end of the store, reading a magazine. He didn’t look up. “Holler if you need help.”

“I will,” I said, clearing my throat. “Thanks.”

I moved past the adult toy aisle and through a section marked ASIAN, which offered a plethora of DVDs with covers showing small women of Asian descent finding creative ways to get boned. There stood another section marked INTERRACIAL, another for GAY/LESBIAN/TRANSSEXUAL, another for S&M and yet another labeled HETEROANAL. The last section before the register promised ALTERNATIVE. Apparently, all the other material was just too mainstream for some people.

“Help you find something?” Asked the young man.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Are you Ryan?”

“I’m Cory.”

He was younger than me, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but taller, broader in the shoulders. He wore a hooded sweatshirt with HOLLISTER printed on the chest, but the long sleeves didn’t quite disguise the flames tattooed on the undersides of his arms. Another look and I saw more tattoos on the topsides; with his shirt off, this guy would have resembled a New York City subway car. He had shaved his head, like Dr. Koenig. He had a gold tooth, unlike Dr. Koenig.

Behind him, a red curtain covered the doorway to another room in the building. A dim light turned red by the gauzy material glowed inside it, and I felt suddenly certain that I was looking at the entrance to the VIP section. Just in case the stuff in the ALTERNATIVE section wasn’t donkeyshow weird enough for some patrons.

I reached inside my London Fog overcoat and pulled out a sheet of paper—a photocopy of the membership card to Ryan’s—which I unfolded and displayed for the clerk. “You guys issue cards like this?”

“Yeah. That’s… who are you?”

“I’m Kevin Swanson,” I said. “I’m an attorney from Alamance County.” Seeing his face tighten up, I quickly added, “Nobody’s in trouble. I’m just looking for information on two guys who might have a connection to this card right here.”

“What two guys?”

“Leon Pinnix and Trayshaun Ramseur. Ring a bell?”

Cory shook his head.

“There’s two of them,” I said. “Cards, I mean. One for Pinnix and one for Ramseur. You mind checking your records and seeing if you have an address?”

“We don’t keep records,” he said. “People that come here don’t necessarily want a paper trail, you know? And even if we had records, I probably couldn’t show them to you. Privacy laws. Know what I’m saying?”

“I do,” I said. My face remained impassive, but inside I felt myself flailing. This was my one and only lead. This was the part of the show where I threatened to subpoena him to a deposition and threatened to force him to produce business records. But it had become very obvious to me—since I wasn’t dealing with Ryan himself here, or anybody else with skin in the game—that Cory wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if I subpoenaed the entire world. In fact, he might enjoy collecting his eight dollars an hour to come sit at a deposition.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what’d they do? I mean, what’s a lawyer from Alamance doing sniffing around a porn store?”

I folded the paper and slipped it back into my coat along with my hands.

“Last year, they tried to break into my house,” I said, maintaining my expression. “They tried to kill me but didn’t do a great job. So I shot and killed them.”

Cory’s thick eyebrows raised and brought the corners of his mouth up with them in a slight smile. “I thought you looked familiar. I saw you on the news, dude.”

“They didn’t have any ID,” I continued. “In fact, but for these cards to your store I don’t think the cops would have even known their names. I’m just trying to get more information. So I can get some… closure.”

“Closure,” he echoed.

“Closure,” I repeated.

His eyes moved over my overcoat, the suit visible beneath it. White shirt, dark tie. I read his mind; this guy killed somebody? You got to be fucking kidding me.

“The nature of the attack,” I said, “suggests that if they held memberships to a place like this—no offense—they would have come here a lot. They’d be regulars.”

“We have a lot of regulars.”

“Two black males, early to mid thirties.”

“Dude, this is Durham. You’re going to need more than that.”

“They would have been into alternative.”

Up climbed the eyebrows, slight but noticeable. “How alternative?”

“The cops found handcuffs and duct tape. Theory is, these guys were getting ready to act something out.”

Cory’s mouth transformed into an O and his eyebrows raised all the way. He whistled. “I see. That’s pretty alternative.”

“It is. Anyway, do these guys ring any kind of a bell? They wouldn’t necessarily have been coming in together—I’m looking for two black guys about my age who consistently rent… very alternative material. The most alternative material you have.”

He looked down at my hand, which still held the photocopies of the membership cards. He motioned for me to hand it over, which I did. He studied it for a moment and handed it back.

“That’s a VIP card,” he said. “Gives the customer access to certain collections. Material we don’t just put out there for everybody. Hey, are you a cop?”

“My State Bar number is 503612. Look me up.”

“If you’re a cop, you have to tell me. Otherwise, it’s entrapment.”

That wasn’t true, but I wasn’t going to disabuse him of that notion just now. “My firm’s website is www.carwoodallisonlaw.com,” I offered. “My mug shot’s on it. Fire up your laptop and take a look.”

He folded his arms and regarded me with eyes that narrowed in suspicious appraisal. Whirs and clicks sounded as he tried to decide whether I was telling the truth or not. After another look at my suit—one of my expensive ones, perfectly tailored to my figure—he must have decided that I dressed too nicely for an undercover cop. His arms unfolded. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the glowing red curtain behind him.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to show you the VIP section.”

I honestly didn’t want to see what kind of things the owners of a store like this considered too spicy to set out with the S&M and anal material. And I didn’t want to stand in that red light. I didn’t want that at all.

But I went.

Cory hadn’t answered my question. He hadn’t indicated whether Pinnix or Ramseur rang a bell.

Because they don’t, I thought. Because they weren’t born and didn’t grow up with sexual desires that could deform like the branches of some twisted tree in the black heart of the forest. They had no lives before the Bald Man gave them air. They had no thoughts other than his.

Impossible. The video store, these membership cards, they proved that. Golems didn’t like porn, because they couldn’t; ergo, the fact that Pinnix and Ramseur had possessed membership cards indicated that they weren’t golems at all and I needed to stop thinking that stupid bullshit right now.

Or not, Bobby mused. He conjured men, but maybe he can’t conjure clothes

What the hell are you talking about? I asked.

I’m saying that maybe the membership cards belong to the people they killed to get the wallets and clothes.

Before I could process that last thought, I had followed Cory through the curtain and found myself in the exclusive VIP section of Ryan’s News & Video.

The light burned dimmer in here, lengthening the shadows and removing the shine from the magazine and DVD covers. I didn’t get a great look at those, because the merchandise on the wall grabbed my attention first.

Chains. Rope. Rolls of tape. Blindfolds.

Handcuffs.

“Good material isn’t all about big titties and tight asses,” Cory said. “I mean, if that’s all it was, we could all get off on Playboy, you know what I’m saying? The good stuff is situational.”

Right next to the handcuffs hung a clear plastic package with what looked like garbage bag ties inside. A handwritten label on the bag proclaimed these to be FLEXICUFFS.

“The good stuff gets to the heart of what you want. Your center. Digs deep into those places that you don’t want to admit exist but are running things anyway. Under every skin is a nasty, nasty son of a bitch. This section is for him.”

I tore my eyes away from the restraints and found myself looking at a DVD showing a girl in what looked like an evening gown. She looked young, probably too young to have her face on a DVD cover in a place like this. The title read simply Prom Night. Next to that, another girl, blindfolded and gagged and chained to a wall. This one was called Please Don’t.

I felt my immortal soul in danger just by being here.

There was another doorway beyond the one I’d just stepped through. Solid metal, with a double lock, it looked like an exterior door. This, logic said, would lead to the outside of the building.

That part of me that believed in golems piped up again. No, it said, it doesn’t. It goes somewhere else.

The thought hit me like a bucket of ice water.

This building isn’t big enough for a room this size, let alone another one behind it. Think about it.

I did. The general merchandise section of the store took up almost its entire width. The old gas station sat on a relatively narrow lot and the builders had structured it accordingly. The room I stood in right now shouldn’t have been here.

Where am I? I asked.

No answer. Oblivious to my thoughts, Cory continued.

“The thing about most bondage material is, the girl is actually okay with it. She’s part of the game, or she’s getting paid, or whatever. Even in your so-called rape videos, what you’ve got is a couple of actors. But in the best shit, they don’t want it. Like this one.”

He picked up a magazine in a language I couldn’t decipher. It looked like Spanish. He flipped it open to reveal a Hispanic woman in her mid-twenties bent over a table, a desk, some nameless piece of furniture. A set of hands pinned her arms to its surface. Behind her stood a man in a ski mask, naked from the waist down. He was

Leering

smiling, I felt this even though the mask covered his face. The woman was crying.

“You can get away with things in other countries that would get your ass sent to prison here,” Cory said.

I looked back at the door. The edges glowed now, like someone had turned on the lights in a room on the other side. I couldn’t ask about this, though, because my throat had closed up.

Where am I where the fuck am I where does that door go if it goes to the outside how are the goddamn lights on because it’s DARK out there

You wanted to see where those two fuckers came from, Bobby said in my head. I think you found it.

My throat unstuck enough to where I could say, “Thanks. I appreciate you showing me this.”

“Anything in here you like?”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure, man? Hey, I got more than just this third-world bullshit. If you’re only into white bitches, I got stacks and stacks of that.”

“I’m good to go,” I said. “Thanks.”

Before he could say another word and before my eyes could take another look at that other door, I turned and walked out as fast as I could. By the time I hit the front door to the building, I was running.

22.

Cory didn’t follow me. I point that out because when I hit the night air outside, it took awhile for the crazy thoughts to subside, and it struck me that Cory could have been a golem, too. He could have chased me out into the parking area and dragged me back inside.

And so I ran. I actually ran past the BMW, because even as my mind yelled hey, wait a minute, my arms and legs seized on this idea of Cory The Porn-Peddling Golem and so they pumped up and down, up and down, continuing long past the point where my heart and lungs could supply them with air. By the time all my systems reached the mutual understanding that Cory wasn’t chasing me, I had left Ryan’s News & Video—and my car—several hundred yards behind. My adrenaline boost spent, my legs first slowed and then stopped. I bounded to a halt and rested my hands on a lamp post, bending over and gasping for breath. I felt more than a little dizzy.

Effective immediately, Bobby said, you are to begin a program of intense physical training with the goal of burning all that candy off your ass. Jesus, man, look at you!

My heart rate slowing now, I straightened up and stretched, feeling my vertebrae pop and crack as I surveyed my new surroundings. The streetlamp under which I stood had burned out—or shot out, as evidenced by the broken glass at my feet—and the city hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. Consequently, I found myself in the darkest section of a street that didn’t have much light even on the best of nights. Down the street, a lamp on the curb outside Ryan’s Video marked the outer boundary of my present darkness. Another lamp down on the other street corner in the opposite direction petered out a hundred yards or so from where I stood, dribbling its miserly electric glow over rows of close-together houses built in the Craftsman style, with rambling front porches and angling rooflines. People paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for architecture and character like this in Burlington, but Durham’s elite had moved on to greener pastures years ago and now their old homes stood in neglected disrepair. Shadows of indoor furniture stood on sagging porches. Several windowless units shouted abandonment, while others with lights glowing in the few windows that weren’t boarded up spoke of residents so far down on the food chain that even their landlords couldn’t afford new glass.

“You all right?”

I jumped. That’s not an exaggeration; I actually jumped, both feet leaving the ground for a split-second when the voice in the darkness startled me so badly that my leg muscles gave a violent convulsion. I think I might have yipped, too.

I looked all around for the source of the voice. I found it on a darkened porch attached to the house just behind me. I saw the outline of a couch—probably fabric-covered, indoor furniture had a way of migrating outside in neighborhoods like this one—from which grew the outline of a man.

“I’m okay,” I replied. “Just out of shape, is all.”

“What are you running from?” His words ran together in that urban style that mashed syllables and dropped seemingly unnecessary verbs—the question came out as whachoo ruh-fum. I couldn’t see him, but he sounded older, fifties or even sixties. His voice was as dark as his home and as cracked as his street. I heard the snick of steel on flint and saw the flash of the lighter as he touched the flame to the end of a cigarette. I watched the cherry rise as he raised it to his lips, and fall as he lowered it. “Well?”

How to explain that? Well, sir, I was perusing your neighborhood video store’s selection of very sick porn, and it occurred to me that the clerk might be a monster made from earth and clay sent by another monster who’s gotten his ass on his shoulders with me. So I ran.

I gestured down the street towards the oasis of light that contained Ryan’s Video and my BMW. “I was out in the parking lot and something spooked me. Guess I panicked.”

“So you ran up here?” So you ruhup heah?

“Yeah. I did.”

“Well, you best get on.”

I looked all around at the menacing shadows. Jesus, I thought, why doesn’t the city come out and fix this? “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for your concern. Have a nice night.”

“You don’t run into darkness. You supposed to run away from it. But you done run right up in it. And this ain’t no place for you. You don’t belong here. You need to go ahead on, and you need to go now. Before they finds you.”

I tried to swallow and failed.

“Who’s they?” I asked.

“The ones that do belong here.”

Although I wore a heavy overcoat, I shivered. Through a mouth of cotton, I said, “I’ll be going now, thanks.”

“Yeah, you get going. Don’t stop for nothing. Just go. And don’t never come back.”

“Thank you. Have a nice evening.”

My legs unfroze and I took off, walking instead of running partly because I felt silly running, but also because the sidewalk was so shattered and buckled that I couldn’t understand how I’d made it this far without tripping and plowing face-first into the concrete psoriasis. As I stepped over the worst spots, the man called out after me:

“You hear what I say? Don’t stop for nothing!”

And I didn’t. Until I heard noises in the shadows maybe a hundred yards from that line on the pavement where the streetlight outside Ryan’s News & Video gave way to the night. I stopped. And I looked.

Keep moving, my Better Sense told me.

Hey, now… what’s going on here? Asked my Inner Self. This was my Better Sense’s mentally handicapped roommate, and it kept me rooted to that spot on the sidewalk. And when I saw what was going on in the shadows, I couldn’t leave.

23.

Where the houses came together, even the moon couldn’t penetrate the darkness. A narrow alleyway separated a boarded-up Victorian from the Craftsman bungalow next door, also boarded up—but the properties weren’t deserted. Up against the wall of the Victorian, three men stood shrouded in black velvet. I blinked and saw a smaller figure, too, a woman. And when I saw the positions they were in, I froze.

Two of the men stood on either side of the woman, who struggled unsuccessfully against the hands pinning her arms against the rotten siding. They’d forced her face-first against the house, the two subduing her while the third, standing behind her, reached around and did something with the front of her pants. He pulled these down, and as he did so her struggle seemed to take on a new intensity. She began to moan no, no, no over and over, gaining in volume until the man who had just pulled her pants down grabbed her by the hair and bounced her face off the side of the house.

“Shut up,” he growled.

The moaning stopped. So did the struggling. The man began to undo his belt buckle.

I knew what I was witnessing, but I couldn’t move. The scene unfolding before me came from another planet, another world whose gravities and atmosphere I couldn’t process—my muscles couldn’t work there, my lungs couldn’t breathe. A cold, slippery feeling writhed in my stomach and I thought that I had never felt so sick in my life.

“Fuck her brains out,” said one of her restrainers.

The woman began to moan again, prompting the third man to take his hands off his belt buckle long enough to smash her face against the wall again. Her knees buckled this time, and she would have fallen but for the two other men pinning her up against the house. His hands returned to his waist. I heard the clink of the buckle, then the snick of his zipper.

Do something, Bobby shouted. Do it now!

And so I did.

“What in the fuck are you clowns doing?” I barked, stepping forward. “Get your hands off that woman right now!”

Mr. Pants Puller jumped about a mile in the air, stumbling backwards so fast that he would have gone sprawling on his backside had the wall of the bungalow next door not stopped him. But it did stop him, and when he hit it he bounced forward just as his partners in crime released the woman and scrambled away from where they’d been holding her for their friend. She collapsed and fell sideways.

“Shit!” One of them exclaimed.

Shit, indeed. Three of them, one of me. Closer in now, I could see that they were all young—the one fiddling to get his pants zippered back up couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-two. He had his head down, trying to see his zipper in the dark, but even with this I could tell that he, like his friends, stood taller than me. Three of them, one of me, and while the two restrainers held their hands up, in just about five seconds they would figure out that this newcomer wasn’t anyone to be afraid of and then…

Burn that bridge when we get there, Bobby said.

“Who is you?” Asked the restrainer on the left.

“Detective Bobby Swanson of the Durham Police Department,” I said in my best command voice. “You got five seconds to get your asses out of here!”

Left and Right—the threat-tracking software in my head had assigned them names already—took two hesitant steps backwards, arms still raised in the air. They’re buying it, my heart sang gleefully as they began to turn, it’s working!

But then Pants Puller finished buttoning himself back up and said, “Hold on.”

They stopped. My heart stopped singing in mid-trill. I looked down at the woman on the ground, who hadn’t moved from where she’d collapsed. If I’d hoped for an ally in all this, I wouldn’t find it in her—she appeared either dead or asleep.

Why isn’t she moving? She was moving a second ago, why is she so goddamned still…

And it dawned on me then what I’d walked into here. I blinked at the woman, at Left and Right and Pants Puller. I had thought I was witnessing a gang rape, but in reality…

A setup, Bobby hissed. You’ve been ambushed.

By golems. The Bald Man had set me up, throwing this cast and crew together to draw me into the shadows using the rope of my own good nature—the knowledge that Kevin Swanson couldn’t stand by and let something like this happen. These were golems.

I saw his bald head outlined against the window of his darkened room. His eyes glowed with red malevolence and although I couldn’t see him, I felt him grinning.

Three against one, he chuckled. Let’s see how the Hero of the Month handles this!

“If you a cop,” said Pants Puller, stepping forward towards me, “show me your badge.”

“I don’t have to show you a goddamned thing!” I growled with false confidence. I raised my voice. “You are all under arrest for the crime of attempted rape! Turn around and put your hands on the wall!”

Left and Right didn’t. Their hands began to lower.

“If you a cop,” Pants Puller said again, “show me your gun.”

Which, of course, I couldn’t do. Because I didn’t have one. I had an AK-47, but this was locked up in my gun cabinet in my basement in Burlington.

“Motherfucker!” Exclaimed Left.

“He ain’t no cop!” Declared Right.

Pants Puller grinned now, and I thought in a flash that he might not be a golem at all. This right here was a demon in the flesh, he had a brain and a malevolent soul, I could read it on his young features and see it glowing orange and red in his eyes. He reached inside his jacket pocket and came out with a small automatic pistol. He leveled it at me.

“You in a heap of trouble now, cracker,” he said. “You done fucked with the wrong motherfuckers.”

Bobby? I cried. What do I do now?

Before Bobby could answer, Pants Puller had snatched the front of my London Fog coat and propelled me against the wall of the bungalow. He aimed the gun squarely between my eyes. My eyeballs rotated in on themselves to try to focus on the gun. Unlike the knife in the hands of the man who had tried to mug me in front of my office, the gun didn’t shake.

“You a dead motherfucker,” Pants Puller said in a voice that was half-growl and half-whisper but all grin. “Oh, you is so dead!”

“You don’t have to do this,” I said. My voice sounded amazingly calm and steady. “I don’t know who you are; hell, I can hardly see you. We can all just go ahead on and…”

“Shut the fuck up.”

So I shut the fuck up.

Over his shoulder, he said, “Go ahead. Pick that bitch up and do it.”

Left obeyed. He bent over and hauled the woman to a standing position while Right first stared, then understood what he was supposed to be doing and began unbuckling his pants.

“You think you bad?” Pants Puller asked me. “You ain’t shit!”

Right worked a lot faster than Pants Puller had. His pants came undone with lightning speed, and now his hands went into them to free himself from the constraints of his boxer shorts. He moved forward towards the woman, whose head lolled from one side to the other.

That could be Abby, that could be somebody’s daughter and I’m just going to stand here and…

No.

Before I could launch another thought, my hands shot up and my body shot sideways. My palms connected with Pants Puller’s gun hand and forced it first up and then violently down as they closed around the weapon and twisted his wrist, making it mechanically impossible for him to continue holding it.

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.

24.

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.

“Sir, you have the right to remain silent…”

My heart stopped for several seconds, then began to race. “Hold on! I called you guys! I’m the one that called! You can’t read me Miranda! You can’t arrest me!”

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You also have the right to an attorney.”

“I am an attorney! What the hell is going on?”

“If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. Do you understand these rights, sir?”

My face burned. My chest thumped. This was insane.

Is it? Asked Bobby. Red and blue lights danced on the plywood sheaths covering the door and windows of the bungalow and twinkled in the broken glass on the porch. Think about it, man. You’re a stone-cold killer. That’s all these guys know right now. You’re a dangerous motherfucker, Kevin, you’re a hard son of a bitch. If I rolled up on you in the ass-crack of Durham at night, I’d cuff you, too.

Right. I was a stone-cold killer, I was a dangerous motherfucker and I was a hard son of a bitch. These cops saw dead people on the scene and found a gun in my waistband. They sensed the danger emanating from my pores; I was a good guy but a bad ass. They had to cuff me and frisk me for officer safety. They had to Mirandize me in case I made incriminating statements. They had to contain me until they got to the bottom of this.

And when they did get to the bottom of this, they would uncuff me. They would uncuff me quickly.

“Yes,” I said. “I understand. And I wish to give a statement at this time.”

The officer who had cuffed me turned me around. I found myself looking at a black ex-Marine—I could spot them from miles away—with shoulders as wide as I was tall. I squinted in the darkness at his nametag: this was MCADOO. His partner, a white ex-Marine with equally linebacker-ish proportions, stood back and to the side. I couldn’t see his nametag, as he stood too far away. Younger than McAdoo, this one regarded me with a suspicion and wariness that his superior didn’t. He kept his right hand close by the holster of his pistol.

“Girl’s alive,” called an officer around the corner. “She’s coming to.”

“Who are you?” Asked McAdoo.

“Kevin Swanson. Wallet’s in my right pocket. Driver’s license is in the flap.”

McAdoo reached into my pants and fished out my wallet. He removed my driver’s license and handed it to the younger man. “Check him for warrants,” he said.

The younger man—I could see his nametag now and it read BRADSHER—studied my license. Probably trying to figure out how anyone who seemed this dangerous out on the street could look so stupid in front of the DMV camera.

“I said, go check him for warrants,” McAdoo growled.

Bradsher looked up from the license and studied my face. His cold, businesslike expression had vanished, replaced now with a lopsided grin. “Kevin Swanson of Burlington?”

“In the flesh.”

“You’re that lawyer who blew away those two B&E sons of bitches with an AK-47.”

I pursed my lips and nodded slowly. “That’s me.”

“Holy shit! Mac, this is Kevin Swanson, man! From Burlington! He’s that guy we were talking about the other day!”

McAdoo’s dark brow wrinkled. “Get out of here!”

“I am who I am,” I said. My nose began to itch. I decided I would plead guilty to three counts of first-degree murder if only they’d let me scratch it.

The other two officers reappeared from in between the two houses. One helped the staggering young woman towards the nearest patrol car while the other, a black man just as tall as McAdoo but only half the width, came over waving his hands.

“Cut him loose,” he said. “Girl says this guy saved her ass. He’s a hero, man, uncuff him.”

And McAdoo did.

The girl—legally a woman, but at nineteen I’d still call her a girl—worked at a service station four blocks away in the opposite direction from Ryan’s News & Video. She attended North Carolina Central University during the day and worked the gas station full-time at night to earn money to support herself and her three-year-old son. She’d seen the three men sitting on the front steps of the bungalow and had considered crossing the street so as to not pass so close to them, but as she debated this with herself, they suddenly leapt off the porch and dragged her into the alleyway between the houses. They showed her the gun and told her if she screamed, they’d use it. She could cry or moan, but she couldn’t scream. So she had started to cry, she started to cry a lot, because when they started unbuttoning her pants, she understood what was about to happen to her and she could do nothing else.

And then a strange man in a business suit appeared out of nowhere. He talked trash and a minute later, all three assailants lay dead.

“Three guys?” Bradsher marveled. “You took out three guys all by yourself?”

After I related the story of how I’d saved the girl, I regaled them with the tale of my mugging in the parking lot of Carwood, Allison and the night I had shot Pinnix and Ramseur. By the time Craig Montero arrived on the scene, we were talking like old friends. I didn’t need a lawyer anymore; I needed a bartender.

“I have a question for you guys, now,” I said as Craig’s Audi pulled up on the curb two houses up, away from the flashing lights. “Those three shitbags I just wasted—they have any ID on them?”

And Bradsher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “At this point, we don’t have any idea who they are.”

25.

“Three men,” Dr. Koenig said. “You killed three men this time.”

“Body count’s up to six,” I replied.

Thanksgiving had come and gone. It was late afternoon now, close to quitting time for normal people, and the sky had taken on the overcast hue that dominates the end of the day in early winter. No leaves remained on the dogwoods beside the bench outside. I hadn’t seen anyone in the courtyard in a very long time.

In my hands, Southern Rifleman had become a tube, a runner’s baton, a small sword. I laid it down on the couch beside me and sighed.

“It sounds like you’re a hero yet again.”

“I’m a lawyer who’s killed six people in less than a year. I’m more a circus freak than a hero.” I looked down at the hardwood floor. “Honestly, I feel… distant.”

“Distant?”

“Everyone’s kissing my ass,” I said. “And Bobby said this would happen. He said it in February, after I hosed Pinnix and Ramseur. He said: you’re a man apart now. You’re going to get your ass kissed like it’s never been kissed before. Because you’re going to make everybody feel small.”

“Small?”

“Bobby has a unique perspective on this,” I said. “He’s killed a lot more than six people. What he says is, we’ve done the things that other men dream about doing. Not like everybody sits there jonesing to pop somebody, but it’s like… everybody likes to think they’d be a superhero if they ever had to be. They say, I can kill. I can fight. I can do all that. But then they run into a guy who actually did what they like to tell themselves they could do in the same situation, and they compare themselves to this man and they think, could I? They’re not so sure.”

I shrugged.

“So they kiss our asses. Praise us, buy us beers, shake our hands and thank us for our service. They’ve never been tested. We have. And while all these Walter Mittys sit there on the bus or at their desks or in their cars in traffic jams and daydream about what total Billy Bad-Asses they’d be in the right situation, we’ve actually done that.”

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.”

26.

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.

“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.”

27.

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.”

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.

28.

“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.”

“And that’s significant… why?”

“Because they stood here for a solid minute. At the least. They were carrying a rape kit, man, they weren’t interested in stealing any of my property; they wouldn’t have looked around for any goodies. The goodies they wanted were upstairs. They knew that. But they stood here for a solid minute.”

We stood in silence as I tried to imagine standing still in a strange house for that long. Funny; a minute had never seemed like a long time before. The seconds ticked by in our heads with the speed of molasses running down frost-covered iron. With each passing moment, the absurdity of what Pinnix and Ramseur had done only grew.

When a minute had passed, Bobby rolled his eyes again. He retreated into the kitchen and returned with our beers, which we had laid on the counter on our way to the basement. “They stood there for a while and listened,” he said. “Trying to hear if there was anybody else in the house other than the dumbass in the basement and the girls they were after. A little recon would have made sense.”

He handed me my beer. I accepted it but did not drink; I studied his expression and saw the discomfort there, the thoughts beneath his words. One minute doesn’t sound like much, but in the context of an assault it becomes an eternity. They wouldn’t have stood there for a full minute. Bobby understood this. I could read this in the tension set in his jaw, born of the effort it took to hold the corners of his mouth up in that wry, this-is-all-a-bunch-of-bullshit smile.

And he understood, too, that this exercise assumed I had lain on the floor for only a half a minute. It was entirely possible—and likely—that I had been out for far longer than that.

“Are you still obsessed with that stupid idea that you caught them on their way out? Do you still honestly believe it’s possible that your wife and maybe your daughter got raped by two strangers and don’t remember a second of it?”

No, I didn’t honestly believe that. Not anymore. What possessed me now—what quickened my heartbeat and narrowed my eyes and brought a sheen of sweat to my skin even though it was only sixty-eight degrees in here—was that the results of our experiment didn’t jibe with my theory of this attack. I had concluded that they hadn’t hit me that hard because the Bald Man had wanted my brains unscrambled and my faculties intact enough to send me running out the back door to get help—whereupon I would have to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had run while these men raped and then killed my family. But then, once they’d knocked me down, they should have proceeded upstairs post-haste. Not stood there in the hallway waiting for me. Why would they have waited for me?

Because the Bald Man knew you were coming up.

Not possible.

Yes, it is. Because he not only makes, but he also sees.

Bobby clapped me on the shoulder and spun me around to face the foyer. “You know what, man? I want you to take a look at something. Don’t say anything; just shut up and look.”

He propelled me into the foyer and then jerked me to a stop. We stood in the dark, the lights off. The only illumination in the foyer came from the lamps and the Christmas lights in the living room. The two beautiful women and one beautiful girl seemed oblivious to our presence. Sundry boxes of ornaments, basking in the warmth of their yearly furlough from the attic, stood open all around them. Allie pulled a little porcelain Barbie doll out and smiled as she showed it to Abby, her lips moving to the tune of the story that came with it. All of Allie’s ornaments had a story—Abby had heard each one every Christmas since she was old enough to hold her head up. But she listened anyway. Mama’s little stories were as much a part of her Christmas as beer was of mine and Bobby’s.

“Look at their faces,” he whispered.

I did. The contours of my wife’s already lovely face seemed highlighted, made somehow finer, in the warmth of the Christmas lights. My daughter, the best of this woman’s essence mixed with the best of my own, could have been an ornament herself—even thought she stood now, I realized, as tall as her mother. She laughed.

“They look happy, don’t they?” Bobby asked.

Santa Claus peddling an ice cream cart, the front wheel immobilized. Your uncle Steve broke it when he was four, Allie’s lips moved. Crimson and full in the soft glow of the lamps, they drew my eyes. He blamed it on his Superman doll.

“Yes,” I whispered back.

A little train. My grandfather made this for me when I was your age, Abby. He was good with his hands.

My daughter took the train and examined it with a curiosity that made her look four again.

“So leave it alone,” Bobby said. I turned away from the Norman Rockwell painting forming up in my living room and faced my brother. Beneath his shock of blond hair cut close to the skull in the typical Marine fashion, his face glowed with a tan bestowed by hours spent outside in the winter sun. Beer and good health ruddied his cheeks. But his eyes were serious. “Stop seeing this therapist; he’s not doing you any favors. Quit calling people and riding around and poring through files—quit investigating. If you see the edges, don’t pick at them. Because you know what? If these guys really did come in here and fuck Allie and Abby’s brains out and they simply don’t remember it? Then good.”

He leaned forward. I smelled the beer on his breath.

“Reality is overrated,” he said. “And if you can hide deeply enough, it really doesn’t matter.”

The furnace kicked on with a click and a whoosh. Outside the door to my right, freezing wind tore down Highway 62 and wrapped winter’s shroud around everything it touched. It buffeted under the eaves and rattled the screens, scratched at my doors and windows with a blind desire to get inside and do its work here just as it had out there. Winter, I thought, the dying season. The great Darwinian colander of nature that separated the old, the sick and the weak from everything else. Winter was cold and hard because nature itself was cold and hard; it had no soul, knew no mercy. In winter, God went to sleep.

Kate laughed behind me.

But in here, that laugh said, He is wide awake.

Bobby slapped me on the back and pointed at my beer glass.

“Chug that so that I can pour you another. Then let’s go in there and help these ladies finish decorating the tree so that we can go downstairs, watch a movie and get drunk. Can you stop thinking long enough to do all that?”

I sighed.

“Yes,” I lied, bringing the glass to my lips. I drank now not out of thirst but from the need to drown the counterpoint to everything Bobby had just said; reality did matter. Because if you didn’t confront it, if you ignored it, you couldn’t see it. And when it bore down on you again, it would find you on your back.

Right now, my reality was busy in its dark room. Conjuring. Creating.

Making.

I finished the beer and spoke another lie.

“I can.”

29.

Christmas went well. Nobody broke into my house, nobody accosted me in any parking lots and nobody called me on the telephone to call me a sniveling little bitch and swear that they’d show me, oh yes they would. I ate and drank like any normal man and during this time, I experienced no nightmares. I woke up feeling refreshed—if not one hundred percent at ease, at least relaxed enough to confront the things that I felt certain Fate held in store for me.

December can be a slow time for divorce lawyers—existing clients go on vacation and new ones wait until after New Year’s—and so in the days after Christmas I found myself with space in my schedule to go visit my GAL client, Brandon Cross, again. I got him out of his room, where his slackjawed roommate stared mindlessly at Dr. Oz, and led him into the lounge. We sat across from each other and Brandon told me what he’d eaten for lunch. Chicken a la king, he said. A biscuit and green beans on the side. Chocolate milk for a drink. Not bad.

“Been sleeping okay?” I asked him.

Shake of the head.

“Why not?”

“Been sliding.”

I frowned, not understanding at first. Then I remembered.

“You’ve been going back and forth. Between this world and the other one. Where you’re a Navy fighter pilot.”

He smiled and nodded.

“I see,” I said. I looked away from him. On one of the motivational posters on the wall, a great wave towered above a very tiny surfer. Don’t let your fears get in the way of your dreams, said the caption.

“So you’ve been waking up from your nightmare. From time to time.”

“Yes.”

On another wall, an explorer climbed a snow-covered glacier beneath the word DETERMINATION in big block letters.

His caption: Believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything.

“I’m curious about something,” I said. “Can you tell me why you’re here? If you’re a fighter pilot, why is it that you have nightmares about being a retarded boy in a care home in Burlington? I mean, why not have nightmares about… I don’t know… your jet disappearing and you falling into the ocean, where you get chewed up by sharks?”

Brandon smiled the kind of smile you see on people when they understand something and you don’t. An appreciation of the knowledge gradient. A wistful desire to return to a time when they, like you, lived in the dark. I never expected such expression from Brandon, whose paperwork said he had an IQ of below 65.

“Not real bad dream,” he said. “I mean something else. I mean it…”

“Figuratively?”

“Yes.”

Wow, I thought. A GAL client that understood the concept of figurative speech. A nineteen-year-old boy who couldn’t read and couldn’t pronounce the “r” sound but who had no problem slinging around a metaphor.

“So Brandon… this Brandon, the one you are now—he’s real.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But there’s another Brandon, and he’s real, too. He’s a fighter pilot. For the Navy. Like Maverick in Top Gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

Now I smiled at him. He smiled back.

“I used to want to be Maverick,” I said. “When I was a kid and that movie came out. I thought: I want to fly fighter planes when I grow up, that’s just what I want to do. Forget this doctor, lawyer, businessman garbage, give me an airplane and a sky to fly it in.”

His smile grew. I’d touched a nerve.

“I used to fantasize about it,” I said. True—I actually had fantasized about being the Tom Cruise character from Top Gun. “Flying, being up there in the clouds. A multi-million dollar fighter jet strapped to my back, loaded with enough firepower to destroy a small navy. Two miles above the world. And everything in it.”

His head bobbed. “In the sky,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “In the sky.”

I swallowed.

Reality is overrated, Bobby echoed in my head. Don’t pick at the edges.

“But the thing about flying is,” I went on, “you have to land your plane at some point. You can fly around all you want, but the world is still down there. You know what I’m saying?”

His smile faltered. He did know what I was saying.

“There’s something down there on the ground, at sea level, and it’s called truth. It doesn’t go away. No matter how high you fly, no matter how fast you fly—it’s still down there. Waiting for you. And it might feel good up there in that plane of yours. But as long as you stay up there, all you’re really doing is running from it.”

Now the smile fell away completely.

“I have a truth of my own,” I said. I wasn’t smiling, either. “I don’t know what it is, and so it’s scary. I’ve been attacked by six different men in the past year, and none of them seem to have an identity. I’d like to stop asking questions, chalk it up to coincidence and go on about my merry way, but that’s not a good thing for me to do, you know?”

He blinked at me. My words sailed over his head and splattered all over the motivational poster on the other wall.

“Because the truth is the truth. In my case, I think someone is after me. And he’s going to continue coming after me whether I recognize his existence or not—and so I ask questions when I see things that don’t make sense. I investigate, I dig, I search for that truth so that I can protect myself from it.”

Blink. Blink.

“You’re hiding from something, Brandon. You can pretend you’re somebody else, but you’re not.”

Blink. Blink.

“You’re not a fighter pilot. You’re an abused kid with cognitive deficiencies. Think about it, man; if this is just a nightmare, why are you spending so much time in it?”

He blinked some more. He opened his mouth, and for a moment, nothing came out. He closed it, looked up at the ceiling and then said, “I’m in the hospital.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes you are, but…”

He shook his head rapidly. “No. There. In the hospital there.”

“In your… other world?”

“In reality.” Weeawity.

Now came my turn to blink in complete lack of understanding. Despite his cognitive deficiencies, Brandon must have recognized this, because he continued without prompt. “Tailhook broke. Plane went off the flight deck. I got saved. In the hospital now.”

“So you’re more or less knocked out right now. And this is all a bad dream going on in your head.”

He nodded.

“And I’m a figment of your imagination. I don’t actually exist, because you’re dreaming me. I didn’t eat breakfast this morning and I didn’t burn my tongue on my coffee on the way to work. I, like everything else you’re seeing right now, am malarkey.”

He shrugged. Yes, said the gesture. You are indeed malarkey.

“And at some point you’re going to wake up more or less for good, and you’re going to be out of here but I will remain. Because I’m part of your nightmare.”

A single nod of the head. Exactly.

“Brandon?”

“Uh-huh?”

I leaned forward.

“That is not true. You’re making all this up.”

Suddenly, his narrow face lit up with the brightest of smiles. “I can prove it!”

“Can you, now.”

Bobbing head. “Uh-huh. Been going home here and there. Mostly at night. Kenny knows.”

“Who’s Kenny?” I asked.

“He’s Kenny.”

I thought for a moment, and the image of the hopelessly retarded young man who shared a room with Brandon popped into my head. “Your roommate?”

An enthusiastic nod.

“Kenny knows I go! Come on!”

He stood and motioned for me to follow him. I picked up my briefcase—I had nothing particularly valuable in there, but the inmates of Magnolia Plantation would have probably loved to get their hands on some pens and paper—and trailed him to his room, where he marched over to the television and cut it off. His roommate continued to stare through him.

“Kenny,” he said, grabbing the man’s tiny head and tilting it up to force eye contact. “Tell Kevin I go away. At night.”

Kenny turned his head to look at me, his face a round collection of features smashed together in a very small space. Although his age was impossible to determine, I pegged him at about forty. If Brandon’s mental retardation qualified as moderate, this guy’s hit severe.

Kenny opened his mouth, revealing an oversized tongue. At first, I wondered if maybe he couldn’t talk, but then he said, “Him go away at night.”

“Tell him I disappear.” Dissapeew.

“Him disappear.”

Brandon smiled, satisfied that he had just nailed his case with the direct examination of this particular witness. He turned the TV back on and stepped out of the way. Kenny’s eyes locked back on Dr. Oz and remained there.

“See?” Said Brandon. “He knows!”

For my cross-examination, I stood up and walked over to Kenny’s bed. I moved Brandon out of the way, turned off the TV, and bent my knees to face Kenny eye-to-eye.

“Kenny,” I asked, “Tell Brandon that cows can fly.”

“Cows can fly.”

I turned the TV back on and returned to the chair beside Brandon’s bed. “I wouldn’t count on what this guy says if I were you,” I said. “He’s not exactly the world’s most reliable witness.”

Lips pursed, Brandon groaned in frustration just like Allie groaned when Abby copped an attitude about her math homework and pretended she didn’t understand it. He came over and sat on the edge of his bed, head held in both hands. He groaned again. “Sucks,” he said. “Being retarded sucks.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Can’t talk right. Can’t…” He straightened his spine and looked up at the ceiling as if asking God to give him the right word.

“Explain,” he said at last.

I laced my hands across my stomach.

“This my nightmare,” he said. “Not real.”

“That’s interesting, Brandon, because it’s my reality and I feel very, very real right now. I believe if you really examine this logically, you’re going to see a fundamental impossibility…”

“You real,” Brandon said, stabbing at me with his right index finger. “Nightmare for you, too.”

I closed my mouth and took a ki breath through my nose.

“I help you,” he said. “Help you get out.”

“Okay, enlighten me. Tell me how to get out of this nightmare.”

“Picture where you want be,” he said, tapping his oblong skull. “And go there.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “I just imagine it and I can punch out of here?”

He smiled, nodding excitedly. “Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless!”

I looked over his shoulder. There, above the television, hung another of the same motivational posters I saw in the lounge. The photo centered on the black background showed what appeared to be a man in a helmet and rock climbing gear scaling the face of a cliff. He had no legs. I squinted at the caption.

Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless.

No wonder Brandon persisted in delusional thinking. These people spent all day surrounded by absolute bullshit.

I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw the clock on the wall and realized I had screwed around here for over an hour. What would have been a billable hour, now lost forever.

“I need to go back,” I said. “We’ll have to continue this later.”

Brandon nodded.

“Believe in the impossible and your world becomes limitless,” he said.

“Right. Bye, Brandon. Bye, Kenny.”

“Bye,” Brandon said, still smiling.

Kenny didn’t say anything. That didn’t surprise me.

But then he followed me, and that did surprise me. Briefcase in hand, I walked down the hall outside Brandon’s room and waved goodbye to a black woman on a computer on my way past the nurse’s station. When I reached the door to the lobby, I of course couldn’t get the door open—this was the lockdown hall—so I turned to ask the nurse to buzz me out.

And there was Kenny, right on my ass. Little head bobbing up and down in agreement with every word that had ever been said in human history.

“Him go away,” Kenny said. “Him disappear.”

I blinked. “No, Kenny,” I said. “He doesn’t.”

“Him disappear. Him go poof! Him come back in morning. Scary.”

He stood so close to me, I could smell the remains of lunch on his breath. Something with a lot of garlic. I tried to back away, but the door only let me go so far.

“You go poof too?”

“No,” I said. Suddenly, my mouth turned dry; when I swallowed, it was like choking on a tumbleweed. “I’m stuck here.”

“Him disappear. Him go poof!”

“That’s… uh… that’s great, man.”

“Kenny!” The woman at the computer called out. “Don’t you go around bothering people!”

Kenny grinned. I noticed then that he was missing about half his teeth. He turned around and hobbled back in the direction he’d come.

The door buzzed and I let myself out like the place was about to blow. And when I got to my car, I realized my hands were shaking.

30.

Another dream. I knew this because I remembered taking an Ambien to help me get to sleep and lying down in my bed, but in my next conscious thought, I was in my basement. I couldn’t move. But I could see. And I could hear.

Flesh smacking flesh. Sick, stomach-twisting grunts. The rhythmic creak of the pool table groaning against itself at its joints.

A very, very, familiar woman’s voice, crying over and over again:

“Please don’t hurt my baby.”

There was someone

Abby

crying to my right, but I didn’t look there. I couldn’t look there, wouldn’t look there—because my eyes were transfixed on the man raping my wife on the pool table. I could see his calves, his legs, his hairy butt cheeks. The back of his head.

Bald.

“Say it,” he said breathlessly over the satanic percussion of hips slapping against buttocks and the backs of legs. “Say it!”

Head hung low over the green velvet, she didn’t say anything, and when she didn’t he thrust harder. She cried out in pain, a sound as sharp and thin as a razor blade yet somehow managing to concentrate all the agony, rage and shame of the moment on its filed edge. When he grunted again, his voice was barely human.

“Say it!”

“Kevin!” She screamed.

“Say it, bitch!”

“Kevin!”

And in that moment I jolted awake. A world away from the Hell of that basement, I opened my eyes first to nothingness, then to the lumps and shadows of the furniture in my master bedroom.

“Kevin, wake up!”

Allie’s hand on my shoulder. Not the green velvet covering of the pool table—my fish belly skin. My cold skin, cold even though my forehead ran with sweat. I shook my head and wiped my face with the edge of the sheet.

I gasped.

“Lay back down. Come on. It’s okay.”

And I did. I laid down and buried my face in her chest, and I stayed that way as my heart rate slowly returned to normal and the rest of my body woke up from the nightmare. Only then did I talk.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Bad dream.”

“I guess so.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Not really.”

Silence ensued. A click sounded from the thermostat in the hallway and brought the furnace to life to fill it.

The Bald Man. The Bald Man had been raping Allie in my dream.

Are you sure it’s a dream? Asked Dr. Koenig.

“You were getting raped again,” I said. “And all I could do was watch.”

She lay quiet for a moment. She ran the fingers of her left hand through my hair and let them stop at the back of my head. Her hand on my skull was gentle and comforting. The mindless terror of my dream withdrew towards the outer edges of the bedroom.

“I suppose it makes sense,” she said.

“What does?”

“Dreams like that. It’s your brain’s way of training itself to deal with the what ifs. An evolutionary was of preparing yourself to deal with all contingencies. That’s’ what nightmares are. Training sessions.”

“But this is ridiculous,” I said. “I mean, it’s done! We won. Why do I have to keep… what… training for it?”

“Simple psychology,” she murmured.

I fell silent. I thought for a moment, debated keeping my next thought to myself, then decided against it.

“What if it’s not?” I asked.

“What if it’s not what?”

“What if it’s not a training session? What if it’s a memory?”

Her body stiffened.

I propped myself up on my elbow. “What if it actually happened?”

“We’ve been over this already. It couldn’t have happened.”

“Why not?”

She rolled her eyes and flipped over on her back. “Do we have to go through this again? Well, Kevin, it just seems like I’d remember getting attacked like that. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that would be a pretty memorable experience. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m wrong about that. Say I’m really good at repression. Better than you.”

She paused. I listened.

“It’s still impossible,” she said. “You shot and killed two men. You keep the rifle in the gun cabinet in the basement. If we accept the proposition that this assailant is raping me on the pool table, what are the chances that he’s going to let you creep away and open the gun cabinet? And then, who did you shoot in the hallway downstairs?”

She shook her head.

“You’re under a lot of stress,” she said, “and you’ve been through… well, you’ve been through a lot. And you’re not exactly made for things like this.”

“I seem to have done okay,” I protested. “6-0 in favor of the good guys at this point.”

“Yes,” she sighed. “That’s true. Which is all the more reason to believe a man like you would never just sit there and watch somebody hurt me. Or our baby.”

She sat up long enough to kiss me on the cheek, not a romantic kiss, but a punctuation kiss—marking as it did the end of a conversation and sending a clear message that she’d finished discussing such things and that I should finish, too. She laid back down and covered her shoulders with the sheet and comforter.

“Now go back to sleep,” she ordered. “You have to work in the morning.”

I laid back down, but I didn’t go to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, trying every little mind trick in the book to calm down enough to where I actually could sleep. I found myself thinking about Brandon Cross disappeawing right in front of Kenny. Brandon disliked his present reality so strongly that he had invented a way of escaping it and going to a place where nothing that plagued him here existed—where everything that bothered him and made his life intolerable wasn’t real at all, but a nightmare. I pictured another Brandon then, the face and skull a little wider and less pinched, more normal-looking. Hair cut short in the military style, skin clear, manly angles chiseled into the kind of face that you would expect to see on a fighter pilot. A handful of men in a locker room, donning flight suits. Brandon grinned, and he said, you guys would not believe the fucked-up dream I had last night. I dreamed I was a retarded kid in a care home in North Carolina.

That is fucked up, said one of the men.

Cross needs to stop smoking crack before he goes to bed, said another. I couldn’t tell them apart; they all looked the same.

I’m telling you guys, Brandon went, it’s those damn powdered eggs. You eat those things and they mess you up all day.

Let’s go kick some ass.

Yeah, buddy.

And they headed off along the route that fighter pilots take to get from their locker room—do fighter pilots have a locker room, my loosening mind wondered, or do they just get dressed at their bunks—to the flight deck. Where they would climb into their steel birds and wait for the steam-powered slingshot to catapult them into the sky.

I thought about Brandon flying a plane. I hoped he found a way to do that tonight; the thought calmed me, made me feel good; so good, in fact, that when a less calming, less feel-good thought tried to surface, I was able to force it back down below the waterline. I never even knew what it was. Instead, I thought about Brandon, I thought about missile-laden fighter planes climbing towards the sun, and I fell asleep.

31.

“The Bald Man raping your wife again,” Dr. Koenig said. “This is beginning to sound familiar.”

I snorted. “Tell me about it.”

Southern Rifleman—the cover, anyway—had disintegrated into almost nothing. On my way back from court the other day, I had swung by Office Depot on Church Street and picked up a clear plastic cover into which I inserted the magazine. There beneath the translucent plastic film, it looked like a museum artifact.

“Have you discussed her coming to see me?”

“She doesn’t want to,” I said. “Guess you’re stuck with boring old me.”

I chuckled, but he didn’t. Instead, he pursed his lips and made another notation on his notepad. Patient uses humor to deflect unpleasant questions. Remember to check insurance coverage.

“What did she say about the dream this time?”

I told him. When I finished, he frowned at me.

“Did you tell her about the pool table?”

“Pardon?”

“You said, ‘you were getting raped again. All I could do was watch.’”

“Yeah.”

“When did you tell her it was happening in the basement? When did you ever say anything about the pool table?”

I blinked. For a moment, I couldn’t speak; my lips froze as my brain flipped through its Rolodex of memories until it found the card corresponding to the night before. I pulled it out. I read everything on it.

I hadn’t said anything about the pool table. Or the basement.

“I’ve had the dream a lot,” I said. “Not just last night. Like, a lot. So I’m pretty sure that even if I didn’t say my dream took place in the basement last night, I probably said it another time.”

“Because it does take place in the basement,” Dr. Koenig said.

“Yes. I’m sure there’s some kind of deep psychological meaning there.”

“Are you.”

I nodded. The one drawback about the plastic cover was that it made rolling the magazine into a tube more difficult. Static electricity made the plastic want to bind to itself and resist my rolling efforts. Maybe I could find a less clingy cover next time I went to the store.

“The basement is mine,” I said. “The rest of the house belongs to Allie, but the basement is my man-cave. Big TV, old furniture that doesn’t match, a custom bar and a pool table. Basketball posters. It’s mine. If you really want to hurt a man, plugging his wife’s a great way to do it. But it’s even better to bend her over his pool table and make him watch.”

“The man-cave is yours,” he noted. “And so is Allie.”

I looked at him. He looked back at me expressionlessly.

“That part of her is,” I said. “She’s never been with any other man. Just me.”

He wrote. I always felt a little defensive when he did that; he could have been writing something positive or something innocuous, but I always felt the scratching of pen on paper to be a criticism of whatever I’d just said.

“And I’ve never been with any other woman other than her,” I added. “We met when we were 18. We belong to each other in that way. That’s not a bad thing.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“I’m not some possessive psycho just because I like the fact that no other guy has ever had sex with my wife. I think it’s perfectly fine.”

“It is.”

“So what did you just write down?”

He looked up. “Why are you asking me that?”

“Because I feel like a lab rat in here. Like you’re making these observations, these judgments, about everything I say and you’re writing them down. So I’d like to know what you’re writing. I’d like to see your notes.”

“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?”

32.

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.

“Motherfucker,” I whispered.

33.

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.

“Hey, asshole,” I said. “I called you last night.”

“I saw it. I was busy.”

“Did you listen to any of your messages?”

“I had an Elon grad student in the shower with me. Do you think checking my voice mail was a priority last night? Single men have to work for their poontang, punk.”

I waved the envelope at him. “You need to see this.”

He reached for it, but I pulled it away.

“Not here. In your office. We need a computer.”

Fortunately, we’d both arrived early enough to where the staff remained sluggish, so nobody assaulted us with messages or questions or reminders or any of the little nuggets of pure joy that made mornings so much fun. We proceeded to Craig’s office and shut the door. I handed him the envelope as he lowered himself into his chair.

“I found this in my inbox last night.”

“Who’s it from?”

“That dickhead that called the radio station.”

He opened the flap and pulled out the sheaf of papers. “This is your Facebook page,” he said.

“Pieces of it,” I said.

“It’s all your photos.”

“Not all. Just the ones of Allie and Abby. Nobody else.”

He continued flipping, then returned to the beginning and flipped again.

“That’s a threat,” I said. “That motherfucker is threatening my family.”

He reached the last photo—Allie, Abby and I at Mellow Mushroom for Abby’s twelfth birthday dinner. He pointed to something typewritten on the bottom. “Did you see this? Says, ‘For a preview, go to www.doithard.com.’ Did you check that out?”

He spun around in his chair to face his computer and reached for the mouse.

“I did,” I said. “It’s a porn site. Bondage. S&M.”

He clicked the mouse and entered the website into the address bar. His computer took its time, as if it didn’t approve of where he had sent it and found the material highly distasteful. But then the pictures popped up.

“Whoa!”

“Yeah.”

“This is some sick shit!”

“He calls it a preview,” I said. I had folded my hands across my stomach, wanting to look calm, but I didn’t feel calm at all. “I didn’t sleep last night. I sat on the bottom step in my foyer with my AK-47 and waited for the son of a bitch to try to get in. Or send somebody after me.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“They don’t give a rat’s ass about little crap like this. And how are they going to find him? I give them dead bodies and they can’t even get them identified!”

“We need to report this,” Craig said. “This is a threat, Kevin. This guy’s basically saying he’s going to come over and… do this stuff.”

I covered my face with my hands and shook my head.

“How long has it been since you’ve gotten any sleep?” He asked me.

“Night before last,” I said. “I got a little then. A few hours in the past forty-eight. Kind of hard to get any meaningful shut-eye when you have to deal with things like this.”

“I’ll call my people with Burlington and the Sheriff’s Department. They’ll take care of this thing.”

Would they? I wanted to believe that, but I wondered how the criminal justice system would tackle a perpetrator who created his own accomplices out of dirt and twigs. A perp who made. I wanted to tell Craig that I hadn’t called the police because this wasn’t a police issue anymore. It had escalated.

“You have court this morning?”

“Some pissant motions over in Civil.”

“I’ll continue them for you. Go home and go to bed. You need to sleep or you’re going to collapse.”

I dropped my hands from my face. The flesh beneath my eyes felt impossibly heavy right then, like my fingers were pulling all my features down towards my chin.

“Can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You still keep that gun in your desk?”

I swallowed.

“I think Allie might need it.”

34.

The Bald Man didn’t want Allie and Abby. I had thought that before, but the more I pondered it the more convinced I became of it. I spent most of my time away from home; if he wanted to rape and murder my family, going after them when I wasn’t around—which was most of the time—made the most sense. It required only a well-placed visit to my house at four in the afternoon, with Abby doing her homework and Allie doing...whatever Allie did with her time at four in the afternoon. They didn’t constitute hard targets.

But he hadn’t done that. He’d thrown four golems at me after Pinnix and Ramseur, but he hadn’t thrown anything at them. Because, ultimately, they didn’t really have anything to do with this. This all centered around me. He wanted to show me I wasn’t a hero, put me in my place. Show me that he stood above me, that he could do anything he wanted and the Hero of the Month couldn’t stop him. Show me that I was a bitch.

Hurting Allie and Abby would only serve his purposes with me there to watch. I saw this as clearly as I saw the restaurants and offices and shops of West Burlington flitting past my window as I made my way back to the interstate. He would hurt them, but only in front of me. And he would do it in such a way that I would later blame myself; there would be some aspect of the assault that I could have prevented but failed to do so. I understood this, and I also understood the next logical progression: remaining around me put both Allie and Abby in serious danger.

“I want you to leave,” I told Allie at home.

I hadn’t told her about the envelope last night, but I told her now. I told her about Ruby the Redneck Psychic, the Facebook pictures of her and Abby and the website the Bald Man had directed me to. A preview, he’d called it. A preview. I told her about my dreams in great detail and although she flinched, she did not interrupt. Only when I finished did she speak.

“A premonition,” she said.

“A forecast,” I said. “And to be honest with you, I don’t know if he’s put it in my head to fuck with me, or if… I don’t know… God put it there as a warning. But something’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen here, in this house, and it’s going to happen soon. So I need you and Abby gone.”

“Where will we go?”

“Pennsylvania,” I said. “With your mom and dad. I’m pretty sure you’ll be okay there. He hasn’t hurt you yet because the time hasn’t been right. Just to make sure, though…”

I pulled Craig’s Smith & Wesson .38 revolver out of my belt. It hadn’t looked like much at first glance; a snub-nose meant for concealed carry, it lacked the heft and visual impact of something like my AK-47. Yet on my kitchen table, it glowed with a deadly aura.

“I want you to take this,” I said. “Just in case I’m wrong and he does come after you. Or sends somebody. But I don’t think you’ll have to use it.”

Allie stared down at the revolver, then up and me. She shook her head slowly and closed her eyes. “Kevin…”

“I know. It’s crazy.”

“This is not good. This is not good at all.”

“All the more reason for you to get gone. If I’m acting crazy, do you really want our daughter to stay here and watch her dad’s downward spiral?”

“I think you’re having a nervous breakdown,” she said.

“Maybe. But this shit is real. You guys need to go.”

“Abby’s got school.”

“She won’t miss more than a week. It’ll do her good to get away from all this for a few days. Visit her grandparents. Reconnect with her Yankee heritage.”

Devoid of makeup, flushed from her workout, hair in a messy ponytail, her beauty twisted my insides. I experienced a moment of unholy terror at the thought of sending her away—something akin, I imagined, to the idea of leaving your newborn baby unattended at a flea market in Tijuana. But the moment passed, and I returned to the solid conviction that come nightfall, she could not remain here.

She looked up at me.

“We have to let her finish out the school day,” she said.

“No,” I said. “You guys need to leave now.”

I shoved the pistol and a box of bullets I’d picked up at Wal-Mart on the way home across the table at her.

“I’ll help you pack,” I told her. “I have a feeling he’s coming tonight.”

35.

Today—this evening, really—Dr. Koenig wore a suit. The remnants of one, more accurately; the wrinkled trousers screamed for a visit to the drycleaner’s and the white shirt begged to tag along. He had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, the collar unbuttoned, the red and blue striped tie loosened to reveal the collar of a crewneck undershirt. When he shifted in his chair, the faintest outlines of a sweat stain showed through around the white collar. It was April now, and growing warmer every day. The blast-furnace days of summer stirred in the near future.

He started in about me not bringing Allie almost right away, but he stopped when I told him I had a plan for ending all this. I told him I’d sent her and Abby to Pennsylvania. Now he crossed one leg over the other and tapped his pen on his legal pad, frowning. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

I nodded. “It’s the only idea. He won’t hurt them if they’re not home.”

“This is the man—the creature, really—who makes golems and sends them after you.”

I nodded.

“What makes you so sure he won’t send golems after them?”

“Because he’s had a million opportunities to do that and he hasn’t tried it,” I said. “I get up in the morning and I go to work. I stay at the office all day, sometimes part of the night. We live out in bumfuck, so if he wanted a shot at them…”

I turned my palms up to the ceiling and shrugged.

“…then I couldn’t stop him. It’s always been like that. He wants us all together. Because this… thing he wants to do only has power if I’m there to watch. He doesn’t just want to destroy my family, Doc. He wants to destroy my soul. Everything I am. He wants this to be my fault. He wants to show me. Because I am defiant.”

“So your plan is…”

“I’m going to throw down,” I said. “Tonight.”

Southern Rifleman, another tight little tube. I had switched plastic covers to one less clear, but also less clingy. The translucent but textured plastic cover allowed me to roll it any way I wanted and it wouldn’t bind. I rolled it now.

“I’m going to lock and load and I’m going to sit on my stairs and I’m going to say game on, bitch, bring it. Don’t send your people out here, you pussy, you come out here yourself.”

“And he’s just going to… come?”

I raised my head and lowered it in a slow but certain nod. It did sound a little crazy, spoken aloud—but I believed it.

“He is.”

“How do you know this?”

“You ever have a gut feeling about something and you know you’re right, you just can’t put your finger on how you know you’re right? Like, have you ever had a patient and before you’ve talked to him five minutes, you know he’s crazy?”

The stare he gave me in reply told me very clearly that I was just such a patient.

“That’s it,” I said. “I’ve been having this rape dream for months, but only recently have I woken up remembering it. And I can’t help but feel like he’s coming to do it soon. It’s just a feeling Doc. Call me psychic.”

He folded his arms and studied me. I didn’t much care for the way he looked at me, because I’d looked at Brandon Cross that same way when he first told me about sliding. When he’d told me he was a Navy fighter pilot with a recurring nightmare that he was a retarded kid in Burlington.

“I want her in here,” Dr. Koenig said, completely ignoring what I’d just said, “but you’ve kind of ruined that for me by repeatedly not bringing her. So why don’t we call her and conference her in on the rest of today’s session?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s driving. I don’t want her talking on the cell phone and driving at the same time.”

“I see,” Dr. Koenig said.

“You see what? There’s nothing to see. She’s on I-95. You’re a Yankee; you should appreciate somebody not wanting his wife yakking on the cell on a road like 95.”

“It’s just interesting to me how you keep coming up with these reasons to not bring your wife to our sessions.”

“No offense,” I said, “but I have other things to worry about right now other than making you happy.”

April showers bring May flowers; the kiss of spring comes in the rain, not cold but cool, the vanguard of nature’s awakening. I had never minded spring rain nor the gray skies that normally sent me into a depressive tailspin, because they heralded winter’s permanent departure. The gray skies and rain meant no more frozen mornings. April served as a mop-up operation, locating and neutralizing the remnants of January and February. So I could deal with April showers. I could deal with them just fine.

But I had a wife and child on the road that afternoon, so on that night, April showers made me worry. After dinner, the idea that they would get in a car accident possessed me, which led me to call Allie eight times between the hours of twelve and three. When she didn’t call back, I resorted to text messages. Like the telephone calls, these grew progressively more desperate as the hours wore on. By the time my phone finally beeped at 7, my nerves had frayed so much that I jumped out of my office chair.

A text from Abby’s phone.

We’re here. Im on Abbys phone.

Why didn’t U answer my calls? I texted back.

My phone died. U on your way home yet?

Still @ office.

B careful. ILY.

I actually typed my response all the way.

I love you too.

I arrived home that night later than usual. The house stood in total darkness, no windows glowing, no exterior lights burning. Inside, I found only silence. I stood in the kitchen and listened to it.

“I’m home!” I called out.

No one answered, of course; I had sent my family away for their own safety. Tonight, it was just me. Me and this big, isolated, silent house.

This is what it would be like, I thought, if I’d hesitated. If I’d let those fuckers win.

But I hadn’t let them win. And their boss man, the Bald Man—I wouldn’t let him win, either. Instead of climbing the stairs to change, I headed directly into the basement. I opened the gun safe and took out the AK-47. I sat down at the bar and stripped it down, the way Bobby had showed me. Then I cleaned it.

Clean it good, Bobby said. Or the shit’ll jam on you. All you need is one hung-up shell casing to end your game.

I put it back together. Not a single speck of dust remained.

Looks good, he commented.

“Thanks,” I replied.

Now lock and load.

I had two magazines for the AK-47, and now I loaded each with thirty rounds of ammunition. I didn’t expect to need all of them, but a man never knew. I suspected no one in history had ever ended a fight thinking damn, I brought too much ammo.

Like the Boy Scouts say, Bobby said, be prepared.

“Damn skippy,” I replied.

When I’d loaded each magazine, I slammed one into the receiver and chambered a round. Then I headed upstairs to the ground floor. I stepped out on the porch and stood there with the door open behind me.

There was no breeze. There where my yard ended and the woods began, the trees stood stock-still, silently crowding the gravel drive down to 62. I looked at the place where the drive disappeared into the darkness and pictured the bald man.

Game on, bitch, Bobby said.

I licked my lips. My right hand tightened on the rifle’s pistol grip, my left on the barrel. My eyes narrowed.

“All right, motherfucker,” I said. “Bring it.”

36.

He didn’t come.

37.

“So,” Dr. Koenig said at the start of our next session. “Is it all over? Did you have your big showdown with the Bald Man?”

I had just seen him yesterday, but he wanted to see me again today. I didn’t ask why; it really didn’t matter.

And, honestly, given everything going on, I needed this extra session. The Bald Man hadn’t shown up last night, but I had woken up on the couch in the basement with my fully-loaded AK-47 clutched across my chest like some kind of fucked-up teddy bear. I woke up that way because I carried the rifle everywhere I went in the house. Right now, I had it in the trunk of my car. So, if my therapist wanted me to come in for a few extra sessions, I felt it entirely appropriate.

“He didn’t show up,” I muttered.

“Your gut feeling was wrong.”

“No,” I said. “Just premature. I didn’t say I knew when it would be; just that it would be soon.”

“Ah.”

I scowled at that—ah, like I’d just lied to him. I reminded myself that I had told this man I believed I hadn’t ever killed a single human being, but rather golems conjured by the Devil personified. I had to understand that I’d given him just cause for skepticism.

“Allie and Abby still in Pennsylvania?”

“Yes. It’s a long drive. Not exactly a place you go overnight and then come back.”

“You told me yesterday that you sent her and Abby there to get them away from the Bald Man,” he said. “Why didn’t you just send them down to Jacksonville to stay with Bobby and Kate?”

“Bobby works,” I answered. “Kate works. They’re gone all day. Besides, Bobby’s my brother, not Allie’s. It made more sense to send her to her family’s house.”

He pursed his lips and nodded once, like he’d known I would say that. It irritated me.

“If you don’t mind me asking, Doc,” I said next, “what’s up?”

“Why don’t we give her a call? Let’s call her right now and conference her in.”

“It’s two in the afternoon. I’m sure she has things going on.”

He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “So? Big deal. Give her a call.”

“I left my phone at the office.”

“Use mine.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out an iPhone just like Abby’s.

“That’s no good,” I said. “Her cell reception sucks at her parents’ house.”

“Call the land line.”

“I don’t know it. It’s in my phone.”

“You don’t know your in-laws’ home phone number?” He asked. “You’re married to this woman for fifteen years and you don’t know her parents’ number?”

“Like I said,” I told him, keeping a lid on my patience. “It’s in my phone. People don’t dial numbers anymore, Doc. You program a number into your phone and push a button when you want to call it. I don’t know Abby’s number off the top of my head, either. All that’s in my phone. If that’s really chapping your ass, I’ll try to remember the phone next time, okay?”

He leaned forward and rested his face in his hands.

“Listen,” I said, “things have changed here. Something’s going down.”

He looked up, although he didn’t sit up. His face was drawn, old and tired.

“Last night I went out on my porch with my rifle and I said come on, you bald-headed fuck. Bring it, bitch, game on. I’m not running from you, I’m not sliding out of this. You bring it, because I’m here. Let’s see what you got, you punk-ass, bald-ass motherfucker.”

He winced at all the profanity, but I felt no embarrassment. I was, I realized, channeling Bobby. And that was okay; Bobby was one hard son of a bitch.

Like me. The whole time I’d sat in here, I hadn’t removed my issue of Southern Rifleman from my briefcase; I hadn’t, if fact, removed it all day. The time for security blankets had passed.

“And what makes you think he’s coming tonight, given that he failed to appear the night before?”

I breathed in through my nose. Ki breath.

“I’m going to unlock all the doors and windows,” I said. “And I’m going to let myself fall asleep.”

38.

That night, I sat at my kitchen table with the AK-47 laying in front of me, and I screwed around with my phone. I talked to my father-in-law, each of us doing little more than blowing hot air. Everything’s fine, everything’s great, hope you’re getting along okay. That kind of shit. There came a long, awkward pause when I asked to speak to Allie. Just when I thought the connection had interrupted, he told me she wasn’t in.

“Where is she?”

Another awkward pause. Then he said, “Kevin… you know… I couldn’t tell you. Because I don’t know. I don’t know where she is. I don’t think anybody really does.”

I could have asked him why he didn’t know, but I already knew. She’s thirty-six years old, he would say. I don’t keep tabs on her anymore, even when she’s staying with us. Speaking of her staying with us, what’s this bullshit about bald devils popping in from alternate worlds?

Of course our conversation was awkward. Had Allie told him the truth, it made me sound crazy. If she’d hedged—she’d told me she would make up a story about just needing to get away for awhile—it would have sounded like we were having marital problems, severe enough to pull Abby out of school just a month before it let out. So I’d either gone crazy or made his daughter miserable enough to have to leave me. Either way, this wasn’t a guy to lean on right now.

So instead of asking to speak to my daughter, I just asked him to let Allie know I’d called. Then I texted Abby.

U doing okay?

She didn’t answer me right away. I held the phone and stared at it for two solid minutes before I got a response.

Im OK. U?

Great. Where is Mom?

Pause. I remembered that she could conduct multiple text message conversations at the same time. Maybe she could work as an air traffic controller when she grew up.

Out with high school friends.

Before I could text a response, she asked me:

When can we come home?

That made my stomach ache.

Soon, I responded.

WTF is going on? Why did we have to leave?

Instead of chiding her for the WTF, I closed my eyes and shook my head. How to answer that one?

It’s not safe, I finally replied. But Ill make it safe for U.

I want to come home.

U will, I typed. Really soon.

ILY.

I love U too.

There came nothing after that. I didn’t know if she’d fallen asleep or become so engrossed in some dialog with one of her text-crazy friends that she simply forgot about me. Either way, she was safe. And that was good enough for me.

I picked up the AK-47 and trudged down into the basement to turn on ESPN and hopefully fall asleep in front of the television. But before I did, I walked around and unlocked every door and window on the ground floor.

Game on, I thought as I descended the stairs.

Game on, Bobby repeated.

39.

In 1989, Ruby the Redneck Palm Reader told Bobby not to join the Army. The Soviet Union still existed then, hunkered down there behind the Iron Curtain with all of its tanks and missiles and men with red stars on their helmets; perhaps Ruby saw war. And perhaps not. Either way, she said stay out of the Army, and when 1990 rolled around and the time came for all young men of Bobby’s cohort to decide what they would do when high school ended, Bobby enlisted in the Marines.

I asked him about it. I was 14, him 18, and I said, “Bobby. Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. What the hell, man?”

We were drinking beer on the back porch. Mom lay in the living room, passed out on the couch, while Kate studied at the dining room table. I didn’t know where Dad had gone. The hospital, I assumed. In my memories of childhood, my father is always something of an extra; he made so few appearances, and they were of such short duration. But he had evidently made a trip to the store at some point, because we’d found beer in the fridge.

I remember Bobby shrugging in the fickle glow of the Tiki Torch we had planted in the grass and lit. In early May, the mosquitoes had yet to arrive in force, but we couldn’t wait for full-fledged summer. We wore denim shorts and our Guns & Roses tee shirts. But for the difference in height, we matched.

“I want to serve my country,” he said. “No big deal. You ought to consider it, too, when you get old enough.”

“Yeah, but… the Marines?”

“The few. The proud.”

“You always said the Army,” I protested. “You always said you’d join the Army so you could get stationed at Bragg and be closer to Kate for her last year of school. The nearest Marine base is clear over on the ass end of the state!”

I didn’t relish the idea of him leaving. On mornings when he slept in and Kate and I ended up in the kitchen at the same time, a silence always came over us as we munched our cereal or ate whatever Kate had cooked up in the skillet. We understood that soon, Bobby would leave. And it would always be like this—silent, something missing. We had comforted ourselves by saying he wouldn’t go far, but we understood now that yes, he would. A five-hour drive to Camp Lejeune was the best we could hope for.

“The Marines look sharp,” he said. “Those uniforms are bodacious; I mean, have you seen those dress blues? And Marines are bad ass. The Russians are scared shitless of Marines, man. Everybody’s scared of Marines.”

“What’s wrong with the Army?”

He shrugged again and took a drink. I had noticed that when I asked Bobby something uncomfortable, he always raised his bottle to his mouth. Whatever he was drinking at any given time, he had to pour something down the hatch before he could answer.

“Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to join the Marines, that’s all. Why are you suddenly so gung-ho about the Army? Hell, man, it’s not like they could promise me Fort Bragg. They have bases all over the world. For all you know, they could send me to Korea.”

“It’s just… weird.”

“No it’s not.”

Silence. Drink, drink, drink, two boys too young to be holding beers but big, fat doing it anyway.

“Does it have anything to do with Ruby?” I asked.

“Who’s Ruby?”

“That lady at the flea market in October. You know.”

“The one that ran us out of her trailer? The one that smelled like an ashtray?”

“Yeah.”

Before he responded, he took another drink.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “You’ve got to be crazy.”

And maybe so. But the idea that Bobby put stock in something that someone like Ruby said stuck in my mind and wouldn’t leave me alone. She had spooked me when we consulted her, because of the things she’d said, the way she’d acted. Out of one side of his mouth, Bobby told me she was dumbass trailer trash, probably so hung over from her acid trips in the ’60s that she could hardly see straight. I shouldn’t worry about anything she said, dumbass trailer trash like that. Let’s go eat.

And then he joined the Marines instead of the Army. This bugged the hell out of me and so the Saturday immediately following our beer-drenched exchange on the deck, I grabbed Mom’s keys and hopped in the Cadillac. I didn’t have a license then, but that hadn’t seemed to deter Bobby when he was my age, and so I wouldn’t let it deter me, either. I fired up the motor and pointed the bumper in the direction of the flea market.

I found Ruby there tending her table. Her husband—Chet, Chester, Chuck, something that started with a “ch” sound—was gone. Lying in a hospital somewhere with a machine breathing for him, probably, the end of a road paved with cigarettes. Ruby sat in a chair alone, but when she saw me approaching, she flicked her cigarette on the ground, stamped it out and abruptly retreated into the trailer. I marched right up there and knocked on the storm door. She didn’t answer.

“It’s Kevin Swanson,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Go on! You get on out of here!”

“Not until I talk to you.”

“You go on or I’m calling the police! You’re trespassing!”

I snorted. “You don’t have a phone in there! And anyway, I’m a customer! I want to get my palm read!”

“I ain’t reading your palm, boy.”

“I got a hundred dollars.”

Pause. I thought that got her attention, and the inner door opened. Ruby, old and wizened and looking like Yoda with dyed-blond hair, looked down at me through the Plexiglass.

“I wouldn’t read your palm again if you had a thousand.”

I blinked at her.

“Why’d you tell my brother not to join the Army?”

“Because he’ll die. Get himself blown away.”

She had given Bobby his money back. Our encounter had produced absolutely no profit for her whatsoever. And now she stood on the other side of the storm door, regarding me as one would a copperhead coiled up on his stoop. I was fourteen years old. And short for my age.

“What about me?”

“What about you?”

“You dropped my hand. You told me to never get married, you told me to always live alone. Why?”

Her face tightened. I didn’t think it possible for her thin and wrinkled lips to compress any more than they already had, but they did. She pressed them into a little raisin so small and compact that the bottom half of her face disappeared into it.

“What can you see about me?” I asked.

Her eyes filled with tears.

“What can you see about me?” I asked again.

“You’re bad,” she said. “You’re very, very bad. So bad.”

“Why am I bad? What do I do that makes me bad? Do I beat up my wife? Get drunk and run over one of my own kids, what?”

“You failed,” she said. Her voice had lowered to a whisper raspy and dry, like newspaper left in the desert sun. “You make me sick. You’re not a good person, boy. You’re not good at all.”

I felt slapped, kicked. Assaulted. I remained, in many ways, a child. Modern American children weren’t used to adults telling them they’re not good people, that they’re dark. So while her words didn’t reduce me to tears, I felt my cheeks growing red. Who did she get off saying I wasn’t a good person? Who was she to pass judgment on my character?

“You don’t know shit about me,” I growled, hands clenching into fists.

“I know more than you do,” she snapped. “And you ought to do the world a favor and go kill yourself. So go on. And don’t you never come back here.”

“This isn’t your property. It’s the flea market’s. I can go wherever I want.”

“Go. On!”

The venom in her voice drove me backwards.

“I don’t want to see your face!” She spoke in a strangled cry, like her voice had to blow something in her throat out of the way before she could say anything. “Don’t you darken my door again! Get gone!”

My eyes widened. Further away, a group of people at another table watched us. I felt their eyes all over my shoulders, the back of my head.

And Ruby’s voice rose to a scream.

“Get out of here, you lousy piece of shit!”

I stepped back. I hit Chester’s chair—Chester, I thought, his name was Chester—and knocked it into the table. A stack of Betamax tapes tumbled and fell.

Skin prickling from the stares of all those around me, I turned and ran.

40.

“I never saw her again,” I told Dr. Koenig. “I wasn’t going back after something like that. I told myself, she’s crazy. Like Bobby said: crazy-ass, Yoda-ass, fucked-up-ass bitch. But she freaked me out.”

I shuddered at the memory.

“Four years later, I met Allie. Within… I don’t know, our first few encounters, I said, this is the one. I didn’t think about Ruby at all. Not for one second.”

“Kevin,” he said, “I need you to concentrate.”

“I am concentrating. What are you talking about?”

“You’re not answering the question. What happened? Tell me what happened. I need to know what you saw.”

He had rolled his shirtsleeves almost to the elbows and loosened his tie. He looked like he’d been working forever, like he hadn’t taken so much as an hour’s break since completing his doctoral thesis on stone tablets and turning it in to a faculty who could only read cuneiform. The bags under his eyes spoke of nights awake and gave the windows to his soul a sunken quality. I blinked at him, and I thought, he looks like I feel.

“I am telling you what happened,” I said. “This is all part of it.”

What is he talking about? I asked inside. My inner voice had taken on a shrill quality that made me feel like it belonged to someone else. My stomach lurched. My hands, clutching Southern Rifleman like a child might have clutched a beloved toy in a moment of high anxiety, shook.

“Kevin, we need to cut the baloney, okay? We need to cut it right now. I need you to open up that head of yours and I need you to tell me what happened.”

My stomach lurched again. I tried to stand, but my legs felt like rubber bands and so I abandoned the effort before they could dump me on the coffee table. I didn’t want that, because I hated the coffee table; I hated it every time I came in here, I hated to look at it, hated setting things on it. I hated it because that thing was bullshit on four legs. Sheets of what was essentially plastic painted to look like wood stretched over slabs of solidified fiberboard—the vomit of sawmills. Chinese factory workers shaking their heads and laughing as they packaged it. Stupid Americans. They think this is wood. Such a shallow people. Such a stupid people.

I looked at Dr. Koenig. His briefcase sat open beside him

briefcase, briefcase, briefcase why does he always get stuff out of a briefcase in his own office

with an array of papers poking out of it in a disheveled mess. Like their owner. His trouser leg had caught on the top of his black polyester sock, revealing a swatch of white flesh.

“I don’t feel good,” I said. “Something’s wrong. I need to go home.”

“Do you feel like you’re going to be sick?”

I nodded. He grabbed a wastebasket and plopped it in front of me. Then he sat down again, leaning forward across the coffee table with that vulpine intensity.

“Tell me,” he said.

“This is so fucked up,” I said. My stomach flip-flopped again and then did nothing more. But I still couldn’t stand up. “What’s wrong with me? Did you slip me something? What the hell did you give me?”

“Tell me about the Bald Man.” If he leaned in any farther, we’d be kissing. “Tell me what he did.”

41.

“When you first discovered this whole idea of sliding,” I asked Brandon Cross, “what was it like the first time?”

We’d had this conversation a month ago, maybe two. I’d gone to see him so many times, all of our meetings blended together even though they’d taken place across the course of both winter and spring. On this occasion, we sat in the lounge again, alone.

“Scary,” he said.

“Scary why?” I asked.

“Just scary.”

“Because you didn’t understand what was going on?”

He nodded.

“It was a surprise to you.”

He nodded again.

“Was it in a dream? Were you in bed when it happened?”

“No,” he replied. “I was awake.”

I woke up on the couch in my basement man-cave. How I’d ever managed to fall asleep with all the doors and windows unlocked upstairs I didn’t know; at some point, I’d learned sheer exhaustion overpowers the mind and just shuts a man down. But I woke up now to a dormant television—it must have overheated and cut itself off—and the soft glow of the lights over my bar.

And the creaking of floorboards upstairs. My eyes rose to the ceiling.

There’s somebody here, I thought.

Game on, motherfucker! Bobby said. He sounded almost gleeful. It’s on! Here he comes!

I took the AK-47 by the pistol grip and thumbed off the safety. The enemy had penetrated my perimeter. This time, though, no problem. I’d unlocked the doors. I’d let him in. This wasn’t a home invasion, not tonight. This was an ambush.

I got up off the couch and crept over to the stairs leading up to the kitchen, covering the door with my rifle. By the sounds of it, he stood in my living room. Probably heading for the stairs, thinking he’d find Allie and Abby up there. In just a moment, he’d reach the staircase to the second floor and begin climbing it.

Get into position in the living room, Bobby said. He’s going to have to come back downstairs to leave the house. When he reaches the foyer, engage.

“Good to go,” I whispered. Above me, the floorboards creaked beneath his weight and suddenly dissipated, becoming almost imperceptible above the rush of blood in my ears. He had reached the staircase. Going upstairs now.

I grinned. I couldn’t see my own face, but I felt it, and what I felt scared me. And thrilled me. This right here felt good. Game on felt good.

Okay, Bobby said, slowly. Get into position.

I reached one foot out for the bottom step and

Suddenly I was somewhere else.

The light coming through the window of Dr. Koenig’s office spoke of mid-afternoon. Shadows of the dogwoods, flowerless now, reached across the hardwood floor for my feet. I wore work shoes, the brown pair of Eccos. I stared at the shoes, I stared at the shadows and I felt the ice crystals slicing the insides of my veins and arteries as my blood began to freeze.

What the fuck?

I looked up at Dr. Koenig. The last thought to run through my mind displayed in bright confusion on his face. His eyebrows had raised in surprise so profound it looked almost like fear. I had succeeded in blowing his mind.

How did I get here?

Of course I blew his mind. I had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I slid.

My slack jaw dangled from the rest of my face. My index finger curled around an invisible trigger guard; my hands were confused, too, wanting to know where the AK-47 had gone.

My next words emerged in a choked squeak, but I got them out. “What in God’s name just happened?”

He stared at me. This must have been how Kenny stared at Brandon Cross when the latter left every night to go back to his wife and his kid and his Navy. He turned his head to one side and then the other in the slowest of shakes.

“How did I get here?”

He swallowed.

“Where are you supposed to be?”

“In my basement! There’s somebody… that son of a bitch is in my house, and I was on my way up the stairs to hose his ass and put a lid on this once and for all! What the fuck, Doc, why am I in your office?”

“Go back,” he said. “Tell me what happens.”

I closed my eyes.

42.

I stood on my basement stairs, the muzzle of the AK-47 covering the door. Slender bars of light around the edges glowed from the lamp over the stove. My trigger finger ached with the desire to open fire on something.

Easy, Bobby said. Make every round count. Make sure it hits home. You need to take a head shot first thing, and it needs to be a home run.

I took a step. Then another. The door grew larger in my field of vision.

What about the Mozambique drill? I asked. Chest-chest-head?

We don’t know what we’re dealing with, here. Bullets might not even work. But if they do, only a head shot’s going to do it; most of the bad shit in this world exists in the head. So blow his off.

I reached the door. I couldn’t see on the other side of it, and I couldn’t hear the bald man anymore. For all I knew, he stood right in the middle of my kitchen, waiting for me. With his leering face.

I thought of that face, and that did it for me. I took a deep ki breath and

Found myself at Magnolia Plantation.

Brandon stared at me from across the coffee table. Every muscle in my body jerked in a sudden spasm that made the boy jump back, like I’d tried to hit him.

I glanced all around. The posters in the conference room didn’t look familiar, but on second glance, yes they did. These were the ones hanging in here this winter, when I first started coming.

I patted my chest and looked down. Trench coat. Black gloves shoved in the pockets. Yes. Winter time.

Brandon spoke, but I couldn’t understand him. I looked back and found him staring at me intensely.

“What did you just say?” I asked.

“Other world real,” he said, pronouncing that last word wheel. “This a nightmare.”

My jaw trembled. “I need you to help me, man,” I pleaded with him. “I’m in the shit right now, I can’t be doing this, I need to stay there and handle this!”

He opened his mouth to speak and

“Keep going,” Dr. Koenig said. “Go back. You can do it.”

“I was just on my basement stairs,” I said. “About to open the door to the kitchen. Then, all of a sudden I’m at Magnolia Plantation. What’s happening?”

He leaned forward. “Go back. It’s almost over. Go there and come back to me. I’m not going anywhere. Go!”

“How?”

“Just do it!”

So I closed my eyes and I did it.

I pushed the basement door open carefully, knowing it would squeal on its hinges if I moved it too quickly—it squealed anyway, and I winced. I had meant to oil that. I had meant to oil all the interior doors in the house once upon a time, but this hadn’t ranked highly on my list of priorities as of late, so I’d let it go. The mundane, I had learned, were slippery things. They tended to escape a man.

The door squealed and I stepped into the kitchen. A faceful of cool air struck me with enough force to turn my skin to gooseflesh, which only tightened more when I got a look at the sliding glass door just off the breakfast nook.

Broken. Not opened; shattered.

A pile of glass lay scattered on the floor around the table, the remains of the door that led from the nook to the deck outside. The light from over the stove puddled in it, manifold sharp edges of broken glass catching the light and reflecting it to irregular twinkles. I looked to either side, stopped and listened. Nothing. I shuffled forward, moving past the little hooks where we hung our car keys, and I froze.

A set of Ford keys dangled from the hook. Allie’s Explorer; her keys hung right there, where they always did. And that was fucked up, because those keys were supposed to be in Pennsylvania.

What are they doing there those keys aren’t supposed to be there did she drive home did she drive all the way home tonight why didn’t she call me WHAT ARE THOSE KEYS DOING THERE

And what about my rifle? I looked down in my hands and I wasn’t holding it anymore. I looked all around and didn’t see it anywhere.

I was unarmed.

My brain jammed then, overloaded with too much conflicted information. It froze, and the rest of me froze, and in that instant I felt the huge arm wrap itself around my neck, I felt the tip of a blade poking into my side and I knew who it belonged to—the Bald Man. He’d gotten the drop on me.

Dr. Koenig slung his legal pad down on the coffee table and shook his head. He leapt up from his seat and reached across to grab me by the lapels.

“Don’t do this now! You can handle this!”

“Where’s my gun?” I asked weakly, not understanding. “It disappeared. Why are Allie’s keys…”

“Don’t think! Just go!”

Back in my kitchen.

The forearm crushed my windpipe, wiry hair abrading my chin. The knife dug into my side. I felt where the tip had actually pierced my skin, but I was so hopped up on adrenaline that it didn’t hurt, not yet.

Bobby? Cried my panicked mind. Bobby, what do I do here? Come on, man, help me!

No answer from the Bobby in my head. The man with his arm around my neck said, “Be cool, man. Chill. I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

A deep, gravelly voice. A calm voice.

A familiar voice, one I had heard before. On the radio. And on the telephone.

“I ain’t gonna hurt nobody. You stay cool, you’ll be alright.”

My struggles weakened, not so much because of what he said but because my muscles suffered from lack of oxygen. I didn’t understand where my rifle had gone, not then, but my empty hands twitched at the air as if trying to grab it. I wanted them to reach up for the hairy arm, but they didn’t listen to me. I wanted them to drive elbows into the chest of this person pulling me into him, but they wouldn’t do that, either. I wanted to fight and nothing would cooperate with me.

My body had mutinied; I’d just come along for the ride.

“You fight me, I’m gonna have to cut you. So be cool, man. Just do what I say.”

I stopped struggling then. My hands fell to my sides. Obeying him, not me.

I had never felt so terrified in my life. I screamed orders that no part of me obeyed. A man—a bald man. He was white and he was bald and I knew this without looking at him

How how how do you know this Kevin how do you know what he looks like when you’ve never seen him before

My mind upended then. Cannons and capstans and lifeboats ripped away from my listing decks and splashed into a black, frozen ocean. And just when I thought I had sailed over the edge of mindless terror, I heard a sound that told me know, I hadn’t; I didn’t know what mindless terror was. Not yet.

“Kevin? Is everything okay?”

Allie. Calling up to me from the basement.

What what what the fuck

“Tell her yes,” the man hissed. “Tell her everything’s cool.”

Call 911, run, run, run, grab Abby and go out the back get out NOW

But my mouth had deserted me, too. I understood then that the mutiny was total. I commanded nothing.

“Everything’s cool,” I called back.

I understood what was happening now. Oh yes I did.

43.

“Go back,” Dr. Koenig said again. “I know it’s hard, but I really need you to push through this, okay? We’re out of time. We’re completely out of time.”

Midafternoon. Nobody on the bench outside, although it looked like the nicest of days. I felt then like I wanted to go out there and sit on that bench. I decided that I would. Later.

I unrolled my battered Southern Rifleman and plopped it down on the coffee table. I pursed my lips and looked down at it, squinting. I breathed deeply, but I did it through my nose. I closed my eyes.

I opened them.

I remained in Dr. Koenig’s office.

“Kevin?”

I looked up at him and shook my head.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” I said. I was lying, but just saying that felt good. I felt like if I said it enough, it would become true again. “But I’m done.”

“Oh, you’re done?”

“Yeah,” I said, reaching for my magazine again and rolling it into its familiar tube shape. “It’s been nice knowing you, but we’re done here. I’m going back to work.”

I rose, but his voice reached out and cracked like a whip.

“Sit down.”

I stopped. Not so much out of any fear of him, but because he’d never spoken to me with such a firm tone before.

He shook his head, covered his face. Breathed so loudly that it qualified as a groan. Then he stood up. I started to rise, too, but he held a hand up.

“You stay right there,” he commanded. “Right there. I don’t want you leaving that couch.”

“Uh… okay.”

He walked briskly over to his desk and picked up the phone. He pushed a single button, waited. Then he said, “It’s Wheeler. This isn’t working.”

“What’s not working?” I asked. “Who’s Wheeler?”

He ignored me. He turned to one side—not away, not to where he couldn’t see me, just to one side to make it clear he didn’t want to hear what I had to say right now—and continued talking into the office phone. “I tried your way, now we’re using mine. We’re out of time here. I can’t wait any longer.”

Pause.

“It’s less than twenty-four hours away. Seriously, we reconvene in the morning.”

Pause. Then:

“Yes. Absolutely. Okay. If it doesn’t go well, I’ll call for you.”

He hung up the phone and walked, slower now, back over to his easy chair. True to his orders, I remained on the couch.

“What was that?”

“Okay,” he said. “We’re going to try a different tack.”

I felt like I’d just stepped into the Twilight Zone. “Uh… okay.”

“Tell me something; what do you think happened just now?”

“You talked to somebody on the phone.”

“No. With your house. The guy trying to choke you, Allie’s keys. The rifle disappearing from your hands, what do you think all that was?”

I swallowed. Ki breath.

“I’m suffering from a particularly serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder,” I replied. The words came out slippery, diarrhea from my mouth. “My anxieties have grown so strong that I’ve blurred the line between reality and fear. I’m having a nervous breakdown. I’m mentally ill. I need medication. I can’t tell reality from bullshit. I should probably be committed right now. I’ll sign myself in wherever you want, you just let me know…”

He reached into his briefcase. At that moment, stark fear stabbed into me with the speed and violence of a killer’s blade.

His hand came out. In it rested a fresh, unmolested copy of Southern Rifleman. My issue.

“I ordered this some time ago,” he said. “Had it sent to my house. And when I got it, I flipped to the back and discovered a significant difference between what you recited to me at our first meeting and what is written in this issue. Would you like for me to read the Hero of the Month article to you?”

My eyes narrowed. My heartbeat quickened again. Ragged now, so many times had it started and stopped in the past few minutes alone.

He flipped to the back. He began to read.

“Kevin Braxton,” he read, “an active-duty member of the United States Marine Corps and a veteran of the Iraq war, successfully defended his Woodbridge, Virginia home on the night of February 1, 2010 after Leon Pinnix and Trayshaun Ramseur gained entry through an unlocked window in the basement. And this man’s name is Braxton, by the way. Not Swanson.”

He looked up.

“Says here that Sergeant Braxton had a Smith & Wesson Model 629 revolver with a 6-inch barrel,” he said. “They never made it out of his basement. He got them on the stairs.”

My hands began shaking. My stomach twitched once, twice, in a very credible threat to evict everything I’d eaten that day. I looked out the window and noticed that the character of the light had changed. Late afternoon now, very late. Not too far from a point where you’d have to start calling it night.

“That’s fucked up,” I said in a voice that shook in time with my hands. “That’s one hell of an error on the printing line, I’ll tell you that. I bet some heads rolled for that one.”

“Sergeant Braxton had a wife and a daughter about Abby’s age. So all that matches. But there’s no mention of Burlington, North Carolina or a lawyer named Kevin Swanson anywhere on this page. Anywhere in this magazine, in fact. And oh, guess what kind of rifle that is on the cover?”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s an AK-47,” he said.

I didn’t respond to that, either. I didn’t respond because I couldn’t breathe.

He laid the magazine down on his shitty coffee table. He appeared to be thinking, but then I got the idea that he just didn’t want to look at me for a while. He closed his eyes and took a ki breath of his own—apparently, I didn’t hold the patent on that technique. Then he continued.

“If you want to read anything about you,” he said, “you have to get your hands on a back issue of the Burlington Times-News from February 4, 2010.”

“No,” I whispered.

He reached into his briefcase again and pulled out a folded-up newspaper. “Do you want me to read this to you?”

I closed my eyes and willed myself to slide. When I opened them again, I hadn’t gone anywhere.

“I’ll summarize it for you,” he said in a softer tone. “What it says is, on the night of February 1, 2010, a single intruder broke into the home of attorney Kevin Swanson off Highway 62 in southern Alamance County. It’s kind of a dry account, as newspapers often are. Gives the bare minimum facts. A lot of quotes from community members. The February 4 issue is the first story. There were other stories in newspapers across the country, but this was the first one. Because it happened here. In Burlington.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tried to say. But the words hung up in my throat.

Bobby? I cried out.

No answer.

“I can give you a lot of detail,” he said. “I’m privy to a lot of the facts here, most of which aren’t properly reflected in the newspapers’ accounts. Kevin Swanson didn’t have an AK-47—he actually didn’t have anything, because he never felt like he needed to keep firearms in his home. The question had just never come up for him. So when he was downstairs in his basement, watching the end of the Carolina-Virginia Tech game with his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter, he didn’t have a gun safe to go digging around in when he heard a strange noise upstairs.”

“What’s going on here? What are you doing?”

“Kevin Swanson is six feet tall,” he continued, “and well within his physical prime. He had taken several years of martial arts training in his youth and felt generally confident and secure. Had he actually owned a firearm, it probably wouldn’t have helped him that night, because the deciding factor there was his mindset. Kevin thought something had fallen in the kitchen. He wasn’t thinking there was a burglar. He thought, something fell, I’m going to go see what it is. Even if he’d owned a whole slew of semiautomatic weapons, he wouldn’t have taken one with him into the kitchen because he wasn’t thinking that way.”

I began to rock back and forth on the couch. I lifted the front legs with every backward roll. I shook my head—but he kept talking.

“Kevin Swanson believed in a civilized world,” he said. “He lived a good life, a happy life. He got up every morning, he went to work, he supported his family. He lived right. And he had every reason to believe that if he continued to live right, if he continued to do the right thing every day, life would continue for him the way it always had.”

Now I began to cry.

“That’s important. People need to understand the way Kevin thought, and they need to understand that his mindset predetermined the choices he made that night. Because it’s easy to judge somebody after the fact and point out the things you think they did wrong. It’s really easy. Unless you’ve been there.”

What choices did he make? What did he do?

More to the point, what did he not do?

“When a man named Travis Wayne Arnold accosted him from behind in his kitchen,” he continued, “he overpowered Kevin with a surprise attack, but the way he really gained control there was by relying on his victim’s innate belief that everything would ultimately turn out okay if he just stayed cool. He didn’t know anything about Kevin Swanson, but he didn’t need to; that’s a common reaction to something like this. A robber sticks a gun in your face, whips out a knife, whatever, most people just hand over their wallets. Nobody ever fights. They just go along with it. Hope they don’t get killed. Most of the time, they don’t.

“Travis Wayne Arnold told Kevin everything would be okay if he just stayed cool. And Kevin believed him. He let Travis Wayne Arnold handcuff him, because Travis Wayne Arnold said the only thing he wanted was electronics, jewelry, other valuables. You just be cool, Kevin, and everything’s going to be okay. So Kevin stayed cool. He let Travis Wayne Arnold take him down into the basement, and then he told his wife and daughter to stay cool, too. And Travis Wayne Arnold handcuffed them, as well.

“And then he raped them.”

My stomach upended. I leaned forward and opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Apparently, I hadn’t eaten anything that day; I couldn’t even upchuck acid.

“He raped Kevin’s wife and he raped Kevin’s daughter while Kevin laid there on the floor watching, listening to it happening for the better part of the next day.”

“No,” I choked.

“Yes.”

“No. No.”

He reached out and grabbed my hands. They shook, and they didn’t stop when he touched them.

My head swam, but I didn’t pass out. I didn’t slide, either. I was beginning to understand that that was so much bullshit.

A question rose in my throat and although I didn’t want to ask it, I couldn’t stop it.

“Where are they?” I asked. “Allie? Abby? Where are they staying? When can I see them?”

He looked away from me again.

“Where am I?” I cried. “Doc? Can you please explain this to me, because I don’t…”

“I’m not a doctor, Kevin,” he said. He looked at me with sad compassion, and it sickened me because I didn’t want anybody looking at me like that. Ever.

“I never said I was a doctor, okay? We’re in your doctor’s office, yes; he’s allowed us to use it so that we can get away from all the hooting and hollering out there. I’m a prosecutor. Dr. Koenig is your psychologist here at Magnolia Plantation. My name is Daniel Wheeler. I’m the Assistant District Attorney working on your family’s case.”

“What kind of case is it? It’s a… a rape case?”

He shook his head.

“Not just that,” he said. “Rape and double murder.”

44.

He said: Bobby is dead, too. Dead for several years now, the victim of a roadside bomb in Iraq. He said: your wife is dead, your daughter is dead, your brother is dead. Kate, she’s still alive. She’s your legal guardian.

But Bobby couldn’t have been dead, because he came to see me that night. I lay in the bed, drugged, and saw him standing by my window. He must have entered through that same window, because they told me that I stayed now in a lockdown ward—like Brandon Cross, and his roommate Kenny.

Guess where? Ta daaaa! Magnolia Plantation.

“They want me to testify,” I said.

Bobby snorted. “Yeah, I guess they would.”

“And I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“No, Bobby, I’m telling you, I can’t. It doesn’t seem real to me, everything they’re saying, but I think that if I have to get up there and say all this shit that it’s going to become very real very quickly and…”

“You know why I really joined the Marines?” He interrupted.

I fell silent.

“I joined,” he said, “because the recruiter said it was hard as shit. Said out of all the services, Marine Corps basic training is the hardest. Some dudes can’t make it in the Marines. Might make it other places, but not there. Because the Marines are hard.”

He smiled out the window. I wondered what could possibly make anybody smile in a world like this, but then I understood that the things he saw didn’t exist on the other side of the glass. They existed somewhere else entirely.

“Greatest thing about finishing Basic,” he said, “wasn’t the uniform or the benefits or the chance to shoot machine guns and throw grenades. Wasn’t even the right to walk around knowing I was a Marine, saying I was a Marine, being a Marine. The greatest thing was knowing that I could do absolutely anything in this world. Because I could. I said, I made it through Parris Island. They didn’t wash me out. They didn’t run me off. And now I can do anything. Impossible doesn’t exist anymore. Not for me. This world bends to my will. This world does what I tell it to do.”

I opened my mouth. I said: “I’m not a Marine.”

“But you’re a Swanson,” he said. “And you could have been a Marine. You’re a hard son of a bitch, Kevin. Impossible doesn’t exist for you either. You can do anything. You hear what I’m saying? Anything.”

He looked back at me, still smiling.

“A lot of guys washed out,” he continued. “I almost did. There was this one point, when I’m down on my face doing pushups with fire ants running all over my goddamned hands and arms, but I don’t even feel them biting me because my chest is cramping up. There’s this drill instructor standing right over me screaming about what a pussy I am and I think, he’s right. I’m not cut out for this. I’m never going to make it in the Marine Corps, I should just quit right now. I can’t handle it. This is my reality. This is who I am.”

“So what happened?” I asked. “Apparently you made it.”

The smile broadened.

“That D.I. called me a pussy one too many times,” he said. “And my reality changed. I said, fuck this. I’m not washing out. Every last one of you motherfuckers can kiss my ass. Because I’m going to do this thing.”

He looked out the window again, his smile fading. He looked thoughtful now, older.

“You can change your reality, Kevin,” he said. “You can be anything you want to be. You’ve just got to tell everyone and everything around you to kiss your ass, because you don’t accept this. When it all comes down, you make your own rules.”

45.

“We’ve got this in the bag,” Dr. Koenig said on the way back to Magnolia Plantation after I’d given my testimony. I understood he wasn’t Dr. Koenig, but I’d tried out Daniel Wheeler and it just didn’t seem to fit. So he remained, in my mind, a psychotherapist. “You did great. I’m in awe of you. Bobby would have been very, very proud.”

I took a drug called clonazepam, which allowed me to testify. By the time we made it back to the car afterwards, I’d forgotten almost all of it. I took that as a blessing. The drug, an abnormally large dose for today, dragged clouds across my ability to feel. Eventually, it would stop working and I would need something that only came in needles. For now, though, I could walk and speak like anyone else.

I rode with my head resting against the window glass, but at the last stoplight before Magnolia Plantation, a question occurred to me, and I asked it of Dr. Koenig.

“Where was I?”

“Pardon?”

“I guess I went to the hospital after the cops or whoever found me down in the basement. Where did I go after that? Did I go straight to the booby hatch or what?”

The light turned green. He began to drive.

But he didn’t answer.

“Well?”

A slight shake of the head, a pursing of the lips.

“No,” he said.

“No, I didn’t go straight to the booby hatch?”

“No.”

“Okay… so where was I? Did I go home?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

He slowed down to pull into the circular driveway. “I mean, I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody does. That’s one thing that’s really never been resolved in this case. You weren’t released from the hospital; you just left. And six months ago, we found you wandering on the road…”

“In Glen Raven,” I said. “On Highway 87.”

Just like Brandon Cross.

“Yes.”

He paused, breathing through his nose. I recognized a ki breath as he brought the car to a stop.

“You had leaves all over what remained of your clothes,” he said. “You had apparently just emerged from the woods. But as far as where you were before that…”

He trailed off into a shrug.

“…is anybody’s guess. When you figure it out, give me a call. Because I’d really like to know.”

I woke up in my room late that night; exactly when, I couldn’t say. I enjoyed a private room roughly the size of the one in which I had lived in Hinton-James Hall my first year at Carolina, only this one didn’t smell like sweat and gym socks. No cinderblocks, either, just smooth, white drywall. And air conditioning. When I opened my eyes, I found myself face-up to the ceiling, staring at a solitary vent that blew cool air across my face.

The room was sparsely furnished, with only a wardrobe, a nightstand and a single chair accompanying the twin bed in which I lay. The doorknob was of the heavy industrial variety; I doubted it would open. The staff remained concerned about the possibility that I might disappear again, Dr. Koenig had told me—hence the lockdown. I had started out in a lower security wing, but I had gotten out. They always found me, eventually, sitting on that bench in the courtyard. But sometimes it took them awhile, and they didn’t want to go through that every week, so I would remain in lockdown for the foreseeable future.

My room must have been easy to access from the outside, though, because when I rolled over on my side, I found Allie sitting in the chair. I sat straight up.

“What are you doing here?”

“Good evening to you, too.”

“What… what are you doing here?”

She grinned. She wore blue jeans and a simple purple blouse beneath a black jacket. Her hair was full and healthy. She didn’t look dead.

How did she get in here? Visiting hours are over and I’m in lockdown, so how did she get in here?

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Uh, yeah, but…”

“But what?”

“But you’re dead.”

She pursed her lips. She looked up at the ceiling.

“You’re dead,” I said again. “I’m deluded.”

“Funny,” she said, “I don’t feel dead.”

“But Dr. Koenig…”

“Dr. Koenig is the worst quack in the State of North Carolina,” she said. “He’s bad. Very bad. I am going to kill Tom Spicer for that referral. Seriously.”

I swung my legs off the edge of the bed, frowning. My feet touched the hardwood floor. I felt its cool solidity. Allie reached out and took my hands; hers were warm. Real.

“But I testified,” I said. “I remember…”

“You don’t remember a thing,” she interrupted me. “You remember what you were told by your quack of a shrink. You can listen to him, or you can listen to me. I want you to listen to me, Kevin, but you need to listen very closely.”

Ki breath.

I listened.

“There was no trial. There was no rape. There was no murder. Nobody’s dead except for Leon Pinnix and Trayshaun Ramseur. They’re dead because you killed them.”

I blinked. She reached into the cavernous maw of a purse she produced from underneath the chair. She pulled out another copy of Southern Rifleman. My issue.

“Read it,” she said. “Read your story in the Hero of the Month column. Go on.”

I took the magazine in my hands. The slick, glossy cover was in perfect condition save the deformation wrought by Allie doubling it over to fit in her purse. I flipped to the back. I flipped on the lamp beside my bed and stared at the words. I read them exactly as they appeared.

“Kevin Swanson, an attorney with the law firm of Carwood, Allison, Spicer and York, P.A., in Burlington, North Carolina, successfully defended his home when Leon Pinnix and Trayshaun Ramseur gained entry through an unlocked window in the basement.”

Allie smiled. The lamp hadn’t changed her appearance any. Still there. Still real.

“Pinnix and Ramseur attacked Mr. Swanson, who had been watching a basketball game in his basement man-cave, by striking him over the head with a softball bat before leaving him for dead and proceeding upstairs.”

I stopped reading.

“See?” She said. “You did it. You’re a double Hero of the Month.”

I stared at the words on the page. I closed the magazine and rolled it into a tube. I looked at the end table upon which the lamp sat and squinted at the grain of the wood. No telltale black line around the table’s edges; this appeared to be solid wood.

“What is all this?” I asked.

“You suffered a nervous breakdown,” she said. “You got hit on the head, and that didn’t help any, but it wasn’t a very good whack. You’ve been deteriorating ever since this happened, and you suffered a nervous breakdown because you couldn’t get over how narrowly we escaped the exact fate that Dr. Koenig managed to convince you was the truth. And I understand that. It was a close call.”

“Why would Dr. Koenig want to do that?”

“A form of aversion therapy,” she replied. “So he said. You were terrified of what could have happened, so he thought it would be a good idea to take you through it. And show you that you could survive it. Let these fears run their course, he said, so that Kevin can put them away. I went along with it because you seemed like such a wreck. I wish I hadn’t.”

I looked down at her hands. They were soft, delicate. Like her face.

“It sounds so elaborate,” I said. “I mean… I did testify, which means this is…”

She rose suddenly, and I stopped mid-sentence. We locked eyes and remained that way for a long moment. I saw no fear in her eyes, but I knew she saw it in mine. Dark waves rose and fell within me, a deep and black seascape where nothing stayed level and a person could dive forever and never reach bottom. I thought of the Bald Man, and I thought of golems, and I thought that maybe he wasn’t the only one who could conjure things.

But I said none of this.

“It’s over,” she said. “I’m taking you home.”

“Now?”

“You’re not in prison. You’re not under an involuntary commitment.”

“Bobby’s not dead?” I asked. “Wasn’t killed in the war like Koenig said?”

She laughed. The sound washed over me like a warm shower in the middle of January.

“Very much alive,” she said. “And he’s at the house with Kate. I told them I was bringing you home tonight, and they wanted to be there. Bobby bought a case of beer. It’s probably half gone by now, but if we hurry you might still get one or two.”

“Abby?”

“Right now, she’s at home sleeping,” Allie said. “Unless she’s gotten up and gotten on her phone again.”

My head, still heavy from whatever drugs they’d given me, felt heavy. A basketball perched atop a drinking straw; my neck felt weak from the weight of it. I let my eyes wander around the room and they came to rest upon the nightstand beside my bed. It looked like oak or walnut or some other heavily grained type of wood, but the moonlight reflected off a flat, smooth surface. Veneer, I thought. It’s not real oak, or walnut. It’s basically a big sticker some Chinese guy slapped over a hunk of particle board. The furniture equivalent of a Chicken McNugget.

I opened my mouth to comment on this, but Allie held up a finger. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say what you were about to say,” she said. “You’re going to need to be careful about the questions you ask from now on. Places you look. Don’t pick at things anymore, Kevin. When you get to a good place, there comes a time to stop asking questions. To just accept what’s in front of you and enjoy it. Because if you don’t want to enjoy it, honey, I can go away. You don’t have to come with me.”

She studied me and cocked her head to one side.

“Do you want to come with me, Kevin? Or do you want to stay here and wake up in a morning in a world where pretty much everyone you love is dead?”

I looked back at the nightstand.

And then I hopped out of bed.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Hold on. There’s something we need to do first.”

She reached into her purse again and pulled out an empty Mason jar. She reached in again and pulled out a freezer bag full of sand. Not for the first time in my life, I reflected that she probably could have hidden a dead body in that purse.

“I have a friend on the Arts Council,” she said, “who practices nontraditional medicine. Holistic healing. Herbs, relaxation techniques, things like that.”

She set the Mason jar on the nightstand and unscrewed the lid. It made a metallic click as she set the lid down beside it.

“She suggested that I have you do this,” she said. “Here, take the bag.”

“Why?”

“Just take the bag.”

I did. She motioned for me to sit back down and I did that, too.

“Fill up the jar,” she commanded.

I filled the Mason jar with the sand handful by handful, careful not to spill any. Allie hadn’t said not to spill, but I felt like I needed to put as much in the jar as possible. When the sand reached the rim, I packed it down with the heel of my hand and added even more. I didn’t ask any questions.

“Put the lid on,” she said.

I screwed the lid back on the jar.

“Okay.”

She smiled again. “How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

I set the jar on the nightstand and stared at it for a long, silent moment. Allie sat quietly, watching me.

“What did I just do?” I asked.

She stood up and motioned for me to do the same. When I rose without the Mason jar, she took it from the nightstand and pushed it into my hands.

“We’ve got to take this with us,” she said. “Come on, let’s go.”

“I need to pack.”

“No, you don’t. I’ve got everything you need at home. This jar is the only thing you can take out of this room. Now come on, follow me.”

She opened the door and led me out into the corridor. The overheads burned brightly out here, and my eyes rebelled at the sudden introduction of so much light. I stood there holding the Mason jar, blinking, until Allie grabbed my wrist and tugged me.

“Come on,” she said. “The car’s outside.”

We found no nurses in the hallway. We passed a clock on the wall reading three in the morning, but this seemed like the kind of place that would have a night shift. Duty nurses, orderlies, people patrolling the hallway for wanderers just like me. We passed a nurse’s station—abandoned—and stepped out into the vacant lobby. Someone had drawn the blinds across the visitors’ window. Across from that, the entire far wall of the lobby consisted of floor-to-ceiling windows, navy blue with night. Allie pushed open one of the double doors. I expected an alarm to sound, but none did. I followed her and stepped out into the night.

“Breathe,” she said.

I inhaled the air that enveloped me as soon as the door closed behind him. We were standing on the broad sidewalk that ran along the turnaround in front of the facility. The night was cool but not cold, heavy in the way that only spring evenings can be. I smelled dogwoods, those vaguely fishy harbingers of spring. It felt like a good night for a walk, a run, even. Beautiful temperatures like this didn’t stay around for long. Twice a year we got this weather from Heaven as the landscape shifted between those few weeks of balls-freezing cold and the long months of balls-sweating hot. Spring never stayed long; this kind of beauty always slid away. I took in great, greedy lungfuls of it.

I caught Allie looking at me quizzically and realized I was tearing up. “Sorry,” I said with a sheepish grin. “I think it’s been a while since I’ve been outside.”

“It has.”

“It’s a beautiful night.”

“It is.” She smiled and pointed to my right. “There’s the car.”

On the curb just a few paces away sat the BMW, my burgundy chariot, polished and shiny beneath the lights shining from the awning over the turnaround. I darted forward.

Allie’s hand on my shoulder stopped me.

She reached around and tapped the Mason jar.

“You’re going to take this home,” she said, “and you’re never going to allow it to break. You must never open it.”

I nodded. I clutched it against my chest, not wanting it to slip from my grasp. “What is it?” I asked.

She pursed her lips in a little smile.

“It’s everything bad that’s ever happened to you in your lifetime,” she said. “It’s all in that jar. We’re going to take it home and you’re going to put it somewhere safe, but you’re not going to open it because it belongs in there. There is no need for you to ever, ever open that jar.”

I nodded.

“No more questions,” she said gravely. “There’s no need. You know what the truth is. Don’t ever question it.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious, Kevin. Don’t ever question it. No matter what. Don’t ever open that jar. And don’t drop it. Because it can break.”

I looked at it. “Okay.”

“Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you understand the choice you’re making here?”

I took a deep breath of that exquisite night air, closing my eyes. When I opened them again, she was still there.

“Yeah,” I said, “I do. No more questions. Ever. Not a one.”

She smiled again and opened the passenger door to the BMW. I made as if to get in, but she stopped me again.

“You’re driving,” she said. “I don’t like stick, remember?”

I did. Still holding the jar, I rounded the trunk and got in on the driver’s side. The leather seat accepted my back and buttocks like a custom-fitted glove. I looked around for a place to set the Mason jar but couldn’t find anything, so I put it on the floor in the passenger foot well.

“Ready?” Asked Allie.

“You bet.”

“Then I suggest we go. Right now.”

I buckled my seatbelt and pushed the button for my memory setting on the power driver’s seat. Allie had driven, and she’d about jammed the seat up against the steering wheel. The seat returned to my position with an aristocratic whir. I reached down and released the parking brake.

“Take us home,” Allie said.

I pushed the stick into first and eased out the clutch. The rumbling six-cylinder dipped then rose again as the car rolled out of the turnaround and into the parking lot. As the facility faded to nothing in my rearview mirror, I didn’t look back.

Afterword

An author shouldn’t confuse the reader.

I read this comment in a review of an earlier version of Trigger Finger, the reviewer making generally positive remarks but describing a less-than-stellar reading experience in connection with the ending. Of course, I wanted to write it off with a you just don’t get it. Clearly, I was one brilliant sumbitch and some of these jokers out there just couldn’t handle me. After hearing the same thing several times, however, I understood it: people weren’t getting it because I’d written a bad ending. I didn’t like admitting that, because there’s an element of criminality in writing a novel and leaving important questions unanswered. If it’s not criminal, it’s at least a civil cause of action for breach of contract—a contract where you give me your time and I give you a quality reading experience. For some people, I’d fallen short of full performance.

Providing a quality reading experience, like any task, is all about the end game. A mechanic can spend days meticulously rebuilding an engine. He can create a maximum-security garage environment where not one speck of dust makes its way into the cylinders and he can use only the highest quality replacement parts. He can create something instead of merely repairing it, deploy his expertise in such a way that the motor isn’t just rebuilt but reborn. None of this counts, though, with the customer who drives the car for two or three hundred pages only to have the motor blow because somebody forgot to tighten the oil pan drain plug. That last little turn of the wrench—or lack thereof—can ruin everything.

End game.

In Trigger Finger, Kevin Swanson creates an alternate reality for himself after a brutal home invasion results in the death of his family. This reality crumbles as he picks and pulls at the edges with the assistance of Dr. Koenig—a man who isn’t a doctor at all, but rather the prosecutor working on a murder case. After several revisions to the ending to make it more clear, I’ve reached the limits of my abilities. I hope that I’ve improved the experience for those who disliked it because of a lack of clarity and that I’ve now pared Trigger Finger’s detractors down to those who disliked it because they saw the ending coming a mile away, because it was riddled with typos and formatting errors or because That-Was-All-Bullshit is a lame way to end a book. Spin the wheel; there’s something for everybody.

The home invasion that forms the core of the story is a mashup of two incidents that occurred in 2006 and 2011. In the first, a family in Virginia were accosted in their home by a pair of young men and a female accomplice. The men restrained them, took them down into the basement, killed them and then set their house on fire. Five years later, a different pair of men attacked a doctor and his family at their home in Connecticut. They made their way in through an unlocked basement door, beat the doctor nearly to death with a baseball bat they’d found in the yard, then went upstairs and corralled his wife and two daughters. Miraculously surviving the assault, the doctor crawled out of the basement and made his way to a neighbor’s house, and somebody there called the police. Sadly, his family didn’t make it.

These are highly simplified summaries of complex, gut-wrenching cases. The intruders were all caught and successfully tried, but the victims are still dead. And even if the guilty die in prison or run out of death penalty appeals, I don’t believe you can call it an eye for an eye in any sense of the phrase. The Code of Hammurabi required an equal exchange; attempting redress with the lives of these perpetrators feels a lot like trying to pay for a Cadillac with Monopoly money. Their currency is worthless.

A husband and father myself, I have something in common with the patriarchs in each of these cases, and so they affected me deeply. As I watched these things unfold in the news, I caught myself analyzing what the victims had done wrong—what I would have done differently, thereby bringing about a different result. I sat in the comfort of my home or car, resplendent with the benefits of hindsight, and criticized the people whom evil took by surprise. On some level, I knew then—and know now—that Monday morning quarterbacking is the easiest job in the world. Once you know what happened, identifying what someone should have done as something you yourself would have done in the same situation is a nice way to make yourself feel better. To assure yourself that this or that tragedy wouldn’t happen to you, because you’re different. You’re resourceful. You’re courageous. You think quickly on your feet and rise to the occasion in the face of a threat, because you’re one hard son of a bitch and nobody’s taking you by surprise.

Maybe you are. And maybe you’re not. Personally, I hope to never learn the truth one way or another.

I hope you enjoyed Trigger Finger. I invite you to leave me a review on Amazon, Goodreads or any other site you care to visit. This is my first novel; as such, I need all the help I can get putting the word out there. I welcome all opinions, good and bad. I also welcome helpful suggestions, so if you’ve seen any mistakes in the text, reach out to me at jacksonspencerbell@gmail.com. Indie publishing means you’re on your own in the marketing world, but it also means you can make quick alterations to your manuscript when a reader points something out. Nothing’s irrevocable.

If you enjoyed my first novel, check out my short stories The Demon and The Man At The Fence, and my novella, Just Hang On. I’m currently at work on my second novel. Since I change projects—and titles—as frequently as I change socks, I’ll refrain from identifying it here. If you’d like me to notify you when I release it, or if you’d be interested in serving as a beta reader before release, send me an email.

Thanks for reading, and take care.

And lock your doors

-Jackson Spencer Bell

Also By Jackson Spencer Bell

Novellas

Just Hang On: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KM1Z2P0

Short Stories

The Man At The Fence: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K6O74YK

The Demon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K389CBM

Content

Jackson Spencer Bell
TRIGGER FINGER

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

Afterword

Also By Jackson Spencer Bell